*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Friday, April 18th, 2014 4:16pm PDT - promote requested by original submitter shveddy.

the christian directive of "be fruitful and multiply" was fine when humanity didn't number in the billions, but now it's hurting us. Now if we actually had the ability to colonize other planets, it wouldn't be as big a deal, but I figure its only a matter of time before more nations enact laws prohibiting large families

Overpopulation is, always has been, and always will be, an issue of quality not quantity. We will colonize other planets, once the people on this one get their acts together. Last time I checked, the known universe is expanding faster than the human race can colonize it. I see nothing that changes that pattern.

I dunno... Malthus was predicting doom and gloom about population growth back in the 1800s but the "Malthusian catastrophe" never came to pass thanks to technology. Technological advancement allowed us to farm better foods more efficiently and to farm areas that were previously inaccessible.

I figure the same process will continue into the future, except it won't be incidental (as it was in Malthus's time) but a deliberate, concerted effort on the part of humanity to be more efficient with our energy and food production while reducing the impacts of our waste... pretty much exactly what Colonel Sanders David Suzuki is saying here.

tl:dr

Science will save us, not family planning.

The solution to overpopulation has always been poverty reduction:

http://videosift.com/video/TED-Hans-Rosling-on-Global-Population-Growth

What stabilises population growth is the birth rate being below the replacement rate (2.1). At 2009 it was 2.33, meaning the doom and gloom is almost completely unwarranted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Replacement_rates

As far as the one child policy, it's unclear if it was necessary in light of China's growth and consequent poverty reduction which would have reduced it without any direct action. What's certain is that it's created a huge group of ageing workers currently approaching retirement with few children to take care of them.

By 2050, China will be roughly as bad as Japan, which has the largest elderly/young imbalance in the world currently. Which will weigh down pension systems, slow down policies towards growth and ironically keep population growth higher because of diverted spending.

@Sniper007

Colonisation of other planets, if it happens, will not ease overpopulation on Earth. Assuming it's actually done with humans rather than, say bacteria which are so much easier to transport; it must involve small seed populations of colonists, not firing billions of people off into space. Where do you imagine the energy required would come from? As it stands in 2014 we can barely move a handful of people into low earth orbit, a few hundred kilometres away.

Think about the logistics of transporting and housing all these billions of colonists in a hostile environment. Making the environment itself habitable is an even greater challenge; we can't even seem to fix the one we have on Earth, the one we spent billions of years evolving to suit.

The expansion of the universe, meanwhile, is always giving us less material to work with and perpetually moving it further away.

@SDGundamX

Relying on technology to solve overpopulation is like refusing to stop smoking because by the time you get cancer science will have found a cure.

Scientific advancement is not a given. It doesn't progress at a guaranteed rate and it isn't a genie that will automatically offer a salve to every need. Or, to coin a cliche, "Where's my jetpack?"

Luckily however, in the instant case scientists have offered an easy solution to overpopulation: Stop having so many children.

@RedSky

Poverty reduction without population reduction - reduction, not stabilisation - is catastrophic. The current global population of ~7.2 billion is only survivable, never mind sustainable, because most of those billions are impoverished peasants who barely consume any resources at all. Elevating the poor to a rich, westernesque lifestyle multiplies the effects of overpopulation tremendously, even if it slightly slows population growth in absolute terms.

Rosling doesn't seem to understand the actual problem, and his predictions are at any rate, horrifyingly optimistic.

We need to be shooting for a global population in the range of 100 million - 1 billion. Any substantially higher number than that is an apocalypse waiting to happen.

@gorillaman

The market dictates prices and the capacity to consume the current amount that we do. With more people affluent and more demand, the price of items will go up based on levels of scarcity. With less countries to outsource lower paid labour to, prices on the supply side will also rise.

Whatever we have will be shared based on wealth. It's the interests of fairly sharing resources that as many people as possible rise from poverty to match rich/middle income countries.

I don't know about his predictions, I was sourcing the data on the relation between birth rate and poverty.

Your range seems arbitrary and not supported by any data. Massively restricting population growth, if it were even possible in anything but a dictatorial state would create the same problems China will have in the coming years as I listed. If we let it plateau, as it's expected to, I don't see how the harm (of having to share more), outweighs the obvious problems of a large elderly/young imbalance.

First, calling David Suzuki "Colonel Sanders" is embarrassing to the entire human race.

Also, to the suggestion in the comments above that 'technology will save us', ..one of the major points of the video is that it buys us 'two minutes'. It has, and it won't keep buying us comparable time. Actually, part of 'science saving us' is this video itself. Population models, and everything we know about life on this planet tell us that we need to radically change how we do things, or widespread famine, war, and environmental and social destruction are inevitable. If you want science to save us, you need to start listening to it.

..and about colonizing other planets. There is no planet we could ever get to, EVER, that would, in its current condition, support a human colony. We can't seem to turn around a one degree change in Earth's global temperature. It is not rational to assume that we could make another planet suitable for human life.

..also, who cares if humans survive to spread across the galaxy, if we are the assholes who burnt down our own home while our family was still inside?

The molecule cares

Hey gorillaman, your numbers are surprisingly close to those proposed by the Georgia Guidestones-My personal favorite is #7: Avoid petty laws and useless officials. Planet now is currently at a pace to match or trump the bureaucracy portrayed in Terry Gilliam's film, 'Brazil.'

I knew someone would object to that. It was just a cheap ploy to get more views and I hope no one takes it seriously. One of the reasons I like videosift is because it gives me an opportunity to experiment with different attention grabbing techniques on the interwebs and see how people react.

In any case, a couple of David Suzuki's books have since been added to my Amazon wish list so I'll consider that my repentance.

But he does look kinda like him...

@gorillaman

If a global population of less than 1 billion is desirable in your eyes, then do you desire the death or sterilization of 6/7th's of the people you know? Or perhaps you desire the death or sterilization of 7/7th's of the people you DON'T know?

This world is simultaneously overpopulated (with wasteful, self-destructive type people) and under populated (with selfless, garden loving infinite sustainable type people). It's not about number.

Until every golf course, front yard, and public park is covered in hyper dense, square foot type gardens, overpopulation (based on quantity) is a complete myth.

It's not my job to police the world by forced population policies. Nor is it David Suzuki's job. Nor Obama's job. Nor gorillaman's job. Nor anyone else's. The best a man can do is to control his own activities and teach his neighbor the virtues of his infinitely sustainable choices.

..all right. I'll let it slide, this time

I don't think anyone's advocating forced population control here.

I only think that people are advocating that a greater emphasis on family planning be incorporated into your prescription for everyone to "control his own activities and teach his neighbor the virtues of his infinitely sustainable choices."

Doing this too fast would be demographic suicide for a lot of complicated reasons, I don't think anyone is denying that, but a very significant organic reduction over the course of a few centuries would be beneficial for humanity and could be reasonably attained. It's certainly less far-fetched than mass colonization of Mars or Venus in the same timeframe.

And that's an important distinction here. We aren't really concerned about the environment here. We're concerned about what's best for us.

The environment is going to shrug us off and incorporate all our plastic, CO2, and evidence of narrowing biodiversity into a few more strata and continue doing its thing. It has survived mass extinctions before.

It's ridiculous to think that we can even destroy the environment. Our population size and its destructive effects would be reduced to insignificance long before we hit a point of no return and the biosphere's existence is even slightly threatened.

We should be framing the argument in terms of how to achieve an environmental equilibrium in which humanity can live in a comfortable and humane manner.

I think we're a lot closer to a point of no return with regards to achieving that goal.

For my money I'd say that exponential population growth isn't pointing us in that direction, and living - as I do - in a rapidly modernizing "second world" country tells me that bringing all eight billion of us to affluence too quickly poses its own significant dangers.

Let's not forget that this videos two main points are that we are demonstrably in a period of exponential growth, and that exponential growth from the limited perspective of the inside can be deceptive. Points of no return that seem far away are in fact very close.

@shveddy

I don't buy his overstretched ticking time bomb analogy or the idea of a point of no return. Countless people have predicted peak oil, global resource wars and the like for decades with none of significance eventuating.

Historically this argument would have been even more credible looking around the baby boomer growth of post WWII, because relative population growth was much higher and families were much larger even in developed countries.

Nevertheless, (taking food as an example) agricultural yields multiplied while (taking the US as an example) agricultural employment fell from ~35% in 1900 to <3% today.

Again, pre-GFC, both general food and oil prices were reaching near historic highs. We've since seen moves towards expanding oil/gas supply through fraking and more aggressive and widespread use of GM to enhance yields as well as purely enhancing supply in response to high prices. Both have stayed more or less flat since 08.

The point is, it will be a gradual change, one that society will respond to automatically through price rises, and incentives to create more efficient use of the resources that are available.

Also as far as how to achieve a reduced population as you alluded to, people don't respond to vague global threats that don't immediately impact them currently. Like global warming. Anything other than financial incentives or legal coercion won't have an impact.

I am absolutely advocating forced population control.

@RedSky

I look forward to sharing my nothing with everyone else's nothing according to the infallible dictates of the market. Your scenario is one in which an ever increasing number of people compete for ever-dwindling resources. Wouldn't it be better to just leave one another a little space?

There's only so much energy, only so much land, only so much fresh water, only so much food (the very least of our concerns), only so much supply of rare minerals, only so much capacity for the environment to absorb pollutants. There are other problems. We may be happy to share what we have with others, how nice, but where do we acquire the right to impoverish everyone else with the burden of our excess offspring? Our share is shrinking all the time due to the actions of criminals who can't keep their legs crossed.

I don't recognise the mild and temporary problem of an aged population as being within two orders of magnitude of all the multifarious harms caused by overpopulation.

@Sniper007

It is my job, it is everyone's job, to police the world. If you're attending a party and you see another guest setting fire to the curtains you do not say,
"Well, it's not my job to stop them. I'll just stand here controlling my own activities, teaching the virtues of not setting fire to the curtains while the house incidentally burns down around me."

Buddy is from *canada

Adding video to channels (Canada) - requested by doogle.

It is everyone's job to kill or sterlize everyone else? I suppose the position is consistent with 'survival of the fittest'. Yet it is totally inconsistent with any hint of ethics or morality.

Your analogy fails. You are not trying to stop someone from burning the house down. You are trying to kill everyone in the house so the house doesn't get damaged by it's use. Presumably you won't be killing yourself however - so you can remain to use and enjoy the house.

I live right up the road from his foundation's HQ, so I used to see him quite often.

Unfortunately, the government of Canada decided they didn't like people like him speaking out against their policies while enjoying tax-exempt status on their non-profit groups and made a law saying they'd start taxing anybody who spoke out of turn.

Yeah... I think they came up with that idea in a beer hall.

From reading some of the comments, it would appear that many people still do not understand basic math.

Over population is a problem. It is real and it will self correct one way or another. Science can't save us (short of moving us all to a digital existence), and we will hit critical population density long before we achieve the kind of technological sophistication to allow us to colonise other planets (singularity notwithstanding).

Basically, there are three possible outcomes:
1. We voluntarily stop having so many kids and we certainly stop celebrating ridiculously huge families like those fucking morons on "18 and counting" or whatever the fuck it's called. This is the best case scenario, and IMHO, the most unlikely

2. Wide scale population control. One child policies, etc. unpleasant but still less unpleasant than...

3. We do nothing and the problem corrects itself. And when I say corrects itself, I mean global hunger on a scale not seen since the last ice age; massive pandemics or just plain ol' killing the fuck out of each other.

This is isn't some airy fairy, mother Gaia, hippy nonsense, it's simple math.

On the plus side, we'll almost certainly have made the planet nigh uninhabitable for ourselves by then anyway.

You're conflating two different points.

1 - Is overpopulation a problem that needs to be addressed?
2 - If it is a problem, is it possible for us to address?

We've been competing for less and less resources ever since populations started growing. Nobody in this thread has offered any evidence for why suddenly at and above 7 billion it will really become a problem this time. My hypothesis is that the past shows that the change in living standards from increased populations will be gradual and not cause some kind of cataclysmic hunger or global food war. Where is your evidence to the contrary? I've shown examples recent and past where the world has dealt with respectively, (1) high commodity prices and (2) dealt with proportionately much higher population growth than what we are experiencing today.

Society has continually shown the ability to drastically grow agricultural yields, tap deeper and harder to access water and energy reserves and substitute different inputs when a commodity becomes scarce or expensive. With global birth rates barely above replacement and global population plateauing, where is your evidence that with the ingenuity of the many people that have come out of poverty since the end of the Cold War, that we won't be able to handle a historically relatively mild proportionate growth in population?

Every time I see someone channelling Malthusian scare mongering such as this video, I always see the same tropes -

(1) The word exponential bounded about with some kind of mystical reverence;
(2) An over-abundant use of analogies while being absent of any historical basis for their argument; and
(3) A complete lack of plausible solutions to the problem because their argument is grounded in emotion and intuition rather than practicality.

You're saying everything I want to say only much more eloquently than I could say it. I'd quality your comments if I could.

@RedSky - You aren't reading what I'm saying.

I'm talking about finding an equilibrium in which humanity can thrive economically, socially and environmentally.

I'm only saying that things like environmental damage, fracking, certain food production techniques, the current flavor of resource wars, and the fact that a massive proportion of our current population really can't feed itself are all evidence that the effort required to sustain current and future population levels doesn't fit my definition of finding balance.

The only point of no return I'm talking about is that at some point it will be essentially impossible to get to that place of balance that I favor. It's a nebulous concept for sure, but I do think it is relatively imminent and at the very least that we are heading in the wrong direction - especially in light of the notion proposed by this video where exponential growth can give you a false sense of security right up until just before you hit it.

I actually agree with you and think that earth could sustain an arbitrarily large population of say 20 billion or even more.

But we'd have to spend more of our time and efforts competing (sometimes violently) for the resources, we'd have to shape ever larger proportions of the natural world to our own narrow needs, we'd have to put up with a much less pleasant environment, and since it will be challenging enough to just get the resources to feed and clothe your own people, there is a really good chance that unfathomable (billions) quantities of human beings will be marginalized by this system and spend most of their time suffering.

Again, a far cry rom my definition of equilibrium.

As for your notion that vague global threats don't cause change, for starters I'm not sure that's true - there are significant popular environmental movements around the world and also some threshold of self interest can be breached. For example if you look at negotiations over things like the Kyoto protocols you will see that developing nations who are much more susceptible to environmental changes like shifting climates and rising sea levels are significantly more likely to sign on. It's no coincidence that Bangladesh and a few other island nations were the only countries to ratify the thing.

But there are also educational and social strategies that can have a huge effect. I think that you'd get a lot of mileage from just increasing women's rights around the world.

@SDGundamX

Thanks!

@shveddy

Bit confused since you say there's a point of no return at the end, but yes your argument is not really about that.

People not meeting their nutritional needs right now is not due to an under supply but due to general poverty. If sufficient employment and income existed in impoverished countries the world supply of food would be able to cope. As far as a lack of balance, see my earlier point about bringing people out of poverty, closing global income gaps and all sharing the available resources.

I don't think you could characterise any of the global conflicts in the past 100 years as being primarily due to resource scarcity. Perhaps Japan's aggression in SE Asia around WWII because of its lack of energy resources but that's an isolated case in the post-Depression era brought about by misguided isolationist economic policies. If you really want to prevent resource wars, your best bet is to be a staunch advocate of free trade.

Large countries have gone to war because of personalities, territorial ambitions and a general desire for power, not out of necessity because of scarcity.

As far as a point of population balance, that's entirely subjective. Like I said before, his bandying around of exponential is completely unfounded. Population growth is rising at a much reduced rate, proportionate growth relative to current levels is much smaller than in the 1950s during the baby boomer period.

When you say 20Bn as an example, I don't think you appreciate how much we're going to plateau. Have a read of:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/06/daily-chart-10

9.6Bn by 2050
10.9Bn by 2100

There is a good chance we will never hit anywhere close to 20Bn short of life enhancing technology which at this point doesn't exist. If we do, then I could equally argue we will invent technology that will reduce our individual resource needs dramatically.

Do I wish population growth was lower and there were more for each of us? Sure. Louis CK has a great bit on it. Agreed on women's rights and education, but as with everything it's correlated to societal poverty. You may as well kill two birds with one stone by just focussing on that. Every policy action has an opportunity cost, given what I've said, I would rather focus on something more pressing.

The influence of religion has peaked hopefully. Along with that, as symptoms of overpopulation become more and more impossible to ignore, there will eventually be a huge negative stigma on anyone who has a large family.

Hell we already live in a world where religious baby-factory families are mocked and ridiculed, at least when we see them on TV, so I suspect the shaming of large families will only become more prevalent as time goes on, so one can hope that we won't need government to tell us to stop breeding so much, but given human arrogance, who knows?

Technology will help, but only so much. If anything, technology is contributing to the factors that say we don't need this many people on this planet as automation and computers reduce the amount of people we need in the workforce.

You could fit everyone in the world into an area the size of Texas with room to spare..the problem isn't the number of human beings or that space is running out, the problem is the mismanagement of our resources and the gross iniquity of man towards man. 1/3 of the worlds food is wasted every year, for example. The gross world product in 2012 was 84 trillion dollars, more than enough to feed clothe house and vaccinate everyone on the planet.

The solution is pretty obvious here. We need to make clocks with more minutes, I propose we make clocks that go to 13 -- and add more as needed.

My volume controls go up to 11.

@RedSky

Crossing your fingers and waiting for the tooth fairy to fix everything is not a valid response to global crises. That is what passivity amounts to whether your eventual, hoped for remedy is shiny's simple-minded faith or failed economic models that got us into this mess in the first place, or unforeseeable scientific advances that may never come.

You've been using the most preposterously optimistic projections available, okay, let's assume they're correct and we level off at somewhere around nine to eleven billion. You want all of these people to live worthwhile, prosperous lives; well that's at least five times as many high energy consuming, 21st century humans as we've ever actually been able to support.

This coming at the end of an economic and technological bubble of readily available, dense energy supply for which we have no replacement; relative efficiency gains in spending that energy that can never be replicated (because efficiency doesn't go above 100%); casual environmental damage that cannot continue; and diminishing returns in every scientific field, where advancement is always becoming more difficult and more expensive.

This isn't a pessimistic view. Humanity has a bright future, all we have to do to secure it is stop creating more and more people out of nothing for no reason. Barring extra-terrestrial threats like meteorites, solar flares and relativistic missiles launched by hostile alien species; we have the knowledge we need to build a civilisation capable of enduring for millions of years, or burn out in a couple of hundred.

I'm advocating passivity because I don't recognise overpopulation as a threat, more an inconvenience, and one that we couldn't really prevent even if we wanted to.

I don't see what's preposterous or optimistic about taking widely accepted birth rate data and projecting based off that. Birth rates are predictable and stable sampled over a large population. The data consistently shows that as societies come out of poverty, their birth rates fall. The only assumption here is that there isn't another GFC event that hinders growth which at this point is not particularly likely.

All taken into account we already know it's plateauing, and have known for decades. This isn't a hypothesis, it's happening right now. Unless you can show me why this trend will suddenly and irrevocably reverse, despite population data being incredibly stable and predictable historically, it seems the onus is on you to explain why you're so pessimistic.

Again, I think you're still conflating (1) what I want / whether it's bad versus (2) whether it could plausibly be stopped. I would also rather live in a less populated world. At current rates of technology and resource utilisation, things would be cheaper, there'd be more to go around. Reality is not like that. But as I said before, every policy focus has an opportunity cost. I don't see a plateauing population as a threat and I would rather see that effort devoted to poverty which will help reduce it anyway.

We're nowhere near an economic bubble. Maybe a short term stock market valuation bubble right now, but there's plenty of economic under-utilisation in the US and Europe, and China and other developing countries have decades to grow.

The term technological bubble is a bit nonsensical. You can have a technology sector bubble but actual physical technology which works now, will not magically stop working tomorrow based on inflated expectations. If you're saying instead we'll reach some cusp of innovation, well people have predicting that for decades.

We're nowhere near a peak oil event. Every time people say current known reserves are dwindling, they either (1) discover a huge reserve in under developed countries that were previously not surveyed (Africa and parts of SE Asia at the moment), or (2) something like fraking comes along which unlocks new supply. The US is forecast to be the largest oil exporter by 2020 based on that second point.

Hell, I'll play devil's advocate with you. Suppose we do reach a glut. We'll know this at least a decade ahead based on dwindling new reserve discoveries. The price of energy will leap up far, far ahead of us running out. That will spur innovation in more efficient sources of energy and will incentivise both individuals and businesses to be more energy efficient. A gradual adjustment like I've talked about endlessly here. Why am I wrong?

Environmental damage is a different issue and something that I agree needs to actually be addressed. I'm sure if you search back through my posts you'll see me talking about the economic rationale of addressing this directly when corporations who pollute aren't subject to the negative externalities that they impose in our current capitalist system and that will inherently create issues. Hopefully countries will take note of the smog clouds in China's big cities.

@RedSky

I'd like to know how you expect to quintuple the availability of every vital resource in the next 50-100 years while somehow reducing the environmental impact of that necessary increase to what you acknowledge needs to be less than the present level. This is supernatural thinking. Corporations don't pollute, incidentally, the fundamental structure of our global society pollutes; which would be no problem whatsoever if there were fewer of us.

It's fine if you'd prefer to just keep the majority of the world in mediaeval poverty, or alternatively impoverish everyone equally; colossally immoral, but by contrast actually physically possible.

Our success as an organism has been implicitly tied to energy availability for our entire history. The bubble of economic and technological advancement we've ridden since the industrial revolution is driven by unprecedented access to energy in the form of irreplaceable fossil fuels. It requires continual investment of energy to maintain. The practical exploitability of wind, solar, wave, geothermal and hydroelectric sources combined doesn't come close, not even close to the demand we'll place on them with population on the scale you're quite comfortable to allow. Fissile materials are limited and similarly irreplaceable; we've been steadily failing to develop fusion power for sixty years.

The innovation of new sources of energy is not guaranteed, unless you have some new breakthrough in physics you'd like to share? Efficiency gains are strictly limited.

If you think we'll have the ability to support billions of people on a sustainable basis at some time in the future, well great, LET'S WAIT UNTIL WE HAVE THAT ABILITY BEFORE WE BET EVERYTHING ON IT.

@gorillaman

Why would we need to quintuple resources by 2100 if population is only forecast to grow 50%? There is no shortage of potential arable land and more would be made room for if food prices were to rise (bringing them back down).

As I said before, I'm not debating environmental damage and climate change need to be addressed. But you address it directly, you don't attempt to reduce the world population to <1Bn ... somehow, like you propose.

No, corporations primarily do cause environmental harm, particularly climate change:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/20/90-companies-man-made-global-warming-emissions-climate-change

That's why changing their incentives directly through taxes or emission schemes is the best approach. I would almost say that attempting to reduce your carbon footprint at a individual level is an exercise in self masturbatory indulgence, which while gratifying is completely insignificant. It's the by-products of all the everyday products that you consume during the industrial process that create the vast majority or pollutants.

3rd paragraph - I've already addressed everything there several times here. You simply are not acknowledging the facts:

http://priceofoil.org/2013/11/26/new-analysis-shows-growing-fossil-reserves-shrinking-carbon-budget/
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/interactive/2013/nov/26/why-fossil-fuel-reserves-growing-oil-carbon

Does our current reliance on carbon based energy precipitate environmental issues with regards to global warming in the future? Obviously, but an international agreement on raising the cost of it, to reduce our reliance on it, is more likely than an agreement on enforced family size limits.

@RedSky

20 billion was just an arbitrarily large number I chose to demonstrate that I think that the world would survive significant population growth beyond what we'll be dealing with in the near future.

The point of no return I was referring to is simply a point where we won't be able to get back to a place where we can sustain human population levels without significant environmental degradation and territorial disputes, among other challenges I'd prefer not to experience.

I do consider things like global warming, the fact that China is buying up land in Africa to feed its population, US foreign policy's competitive focus on securing cheap oil and the large scale destruction of rainforest to make way for single crop agriculture in Brasil to be symptoms of an imbalance in population vs. resources.

I'm not drawing the line at "everyone and stock up at the grocery store/pumps" type destruction before I take notice and preach caution. I think that defining that as a deadline would be irresponsible.

Again, I agree that we could theoretically mechanize the whole world in a way that grows the supply of resources and shares them equitably amongst an enormous human population, but that goes against the type of world I'd want to live in (excessive mechanization of natural resources) and the way human social systems typically work (equitable sharing).

There are various estimates on how much longer exponential human population growth will last, but it has certainly happened on a scale of centuries or decades - blips like baby boomers are just expected outliers within that trend.

But what's more important is that even if population levels peter off, it is consumption - which is the only statistic that really matters because it is the only negative effect of population increase - that will continue to increase exponentially as a greater proportion of the world's population begins to achieve first world living standards.

This is why free trade alone is not enough to solve problems. While it is likely to bring people out of poverty, raise education levels and increase human rights (all very good things), it will also continue to push our overall imprint on the planet in a more exponential direction than I'm comfortable with (one reason being the argument detailed in this video).

But of course I'm also uncomfortable with the prospect of any sort of forced population reduction mechanism, and I'm also uncomfortable with the notion of not raising people out of poverty.

So as I see it the only thing left to mitigate my fears is to place a primary emphasis on Education.

There's a million and one ways to do this: Everything from broad, effectual efforts like getting the Pope to get with the program and endorse contraceptives, to nearly insignificant efforts like arguing with people on the internet in hopes that you contribute some small part to a culture that places some significant emphasis on educating people about the importance of self control and restraint in every type of consumption - family size included.

@RedSky

I don't know how many times you want me to explain to you that it is not the absolute number of humans on Earth that signifies. In principle a human being costs no more than a large dog to support.* The number of advanced, high energy, modern lifestyles is the figure in question, which you want approximately to quintuple to around ten billion (as recently as fifty to sixty years ago there were fewer than one billion near-modern humans on Earth); that's using a high estimate of the number already at that level, a low estimate of the growth in their resource consumption over the relevant period and a low estimate of total population growth; that's your plan. Or alternatively, to share two billions worth of resources among ten, a burden civilisation cannot bear.

Corporations pollute only so far as we require them to. These are not cigar-puffing fat cats pouring oil on baby seals for the evulz; the fulfilment of the social function we assign them necessarily involves pollution. Expecting to control that effectively with tax incentives is childishly naive.


*Much less if we forego meat. Carnivorous pet ownership by criminals is a substantial driving factor in climate change.

@shveddy

Fair enough. I guess I see things from a different perspective, but ultimately neither of us can really know how the future will eventuate.

When I see China buying up land/investing in Africa, I see a system of inter-dependence being built such as the consumer / exporter relationship that underpins US/China that acts as a stabiliser in relationships with any potential conflict threatening both parties' interests and helping to ensure stability (although some could argue trade was heavily entrenched between Britain and Germany pre-WWI).

The baby boomer generation wasn't a blip, it was very much the defining moment of world population growth. Also, by definition, growth is no longer exponential. On average, it is regressive and at the most pessimistic estimates (which I think are completely unrealistic), it is linear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

As more people come up to middle/high income levels, I think what that implies will fundamentally adjust. Just as a single income is no longer sufficient to sustain a nuclear sized family, I suspect adjustments in price will dictate that our entertainment and recreational activity will increasingly be virtual and computerized with a much smaller resource cost.

I think it's a frequent economic fallacy to assume aspects of society will remain fixed. Just like how there are not a fixed number of jobs that immigrants threaten (Lump of labour fallacy), high income lifestyles are not fixed.

@gorillaman

First paragraph is pretty much addressed above by my last two above.

I'm not denying that corporations pollute because of the competitive incentives of consumers. The alternative however, of targeting consumers to inform them of the costs of their actions (assuming that this would change their purchasing decisions) is a roundabout solution that I think we both realise would not be nearly as cost effective.

If you think tax/financial incentives are not the best way to curb environmental damage, then please suggest a more effective alternative.

The problem with the hypothesis that lifting people out of poverty lowers the population growth rate is twofold.

First, it is a long term (as in several generations) solution.

Second, as people become better off, they typically consume more resources.

The problem is not people it's resources. The tipping point is not x billion people. It's x billion people multiplied by the average resource consumption of a human. The planet is big, but it's finite.

Population reduction, obviously.

Your belief that we can continue to prosper while drastically cutting our per capita resource consumption is directly contradicted by all of human history.

@ChaosEngine

While long term, it is continuous, relatively easy to encourage (than directly constrain population growth) and historically effective.

As for resources consumption, see my posts about automatic adjustment, comparison to nuclear family, fallacy of fixed factors in an economy etc ... If you disagree with any of these, why?

@gorillaman

Which is politically infeasible, short of a dictatorial state like China.

At this point there are no significant physical resources that you have pointed out that are genuinely becoming scarce. If they were, we would see prices sky-rocket and an adjustment away to another type would take place.

I gave the example of labour resources becoming scarce and the adjustment to dual income households. That was a gradual adjustment.

But okay, suppose energy resources genuinely became scarce. Current alternative energy (nuclear/renewable) techniques are not as cost effective as coal/gas/oil. But if there were genuine scarcity in fossil fuels, they would be.

We would know about the coming scarcity for at least a decade ahead and would build out alternative capacity over that period. Even if the average cost were twice current energy costs, how would that be different to the change to dual income households? Society wouldn't like it, but we would adjust.

Perhaps there may be some unrest in borderline developing/poor countries, especially those dependant on energy exports. But there would be no incentive for inter-country wars. In fact, those with the most efficient renewable technology would have much to gain from trading and selling their technology to those who do not.