19 ms·

Human Population has more than doubled in the same timespan (from 3.7 billion to 7.7 billion today). This is not sustainable. We only have one small planet to

Human Population has more than doubled in the same timespan (from 3.7 billion to 7.7 billion today). This is not sustainable. We only have one small planet to live on, and we are destroying it. We are overfishing the oceans, cutting down entire forests to make way for pastures, warming up the planet and acidifying the plastic-filled ocean. Even insect populations are plummeting. The consequences of this will not be felt by your grandchildren. They will be felt by me and you. They are starting to appear already. What can we do to change this? This cannot be fixed by individual action. Buying an electric car and using recyclable shopping bags is not enough. I implore you to be politically active, to consider support for candidates that at least acknowledge that there is a problem. Consider a carbon tax. Consider big, international efforts to clean up our oceans. Consider sexual education efforts in developing nations. Consider carbon re-capture efforts. There's a ton of things we can do, but we have to start doing

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock. Climate change will cause famine, natural disasters and mass migrations. Poverty, overpriced health care and a lack of common social structure (every man for himself) will lower the life expectancy again after decades of increase.
- feistypharit 8y ago
  Sadly, I think this is right. The "fix" involves one group of people telling another group of people what to do. That never goes over without a fight. Especially when it will involve land, life and death, and reproductive rights. I think what we're seeing with government's moving more right wing is the first step of this. These people are already operating on this assumption and plan on being the ones doing the telling.
  - trentnix 8y ago
    It's a shame you've been downvoted on this point, and it's more evidence Hacker News is becoming more like Ars: upvotes are votes of agreement as opposed to votes that you providing insight. And your comment is not only extremely insightful, it is exactly right - the current global political climate is a populist reaction by people tiring of being told by elites what they should and should not have and what they should and should not believe. All of the fixes being proposed are, if we are honest, some form of rationing or another. That will necessarily reduce the quality of life of a large group of people, and they won't accept that no matter how strongly bureaucrats insist they should. So such insistence will need to be backed by force, because it will be resisted by force.
    - nprateem 8y ago
      > All of the fixes being proposed are, if we are honest, some form of rationing or another. That will necessarily reduce the quality of life of a large group of people, and they won't accept that no matter how strongly bureaucrats insist they should. I'm not sure this is true. It used to be socially acceptable to smoke in offices and inside, but attitudes changed. Now fewer and fewer people smoke tobacco in the UK at least. Even drinking is seen as uncool, with around 20% of 18-24 year olds saying they don't drink at all IIRC. I think a similar change in attitude could occur so people make ecologically-minded decisions. A few ideas I've heard that I agree with are also: * The Earth and ecosystem should have legal rights and be legally represented & defended in courts to oppose industries like e.g. fracking/mining/deforestation, etc., not as an after thought, but in terms that the Earth is its own legal entity and therefore ultimately owns itself and major industry would require approval from a group of trustees acting on behalf of the Earth. * Companies should be legally responsible for putting the environment before shareholder profits (i.e. not be run for the benefit of shareholder, but for the benefit of the environment) * Governments should pay people to keep trees on their land - not just landowners, but people who would fell the land. Maybe this would be some combination based on land ownership/licencing rights (e.g. tenancy) and universal basic income. This would probably need to be an international effort because e.g. we all benefit from the South American rainforests, not just people who live in close proximity to them. It won't be simple to decide how to implement the above ideas, but we need to value the environment far more instead of just unsustainably stripping resources so a few people can make a fast buck. The idea that just because you own some land (or it's the commons) that you can do whatever you want with it needs to end. But whatever we decide, it is clear we need widespread, dramatic, global changes in our behaviour now.
  - kiliantics 8y ago
    This is why people should support popular movements that are resisting the right wing and resisting unsustainable practices. Unions and social justice activists are our best hope for a decent future without extreme repression. But they get labeled as antifa or eco-terrorists and arrested or otherwise silenced.
- rootsudo 8y ago
  To be fair, the Doomsday Clock is updated once a year in January. With recent political affairs in NK, we may have just bought ourselves another minute.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  But does that fix it? Isn't it a vicious cycle once methane is released from the melting ice. And a collapsed civilisation won't have the budget to fix it.
  - shoo 8y ago
    from a sufficiently misanthropic perspective that global human over-population is "the problem" , both methane release, civilisation collapse, and lack of budget to maintain or build infrastructure and systems like healthcare all sound like they are part of the "fix". I don't really think it's helpful to talk about "the" problem, there's a big mess of coupled systems and most "moves" available to us have unpleasant side effects or unknown side effects on global or long-term time scales. we have a limited time and resource window where moves are still available.
  - sambull 8y ago
    No it doesn't unfortunately. Even with no 1% pop going forward we would still have to remove the cco2 and find a way to regulate our temp. The time line makes it sound like those evil hippies were right but lost so we all have.
- uxcolumbo 8y ago
  > I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock[...] I wouldn't call WW3 a fix (short term anyway). Even a small nuclear exchange would have devastating ecological consequences [0] [0] "Radioactive fallout from these weapons’ debris clouds would reach the stratosphere, where it would travel worldwide, potentially contaminating crops and livestock as well as causing radiation sickness and cancer directly. Later, this fallout would cause genetic mutations in plants, animals and human beings, as it has in the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear accident." From: https://medium.com/freeman-spogli-institute-for-international-studies/how-nuclear-war-would-affect-the-world-climate-and-human-health-8b40b4668074 https://medium.com/freeman-spogli-institute-for-internationa...
  - drb91 8y ago
    Dark. I can see the immediate consequences would be atrocious. How would nuclear fallout affect wider gene pools and extinction rates? I’ve always envisioned the “apocalyptic” scenario to be a nuclear winter. Is that accurate?
  - code_duck 8y ago
    I think the idea is that the massive depopulation caused by what you describe would function as a ‘fix’.
    - pvaldes 8y ago
      A fix or an end. It is said that without enough population to watch and repair the current nuclear systems, the problem would quickly scalate in a few years when nuclear plants in the planet would deteriorate, get out of control and explode one after one.
      - CalRobert 8y ago
        That would be devastating for individual organisms, but what would the large scale ecological impact be? Chernobyl is home to quite a bit of wildlife as I understand it. Also, if we're talking about a world after the exchange of thousands of ICBM's I'm not sure how much relative impact the melting down of the world's nuclear power plants would have. The problem has been considered before, though probably as a general safety issue rather than trying not to further irradiate a barren world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
- titzer 8y ago
  > I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock. Nah, I doubt it. War is bad for business, and the global economy needs peace in order to extract maximum profit. Best to keep those wars to little backwater countries so we can keep spending trillions on mega-high-tech weapons without really disrupting the flow of money to bigcorp.
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    War is good for business - 34th Rule of Acquisition (Ferengi, Star Trek)
    - titzer 8y ago
      Well, war is good for the war racket, but generally not good for trade in the vast majority of other goods.
      - bpicolo 8y ago
        Globalization is in full swing drastically more than it was during large-scale wartime. Hard to imagine a world war happening in that context
        saiya-jin 8y ago
        Not in the current context, but imagine darker world, people pushed into poverty, starvation, desperation. Dictatorships, people like Trump would be fondly remembered for their friendly and kind policies. There are no limits how dark things can potentially get.
        wcoenen 8y ago
        Right before world war I, globalization was peaking and people also thought that large scale war was impossible because of it.
      - stephengillie 8y ago
- api 8y ago
  War is one of the most environmentally destructive things we do, and it's usually followed by a period of expansion.
- mtberatwork 8y ago
  > Poverty, overpriced health care and a lack of common social structure (every man for himself) will lower the life expectancy again after decades of increase. This seems to be a very US specific outlook on things that most western countries have long since figured out. Extreme poverty, lack of health care, lack of social safety nets - all self-inflicted in the US. Take for example the recent closings of hospitals in rural areas of red states that have refused Medicaid expansion due to extreme political polarization [1]. It doesn't have to be that way, especially in a country as wealthy as the US. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/upshot/a-sense-of-alarm-as-rural-hospitals-keep-closing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/upshot/a-sense-of-alarm-a...
  - kiliantics 8y ago
    The problem is that western countries will not be the first ones to experience the consequences of climate change. Most likely the first victims will be in places where such social safety nets barely exist. Arguably, this is already happening, which is why we are seeing civil unrest and mass migration from North Africa and the Middle East, where droughts and famine were a factor in many of the instabilities.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
albertgoeswoof 8y ago
What’s not sustainable? The human population doubling again? Or maintaining the current population? Clearly we have to address climate change but it’s not a growing population that is unsustainable, if anything the progress over the past 50 years has indicated the exact opposite.
- cyberpunk0 8y ago
  Uhh our population is also a huge problem driving that climate change.. wtf?
- montenegrohugo 8y ago
  Human population by itself is not the measure we should worry about. With enough technological progress, the earth could reasonably sustain 100+ billion people. The problem lies in the doubling of human population in little more than a generation. The problem lies in that we are not being sustainable with this. We are depleting resources whilst polluting and rapidly changing our environment. For the moment, we only have one small rock in which to live and breathe. If we have to shit where we eat, then let's at least try to shit cleanly.
  - ahje 8y ago
    Once that technological progress has been made, and we have implemented those new technologies on a global scale, then sure. Right here and right now, we're still largely relying on fossil fuels and machinery up to several decades old in order to produce food and considering it seems to be hard to even get up to modern standards, hoping for future tech to save the day seems far fetched.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      What if part of the reason is the fact that the new tech isn't better enough to justify switching - yet?
      - ahje 8y ago
arkh 8y ago
> What can we do to change this? Let's cull the population. A little plague to remove 80%. Or if you want to stay almost humane: make 90% of the population sterile. It would be extreme but that's what you get when your postulates are that all those species were useful, we can't adapt to climate change and we won't ever get out of here.
Theodores 8y ago
> I implore you to be politically active, to consider support for candidates that at least acknowledge that there is a problem. Consider a carbon tax. Consider big, international efforts to clean up our oceans. Consider sexual education efforts in developing nations. Consider carbon re-capture efforts. There's a ton of things we can do, but we have to start doing It has all been said before. None of this is going to be easy when we have our governments frittering away money on the arms trade. It is violence and the threat of violence that enforces the current economic order. Therefore it is the trade in arms that needs to be addressed if there is going to be progress in other areas. The arms trade isn't just bullets, the business is also about 'cyber warfare' which means planting the post-truth news stories in the media that enforces the status quo for the arms trade. People laughed at Martin Luther King for wanting to combine the rights he wanted for all people at home with the anti-Vietnam War, pro-peace ideas. They thought he would set back both causes and confuse people. History was not kind to those critics, we only know of Martin Luther King, the others were just shills anyway. It may seem a bit of a stretch of the imagination to think that the acidification of the oceans or the fact that there are less than 7000 cheetahs left is going to be solved with things like nuclear disarmament and global treaties to abolish the arms trade. There will be those that think these issues shouldn't be confused and that things will not get better for the likes of the cheetah if focus is shifted over to the steps needed for a more peaceful planet. But why not give peace a chance? Every one of those billions of single use bullets could have been made into a reusable and recyclable rechargeable battery and you could have an extremely large wind farm instead of the F35 programme. We could go fully carbon neutral in a generation to make this planet a beautiful garden for all. But, for this to happen the arms trade has to be made extinct first.
- abledon 8y ago
  For that, humanity needs spiritual process — people like Putin trump , NK, China etc will not let that happen unless we provide them with a tool for inner transformation of their experience of living
  - Theodores 8y ago
    The largest arms dealers sit on the UN security council. One of them is currently wanting to abolish the INF treaty and they aren't in Asia. I would say that spiritual mumbo jumbo ain't going to cut it, a business case needs to be made that green energy is going to offer better profit and more security than more nukes.
quantum_magpie 8y ago
There has to be political will to completely ban all fishing, hunting and deforestation. Allow rangers and coast guard to kill on sight all violators. At the moment I see no other option to restore wildlife on this planet.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  ...and animal farming. It's completely unsustainable as well.
  - tashoecraft 8y ago
    Do be careful with that, whilst I agree that we need to drastically reduce our meat consumption, getting rid of all meat consumption with out some kind of super advancement in other fields will be far worse for the environment. In some place plant based food is more sustainable, in other animal based is.
    - yesenadam 8y ago
      getting rid of all meat consumption with out some kind of super advancement in other fields will be far worse for the environment How so?
  - mkirklions 8y ago
    The Chicken + Talapia conversion to protein is the most efficient animal protein to build. If only people knew how to cook and flavor foods, then people wouldnt be reliant on beef to make their foods tasty.
- thousandautumns 8y ago
  Hunting is not what is wiping out animal populations. In fact, for many commonly hunted animals, like deer and many forms of fowl, human hunters are a necessary part of maintaining ecological balance. Fishing and deforestation are another story.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
At least in the U.S., politics is a football game complete with cheerleaders and game stats. It's my side vs their side. Even the most intelligent people get locked up in this battle. They don't bother looking at the candidates themselves, they just vote for their team. I mean, I look around and so many people who voted for certain people to get rid of certain programs are the one's who would actually benefit from those programs. It boggles the mind.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Given that the candidates tend to hew pretty closely to their party platform, it is perfectly sensible to vote for a team instead of an individual. It is a completely valid choice. The people voting against their own self-interest clearly disagree, there must be some overriding element of their ideology that is more important.
travisoneill1 8y ago
Who cares if they acknowledge the problem but take no meaningful action? I give no credit for that. Anybody who can do math can see that the only solution is to manage the population but that will never happen outside authoritarian states like China.
Fiahil 8y ago
I firmly look toward the end of humankind. Extinction events are full of opportunities.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  At one point, there were hundreds of thousands (millions?) of horses in the world, owned as transportation vehicles. Then the horseless carriage was invented, and now horses are somewhat rare. The same could happen to humanity, if AI and general purpose robots become viably robust.
brownbat 8y ago
> Human Population has more than doubled... This is not sustainable Hans Rosling had some interesting findings on population growth: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnexjTCBksw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnexjTCBksw
- arbitrary_name 8y ago
  This does not cut it as a response. The earth does not have capacity for us and all the living plants and animals. A healthy future should include biodiversity and not 9 billion people. Things are not getting better for most of the planet.
  - brownbat 8y ago
    Huh. I've heard carrying capacity estimates range from 10 to 150 billion. http://outsideinradio.org/shows/2018/10/11/so-over-population http://outsideinradio.org/shows/2018/10/11/so-over-populatio... Maybe population theorists are wrong and you are right it's more like 5, or whatever your number is. It's just hard to know, since Malthusianism has such a terrible track record, adamantly predicting apocalypse for two hundred years. They continue to make failing predictions: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/31/258687278/a-bet-five-metals-and-the-future-of-the-planet https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/31/258687278/a-be... There are real challenges to confront about the environment, but I do worry about maintaining credibility while endorsing some of the more tenuous extrapolations.
    - jlawson 8y ago
      Carrying capacity is related to quality of life and technology. With very poor quality of life, Earth could probably carry quite a large number of people. But why build such a world? Why is 100 billion people packed in tenements, living off hydroponic slop better than 2 billion experiencing nature, breathing free and having the option of traditional or modern lifestyles?
      - brownbat 8y ago
strainer 8y ago
Human behavior is vastly more impactful on the planet than human numerosity. We are not feeling the consequences of simply people - it is our gross behavior. impact = people * behavior To make people reduction the target in this situation would be systematically misanthropic. Behavior can improve by orders of magnitude and even reverse polarity amicably and rapidly, through culture, inspiration, technological potential, historic renaissance - this is the solution to envisage - not come on... you know... people ~reductions.
- redleggedfrog 8y ago
  I think the problem with this is plausibility. I have much more faith in humanity culling itself, by whatever misanthropic means, than behaving "amicably and rapidly." The possible solution might not be the pleasant one.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    Basically stop eating beef and using internal-combustion cars, and the situation is vastly improved. Not impossible. A bunch of tax law changes would do it. And that's a lot more passable than killing a bunch of people.
    - JTbane 8y ago
      The problem with that is people are really attached to their cars and beef.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Basically stop eating beef and using internal-combustion cars, and the situation is vastly improved. Not impossible. For one, beef's not that much of a problem: https://theconversation.com/yes-eating-meat-affects-the-environment-but-cows-are-not-killing-the-climate-94968 https://theconversation.com/yes-eating-meat-affects-the-envi... But second, all kinds of systems we have have been premised on economic growth year after year. When we hit some harder limits, we'll hit them hard.
qubax 8y ago
Most of the environmental damage so far has been done by the wealthy developed countries to maintain a high standard of living. Most of the population growth is in the underdeveloper world that hope to be developed. What's really worrying is that the 5.5 billion people in underdeveloped countries want the high living standards of 1.5 billion people in the developed countries. This will put incredible strain on the environment and resources. Technological advancements will help but technology can only do so much. We already see this with china. They are developing and getting richer and they want to drive cars, have AC/refigerators/computers, eat more meat, etc like americans or europeans. And who can blame them. Why shouldn't they have the same living standards? Soon, ASEAN, india, africa, etc will want the high living standards as well. Can 7 billion people ( soon to be 9 billion ) live like americans or europeans? Also, as the chinese, indians, africans, etc get higher living standards, wouldn't we want even higher living standards? Will we reach any resource limits?
gadders 8y ago
Are people still trotting out these Malthusean ideas? It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. Global standards of living have never been higher.
api 8y ago
It's clear that this rate of growth is not sustainable. Everyone knows that, though not everyone acknowledges it. Population growth must top out somewhere. The most likely mechanism is the same one that's driven birth rate decline in developed nations: affluence. The end of huge scale population growth doesn't mean human extinction or even significant population decline, though it may mean financial crisis and a major re-invention of modern finance around models that do not depend on eternal massive GDP growth. Wars of course will happen. People fight wars. Modern wars don't have body counts like they used to. A war between the USA and Russia or the USA and China would -- unless nukes come out in force -- be largely fought by machines with body counts far lower than WWI and WWII. (USxChina would be a full-on cyberpunk mech battle.) Wars also tend to be followed by periods of expansion, so don't pin your "hope" on war to reduce human population or environmental effects in the long term. I've simply come to terms with the fact that we have entered the Anthropocene. The holocene geological epoch has ended. If you want to slap a date on the anthropocene, I'd go with July 16th, 1945, the date of the Trinity atomic test. That was the point at which the evolutionary ratchet clicked and regression to a pre-industrial state became game-theoretically impossible. Subsequent atomic testing also furnishes a nice neat line in geological strata that will be clearly visible to any geologists of the far distant future. We are in the early anthropocene, which seems characterized by increased CO2 and methane concentrations, increased temperatures, and plummeting biodiversity. The latter is a common characteristic of geological boundary events. The fact that this one was caused by the emergence of large scale industrialized intelligence instead of a meteorite or volcanism doesn't much matter. When the environment drastically changes a lot of species die off. What happens next is debatable. It's likely that intelligence will soon figure out massively scalable renewable energy (it's close) and/or fusion. That combined with depletion of fossil fuels will mean CO2 emissions will probably fall off a cliff by mid-century. The big CO2 pump is probably a H-A (Holocene-Anthropocene) boundary event like the line of radioisotopes from early atomic testing. CO2 has a long half-life in the atmosphere but we don't know what biology is going to do as the planet warms and all that CO2 is hanging around. There could be a huge burst in photosynthesis. The Cretaceous period, the last epoch with similarly high CO2 concentrations, also had about 150% today's oxygen concentration in the atmosphere. Maybe that will happen by a few hundred years from now. I'm thinking the Anthropocene is going to look a bit like the Cretaceous. The loss of biodiversity here on Earth is depressing, but on the positive side it's likely that the Anthropocene will see the spread of organic life from Earth to its Moon, Mars, and possibly other locations in the solar system. It may also see the birth of self-replicating machine intelligences, an entirely new offshoot of life adapted for large-scale growth beyond the planet's biosphere. A moderate number of humans and associated symbiotic plants and animals might colonize other worlds, but I'd predict that post-biological life will make the big leap from atmosphere to space (analogous to the leap from the oceans to land). Us with our clunky space suits are like lungfish.
cletus 8y ago
> This is not sustainable. This is a longstanding concern going back to at least the 70s [1]. The argument is essentially twofold: 1. Population growth will continue at or near present rates indefinitely; and 2. We will exceed population N where N is the number of people the planet can support. For (1) the rate of growth has slowed and is projected to continue slowing over the next century [2] such that many of these estimates have been way off. For (2), we have a pretty narrow-minded view of how many people this planet can actually support but with sufficient automation hydroponic yield depending on crop can be 10x+ per unit of land area (eg [3]). Automation here is important for both constructing greenhouses and maintaining the crop. This could well increase food capacity to 50-100B people depending on diet, possibly much higher. What's more of a factor are resources and in particular energy costs. Commercial fusion power with deuterium would solve a whole bunch of problems at once (eg if the cost is below hydrocarbon based fuels then you can extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into fuel, which also largely solves your greenhouse gas problem too). If we ever figure out commercial fusion based on normal hydrogen well that's basically unlimited energy. Fusion isn't a requirement though. Solar gets ever cheaper. At some point it will become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and I've seen estimates for the yield of this to be about 7x the energy production of the same panel on the ground since there's essentially no night and there's definitely no weather. Don't get me wrong: people are screwing up the planet and a lot of the larger animals seem doomed but that's more an issue of human vanity (eg wanting rhino horns, ivory, fish bladders and the like) rather than being driven by any actual need. Deforestation is an issue but more-so in the developing world and more of an issue for ecosystems rather than, say, the atmosphere (IIRC ~80% of the CO2 is produced by the oceans). Overfishing too is a problem but mainly for us because at some point there just won't be any fish to eat. People like to make alarmist predictions. In some cases I'm sure they truly believe them. This to me is largely a folly of youth as experience teaches you the poor track record of such prognostications. In other cases I suspect people are trying to prompt action from the complacent. The problem with this is that alarmist rhetoric about the environment tends to turn a lot of people off. And a history of bad predictions doesn't help your cause (whatever that cause is). People do and will continue to make short-term decisions based largely on self-interest. That's just human nature. In a lot of cases its based on need rather than want. It's hard to tell a poor family in a developing country not to chop down the forest when the alternative is not heating their homes (with the wood) and/or not feeding their families (with the farmland created) In others, it's not. But the notion that this planet can only support 5, 7 or 10 or 15B people is patently false. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... [3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4483736/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4483736/
ataturk 8y ago
But it is the West's fault even though our population growth rate has leveled off, we are working hard to keep trash out of the oceans, put limits on fishing, and have been working hard on many other efforts. Meanwhile, in the corrupt 3rd World...
timonovici 8y ago
I'm afraid the incentives are not there - and we won't do any of those things - but at some point the system will bounce back, and hopefully it will self-regulate, rather than spiraling out of control. You can already see it happening, the hurricanes are getting worse and more frequent in USA, Italy and parts of Europe are hit by floods; An occasional reactor melts down. I'd say just enjoy the next decade as much as possible, who knows, maybe it won't last even that long.
ackidacki 8y ago
The argument really comes down to whether to curtail the liberty and veneration of independence that defines this century.
deialtrous 8y ago
>to consider support for candidates that at least acknowledge that there is a problem There are none. Every candidate for every major party in almost all western nations is openly pro-growth. Saying "we'll tax CO2 emissions while importing millions of people and destroying ever more of the little remaining natural ecosystems on the planet" is not acknowledging the problem: overpopulation. >Consider a carbon tax. That won't do anything. CO2 is not the problem, too many people is. >Consider sexual education efforts in developing nations That is at least addressing the issue, but it also gets you labelled an evil racist nazi klansman. Unfortunately it also hasn't proven effective. The governments of those countries need to be directly involved like China's one child policy. >There's a ton of things we can do, but we have to start doing We're still doing in the wrong direction. The population of Africa has increased by 1000% in the last century, and we're still actively trying to make that continue, while pretending we can simply import a tiny fraction of those people into Europe and North America as if that will solve anything.
- ajross 8y ago
  > CO2 is not the problem, too many people is. Proximate vs. root cause nitpickery isn't a solution either. It's entirely possible to get carbon output down to sustainable levels without genocide. You're simply wrong here.
  - deialtrous 8y ago
    Getting carbon output down will not do anything about the massive ecological destruction this article is about. That's the point. And where on earth does genocide come into this from?
- apazzolini 8y ago
  > That won't do anything. CO2 is not the problem, too many people is. CO2 is a problem. This year's Nobel prize in economics was awarded to Bill Nordhaus [1] for figuring out the economic impact of carbon based emissions. He, along with many climate scientists and economists, think that this is the most market-aligned way to reduce the impact of climate change. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Nordhaus#Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Nordhaus#Nobel_Memoria...
kimmeld 8y ago
> What can we do to change this? Get people out of poverty. Educate people. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_...
- jlawson 8y ago
  You can't get people out of poverty, you can create opportunities for them to get themselves out of poverty. But what if some never do, for whatever reason? Even if 99% of humans climb out of poverty and stop overpopulating, there must be a few on the end of the bell curve who never will, and that group will multiply exponentially until it eventually dominates the global population. It doesn't matter why. Could be religion, or culture, or genes. But someone is on the end of that fertility curve. It only takes one man breeder and one woman breeder and they will, in a world of non-breeders, soon dominate the world population because of the explosive power of exponential math. So what then? (As an example, Amish in America double their population every 20 years or so. We can calculate that they'll number >250 million within maybe 150 years.)
mempko 8y ago
Let's pretend the human population stopped growing 30 years ago. No new children. The USA and other rich nations use SO MUCH energy and resources we would still have seen this drop and still see global warming. Let's not make it about them, it's about us.
- jlawson 8y ago
  Extant hyper-fertile populations haven't caused the existing problem in the past. That's not what people are saying so there's no such blaming going on. The point is that they'll cause the impossible-to-solve exponentially-growing problem in the future. USA population of 350m can cut down usage. It is at least possible without mass death. When there are 7 billion+ Africans at the end of this century, it'll be rather a much more brutal challenge.
  - mempko 8y ago
    I like how you think they won't follow the same growth curve as USA or Europe. It's insanely stupid. Also we don't have until end of century for the brutal challenge. We have it now and it's ridiculous to ploace the burden on the developing world. We have to act now, in USA, Europe and SE Asia NOW. It's not even worth entertaining the population issue of Africa in 2100 when we have more urgent problems at home RIGHT NOW. To put that in perspective, the current billion Europeans and north americans is worth about 15-20 billion africans in terms of energy consumption.
    - jlawson 8y ago
      It's well-acknowledged that they're not following the same curve as USA or Europe. This isn't a matter of the future; it's already happened. That's why the UN has increased it's estimate for peak African population 5 years in a row.
auiya 8y ago
Stop having kids.
- pvaldes 8y ago
  "Stop having kids, said the elder people. Die faster, said the younger people..."
  - prestonh 8y ago
    We could use both to be honest.
- tomp 8y ago
  Don't worry, that's exactly what the developed countries have been doing!
SuddsMcDuff 8y ago
"We only have one small planet to live on, and we are destroying it." We're not destroying the planet, we're destroying our habitat, and the habitat of those animals unfortunate enough to live at the same time as us. The planet is going to be just fine, it's us who's going to suffer. I love this quote from George Carlin: "The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are! We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas."
- patagonia 8y ago
  Recent article reported: “So many animals will go extinct in the next 50 years that it will take Earth at least 3 million years to recover” Add to that the impacts of the technosphere (the artifacts of humanity which would not have existed in our absence) which was reported to be 30 trillion tons in 2016. Our impact to climate. Our impact to geography. Sure, in all likelihood there will be a big round ball hanging around in our solar system despite humanity’s best efforts. But that seems like a distinction without a difference. To say the argument is disingenuous would be generous.
  - ProAm 8y ago
    99.9% of all creatures who have existed on earth are extinct. [1] The world will continue to move on just as it always has, humans maybe not, but it would just be nature taking it's course. [1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/massext/statement_03.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/massext/statem...
- birksherty 8y ago
wonderwonder 8y ago
I agree, large scale political action is the only sustainable fix. Included in this needs to be an effort to switch to a renewable energy economy. This would potentially transform both our environment and the incomes of lower class people. Wind already employs double the number of people as coal in the US. We need to end the use of coal and natural gas, thereby eliminating mountain top removal mining and fracking both of which destroy their surrounding environment and dump massive amounts of waste into the water supply harming the species that live there. Initiate a gradual tax on petroleum based cars and then use that tax to fund the adoption of electric ones. Provide tax incentives for switching to electric vehicles. Add a gradual tax to beef and pork while slowly using that to subsidize organic farming startups. Widespread pesticide use in farming is decimating the insect population. Government subsidized closed system farm startups would help as they limit waste and encourage the reuse of water and soil. Attempting to limit population via government mandate at this stage can only lead to a dystopian bitter society and IMO is not the route to go as it attempts to override natures prime directive driving discord and civil unrest unless we are willing to also accept enforcement along the lines of the Chinese model; which personally I am not. Dumping chemical waste into streams and rivers should be politically removed as an option. If all of this took place only in the US it would have a massive affect as we are essentially tied with China as the worlds largest polluters. Our scientific advances in attaining the green economy would trickle down into the developing nations, especially if we stopped exporting coal.
08-15 8y ago
> Consider sexual education efforts in developing nations Is this a joke? Do you really think people in poor(!) nations don't know how children are made? They do. They want 10+ children, because that's their retirement fund. If you want to make a difference, educate women about everything but sexuality. That drops the fertility rate to below replacement and raises the generation time from 20 years to 35.
elocinstr8t 8y ago
I agree that the consequences of us trashing the planet will be felt more by us, but I think that our future kids and grandchildren will have to suffer through it, if we don't take actions fast. It's true, we should support someone who acknowledges climate change and tries to find ways to stop it, but we could also help by starting in our own homes. Change must come from within. Also, tech companies should help solve this problem. They have the resources, they can find a way to stop or alleviate climate change from worsening.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock. Climate change will cause famine, natural disasters and mass migrations. Poverty, overpriced health care and a lack of common social structure (every man for himself) will lower the life expectancy again after decades of increase.

feistypharit 8y ago
Sadly, I think this is right. The "fix" involves one group of people telling another group of people what to do. That never goes over without a fight. Especially when it will involve land, life and death, and reproductive rights. I think what we're seeing with government's moving more right wing is the first step of this. These people are already operating on this assumption and plan on being the ones doing the telling.
- trentnix 8y ago
  It's a shame you've been downvoted on this point, and it's more evidence Hacker News is becoming more like Ars: upvotes are votes of agreement as opposed to votes that you providing insight. And your comment is not only extremely insightful, it is exactly right - the current global political climate is a populist reaction by people tiring of being told by elites what they should and should not have and what they should and should not believe. All of the fixes being proposed are, if we are honest, some form of rationing or another. That will necessarily reduce the quality of life of a large group of people, and they won't accept that no matter how strongly bureaucrats insist they should. So such insistence will need to be backed by force, because it will be resisted by force.
  - nprateem 8y ago
    > All of the fixes being proposed are, if we are honest, some form of rationing or another. That will necessarily reduce the quality of life of a large group of people, and they won't accept that no matter how strongly bureaucrats insist they should. I'm not sure this is true. It used to be socially acceptable to smoke in offices and inside, but attitudes changed. Now fewer and fewer people smoke tobacco in the UK at least. Even drinking is seen as uncool, with around 20% of 18-24 year olds saying they don't drink at all IIRC. I think a similar change in attitude could occur so people make ecologically-minded decisions. A few ideas I've heard that I agree with are also: * The Earth and ecosystem should have legal rights and be legally represented & defended in courts to oppose industries like e.g. fracking/mining/deforestation, etc., not as an after thought, but in terms that the Earth is its own legal entity and therefore ultimately owns itself and major industry would require approval from a group of trustees acting on behalf of the Earth. * Companies should be legally responsible for putting the environment before shareholder profits (i.e. not be run for the benefit of shareholder, but for the benefit of the environment) * Governments should pay people to keep trees on their land - not just landowners, but people who would fell the land. Maybe this would be some combination based on land ownership/licencing rights (e.g. tenancy) and universal basic income. This would probably need to be an international effort because e.g. we all benefit from the South American rainforests, not just people who live in close proximity to them. It won't be simple to decide how to implement the above ideas, but we need to value the environment far more instead of just unsustainably stripping resources so a few people can make a fast buck. The idea that just because you own some land (or it's the commons) that you can do whatever you want with it needs to end. But whatever we decide, it is clear we need widespread, dramatic, global changes in our behaviour now.
- kiliantics 8y ago
  This is why people should support popular movements that are resisting the right wing and resisting unsustainable practices. Unions and social justice activists are our best hope for a decent future without extreme repression. But they get labeled as antifa or eco-terrorists and arrested or otherwise silenced.
rootsudo 8y ago
To be fair, the Doomsday Clock is updated once a year in January. With recent political affairs in NK, we may have just bought ourselves another minute.
quickthrower2 8y ago
But does that fix it? Isn't it a vicious cycle once methane is released from the melting ice. And a collapsed civilisation won't have the budget to fix it.
- shoo 8y ago
  from a sufficiently misanthropic perspective that global human over-population is "the problem" , both methane release, civilisation collapse, and lack of budget to maintain or build infrastructure and systems like healthcare all sound like they are part of the "fix". I don't really think it's helpful to talk about "the" problem, there's a big mess of coupled systems and most "moves" available to us have unpleasant side effects or unknown side effects on global or long-term time scales. we have a limited time and resource window where moves are still available.
- sambull 8y ago
  No it doesn't unfortunately. Even with no 1% pop going forward we would still have to remove the cco2 and find a way to regulate our temp. The time line makes it sound like those evil hippies were right but lost so we all have.
uxcolumbo 8y ago
> I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock[...] I wouldn't call WW3 a fix (short term anyway). Even a small nuclear exchange would have devastating ecological consequences [0] [0] "Radioactive fallout from these weapons’ debris clouds would reach the stratosphere, where it would travel worldwide, potentially contaminating crops and livestock as well as causing radiation sickness and cancer directly. Later, this fallout would cause genetic mutations in plants, animals and human beings, as it has in the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear accident." From: https://medium.com/freeman-spogli-institute-for-international-studies/how-nuclear-war-would-affect-the-world-climate-and-human-health-8b40b4668074 https://medium.com/freeman-spogli-institute-for-internationa...
- drb91 8y ago
  Dark. I can see the immediate consequences would be atrocious. How would nuclear fallout affect wider gene pools and extinction rates? I’ve always envisioned the “apocalyptic” scenario to be a nuclear winter. Is that accurate?
- code_duck 8y ago
  I think the idea is that the massive depopulation caused by what you describe would function as a ‘fix’.
  - pvaldes 8y ago
    A fix or an end. It is said that without enough population to watch and repair the current nuclear systems, the problem would quickly scalate in a few years when nuclear plants in the planet would deteriorate, get out of control and explode one after one.
    - CalRobert 8y ago
      That would be devastating for individual organisms, but what would the large scale ecological impact be? Chernobyl is home to quite a bit of wildlife as I understand it. Also, if we're talking about a world after the exchange of thousands of ICBM's I'm not sure how much relative impact the melting down of the world's nuclear power plants would have. The problem has been considered before, though probably as a general safety issue rather than trying not to further irradiate a barren world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
titzer 8y ago
> I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock. Nah, I doubt it. War is bad for business, and the global economy needs peace in order to extract maximum profit. Best to keep those wars to little backwater countries so we can keep spending trillions on mega-high-tech weapons without really disrupting the flow of money to bigcorp.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  War is good for business - 34th Rule of Acquisition (Ferengi, Star Trek)
  - titzer 8y ago
    Well, war is good for the war racket, but generally not good for trade in the vast majority of other goods.
    - bpicolo 8y ago
      Globalization is in full swing drastically more than it was during large-scale wartime. Hard to imagine a world war happening in that context
      - saiya-jin 8y ago
        Not in the current context, but imagine darker world, people pushed into poverty, starvation, desperation. Dictatorships, people like Trump would be fondly remembered for their friendly and kind policies. There are no limits how dark things can potentially get.
      - wcoenen 8y ago
        Right before world war I, globalization was peaking and people also thought that large scale war was impossible because of it.
    - stephengillie 8y ago
api 8y ago
War is one of the most environmentally destructive things we do, and it's usually followed by a period of expansion.
mtberatwork 8y ago
> Poverty, overpriced health care and a lack of common social structure (every man for himself) will lower the life expectancy again after decades of increase. This seems to be a very US specific outlook on things that most western countries have long since figured out. Extreme poverty, lack of health care, lack of social safety nets - all self-inflicted in the US. Take for example the recent closings of hospitals in rural areas of red states that have refused Medicaid expansion due to extreme political polarization [1]. It doesn't have to be that way, especially in a country as wealthy as the US. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/upshot/a-sense-of-alarm-as-rural-hospitals-keep-closing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/upshot/a-sense-of-alarm-a...
- kiliantics 8y ago
  The problem is that western countries will not be the first ones to experience the consequences of climate change. Most likely the first victims will be in places where such social safety nets barely exist. Arguably, this is already happening, which is why we are seeing civil unrest and mass migration from North Africa and the Middle East, where droughts and famine were a factor in many of the instabilities.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

albertgoeswoof 8y ago

What’s not sustainable? The human population doubling again? Or maintaining the current population? Clearly we have to address climate change but it’s not a growing population that is unsustainable, if anything the progress over the past 50 years has indicated the exact opposite.

cyberpunk0 8y ago
Uhh our population is also a huge problem driving that climate change.. wtf?
montenegrohugo 8y ago
Human population by itself is not the measure we should worry about. With enough technological progress, the earth could reasonably sustain 100+ billion people. The problem lies in the doubling of human population in little more than a generation. The problem lies in that we are not being sustainable with this. We are depleting resources whilst polluting and rapidly changing our environment. For the moment, we only have one small rock in which to live and breathe. If we have to shit where we eat, then let's at least try to shit cleanly.
- ahje 8y ago
  Once that technological progress has been made, and we have implemented those new technologies on a global scale, then sure. Right here and right now, we're still largely relying on fossil fuels and machinery up to several decades old in order to produce food and considering it seems to be hard to even get up to modern standards, hoping for future tech to save the day seems far fetched.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    What if part of the reason is the fact that the new tech isn't better enough to justify switching - yet?
    - ahje 8y ago

arkh 8y ago

> What can we do to change this? Let's cull the population. A little plague to remove 80%. Or if you want to stay almost humane: make 90% of the population sterile. It would be extreme but that's what you get when your postulates are that all those species were useful, we can't adapt to climate change and we won't ever get out of here.

Theodores 8y ago

> I implore you to be politically active, to consider support for candidates that at least acknowledge that there is a problem. Consider a carbon tax. Consider big, international efforts to clean up our oceans. Consider sexual education efforts in developing nations. Consider carbon re-capture efforts. There's a ton of things we can do, but we have to start doing It has all been said before. None of this is going to be easy when we have our governments frittering away money on the arms trade. It is violence and the threat of violence that enforces the current economic order. Therefore it is the trade in arms that needs to be addressed if there is going to be progress in other areas. The arms trade isn't just bullets, the business is also about 'cyber warfare' which means planting the post-truth news stories in the media that enforces the status quo for the arms trade. People laughed at Martin Luther King for wanting to combine the rights he wanted for all people at home with the anti-Vietnam War, pro-peace ideas. They thought he would set back both causes and confuse people. History was not kind to those critics, we only know of Martin Luther King, the others were just shills anyway. It may seem a bit of a stretch of the imagination to think that the acidification of the oceans or the fact that there are less than 7000 cheetahs left is going to be solved with things like nuclear disarmament and global treaties to abolish the arms trade. There will be those that think these issues shouldn't be confused and that things will not get better for the likes of the cheetah if focus is shifted over to the steps needed for a more peaceful planet. But why not give peace a chance? Every one of those billions of single use bullets could have been made into a reusable and recyclable rechargeable battery and you could have an extremely large wind farm instead of the F35 programme. We could go fully carbon neutral in a generation to make this planet a beautiful garden for all. But, for this to happen the arms trade has to be made extinct first.

abledon 8y ago
For that, humanity needs spiritual process — people like Putin trump , NK, China etc will not let that happen unless we provide them with a tool for inner transformation of their experience of living
- Theodores 8y ago
  The largest arms dealers sit on the UN security council. One of them is currently wanting to abolish the INF treaty and they aren't in Asia. I would say that spiritual mumbo jumbo ain't going to cut it, a business case needs to be made that green energy is going to offer better profit and more security than more nukes.

quantum_magpie 8y ago

There has to be political will to completely ban all fishing, hunting and deforestation. Allow rangers and coast guard to kill on sight all violators. At the moment I see no other option to restore wildlife on this planet.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago
...and animal farming. It's completely unsustainable as well.
- tashoecraft 8y ago
  Do be careful with that, whilst I agree that we need to drastically reduce our meat consumption, getting rid of all meat consumption with out some kind of super advancement in other fields will be far worse for the environment. In some place plant based food is more sustainable, in other animal based is.
  - yesenadam 8y ago
    getting rid of all meat consumption with out some kind of super advancement in other fields will be far worse for the environment How so?
- mkirklions 8y ago
  The Chicken + Talapia conversion to protein is the most efficient animal protein to build. If only people knew how to cook and flavor foods, then people wouldnt be reliant on beef to make their foods tasty.
thousandautumns 8y ago
Hunting is not what is wiping out animal populations. In fact, for many commonly hunted animals, like deer and many forms of fowl, human hunters are a necessary part of maintaining ecological balance. Fishing and deforestation are another story.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

At least in the U.S., politics is a football game complete with cheerleaders and game stats. It's my side vs their side. Even the most intelligent people get locked up in this battle. They don't bother looking at the candidates themselves, they just vote for their team. I mean, I look around and so many people who voted for certain people to get rid of certain programs are the one's who would actually benefit from those programs. It boggles the mind.

rootusrootus 8y ago
Given that the candidates tend to hew pretty closely to their party platform, it is perfectly sensible to vote for a team instead of an individual. It is a completely valid choice. The people voting against their own self-interest clearly disagree, there must be some overriding element of their ideology that is more important.

travisoneill1 8y ago

Who cares if they acknowledge the problem but take no meaningful action? I give no credit for that. Anybody who can do math can see that the only solution is to manage the population but that will never happen outside authoritarian states like China.

Fiahil 8y ago

I firmly look toward the end of humankind. Extinction events are full of opportunities.

stephengillie 8y ago
At one point, there were hundreds of thousands (millions?) of horses in the world, owned as transportation vehicles. Then the horseless carriage was invented, and now horses are somewhat rare. The same could happen to humanity, if AI and general purpose robots become viably robust.

brownbat 8y ago

> Human Population has more than doubled... This is not sustainable Hans Rosling had some interesting findings on population growth: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnexjTCBksw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnexjTCBksw

arbitrary_name 8y ago
This does not cut it as a response. The earth does not have capacity for us and all the living plants and animals. A healthy future should include biodiversity and not 9 billion people. Things are not getting better for most of the planet.
- brownbat 8y ago
  Huh. I've heard carrying capacity estimates range from 10 to 150 billion. http://outsideinradio.org/shows/2018/10/11/so-over-population http://outsideinradio.org/shows/2018/10/11/so-over-populatio... Maybe population theorists are wrong and you are right it's more like 5, or whatever your number is. It's just hard to know, since Malthusianism has such a terrible track record, adamantly predicting apocalypse for two hundred years. They continue to make failing predictions: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/31/258687278/a-bet-five-metals-and-the-future-of-the-planet https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/31/258687278/a-be... There are real challenges to confront about the environment, but I do worry about maintaining credibility while endorsing some of the more tenuous extrapolations.
  - jlawson 8y ago
    Carrying capacity is related to quality of life and technology. With very poor quality of life, Earth could probably carry quite a large number of people. But why build such a world? Why is 100 billion people packed in tenements, living off hydroponic slop better than 2 billion experiencing nature, breathing free and having the option of traditional or modern lifestyles?
    - brownbat 8y ago

strainer 8y ago

Human behavior is vastly more impactful on the planet than human numerosity. We are not feeling the consequences of simply people - it is our gross behavior. impact = people * behavior To make people reduction the target in this situation would be systematically misanthropic. Behavior can improve by orders of magnitude and even reverse polarity amicably and rapidly, through culture, inspiration, technological potential, historic renaissance - this is the solution to envisage - not come on... you know... people ~reductions.

redleggedfrog 8y ago
I think the problem with this is plausibility. I have much more faith in humanity culling itself, by whatever misanthropic means, than behaving "amicably and rapidly." The possible solution might not be the pleasant one.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  Basically stop eating beef and using internal-combustion cars, and the situation is vastly improved. Not impossible. A bunch of tax law changes would do it. And that's a lot more passable than killing a bunch of people.
  - JTbane 8y ago
    The problem with that is people are really attached to their cars and beef.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Basically stop eating beef and using internal-combustion cars, and the situation is vastly improved. Not impossible. For one, beef's not that much of a problem: https://theconversation.com/yes-eating-meat-affects-the-environment-but-cows-are-not-killing-the-climate-94968 https://theconversation.com/yes-eating-meat-affects-the-envi... But second, all kinds of systems we have have been premised on economic growth year after year. When we hit some harder limits, we'll hit them hard.

qubax 8y ago

Most of the environmental damage so far has been done by the wealthy developed countries to maintain a high standard of living. Most of the population growth is in the underdeveloper world that hope to be developed. What's really worrying is that the 5.5 billion people in underdeveloped countries want the high living standards of 1.5 billion people in the developed countries. This will put incredible strain on the environment and resources. Technological advancements will help but technology can only do so much. We already see this with china. They are developing and getting richer and they want to drive cars, have AC/refigerators/computers, eat more meat, etc like americans or europeans. And who can blame them. Why shouldn't they have the same living standards? Soon, ASEAN, india, africa, etc will want the high living standards as well. Can 7 billion people ( soon to be 9 billion ) live like americans or europeans? Also, as the chinese, indians, africans, etc get higher living standards, wouldn't we want even higher living standards? Will we reach any resource limits?

gadders 8y ago

Are people still trotting out these Malthusean ideas? It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. Global standards of living have never been higher.

api 8y ago

It's clear that this rate of growth is not sustainable. Everyone knows that, though not everyone acknowledges it. Population growth must top out somewhere. The most likely mechanism is the same one that's driven birth rate decline in developed nations: affluence. The end of huge scale population growth doesn't mean human extinction or even significant population decline, though it may mean financial crisis and a major re-invention of modern finance around models that do not depend on eternal massive GDP growth. Wars of course will happen. People fight wars. Modern wars don't have body counts like they used to. A war between the USA and Russia or the USA and China would -- unless nukes come out in force -- be largely fought by machines with body counts far lower than WWI and WWII. (USxChina would be a full-on cyberpunk mech battle.) Wars also tend to be followed by periods of expansion, so don't pin your "hope" on war to reduce human population or environmental effects in the long term. I've simply come to terms with the fact that we have entered the Anthropocene. The holocene geological epoch has ended. If you want to slap a date on the anthropocene, I'd go with July 16th, 1945, the date of the Trinity atomic test. That was the point at which the evolutionary ratchet clicked and regression to a pre-industrial state became game-theoretically impossible. Subsequent atomic testing also furnishes a nice neat line in geological strata that will be clearly visible to any geologists of the far distant future. We are in the early anthropocene, which seems characterized by increased CO2 and methane concentrations, increased temperatures, and plummeting biodiversity. The latter is a common characteristic of geological boundary events. The fact that this one was caused by the emergence of large scale industrialized intelligence instead of a meteorite or volcanism doesn't much matter. When the environment drastically changes a lot of species die off. What happens next is debatable. It's likely that intelligence will soon figure out massively scalable renewable energy (it's close) and/or fusion. That combined with depletion of fossil fuels will mean CO2 emissions will probably fall off a cliff by mid-century. The big CO2 pump is probably a H-A (Holocene-Anthropocene) boundary event like the line of radioisotopes from early atomic testing. CO2 has a long half-life in the atmosphere but we don't know what biology is going to do as the planet warms and all that CO2 is hanging around. There could be a huge burst in photosynthesis. The Cretaceous period, the last epoch with similarly high CO2 concentrations, also had about 150% today's oxygen concentration in the atmosphere. Maybe that will happen by a few hundred years from now. I'm thinking the Anthropocene is going to look a bit like the Cretaceous. The loss of biodiversity here on Earth is depressing, but on the positive side it's likely that the Anthropocene will see the spread of organic life from Earth to its Moon, Mars, and possibly other locations in the solar system. It may also see the birth of self-replicating machine intelligences, an entirely new offshoot of life adapted for large-scale growth beyond the planet's biosphere. A moderate number of humans and associated symbiotic plants and animals might colonize other worlds, but I'd predict that post-biological life will make the big leap from atmosphere to space (analogous to the leap from the oceans to land). Us with our clunky space suits are like lungfish.

cletus 8y ago

> This is not sustainable. This is a longstanding concern going back to at least the 70s [1]. The argument is essentially twofold: 1. Population growth will continue at or near present rates indefinitely; and 2. We will exceed population N where N is the number of people the planet can support. For (1) the rate of growth has slowed and is projected to continue slowing over the next century [2] such that many of these estimates have been way off. For (2), we have a pretty narrow-minded view of how many people this planet can actually support but with sufficient automation hydroponic yield depending on crop can be 10x+ per unit of land area (eg [3]). Automation here is important for both constructing greenhouses and maintaining the crop. This could well increase food capacity to 50-100B people depending on diet, possibly much higher. What's more of a factor are resources and in particular energy costs. Commercial fusion power with deuterium would solve a whole bunch of problems at once (eg if the cost is below hydrocarbon based fuels then you can extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into fuel, which also largely solves your greenhouse gas problem too). If we ever figure out commercial fusion based on normal hydrogen well that's basically unlimited energy. Fusion isn't a requirement though. Solar gets ever cheaper. At some point it will become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and I've seen estimates for the yield of this to be about 7x the energy production of the same panel on the ground since there's essentially no night and there's definitely no weather. Don't get me wrong: people are screwing up the planet and a lot of the larger animals seem doomed but that's more an issue of human vanity (eg wanting rhino horns, ivory, fish bladders and the like) rather than being driven by any actual need. Deforestation is an issue but more-so in the developing world and more of an issue for ecosystems rather than, say, the atmosphere (IIRC ~80% of the CO2 is produced by the oceans). Overfishing too is a problem but mainly for us because at some point there just won't be any fish to eat. People like to make alarmist predictions. In some cases I'm sure they truly believe them. This to me is largely a folly of youth as experience teaches you the poor track record of such prognostications. In other cases I suspect people are trying to prompt action from the complacent. The problem with this is that alarmist rhetoric about the environment tends to turn a lot of people off. And a history of bad predictions doesn't help your cause (whatever that cause is). People do and will continue to make short-term decisions based largely on self-interest. That's just human nature. In a lot of cases its based on need rather than want. It's hard to tell a poor family in a developing country not to chop down the forest when the alternative is not heating their homes (with the wood) and/or not feeding their families (with the farmland created) In others, it's not. But the notion that this planet can only support 5, 7 or 10 or 15B people is patently false. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... [3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4483736/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4483736/

ataturk 8y ago

But it is the West's fault even though our population growth rate has leveled off, we are working hard to keep trash out of the oceans, put limits on fishing, and have been working hard on many other efforts. Meanwhile, in the corrupt 3rd World...

timonovici 8y ago

I'm afraid the incentives are not there - and we won't do any of those things - but at some point the system will bounce back, and hopefully it will self-regulate, rather than spiraling out of control. You can already see it happening, the hurricanes are getting worse and more frequent in USA, Italy and parts of Europe are hit by floods; An occasional reactor melts down. I'd say just enjoy the next decade as much as possible, who knows, maybe it won't last even that long.

ackidacki 8y ago

The argument really comes down to whether to curtail the liberty and veneration of independence that defines this century.

deialtrous 8y ago

>to consider support for candidates that at least acknowledge that there is a problem There are none. Every candidate for every major party in almost all western nations is openly pro-growth. Saying "we'll tax CO2 emissions while importing millions of people and destroying ever more of the little remaining natural ecosystems on the planet" is not acknowledging the problem: overpopulation. >Consider a carbon tax. That won't do anything. CO2 is not the problem, too many people is. >Consider sexual education efforts in developing nations That is at least addressing the issue, but it also gets you labelled an evil racist nazi klansman. Unfortunately it also hasn't proven effective. The governments of those countries need to be directly involved like China's one child policy. >There's a ton of things we can do, but we have to start doing We're still doing in the wrong direction. The population of Africa has increased by 1000% in the last century, and we're still actively trying to make that continue, while pretending we can simply import a tiny fraction of those people into Europe and North America as if that will solve anything.

ajross 8y ago
> CO2 is not the problem, too many people is. Proximate vs. root cause nitpickery isn't a solution either. It's entirely possible to get carbon output down to sustainable levels without genocide. You're simply wrong here.
- deialtrous 8y ago
  Getting carbon output down will not do anything about the massive ecological destruction this article is about. That's the point. And where on earth does genocide come into this from?
apazzolini 8y ago
> That won't do anything. CO2 is not the problem, too many people is. CO2 is a problem. This year's Nobel prize in economics was awarded to Bill Nordhaus [1] for figuring out the economic impact of carbon based emissions. He, along with many climate scientists and economists, think that this is the most market-aligned way to reduce the impact of climate change. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Nordhaus#Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Nordhaus#Nobel_Memoria...

kimmeld 8y ago

> What can we do to change this? Get people out of poverty. Educate people. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_...

jlawson 8y ago
You can't get people out of poverty, you can create opportunities for them to get themselves out of poverty. But what if some never do, for whatever reason? Even if 99% of humans climb out of poverty and stop overpopulating, there must be a few on the end of the bell curve who never will, and that group will multiply exponentially until it eventually dominates the global population. It doesn't matter why. Could be religion, or culture, or genes. But someone is on the end of that fertility curve. It only takes one man breeder and one woman breeder and they will, in a world of non-breeders, soon dominate the world population because of the explosive power of exponential math. So what then? (As an example, Amish in America double their population every 20 years or so. We can calculate that they'll number >250 million within maybe 150 years.)

mempko 8y ago

Let's pretend the human population stopped growing 30 years ago. No new children. The USA and other rich nations use SO MUCH energy and resources we would still have seen this drop and still see global warming. Let's not make it about them, it's about us.

jlawson 8y ago
Extant hyper-fertile populations haven't caused the existing problem in the past. That's not what people are saying so there's no such blaming going on. The point is that they'll cause the impossible-to-solve exponentially-growing problem in the future. USA population of 350m can cut down usage. It is at least possible without mass death. When there are 7 billion+ Africans at the end of this century, it'll be rather a much more brutal challenge.
- mempko 8y ago
  I like how you think they won't follow the same growth curve as USA or Europe. It's insanely stupid. Also we don't have until end of century for the brutal challenge. We have it now and it's ridiculous to ploace the burden on the developing world. We have to act now, in USA, Europe and SE Asia NOW. It's not even worth entertaining the population issue of Africa in 2100 when we have more urgent problems at home RIGHT NOW. To put that in perspective, the current billion Europeans and north americans is worth about 15-20 billion africans in terms of energy consumption.
  - jlawson 8y ago
    It's well-acknowledged that they're not following the same curve as USA or Europe. This isn't a matter of the future; it's already happened. That's why the UN has increased it's estimate for peak African population 5 years in a row.

auiya 8y ago

Stop having kids.

pvaldes 8y ago
"Stop having kids, said the elder people. Die faster, said the younger people..."
- prestonh 8y ago
  We could use both to be honest.
tomp 8y ago
Don't worry, that's exactly what the developed countries have been doing!

SuddsMcDuff 8y ago

"We only have one small planet to live on, and we are destroying it." We're not destroying the planet, we're destroying our habitat, and the habitat of those animals unfortunate enough to live at the same time as us. The planet is going to be just fine, it's us who's going to suffer. I love this quote from George Carlin: "The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are! We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas."

patagonia 8y ago
Recent article reported: “So many animals will go extinct in the next 50 years that it will take Earth at least 3 million years to recover” Add to that the impacts of the technosphere (the artifacts of humanity which would not have existed in our absence) which was reported to be 30 trillion tons in 2016. Our impact to climate. Our impact to geography. Sure, in all likelihood there will be a big round ball hanging around in our solar system despite humanity’s best efforts. But that seems like a distinction without a difference. To say the argument is disingenuous would be generous.
- ProAm 8y ago
  99.9% of all creatures who have existed on earth are extinct. [1] The world will continue to move on just as it always has, humans maybe not, but it would just be nature taking it's course. [1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/massext/statement_03.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/massext/statem...
birksherty 8y ago

wonderwonder 8y ago

I agree, large scale political action is the only sustainable fix. Included in this needs to be an effort to switch to a renewable energy economy. This would potentially transform both our environment and the incomes of lower class people. Wind already employs double the number of people as coal in the US. We need to end the use of coal and natural gas, thereby eliminating mountain top removal mining and fracking both of which destroy their surrounding environment and dump massive amounts of waste into the water supply harming the species that live there. Initiate a gradual tax on petroleum based cars and then use that tax to fund the adoption of electric ones. Provide tax incentives for switching to electric vehicles. Add a gradual tax to beef and pork while slowly using that to subsidize organic farming startups. Widespread pesticide use in farming is decimating the insect population. Government subsidized closed system farm startups would help as they limit waste and encourage the reuse of water and soil. Attempting to limit population via government mandate at this stage can only lead to a dystopian bitter society and IMO is not the route to go as it attempts to override natures prime directive driving discord and civil unrest unless we are willing to also accept enforcement along the lines of the Chinese model; which personally I am not. Dumping chemical waste into streams and rivers should be politically removed as an option. If all of this took place only in the US it would have a massive affect as we are essentially tied with China as the worlds largest polluters. Our scientific advances in attaining the green economy would trickle down into the developing nations, especially if we stopped exporting coal.

08-15 8y ago

> Consider sexual education efforts in developing nations Is this a joke? Do you really think people in poor(!) nations don't know how children are made? They do. They want 10+ children, because that's their retirement fund. If you want to make a difference, educate women about everything but sexuality. That drops the fertility rate to below replacement and raises the generation time from 20 years to 35.

elocinstr8t 8y ago

I agree that the consequences of us trashing the planet will be felt more by us, but I think that our future kids and grandchildren will have to suffer through it, if we don't take actions fast. It's true, we should support someone who acknowledges climate change and tries to find ways to stop it, but we could also help by starting in our own homes. Change must come from within. Also, tech companies should help solve this problem. They have the resources, they can find a way to stop or alleviate climate change from worsening.