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Not a Malthusian, but I’m very worried about the amount of resources we are using. We already lack the carbon budget and farming capacity for the world’s popula

Not a Malthusian, but I’m very worried about the amount of resources we are using. We already lack the carbon budget and farming capacity for the world’s population to live to the standard of an average US citizen. There might be enough space and enough atoms, but we don’t yet have the capability to direct it into sustainable quality of life for all.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
As a cow eating, hot showing, car jamming American, I wouldn’t correlate resource usage with quality of life.
- pharmakom 5y ago
  OK it’s not a perfect correlation, but manual labourers on under 1800 calories/day and with no AC would definitely benefit from more resources! Even a European level of resource usage (roughly half that of US, last I checked) would be hard to achieve for the entire world pop.
cryptonector 5y ago
Did you know that total land under agriculture has been trending down for several decades? Would that put you at ease?
- pharmakom 5y ago
  But environmental destruction is way up. A good example is river health. We can provide more meat with high density grazing. But the waste products have to go somewhere, so the farmers spread them across their fields. Now when it rains, these run into the rivers and we get algae bloom. Majority of rivers in UK are now dying, for example. Have we discovered a sustainable way of producing more meat in less space? I hope so. But perhaps we are destroying natural systems whose benefit to us has not been properly quantified, in a way that will be extremely difficult to reverse. Modern agriculture has enabled us to support a larger world population with less labour and less space, but can we continue as we are for another 50 years?
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    > Modern agriculture has enabled us to support a larger world population with less labour and less space, but can we continue as we are for another 50 years? I keep pointing to the fact that negative population growth is already baked in to the world's population pyramid, and responders conveniently continue to ignore that fact. We DO NOT have to "continue as we are for another 50 years". In 50 years there will be desperation to increase fertility rates. > But environmental destruction is way up. > A good example is river health. Demonstrably false in the U.S. In the U.S. in the 30s river fires were so common that they weren't notable. By 1947 they were so rare that a river fire graced the cover of Time magazine to get people outraged (and succeeded, and good thing too because that was part of a process that led Americans to care about their environment). U.S. rivers are much cleaner than they used to be. Sure, there are some terrible stories still (e.g., the Hudson river has some terrible pollutants now-thankfully-mostly-buried under sediment). I don't know what's the case in the UK, but I would be surprised if the state of the UK's rivers today was worse than 50 years ago, and shocked to my core if it was worse than 100 years ago.
    - pharmakom 5y ago
      > We DO NOT have to "continue as we are for another 50 years". In 50 years there will be desperation to increase fertility rates. If the population size goes down but consumption per person goes up by an equivalent amount (easy to imagine when US citizen emits 5x carbon of average citizen of many other countries) we have the same problem. If things are so rosy environmentally, why are so many species going extinct due to habitat loss?
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    For "Not a Malthusian", you have a very negative view of the future.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  Why is the land no longer farmed? Could it be there isn't enough topsoil left to be fertile? Could it be that there are new crops of McMansions and ever further commutes as the core of our cities is abandoned?
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    You're looking at it the wrong way. If population has gone up, so food needs have gone up, and total land under agriculture has gone down, and the planet has greened... that means that farming efficiency has increased by so more than enough to feed the planet's people that it's not profitable to keep so much land under agriculture, and most of the land that is no longer under agriculture didn't get paved over -- it's forest now.

jazzyjackson 5y ago

As a cow eating, hot showing, car jamming American, I wouldn’t correlate resource usage with quality of life.

pharmakom 5y ago
OK it’s not a perfect correlation, but manual labourers on under 1800 calories/day and with no AC would definitely benefit from more resources! Even a European level of resource usage (roughly half that of US, last I checked) would be hard to achieve for the entire world pop.

cryptonector 5y ago

Did you know that total land under agriculture has been trending down for several decades? Would that put you at ease?

pharmakom 5y ago
But environmental destruction is way up. A good example is river health. We can provide more meat with high density grazing. But the waste products have to go somewhere, so the farmers spread them across their fields. Now when it rains, these run into the rivers and we get algae bloom. Majority of rivers in UK are now dying, for example. Have we discovered a sustainable way of producing more meat in less space? I hope so. But perhaps we are destroying natural systems whose benefit to us has not been properly quantified, in a way that will be extremely difficult to reverse. Modern agriculture has enabled us to support a larger world population with less labour and less space, but can we continue as we are for another 50 years?
- cryptonector 5y ago
  > Modern agriculture has enabled us to support a larger world population with less labour and less space, but can we continue as we are for another 50 years? I keep pointing to the fact that negative population growth is already baked in to the world's population pyramid, and responders conveniently continue to ignore that fact. We DO NOT have to "continue as we are for another 50 years". In 50 years there will be desperation to increase fertility rates. > But environmental destruction is way up. > A good example is river health. Demonstrably false in the U.S. In the U.S. in the 30s river fires were so common that they weren't notable. By 1947 they were so rare that a river fire graced the cover of Time magazine to get people outraged (and succeeded, and good thing too because that was part of a process that led Americans to care about their environment). U.S. rivers are much cleaner than they used to be. Sure, there are some terrible stories still (e.g., the Hudson river has some terrible pollutants now-thankfully-mostly-buried under sediment). I don't know what's the case in the UK, but I would be surprised if the state of the UK's rivers today was worse than 50 years ago, and shocked to my core if it was worse than 100 years ago.
  - pharmakom 5y ago
    > We DO NOT have to "continue as we are for another 50 years". In 50 years there will be desperation to increase fertility rates. If the population size goes down but consumption per person goes up by an equivalent amount (easy to imagine when US citizen emits 5x carbon of average citizen of many other countries) we have the same problem. If things are so rosy environmentally, why are so many species going extinct due to habitat loss?
- cryptonector 5y ago
  For "Not a Malthusian", you have a very negative view of the future.
mikewarot 5y ago
Why is the land no longer farmed? Could it be there isn't enough topsoil left to be fertile? Could it be that there are new crops of McMansions and ever further commutes as the core of our cities is abandoned?
- cryptonector 5y ago
  You're looking at it the wrong way. If population has gone up, so food needs have gone up, and total land under agriculture has gone down, and the planet has greened... that means that farming efficiency has increased by so more than enough to feed the planet's people that it's not profitable to keep so much land under agriculture, and most of the land that is no longer under agriculture didn't get paved over -- it's forest now.