I see no memes, just truth bombs.
I think the point is that we already live in a post-scarcity world, or rather in a manufactured-scarcity world
Yes! Cover the earth in medium-density mixed-zoning tram neighborhoods! Anyone who doesn’t want to give the entire planet to one species is Malthusian!
Overpopulation is not a myth. 36% of the earth’s mammalian biomass is Humans, only 5% is wild mammals. 71% of avian life is livestock. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
Half of all “habitable land” (which includes everything except deserts, tundra, salt flats, beaches, or exposed rock) is used for agriculture. Half of all land, for agriculture. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/12/agriculture-habitable-land/
Industrial farming is not sustainable at the current rate and relies on either mined or petrochemical derived ammonia which supplies the nitrogen necessary for protein. Synthetic Ammonia alone feeds half the world population and requires an additional 2% of the world’s power to produce.
The global ecoystem is in rapid decline.
I gave up finding appropriate sources halfway when I realized this post will just get removed eventually.
It’s not the growth of ethanol (maize) and animal feed (soybeans) producing crops on the last 30 years, highly fucking inefficient and produced in the worst way possible, not even that pasture uses A LOT more land than agriculture while being a lot less energy dense, both using a lot more water than producing direct food, it’s the poors.
Edit: And also, beef is the major cause for deforestation too:
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It doesn’t have to be one or the other, we can tackle multiple solutions simultaneously.
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Developing nations have proven to increase their carbon footprints over time, e.g. China, so the fact that they’re the fastest growing populations on earth is a serious issue we can address with solutions such as: empower women’s rights and advancing access to education and upward mobility in society. That was the same exact solution that the UN came to in their meeting in Cairo, Egypt in 1994.
EDIT: 3. less people consume less beef also
Producing beef is the most inefficient way to produce food, in both use of space and water, and energy. We don’t need to impose things on people if humanity reduces its beef consumption.
If we cut beef consumption by half, literally oligarchs would not have an economic reason to deforest the Amazon, because of the price drops. But no one wants to do that.
Developing nations have proven to increase their carbon footprints over time, e.g. China, so the fact that they’re the fastest growing populations on earth is a serious issue
You’re conflating a lot of words, gives an example for China, while Chinas population is not growing even (or will start to diminish on some years), associating different things into the same sentence is hard to pick what exactly you’re talking about, China or Africa (the last place where population growth is happening at large beyond the 2.1 fertility rate).
This mix of “things that are possible/reasonable” and “things that are wildly speculative” is interesting.
Producing beef is the most inefficient way to produce food, in both use of space and water, and energy.
Reasonable/possible
We don’t need to impose things on people if humanity reduces its beef consumption.
Wild speculation / nonsensical.
This is not at all how large societies have worked, in any time period, ever.
While it might be technically true, it’s missing a whole bunch of steps in the middle for it to be a practicality.
If we cut beef consumption by half, literally oligarchs would not have an economic reason to deforest the Amazon, because of the price drops. But no one wants to do that.
- Palm Oil
- Real Estate
- Mineral Speculation
- Wood
And that was just off of the top of my head.
Oligarchs gonna oligarch, removing one revenue source isn’t going to suddenly kill interest in the amazon, with it’s abundant resources and space.
While it might be technically true, it’s missing a whole bunch of steps in the middle for it to be a practicality.
As I said in my comment:
But no one wants to do that.
And about this:
And that was just off of the top of my head.
Beef is the major factor in the amazon, by a large margin, as in my original comment. Palm Oil is not a significant part in Brazil, nor real state. Mineral is mainly in Roraima, but not as big as beef, because it’s based on small operations, there are a lot of sources on this for gold mining and the local Yanomami indigenous population that fights agains this (as this is done on their land).
If you’re going to cherry pick at cherry pick from the text being mentioned.
Your whole comment was :
If we cut beef consumption by half, literally oligarchs would not have an economic reason to deforest the Amazon, because of the price drops. But no one wants to do that.
and wasn’t the comment to which i was responding.
Beef is the major factor in the amazon, by a large margin, as in my original comment. Palm Oil is not a significant part in Brazil, nor real state. Mineral is mainly in Roraima, but not as big as beef, because it’s based on small operations, there are a lot of sources on this for gold mining and the local Yanomami indigenous population that fights agains this (as this is done on their land).
Cool story, still irrelevant to my point which was:
Oligarchs gonna oligarch
Create a revenue vacuum (like removing the biggest value stream in a region) and oligarchs gonna oligarch right in and expand another value stream to make up the difference.
I’m not advocating for this to happen, I’m saying that expecting beef reduction to remove oligarchs from the amazon is unrealistic.
Beef is heavily subsidised either by giving money directly to the producers, or letting them get away with pollution (or deforestation in places like Brazil) and using terrible food and/or drugs for their product.
Without subsidies I’m pretty sure beef wouldn’t be affordable even in rich countries.
They also sell the rainforest lumber, but lifestyle changes aside we should always pursue a lower total population via lower birthrates until we can restore natural order.
China was a developing nation a long time ago, and since 1700 their population has grown 11x over, and now they produce more emissions and utilize more landmass than any other nation on earth.
Total emissions or per capita?
less capita = less emissions
Chinese leadership are trying to promote population growth, again.
Wrong place, my bad
NP we good.
i did, tool.
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Also: animal ag uses 80% of all arable land with most of it destined for grazing land (which a lot of (rain-)-forest had to be razed for) while only producing 17% of global calories and 38% of global proteins. The rest comes from human edible plants. A global switch to a plant based diet would reduce land usage from 4 to 1 billion. But that would be eco-fascism, I guess. Wonder if this is eco-fascism too.
A global switch to a plant based diet would reduce land usage from 4 to 1 billion.
this is based entirely on poore-nemecek 2018, and is not a reliable claim
IMO the biggest problem with the post is that it is ignoring that natural world completely.
We can’t colonize mars, not because it’s far away and hard to get to (although those are problems). The real issue is that we don’t really understand our own biosphere enough to build even an imitation one somewhere else. The ISS is orbits so close it’s barely out of the atmosphere. It’s still well protected by the Earth’s magnetic field, and gets regular deliveries of food, water, spare parts, etc. Every time we’ve tried a closed biosphere (biodome?) on earth, it has failed.
The bigger Earth’s population, the shorter the timespan we have before we can realize we screwed up somehow (i.e. overusing artificial fertilizer, emitting too much carbon, etc.) and having to urgently fix it or the whole planet is wrecked. If we had a “planet B” it wouldn’t be so urgent. If we knew perfectly how the ecosphere worked, we wouldn’t screw up. If we had “save points” and could just load them if we screwed up, then we could run closer to the edge and go back if we messed up. Unfortunately, this is the only planet we have, and we still don’t know how it all works. Because of that, we should really run with a much lower population so that when we inevitably screw up there’s a buffer to protect us while we adjust.
What is the ideal amount of biomass for humans? Same question for agricultural land. What’s the ideal amount? I’m torn between thinking this is just how things go or maybe I’m just terribly ignorant. At some point the majority of biomass was dinosaurs or something, so what? That’s the ebb and flow of life. It wasn’t the biomass of dinosaurs that caused their extinction. How do these biomass stats indicate overpopulation?
I can’t disagree with the industrial farming and overall ecosystem points you raise but the biomass bits seem awfully arbitrary.
I’d also say feeding 50% of the world’s population for 2% of the world’s energy seems pretty damn efficient.
The whole human biomass question is difficult to me. Half of humanity doesn’t have access to proper toilets. I have cheap products produced by contemporary slaves in asia. Fewer people with better conditions sounds good to me.
There was an article released this year that found 2-2.5 billion humans to be the carrying capacity of the earth. I’ve only read the abstract though.
https://researchnow.flinders.edu.au/en/publications/global-human-population-has-surpassed-earths-sustainable-carrying/
Open access:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae51aaBerries in swedish forests go ungathered because the work pays so badly swedes refuse it and our new anti abuse laws stops the thai workers who did it for pennies earlier from coming here.
Good riddance, I say, people can gather their own blueberries and make their own jam - if the alternative is working conditions no one should have to suffer.If the aim is to have no one live in squalor and have everyone live a luxurious, but preferably more eco friendly, western lifestyle then how many humans can the planet support without degrading over time?
How can we make 4-6 hours of daily paid work enough to live on, globally?
How can we change society to stop chasing growth and find a system that allows future generation a planet with wildlife, clean air and water and a temperature that humans can enjoy not just survive?That was a weird ass study, they calculated the number based solely on historical population numbers and not any actual metrics regarding planetary capability. I have my doubts how useful a calculation that actually is.
They do use some more data than that, see my quote.
2.5. Indices of global change
We compared global human population size in the three main phases of facilitation, transition, and the negative r∼ N phase (see Results) to the global temperature anomaly obtained from the HadCRUT.5.0.2.0 ensemble prediction anomaly [56] relative to the 1960–1991 baseline (data available from 1850 to the present).
We hypothesize that the strongest positive relationship between human population size and climate change occurred during the negative phase because of consumption externalities such as increasing natural resource exploitation and loss of biodiversity. This can result from societies in the period of declining r and resources subsequently driving environmental degradation. In contrast, societies in the facilitation phase might have adequate resources to fuel increasing population growth rates.
We also used two additional indices of global change in the analyses to corroborate the results using global temperature anomaly: global ecological footprint measured as the number of Earths required to meet consumption rates [29], and total annual CO2-e emissions (ourworldindata.org).But that’s still based on random points in history. Their argument is basically ‘climate change started at this point, so that’s where the max sustainable population is’. Which makes absolutely no sense. Technologies were different, cultural attitudes were different, yadda yadda. It’s Malthusian arguments in a new (and less logical) wrapper.
0%
The equivalent of dinosaurs are mammals, not humans. But the biomass of humans isn’t really the issue, resource consumption and pollution are. Even if we transition to 100% renewable energies, which we have to sooner or later, unless civilization collapses before fossile fuel runs out, we rely on countless finite resources. The more people the more of a problem that becomes.
Agriculture is part of this issue, a lot of it is currently running on depleting soil snd much of the yield multiplier is coming from oil (fertilizer and fuel). Just because in recent time agriculture performance could keep up with population explosion, doesn’t mean this will be the case forever, especiall as car centric utban planning eats up fertile land at an excelerating rate and usable land for agriculture is already pretty much maxed out.
Providing everyone with a good live just gets harder with every billion more in the planet as resources are finite and exponential progress can’g go on forever.
Personally I’d say 10% each humans and livestock, or some similar ratio such that wildlife remain 80%.
Another option is to return as far as the proven stable number of 2 million humans total, though that would take many many many generations to do and isn’t even guaranteed to be better for the environment since sometimes forest management and natural disaster response can actually be helpful.
Definitely lower than 2 billion. It’s going to take a lot of figuring out since we clearly have no idea what number will bring global ecostability.
The 36℅ you cited is for Mammalians, that doesn’t mean the rest of Biomass can be compared to it.
Animal Biomass is around 0.5℅, so that puts it into relation.
Also the earth consisist of 70% Water, this means Land mass is 30℅ and from that 30℅, around 46% is used by Humans.
Also Land use has been steadily falling with modern agriculture. There was a time when Europa barely had any forests left, because of the extensive agricultural need for Farmland.
I know “numbers scary”, but I think a bit of contextualisation can’t hurt.
NB: Ecofascism is still Fascism.
You’re gonna sit there and tell me it’s fine if only 5% of mammals are neither human nor livestock? That’s a horrifying thought alone, it means we’ve consumed or destroyed all of nature that we had the capability of doing such to. We should not be the 95% under any circumstance. We should not be 50%. We need there to be nature, we need there to be a natural order.
For the record, the larger groups are fish and arthropods. That’s it. Sauropsida or Reptiles and amphibians are such a small amount of biomass that they’re completely negligible.
BTW, it’s super cringe when you call the advocacy of women’s rights and education as “Fascism”. You know who else fights against the idea of allowing or promoting population decline? Christofascists and Technofascists like Elon Musk, they’re pushing for population growth instead.
“(…) we need there to be natural order.”
The natural order of things, does it involve a concept of degeneracy and normalcy?
Always funny how quick the mask slips.
Also humans are animals and therefore nature. There is no concept of nature versus humans, unless you enforce these boundaries to construct an ideology that needs it.
This idea of nature just means everything “that is good” is nature, which does not make sense. In that view a whale is nature, but the rabies virus is not.
Also to respond to your last sentence with an equal out of place diction.
Why can’t you accept that Hubble’s constant is universally equal. That is anti science.
does it involve a concept of degeneracy and normalcy?
It involves a natural slow decline in human population via methods like empowering women’s rights and widely available education and upwards mobility in society. The solution that the UN came to in Cairo, Egypt, in 1995.
The fuck are you talking about with masks and normalcy?
You mean the “natural decline” that is already happening.
Also what “upwards mobility” - Capitalism is hell bent in killing us all - the upwards mobility is not the solution here.
Those numbers mean nothing to refute the overpopulation as a myth. The core premise of overpopulation is that humans can no longer produce enough food to sustain its people. So mammalian biomass doesn’t matter, total amount of farmable land doesn’t matter, and percent of avian life does not matter.
It’s never been a question of our impact on the environment. it’s a question of our impact on ourselves and how much past our means we are.
How much of our farmable land is currently being used to produce non-edible crops such as maize used for fuel additive or soy used for cosmetics? How much farmable land are we sabotaging with pollution which could be cleaned up? These are more pertinent questions for this, because if we could be making more food instead of maize or soy, we could still feed our people.
The core premise of overpopulation is that humans can no longer produce enough food to sustain its people.
No, it absolutely isn’t that, idk where you even got that from. The core premise is that it is unsustainable for any reason.
Producing food is one reason for evidence of current overpopulation, as I mention 50% of the world’s food production is with synthetic ammonia sourced from mining and petrochem which are finite nonrenewable resources.
Another reason is that the world ecosystem sustains all life including humanity, and when it collapses the human population will collapse with it.
Literally from Malthus himself. He argued that due to overpopulation we’d cause mass famines, leading to war and societal collapse. And he solidly pointed blame on developing countries overbreeding and called for population control and oven culling in those nations. All arguments directly derive from his original argument.
Because that is the only solution to overpopulation, is population control and population culling. Population too big, either start killing people or forcing couples to not have children. That’s what you’re arguing for every time you agree with an overpopulation argument.
The new twists of ecological destruction are also highly misplaced. You’d have to pin the blame on the places which are reproducing the most, which is not the case. The damage we do with deep sea fishing, fish farms, and meat farms is not the fault of the poor nations overbreeding - the only groups we could blame for overpopulation right now.
In reality, we’d not be causing nearly as much damage to our environment if we weren’t using fossil fuels, weren’t transporting a massive portion of our goods from overseas, weren’t getting most of our meat from cows and other methane producers, weren’t fishing in such a way that destroys the seafloor, etc. There’s literally hundreds of ways I could list that we’re doing which if we switched to an alternative would solve large portion of our ecological damage.
We all are carrying out these unsustainable practices, regardless of population. Those practices are the problem, not overpopulation. We could still be producing enough food with sustainable methods that don’t destroy the world ecology.
Well I can compare your anti-population-reduction stance to Elon Musk. Do you feel good knowing that Christofascist and Technofascist oligarchs hold the same view as you?
As for your absolutely bonkers claim that sustainability isn’t directly proportional to population size, I feel need to argue such a blatantly false statement.
I’m not the same person btw.
Genuine question, wouldn’t a directly proportional link require that sustainability efforts go up in a direct mirror to population?
edit: a downvote isn’t particularly helpful here, is that a downvote of “yes, but i don’t want to admit it” or “no, because reasons” ?
Ask better questions, ig. Do I look like I’m running for governor? Idk what you think should or should not be happening, but the answer has absolutely no impact on what is happening now and what we know will happen as a result: human overpopulation is real, it is the driving force behind global ecosystem collapse, we know of many safe and friendly methods to reduce birthrates.
I’m…not sure how much better i can phrase that question ?
It was concise, contained all the information needed for an answer, it could even be a single yes or no.
If you have an example of how that could have been asked in a better way, I’d be interested in seeing it.
There was no reference to my thoughts on the overall theme, the question is only loosely related to that theme.
If it helps, i don’t care at all about the overpopulation classification or anything to do with it.
Is it easier if i remove all references to the theme? Let’s try this :
Doesn’t directly proportional mean both metrics being compared need to track each other?
Humans today are like 300% more biomass than every mammal on earth 100,000 years ago.
This might come as a shock to you but there used to be 30 million people about six thousand years ago. Two thousand years ago we had 200 million. One thousand years ago we had 300 million. In 1750 we had 750 million people.
Now we have 8 billion people.
We are producing enough food (and clothes, and appliances, etc., etc.) for 10 billion people, and the planet is burning. It is not sustainable long term. And, by “long term”, I don’t mean “the next 20 years”, I mean “the next 100-200 years”.
And the “manufactured crisis” of population decline hits really hard if you’re 12 and have no clue how the retirement system works.
They arrive at the right conclusion (capitalism is currently the cause of all suffering), but through completely stupid reasoning.
We should be ecstatic about the population decline. The surplus production from automated/industrial systems can more than make up for the decline in population. The resource issues are purely a matter of distribution. The people who oppose the common sense solutions to the distribution issues can be sidelined or composted.
I would agree with you if we went all in on UBI, including Universal Basic Pension. Because without that, population decline means slowly starving out the elderly, or throwing so much work on the younger generations, that they reproduce even less.
If everyone is old and nobody is left to work, it doesn’t matter how big the pension is, there’s nothing to buy
There are only three solutions to this problem:
- UBI + UBP, like I mentioned.
- Throw so much work at the young that they literally cannot do anything else but work.
- Completely restructure how the retirement system works on a fundamental level.
1 is impossible because Capitalism.
2 ends in an even bigger disaster than we have now.
3 is inconceivable. Would probably require some form of “communism for old people” where everything is provided without money being required and they get a relatively small amount of cash in case they want to travel. Won’t ever happen because greed exists.
1 is of course the only actually sustainable solution, but I’m trying to say that even 1 isn’t completely smooth sailing in an aging society even when you get rid of capitalism. Or, rather, people are going to have to accept a lower standard of life.
If you get rid of the capitalist leeches, yes, you have more workers left over because there’s no more demand for yachts and other shit. But really, it’s only the luxury goods that demand will go away for. The rich hold nearly all of the purchasing power in the world, and they own a bunch of land and other assets, but for the most part their wealth is still on paper, not in tangible usable goods they’ve bought. Elon Musk COULD liquidate all his stock, but firstly he’d lose at least half of it due to the massive value drop when he sells so much Tesla stock at once, and then if he tries to spend it all on, say, rice or something, he’ll find that there’s a limit to how much rice is actually produced, and he literally couldn’t spend all of it at the current market price of rice, without a bunch of new rice production happening first.
There’s still so much in the world that gets made or maintained by human labour, that we take for granted. From food, to working plumbing, to medical supplies. Unless we can ALSO automate production of most things we consume, we still need to have a bunch of young people working.
This is not to say that I support capitalism as the best economic system. It’s far from it, and billionaires shouldn’t exist. But at the end of the day, we still need people to do jobs. More equality in the distribution of resources doesn’t mean we suddenly get said resources without any work. It just means we have less bullshit work (building yachts and skyscrapers, anything to do with stock trading, etc), but I think most people overestimate the share of bullshit work in a healthy modern society (the US does NOT count as a healthy one).
Of course the irony is that if we manage to automate the production of (nearly) everything and there’s truly no more need for anyone to work, young people might start having more children again and there’ll be more people who could work.
I also don’t think there’s a need for UBP if there’s already UBI. The U implies nobody is left behind. If you work, you get UBI, if you don’t work, you still get UBI. If you’re 120 years old, you still get UBI.
As for your idea #3, that’s just unfair towards the people who have to work. The idea of UBI is that everyone’s taken care of, but those who work can afford more nice things. If you don’t do UBI, but instead do “communism for old people”, that means that young people have to work to even have food, whereas the old people just get to enjoy the spoils of young people’s labour. UBI is more fair, in that those who put more effort into society still get more. If society is productive enough, UBI could be big enough that those who don’t work can also have nice things (like travelling). I’d say that for sustainability and fairness, it has to be either UBI, or communism for all, but not “communism for one part of society”.
If you get rid of the capitalist leeches, yes, you have more workers left over because there’s no more demand for yachts and other shit
Yeah, you can’t think like that.
The “demand for yachts” means a lot of employment in very specialised, expensive areas. That means high tax revenue. Yes, the capitalist leeches should be eliminated, but eliminating “the demand for yachts” doesn’t suddenly usher the age of prosperity, it might actually lower the tax revenue.
But yeah, in terms of literally freeing hands to instead do plumbing, that is correct.
Otherwise - fully agree!
We are producing enough food (and clothes, and appliances, etc., etc.) for 10 billion people, and the planet is burning. It is not sustainable long term.
That’s not necessarily true. How much of our overall greenhouse emissions come from which sector?
From this chart, decarbonizing electricity and transport will go a long, long way, and decarbonizing manufacturing and construction could also give some room to reduce overall emissions by more than the entire agricultural sector produces.
And it’s not just some kind of pipe dream. We’re doing real work at decarbonizing electricity, heat, transport, shipping, construction, etc., as the prices of low or zero emissions options start to outcompete the higher emission options for many applications.
Plus if the data center boom crashes as a bubble, a lot of the infrastructure investment into increasing energy production and distribution with both high carbon and low carbon sources will at least have financed a lot of low carbon energy and the potential for curtailing the least carbon efficient generation methods.
Too narrow a view. You’re looking at it purely through the climate change lens.
Our farming activities have other issues as well though, which won’t go away no matter how successful decarbonization is going to be.
Eutrophication of soil and bodies of water through intensive use of fertilizer and the loss of biodiversity which comes with that, as well as with widespread pesticide use and the loss of small scale structures across agricultural land is one huge example. Top-soil erosion is another one.
Those issues are really only a result of overuse of inputs driven by meat consumption, fuel ethanol production, and basic misunderstanding/incompetence at agroecology. Not hard problems to solve if regulatory tools can be used. Wouldn’t be an issue if you could get rid of industry groups and lobbyists etc.
It wouldn’t be an issue if you suddenly had to tell everyone in the western world they need to cut their meat consumption to like 1/10? I’ve seen how even the seemingly smartest, most rational western leftist reacts to the mere suggestion that their personal consumption habits are unsustainable, no matter the economic system. Good luck…
Wouldn’t be an issue if you could get rid of industry groups and lobbyists etc.
and we all know how easy that is…
I didn’t mean to sound too gloomy, those things can definitely be changed as well. I just meant to say, that if you purely focus on climate issues, those issues still remain unchanged.
I disagree with your analysis however. It’s not just meat consumption and energy crops. I mean, both of those are particularly bad, sure, but other fields (pun intended) are also not super sustainable.
I take your point, but I also think that all the other stuff can improve, too. Fertilizer use peaked in the US in 2013, and better land use practices are trying to use less water and less fertilizer and allow less erosion.
None of this is by any means guaranteed to get better, but it’s also not inevitable that it will get worse. The work needs to be done.
There’s definitely a lot of work to be done. The relevant question for this discussion is, if we’re going to have to take cuts to productivity during the transformation to more sustainable practices.
I can’t give a qualified answer to that, but I guess we’d have to. However there are also promising new technologies emerging, that might be able to mitigate those; like precision farming and agro-robotics.
This isn’t a fucking meme.
It’s just blatant disinformation.
A meme is a self replicating idea. I think this is a meme.
There are memes, and then there are memes. Two different words. What you’re describing is not the commonly thought of word when someone goes on the internet looking for memes.
I could say, “Suck my dick, motherfucker”, and that’d be a meme.
how do I know if you mean memes or memes tho
Context. A lot of word have more than one meaning.
Malthusianism definitely a meme ideology
What is a meme?
Much better, thank you
A miserable little pile of in-jokes
Somebody who covers their drink when you’re around.
This post is an embarrassment to critical thinking.
right? i sounds great until you realize oh shit… logistics exist… all those perishable goods don’t just magically appear on people’s plates… 2.3billion people’s worth of food waste for 7.7bn people is honestly bloody miraculous tbh… can we do more to reduce food waste in our rich nations? sure… would that help feed people in areas of famine? unlikely
I agree, it’s really hard to remember how to use things like cans and preservatives when it comes to shipping food to areas of famine.
Hard /s
Overpopulation and billionaires can be part of the problem at the same time. We can produce so much resources because of the capitalist approach of cutting corners and going cheap at the expense of environment. More ethical ways of producing stuff would mean significantly less than what we have now which would require less population. Moreover it is funny to call this the ecofascist rhetoric because implementation of the idea presented in the OP would require forced displacement of billions of people living in cities to rural areas at best, to deserts and tundras at worst.
Also people like Elon who thinks they should distribute their sperm all around the world is at the intersection. So no matter which way one chooses they are always the problem so maybe we can agree to start with them and see if it gets better.
It’s ecofascism when people pin it on humanity in general and not capitalism. The solution is changing our economic system to one that would allow us to live alongside nature rather than destroying it, and not to simply kill off a chunk of the population to address “overpopulation”.
100% capitalism is the main source. And definitely not kill but engrave in people’s minds that trying to have five children is selfish. If your action is the kind of action “if everyone does it, it is a big problem but because they don’t I can do it” then there is a very good chance that it is a selfish behaviour. Reducing population will I think transform capitalist economy too. Less work force means higher demand for it and therefore companies will eventually have to pay higher wages. Less population means less demand for products and therefore capitalistic way of “cutting corners” mode of mass production will likely be not as profitable. Sure therewill always be people trying to capitalize on new means of production and yeah I also agree that changing the economic system will be required to prevent. But even changing the economic system will be easier with less population.
The more disenfranchised workers the more power they have and the easier it would be to replace the system.
fuck these climate change deniers
What in the fuck is an ecofascist?
Is there some alternate universe you people come from where overexploitation of arable topsoil doesnt happen?
ecofascism is an authoritarian approach to addressing global climate change. they believe that poor people are a strain upon the land and that left to their own devices humanity would destroy the planet out of spite.
often, they ignore the top heavy causes of climate change. i can elaborate now but i need to go to the store
Rich people are a bigger strain on the land. Get rid of them first.
Do enlighten us when you’ve done your shopping.
okay. so. ecofascism ignores, or is ignorant of, the role that indigenous people played maintaining ecosystems and the overall climate of this world. they frame the tragedy of the commons as that a commonly shared resource will be overutilized by the community leading to the degredation and loss of that resource. given this, they believe that a top level force is required to protect that resource.
the flaw with this framing is that anthropologically, there is no evidence that the tragedy of the commons works this way. we have much more evidence of an ownership class overexploiting a resource than we do collaborative communities. the people, left to their own devices, will largely find solutions that will best fit all their needs, where as an ecofascist route will generally only allow the person commanding the economy to assess needs and they will do so with their set of biases and blindspots, leading to things like the famines of the 5 year plans and the great leap forward
Cheap Chosen Slavery?
It’s wild how ideas like this continue to exist despite being so contrary to evidence and reason, just because it shifts blame away from systemic issues and the ruling class.
No, its because people don’t trust what they are told. Hard to blame them I think. There are so many lies every day that of course people are not going to trust anything in the end.
Replace “sustainable,” and the bit about profit and capitalism, with “efficient” and “corruption and un-free markets,” then this is a common right-wing talking point (back when the right wing tried to engage intellectually, at least).
In my unscientific opinion, the current population is unsustainable, and there’s no known ways to make it sustainable enough to support the population in the long term (I hope there will be, of course). The most sustainable framing practices are less intensive and result in less output per acre. That’s just about survival, ignoring quality of life. I’ve heard it claimed we’d need 5 Earths for everyone on Earth to live a first-world-like lifestyle. Granted, we should drastically change our lifestyles.
Climate change will also likely lower the human population the Earth can support, and I think we will likely adopt even less sustainable practices to make up for the loss, accelerating our own demise; kicking and scratching and bringing all the ecosystems of the Earth down with us.
First world lifestyles are indeed unsustainable, but not due to food scarcity. We have a global overproduction of food, due in part to logistical inefficiencies but in a larger part due to free market economics with artificial scarcity to drive up prices.
Organic farm practices currently yield about 20-30% less than less sustainable ones. Current US food wastage is 40 % of produced goods. So at least the US could switch over it’s food supply to organic farming and still feed everyone on the same acreage.
There’s plenty other resource usage that first-worlders need to cut back on, mostly petrochemicals and plastics in everything from travel (make walkable cities) to novelty consumption (buy it for life).
This is a much less cool post when you realize that the Earth can only sustainably support 10 billion people if we never fly, give up a lot of our modern tech, and have rice make up 50% of our diet. Basically any meat is completely off the table, as with personal cars, and probably standalone houses. If I’m given the choice between not having kids and not flying to see my family for holidays, I’ll take the no-kids option.
So let’s build lots of highspeed rail? We went to the moon on less compute than your cell phone and modern tech could be way more sustainable if we properly optimized. Rice is fantastic and works for a significant chunk of the current population just fine. Meat? Just gotta grow that protein in other more sustainable/efficient ways. Cars are useless in a dense urban environments and make everything worse. Fuck cars. Standalone houses are a giant waste of space and when you design your neighborhoods around this idea, everything is too spread out to actually have proper density and utility.
This is a very cool post that does point out that all of these things are in such excess. You should give StrongTowns and NotJustBikes a watch on youtube for much more on the topic of urban design.
Aviation is about 2.5% of global emissions.
In the long run then yes, we need carbon neutral fuels, but it should be possible for people to fly a little and not destroy the planet.
The reason why aviation emissions are so bad is not so much the amount but where exactly they are emitted.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions
4% of global warming to date. Flying will still be possible (and not uncommon) in a net zero world. Maybe americans will have to take the train to see their relatives, but they could just DACCS if they love TSA controls so much.
Which gives me huge misgivings about the current space push.
I am no expert at all in this field, but I think rocket fuels are often quite differently composed than plane fuels. If you just use liquid oxygen and hydrogen, your only reaction product will be water, which isn’t a strong greenhouse gas (despite being the dominant on by sheer amount). Of course there are also rocket fuels which blast out carbon products like there is no tomorrow.
I was very interested in space and learned a lot. The more I learned the more I realized this is just another case of capitalists destroying the planet for profit.
Yes, some rockets are hydrogen/oxygen. The space shuttle was. The Falcon 9 uses kerosene/oxygen (or RP1, rocket propellant 1 but it’s just refined kerosene) the new rocket, starship, uses methane/oxygen. They’ll tell you that methane burns really clean but the part they don’t tell you is how much “leaks” out. Rocket engines don’t just start, they have to ‘spin up’. The pumps have to be pumping and all the propellant has to be flowing before it’ll ignite. So a certain amount of raw propellant (oxygen and or methane or kerosene) will get ‘spent’ as in ‘thrown out the back’. Perhaps it’s not that terrible at launch, but during second stage ignition the rocket is way up there. How much comes out? Don’t know, they don’t say. You can watch the streams and see it happen for your self. The two stages separate and big puffs of ‘mist’ happen. Again, the mist is oxygen and or methane or kerosene (there are other gasses, like nitrogen and helium used for maneuvering but we’re talking about what comes out the back). Right there is enough for me to think it’s a bad idea and will end up fucking us over, and that’s just the obvious part. Now make a business model that says you’re going to launch these 5 times a day to deliver tons and tons of electronics into space that you plan on burning as a means of disposal. It’s almost as if Samsung had a recycling program where they just burned everything out back. Except that it’s at high altitude so it’s way worse. No planet B my ass.
As a Mexican I can confirm I’m already eating a lot of rice and beans, and I take the bus instead of flying. It’s really not that bad, it’s mostly over production of resource intensive corps and fossil fuels, which we could have already transitioned from without any real detriment.
Your thesis doesn’t match up with this chart:
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
We’re working to decarbonize the highest categories on that list, with rapid adoption of solar/wind, some potential for more nuclear and geothermal in the medium term, and maybe even fusion in the long term.
Then, while decarbonizing electricity, we’re electrifying heating for homes, water, cooking, and we’re electrifying transportation.
US carbon emissions per capita peaked in the 70’s, and peaked as a whole in the 2000’s. US carbon emissions per capita still greatly exceed those of other rich nations.
It’s very much possible to have modern first world living standards, even with significant reductions in our resource use and net emissions. We just need to line up the incentives (aka pricing) with what is good for the Earth. And we’re already doing that in many of the heaviest polluting sectors.
May ask, which circumstances in your life have lead you to the point where you need to fly to be able to see your family?
I picked a rather niche field for my career. Leaving where I work would basically be a career reset. At the same time, a lot of my family chose not to live in a big city, and there aren’t lots of good jobs there no matter what field I worked in. This was a career path I took knowing that flying around was no big deal.
Other people are replying that Trains will cure all the world’s ailments. Even if we had good train infrastructure, it would get you from New York to Florida, it would never get you something weird like from Montana to Nebraska in a timely manner.
I don’t think trains can solve all of it, although you in the US especially could benefit greatly from better rail infrastructur, imho.
I suspected, it was a career decision. But I also think maybe you’d have chosen a different path, if you’d have had better opportunities closer to your home?
I won’t blame you for having taken those decisions in a system that takes flight mobility for granted. And it probably would be hard for you to go back, now that you’ve arranged your life that way. But also I think it would be a mistake to let that get in the way of envisioning a more sustainable future for our societies.
In my opinion, sustainability is more than just a tech challenge. But encompasses a broader political vision, that enables people to take more sustainable decisions in the first place. And people take decisions like that based on the opportunities and possibilities they see.
So basically it’s perfectly fine? But for some reason you made it sound horrible?
“I don’t see what’s the problem with everyone living like a desperate Indian untouchable!”
These takes are why socialism is a dirty word, all because you can’t just admit there needs to be some form of democratically agreed on population control and it doesn’t have to be fascist by design.
You’re not being oppressed by having to use the train.
Source: my ass
Our rapidly depleting aquifers being used to produce those resources would suggest there are too many people.
World population in 2024 was 8.1 billion.
Doesn’t really matter but people please make sure your numbers are right before you use them. easily avoidable way to lose your credibility.
Edit: Oh wait it’s a double quote without date attribution. Assuming that original source did some basic numbers checking, that puts it at around 2018.
