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> If a degrowth advocate came out and said point blank that under their proposals it would be only say 2 billion people, at least that would be intellectually h
by rekabis 4y ago
> If a degrowth advocate came out and said point blank that under their proposals it would be only say 2 billion people, at least that would be intellectually honest and I would respect that as a coherent point of view.
Except that the _healthy_ carrying capacity of the planet _is_ 2 billion people, assuming a vegan consumption somewhat less than a first-world level.
Put an omnivorous consumption at first-world levels, and it’s somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion.
Sure, the planet can “support” ten or twenty billion or more, but only by farming 100% of the planetary surface and making 99% of all species extinct, whereupon a complete collapse of the biosphere would quickly ensue, resulting an effective planetary carrying capacity of 0 humans for the following several million years as the biosphere recovers.
- ben_w 4y agoCarrying capacity depends on tech as well as lifestyles and dietary choices. If we were willing to cover the entire planet and make 99% of all species extinct (and I agree that would be bad), greenhouses would are enough to boost production to the 100 billion to 1 trillion range, hydroponics and aeroponics about ten times that. But that's expensive and we don't have a clear and present need to shift away from open air farming in most cases.
- babas 4y agoThis made me think of 2 videos by Isaac Author https://youtu.be/XAJeYe-abUA https://youtu.be/XAJeYe-abUA Tldv; if we pave over the earth the carrying capacity is humongous. Only limited by heat and energy.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoVegan diets are cool, but they're not actually that much more GHG friendly than a sensible omnivorous diet, see the EAT-Lancet diet plan for example: > The resulting EAT-Lancet reference diet promoted increased consumption of nuts, fruits, legumes and vegetables and suggested that global consumption of red meat and sugar needed to decrease by more than 50% by 2050 https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/ https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/ They're working on version 2 at the moment. But yeah, eating much more food than your doctor recommendeds and subsidizing lots of terrible things going into processed foods is bad, If that's what you mean by "first-world levels".