8 ms·

People keep saying we can feed 10 billion people. We can. But at what cost to the diversity of biological systems? It’s not popular to say but we need to stab

• skeeter2020 5y ago
  >> Stabilize populations to 1960s or whatever, What exactly does this mean? People were pretty upset with China's one child policy (all the unintended side-effects ignored); this sounds even more nefarious? .
  • mc32 5y ago
    It’s not something we achieve in 20 years. It would be a century long goal via reduced fertility rates that do not include barbaric tools like forced abortions, etc.
    • Scarblac 5y ago
      Yeah, if it takes a century then it will be way too late for biodiversity. The man-made great extinction is right now.
      • mc32 5y ago
        It’s not like we want to be authoritarians and control reproduction directly. We can only incentivize via education, opportunity and availability of contraceptives. India for example offers sterilization for men who want to avoid unintended impregnation of partners. They could even incentivize such a thing.
        • tacocataco 5y ago
          How can you prevent any incentives becoming economic eugenics?
        • Scarblac 5y ago
          I agree, but then it shouldn't be brought up as something relevant to preventing catastrophic climate change.
    • whimsicalism 5y ago
      How do we reduce fertility rates? The enemy you are fighting is natural selection, in this case.
      • sdenton4 5y ago
        Give people (especially women) access to both education and reproductive freedom. It works wonders.
        • nitrogen 5y ago
          There seem to be memetic inoculations (i.e. core beliefs that reproduction at a high rate is desirable) in some groups that prevent those wonders from being worked. You eventually reach a point where all children are born to the uneducated or memetically inoculated, so again natural selection is a problem.
• mistrial9 5y ago
  With actual land use planning, the tension between production and conservation is a false dichotomy. Second, agricultural products are already produced to meet needs Third, the "reduce people" argument is almost always a losing one
  • i_haz_rabies 5y ago
    It's not a false dichotomy, there's just some slack in the current system. Eventually, no matter how hard you try, you hit a point where population and conservation are incompatible. We just don't know what that point is.
  • mc32 5y ago
    We could handle 10 billion if we consumed as people consumed in 1901, but not at the rate middle class people consume in even middle of the road developed countries. Japan, Italy and the US are "reducing the people" naturally. We're there already. Yes our pop happens to be "growing" but that's due to others exporting their excess to us.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      > We could handle 10 billion if we consumed as people consumed in 1901, but not at the rate middle class people consume in even middle of the road developed countries. How do you figure? Certainly we can't afford to keep emitting at the rate we're emitting, but if we transition to entirely clean energy and use our existing farmland more efficiently (rather than encroaching on important ecosystems) then I'm not sure what the remaining bottlenecks are. Lumber?
      • goatlover 5y ago
        Yes, We will probably figure out fusion and AGI within a century along with advanced molecular nanotech. So yes, if civilization can make it through the 21st, we should be able to transition to a highly efficient, clean civilization, while restoring part of the biosphere.
• sleepysysadmin 5y ago
  >Stabilize populations to 1960s or whatever, but we need to do the same as we’re doing for pollution set a benchmark and aim for it. Get those people educated, provide them with prophylactics and get them out of a pop explosion curve and get to ZPG like Italy and Japan (US as well if we didn’t import pop growth). So about 3 billion people is stable? You're saying we need a reduction of about 5 billion? How do we do that? Which countries need massive depopulation?
  • mc32 5y ago
    I dunno, how did we establish which countries have to reduce greenhouse emissions the most? When it comes to population regulation it's via reproduction policies that educate women and offer them job opportunities and incentivize them to have sustainable family sizes.
    • sleepysysadmin 5y ago
      >I dunno, how did we establish which countries have to reduce greenhouse emissions the most? You will be frightened how we did that. Canada for example is net-positive and effectively doesn't have to do anything. Not surprising given we have a gigantic boreal forest that stretches across the country. We have almost 10,000 trees per person. So then why do we show up in top 10 worst countries? Our trees don't count, they are considered against us. >When it comes to population regulation it's via reproduction policies that educate women and offer them job opportunities and incentivize them to have sustainable family sizes. Well, the 'climate clock' has only 8 years left before DEADline. Education and reproductive policies like only allowing 1 child won't work. We have to obviously do far more to reduce the world population by more than half. What do you think we should do?
      • goatlover 5y ago
        > Well, the 'climate clock' has only 8 years left before DEADline. What DEADline? You mean to keep warming below 1.5°C? Do you suppose if we go ver by .1°, we all die? That's not how it works. It's better to limit warming, but there's no magic cutoff in which we all die. It's on a continuum, with more warming meaning the increase in the likelihood of extreme events and disruption. Also at some point, increase in the possibility of positive feedback, but that's likely above or near the maximum projected warming range 2.7°-4°C, and it's still a matter of degree. The IPCC report does not say we all die in the current projected warming range, or that civilization collapses.
• slothtrop 5y ago
  Isn't global population already projected to stabilize in 100 years? The only way you could accelerate this is through aggressive policy measures to allow universal access to contraceptives, and investments to hasten development of manufacturing or other (which, in the interim, will raise emissions - but it would be unethical to disallow it) in the 3rd world. I'm for it but I don't expect it. The alternative is what China opted for which is likely not possible in developing countries. There's a class conflict in the backdrop and I see this as the reason media is planting the idea that consumers ought to be content with less, not because of the environment. They still want and expect you to consume, but will spin lower quality of life (owing to unaffordability of housing and certain lifestyles) as a virtue. Realistically your carbon footprint +/- on an individual level stays in the same rough ballpark if you live in the West since a lot of it is due to city infrastructure, electricity, gas. It's just compounded by sheer population. In my view everyone ought be able to live and pursue a life of high quality; reducing quality of life is not the solution, it's a problem. The solution will lie in innovation, population stagnation, growing economy for developing nations, etc.
  • mc32 5y ago
    Obviously we don't want to go the route China went (even without their bad policy, most people there we having fewer children). But as you say contraceptive availability and education coupled with opportunities.
    • alexgmcm 5y ago
      I mean "Stop at two" isn't a particularly awful policy, yet that is sufficient to curtail population growth. I doubt it even needs to be a policy in many countries - I don't know many people with more than two kids.
      • mc32 5y ago
        Agreed. Two even three. The issue is when most people go over that. It's not usually because they want to but because they don't have the means or options to control their family's growth.
• alexgmcm 5y ago
  > People keep saying we can feed 10 billion people. We can. But at what cost to the diversity of biological systems? Also those 10 billion people in the future will be consuming far more per capita as developing nations continue to industrialise. This is a good thing as everyone deserves a decent life. But if we are all going to have a decent life without destroying the planet then we need to be mindful of how many of us we can sustainably support.
  • whimsicalism 5y ago
    Resource expenditure per unit of consumption is on a multi-decade long downtrend.
• throwawayfear 5y ago
  With vertical farming, we can feed any number of people with less and less inputs. It's a solved problem, if we just scale up this technology everywhere. "It’s also indoors, can be placed anywhere on the planet, is heavily integrated with robots and AI, and produces better fruits and vegetables while using 95% less water and 99% less land." https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/20/this-2-acre-vertical-farm-out-produces-750-acre-flat-farms https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/20/this-2-...
  • carapace 5y ago
    I recently came across this pretty awesome system for vertical hydroponics. It's designed to be self-contained, with minimal labor and power requirements (systems can be run off-grid.) It's a bit capital intensive, and you have to get your nutrients from somewhere, of course, but it seems really promising. https://ezgrogarden.com/ https://ezgrogarden.com/ > Johnson says the system will grow 700 plants, using 15 towers, in a space of just 2 by 18 feet. Today, he sells kits ranging from single tower patio gardens to 10-tower deck gardens to commercial-sized set-ups like those being used by a Miami football stadium for concession meals, by a Whole Foods Market in New Jersey, and by rooftop farmers in Lagos, Nigeria. ... This closed-loop system uses less than 10% of the water of a traditional garden. ... To create a system robust enough for even off-grid farmers, Johnson has spent the last 2 decades developing his trihelix solar windmill. "Mad scientist's homestead is parking size, off-grid system" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSnHShly5R0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSnHShly5R0
  • imtringued 5y ago
    Ok but first you have to show us your fusion reactors.
• zip1234 5y ago
  Look at this: https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields The yields/unit area go up and to the right, which means two things. One is that we need less land for agriculture, which frees it up for other purposes, including allowing biodiversity/forestland.
  • titzer 5y ago
    In my native state of Indiana, cornfields are being converted into subdivisions and parking lots for Lowe's and Walmart. Progress!
    • zip1234 5y ago
      I wish sprawl was addressed in the US. New housing is definitely needed but it seems like the cheapest way to do it is always expanding ever outward in car-dependent suburbs. We need to price externalities of car use yesterday.
      • curryst 5y ago
        Downtown housing stock tends to be old in most cities. It's prohibitively expensive to buy a building, tear it down, rebuild something bigger and hope that it's worth enough to pay for the above. It's cheaper to buy unused land and build on it. Well, cheaper to the homeowner anyways. The costs of maintaining ambulance/fire/police/sewage/electricity infrastructure are huge, but born by the whole city usually. If you want to stop sprawl, have city/state taxes be based on the cost to provide service to your address. Taxes in the cities will likely go down (there's probably a customer per few feet of sewage pipe), and taxes in the suburbs will be astronomical (where there's probably a hundred feet of piping per customer). The amount of resources allocated per-consumer in the suburbs is bad, and in rural areas is crazy. I'm in the suburbs and there's probably 50 feet of clearance between houses on all sides. That's 100 feet of piping to connect our houses, 100 feet of electrical wiring, etc. And yet I pay the same taxes as I did when I lived downtown in an apartment complex, where each resident probably had 1/2" of city-owned piping connected to it.
• rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  >People keep saying we can feed 10 billion people. We can. But at what cost to the diversity of biological systems? > >It’s not popular to say but we need to stabilize population growth and stop encroaching on natural habitats and put a brake on consumerism. This is not popular because it assumes that everyone has an excessive footprint. I'm vegetarian, I get most of my food from a local, organic farm. My footprint is minimal (no car, zero commute, no flight, etc). We could be billions more if we chose to live this way. Why ask/force people not to have a family where we could have happy family living responsibly? Asking others to die / not reproduce is a great way not to challenge our way of life. For some reasons, all the people I know who campaign for population stabilization/reduction are among those with the worst footprint.
  • chuckee 5y ago
    > Why ask/force people not to have a family where we could have happy family living responsibly? I'm sorry, but you know that people can still have families (up to 2.1 children/woman on average) while staying below the replacement reproduction rate (so resulting in population reduction). So why pretend that they're being asked to give up families entirely?
    • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
      You'll have to explain that to those who want 3+ children. I know a few that will fight for their rights to have as many children as they desire. I personnally believe population control is just a way not to challenge our way of life. Because if you get them to actually care about the environment (our future), then people will ajust their family's dream (why have another child if it makes life worst for the first one?).
      • chuckee 5y ago
        Your initial claim was that people would be asked to have no family. At least acknowledge that the choice is "large family" vs. "medium/small family", and not "family" vs. "no family", instead of blithely shifting the argument.
• triceratops 5y ago
  > It’s not popular to say but we need to stabilize population growth Is it not? Where, and why? > provide them with prophylactics Kinda problematic for orgs that rely on US foreign aid.[1] "The policy originally enacted from 1984 to 1993 spoke to abortion only, not family planning in general. However, in 2001, the policy was re-implemented and expanded to cover all voluntary family planning activities, and critics began to refer to it as the "global gag rule." These critics argue that the policy not only reduces the overall funding provided to particular NGOs, it closes off their access to USAID-supplied condoms and other forms of contraception. This, they argue, negatively impacts the ability of these NGOs to distribute birth control, leading to a downturn in contraceptive use and from there to an increase in the rates of unintended pregnancies and abortion. A study of nations in sub-Saharan Africa suggests that unintended pregnancies increased and abortions approximately doubled while the policy was in effect. Critics also argue that the ban promotes restrictions on free speech as well as restrictions on accurate medical information. The European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development presented a petition to the United States Congress signed by 233 members condemning the policy. The forum has stated that the policy "undermines internationally agreed consensus and goals"." The global gag rule is enforced by Republican administrations and rescinded by Democratic ones. Infer from that what you will. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_policy
  • bordercases 5y ago
    The Green Revolution was predicated on the idea that we should increase calorie yields now to prevent famine shocks in key third world populations. The most efficient way to perform well on this single metric is with monoculture and cash crops, due to economy of scale. This is humane, but it doesn't slowed down population growth, which requires either a bottleneck or a set of loose constraints aside if we want to maintain a constant food yield, ceteris paribus the way we grow food now.
  • chiefalchemist 5y ago
    All well and good, but thecountries of Africa are 't the problem. They're not the ones consuming resources disproportionately to their populations. Is population an issue? Yes, probably. But it's (Western) (over) consumption that got us here, and continues to escalate the crisis. The less distractions for that, the better.
• andrewjl 5y ago
  > People keep saying we can feed 10 billion people. Whether global population ever reaches 10 billion people is in doubt. Fertility rates are falling faster than the most aggressive UN estimates in all but a few places. [1][2] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-shrinking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-s... [2] Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson
• goatlover 5y ago
  The population is going to stabilize somewhere between 9 and 11 billion by around the end of the century, and then start slowly declining. But getting back to 1960s level of population isn't realistic. Maybe several centuries from now. But at that point, we could reasonably expect advanced nanotech, advanced efficient automation, arcologies and fusion to offer sustainably high standards of living for 10+ billion people. It's really more of a matter of how we make it through the next 100 years.