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The real culprit is the uncontrolled population growth but nobody wants to talk about that. Ok, let's assume that people do indeed eat too much meat and that w

The real culprit is the uncontrolled population growth but nobody wants to talk about that. Ok, let's assume that people do indeed eat too much meat and that we halve our current consumption. Population grows until it has doubled and the meat consumption is then back to the same level as to what it is now. Eventually we can all be eating grass and rocks and there'd still be too much demand on nature crated by the existence of humans. The only real long term solution is start limiting population growth drastically. Any crutch trying to limit energy and material consumption will not solve the root cause. (Ofc it still makes sense to cut off the excess and not be wasteful or a resource hog) Personally I'd like to have only enough people on this planet, so that everyone can be fed and educated and have access to health care, sanitation and all the basic needs.

sanxiyn 7y ago
> Ok, let's assume that people do indeed eat too much meat and that we halve our current consumption. Population grows until it has doubled and the meat consumption is then back to the same level as to what it is now. This is a very strange assumption as UN Population Division predicts peak population at 12B, that is, the current world population will never double. That is business as usual without any intervention. Do you have specific reasons to disagree with UN Population Division?
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  The UN Population Division have underestimated population growth for decades and base their projections on the assumption that fertility will converge on a steady state. This is evolotuniariliy illiterate. People who have more children will have children who have more children. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513817302799#bb0180 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381... The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future The forecasting of the future growth of world population is of critical importance to anticipate and address a wide range of global challenges. The United Nations produces forecasts of fertility and world population every two years. As part of these forecasts, they model fertility levels in post-demographic transition countries as tending toward a long-term mean, leading to forecasts of flat or declining population in these countries. We substitute this assumption of constant long-term fertility with a dynamic model, theoretically founded in evolutionary biology, with heritable fertility. Rather than stabilizing around a long-term level for post-demographic transition countries, fertility tends to increase as children from larger families represent a larger share of the population and partly share their parents' trait of having more offspring. Our results suggest that world population will grow larger in the future than currently anticipated.
anonymou2 7y ago
It is approximately 200.000 new humans every day. Or an entire new Germany every year.
_Microft 7y ago
Peak population growth rate was 50 years ago. -> https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth What we are currently seeing in absolute numbers is a huge number of people with a lower growth rate out-reproducing a lower number with a higher growth rate in the past. Education, available contraceptives, low child mortality (yes, low mortality as that makes having children less of a gamble and therefore you can get away with having fewer) automatically lead to lower fertility rates.
tom_mellior 7y ago
Population growth... where? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region: "When aggregated in terms of income, we see in the visual below that the richest half (high and upper-middle income countries) emit 86 percent of global CO2 emissions. The bottom half (low and lower-middle income) only 14%. The very poorest countries (home to 9 percent of the global population) are responsible for just 0.5 percent. This provides a strong indication of the relative sensitivity of global emissions to income versus population. Even several billion additional people in low-income countries — where fertility rates and population growth is already highest — would leave global emissions almost unchanged. 3 or 4 billion low income individuals would only account for a few percent of global CO2. At the other end of the distribution however, adding only one billion high income individuals would increase global emissions by almost one-third."

sanxiyn 7y ago

> Ok, let's assume that people do indeed eat too much meat and that we halve our current consumption. Population grows until it has doubled and the meat consumption is then back to the same level as to what it is now. This is a very strange assumption as UN Population Division predicts peak population at 12B, that is, the current world population will never double. That is business as usual without any intervention. Do you have specific reasons to disagree with UN Population Division?

barry-cotter 7y ago
The UN Population Division have underestimated population growth for decades and base their projections on the assumption that fertility will converge on a steady state. This is evolotuniariliy illiterate. People who have more children will have children who have more children. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513817302799#bb0180 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381... The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future The forecasting of the future growth of world population is of critical importance to anticipate and address a wide range of global challenges. The United Nations produces forecasts of fertility and world population every two years. As part of these forecasts, they model fertility levels in post-demographic transition countries as tending toward a long-term mean, leading to forecasts of flat or declining population in these countries. We substitute this assumption of constant long-term fertility with a dynamic model, theoretically founded in evolutionary biology, with heritable fertility. Rather than stabilizing around a long-term level for post-demographic transition countries, fertility tends to increase as children from larger families represent a larger share of the population and partly share their parents' trait of having more offspring. Our results suggest that world population will grow larger in the future than currently anticipated.

anonymou2 7y ago

It is approximately 200.000 new humans every day. Or an entire new Germany every year.

_Microft 7y ago

Peak population growth rate was 50 years ago. -> https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth What we are currently seeing in absolute numbers is a huge number of people with a lower growth rate out-reproducing a lower number with a higher growth rate in the past. Education, available contraceptives, low child mortality (yes, low mortality as that makes having children less of a gamble and therefore you can get away with having fewer) automatically lead to lower fertility rates.

tom_mellior 7y ago

Population growth... where? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region: "When aggregated in terms of income, we see in the visual below that the richest half (high and upper-middle income countries) emit 86 percent of global CO2 emissions. The bottom half (low and lower-middle income) only 14%. The very poorest countries (home to 9 percent of the global population) are responsible for just 0.5 percent. This provides a strong indication of the relative sensitivity of global emissions to income versus population. Even several billion additional people in low-income countries — where fertility rates and population growth is already highest — would leave global emissions almost unchanged. 3 or 4 billion low income individuals would only account for a few percent of global CO2. At the other end of the distribution however, adding only one billion high income individuals would increase global emissions by almost one-third."