I said that 15 years ago on this very forum and people attacked me for it.
China used to understand this, but they’ve rolled those restrictions back.
Now, every country wants more people, because people translate into more economic and geopolitical power.
You’re correct in this, despair isn’t entirely rational. It’s an emotional response, but it’s difficult to overcome. For me, personally, I’ve been thinking of human-nature relationship for a long time and the pendulum has swung back and forth. Along with the acceleration of biodiversity loss since the turn of this century that isn’t slowing, I guess the tipping point for me is the realization that there’s just no political will in this country to take any kind of substantive actions on climate as evinced by the willingness to jettison the entirety of the climate actions in the original infrastructure bill and the G7 failures. Much like Obama’s term, I suspect WH strategists are advising that climate is a political loser. I understand the political realities, but there’s always going to be an excuse to forestall action. Compromising on climate is like compromising with a virus, climate and physics do not care about political ideologies (not to mention, the compromise deal is a bad bill, and sometimes a bad bill is worse than no bill.) Put another way, the Democratic party as currently constituted isn’t up to the task. This is not to say no action should ever be taken if it’s ‘too late’, but I fear the time it is the consequences are going to be severe (and geo-engineering is fraught with peril.)
I don’t know, I thought that sentence was incongruent with the preceding paragraph (but I didn’t want to selectively quote.) I suppose it might mean accepting a post-technological world maybe (human extinction will occur, but it’ll be from some cosmic calamity or super volcanoes on par with the Siberian traps that caused the Permian extinction, but obv. from the topic, I think a collapse of some kind will occur.)
For some reason Google has started feeding me articles from https://oilprice.com/. Investors are expecting $100/bb crude oil prices, and this drives further exploration and drilling (or in the case of bitumen, mining). It’s a wicked catcher (as they say here in New England) - on the one hand, we don’t pay the externalities for fossil fuels; OTOH, when oil prices et al rise there’s a boom in drilling (if say Saudi Arabia or Iran should it get sanctions removed turn on the spigot that would drive down prices which would slow down new drilling. I’ve no idea with the best outcome should be.) Here’s just a couple samples from that site.
(I know some are going to eyeroll that the following thread is from an extinction rebellion activist, but the links provided are valid - long thread on much of the new drilling occurring globally. Many (but not all of course) of these new sites are in poor countries and there’s no way those governments are going to say no to petrol dollars, even though history shows that the outcome is rarely if ever what’s promised.)
https://twitter.com/xr_cambridge/status/1404010271094579203?s=20
The other thing that is super depressing is if the rare Earth hypothesis turns out to be true. Imagine if Earth is unique in the galaxy. :(
Yeah, we’d need to actively pursue de-growth or something similar and that just seems so far from ever happening. Ironically we’re doing what all species do without thought (largely) to the long term consequences and/or ethical considerations.
I don’t know, it’s a fair point (Europe hasn’t collapsed either despite the millennial long impact on its environment). But, globally, ecological collapse hasn’t happened (yet). The question is I guess are there limits to technology? If so we’ll outstrip the planet’s life support systems at some point in the future.
I was suggesting Japan as an example where energy use is declining (or plateauing) while some economic growth continues, and that is happening without a whole lot of people dying to make it happen. It at least suggests that if an already-industrialized society adopts a culture which results in 0PG, or even mild decline, energy use doesn’t have to keep climbing at the same rate as economic growth.
On the other hand, most people live in societies that are still developing industrially and economically, and that growth is going to swamp any per-capita energy use benefits you’d see in places like Japan.
It’s not the greatest counter-example though given that Japan rather famously had a “lost decade” of growth in the 90s, which was then extended through the 2000s, despite what was at the time considered extremely loose monetary and fiscal policy. I’m not a huge fan of applying thermodynamics to economics as anything more than an analogy, but Japan doesn’t seem to contradict the correlation.
Agreed, hell I may even have read that post back then and that got me thinking about it, but for sure there was a pretty stark show on one of the Discovery type channels that went into something like the top 5 reasons that humans will become extinct. It was one of them, the notion that we will outstrip the ability for us to keep growing due to loss of everything we need to live. Granted, that timeline was more futuristic in it’s projection, which kind of wrapped up the other reasons we will become extinct into the same nutshell (not enough water, not enough food, etc.) But it was the thing that made me see the numbers: In 1967 there were roughly less than 3.5 billion people on Earth. Today in 2021 there are over 7.8 billion people on Earth. When people question why we’re rushing to this collapse, well, it’s from a number of things, to me, chief among them is that we’ve doubled and then some.
I landed here several years ago, certainly not as well said or researched as the OP citations, but I realized that there is no way that any significant chunk of people are going to suddenly become altruistic to their immediate detriment, which is what it would take globally to turn the ship. Like Alstein, I’m just taking comfort that I’m old enough I should be heading towards the grave roughly when everything utterly fails.
There have been examples of human societies that are more or less stable over time without growth. There have not been any that also include advanced technology and the expectation of significant energy usage.
I was mostly a techno-optemist up through 2000. Then I swung back and forth on a doomy outlook based on climate change, resource wars, and exponential growth. Now I’m mostly resigned. When I’m feeling optimistic I can look to the types of local thinking, green energy, sustainable living movements from both the 70s and the 00’s as good goals but mostly I think that any gains made there will be a blip wiped out by the masses.
If you’re going on population, there’s good indicators the rate of global pop growth has peaked, and might go negative in a generation.
Industrialized societies have lower birthrates.
The biggest source of population booms in the past 200 years have been industrial revolutions, where people still have kids at pre-industrial rates, but the rate of child mortality goes down heavily.
Once the industrial revolution is complete folks have fewer kids.
Many sci-fi futures have us all living in huge arcologies, massively integrated, sometimes self-sustaining, super-dense concentrations of people, manufacturing, and resource-generation usually built on a cyclopean scale and very very vertical. I suppose that if you concentrated the population of the planet into a bunch of super-densely populated collections of arcologies, and turned the rest of the planet thus freed up from human habitation into wilderness again, things might work. But the social and psychological consequences would be…something else again.
It’s like long-term space journeys, where the technical difficulties pale compared to the challenges of human psychology and society forced into such situations.
I think something like this is likely to be the future, and I guess I don’t even know why it would have negative social and psychological consequences. More people already live in urban settings than rural ones. High-density living doesn’t have to be unpleasant or a prison.
Specifically, the real culprit to population growth is the Haber-Bosch process of synthesizing ammonia (to make artificial fertilizer). Paraphrasing Robert Marks here (himself building on work by several earlier environmental historians, e.g. John McNeill), there was reason to believe that by ~1900, the farmable land on earth by natural processes (i.e., the sun and natural fertilizers) was nearing its limit. The Haber-Bosch process was able to increase yields considerably such that while population grew ‘merely’ from 1 billion to 1.6 billion from 1800 to 1900, the Haber-Bosch process created around 1910 allowed for populations well over 6 billion by 2000, which would have been impossible under the natural ‘biological’ regime that previously limited farm yields and production.
Industrialization is basically built on energy exploitation; the discovery of hydrocarbons, first as coal and later petroleum and natural gas in huge quantities are the “work” that is done for us. Imagine an industrial revolution built on burning wood… ain’t going to happen, we’d still be living in something like very late-18th century conditions.
The keys to future industrial sustainability require enough energy to not only maintain standards of living but also increase available energy, as with enough energy you could in theory fix the pollution industrialization caused. What like half of all college graduates should be working on is advanced energy production systems; panels on the moon, heat exchangers, gravity flywheels, whatever.
The world we live in right now is like trying to put out a worldwide forest fire by… burning forests for the energy you need to do it. The very thing we do to solve the climate crisis is the same thing we’re doing to cause it.
TBH it’s more likely we’re going to get hit by a pandemic we can’t stop. We’ve seen the chaos even a relatively mild pandemic has caused; increase the virulence of COVID by 10 and you’re starting to make a dent in the worldwide population. Reducing the worldwide population is 100% the solution.
Certainly from a totally conspiratorial and also not-what-I-actually-believe-but-would-make-a-good-Tom-Clancy-novel sort of way, it’s clear that if China did decide to Make Han Great Again and actually did engineer a virus intentionally, COVID has shown that they could cull a pretty significant portion of the world’s population and still maintain a relatively high level of population themselves, because the rest of the world is hopelessly incompetent and lacking in social cohesion and politically will. China could easily go from 1/6 of the world’s population to like 1/2 if they really, really wanted to.
I think it would work for perhaps most of the population, sure. I think Americans would be the last to accept it though, given our devotion to (comparatively) massive amounts of personal space. For me, I tend to really hate crowds, so I might be letting that influence my take–though even I could see living in Manhattan, if you, um, give me one of those multi-million dollar apartments and a cleaning staff!
I’ve read that too in a few places. It’s mostly an industrialized society thing though, very developed countries having a population shift and decline. Meanwhile, there is no limit on other countries and they continue to grow. I don’t know what that means globally but I sure hope it means we level off.
I needed to know MOAR, so I googled.
I learned about it from my first real history class in undergrad using an earlier edition of the book linked below. It was my introduction to both global and environmental history. It is pretty short for a survey text and also highly readable if you’re into that sort of thing (it’s meant as an intro text, so it’s not too academic or jargon-laden).
It’s worth noting too that the population growth from 1800-1900 was also largely unprecedented up to that point, it’s just that artificial fertilizer really upped things by a degree of several magnitudes.
I have used Marks’ book in a class on colonialism and the West for several years. It is definitely worth a read.
Maybe, but there are so many engineering problems alone that it’s not going to happen. Or, God forbid we get rid of cars, the parking space!
But, as far as I’m aware, we can have pretty dense lowrise neighborhoods where every service is within walking distance, as long as we get a significant part of cars out. Like The Netherlands, but less dumb.
You have the best autocorrect in the world. :)