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Have We Reached Maximum Sustainable Population Size?
Hugh Pickens writes "Pulitzer prize winning writer Thomas Friedman writes that in few years we may be looking back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? 'We're currently caught in two loops,' writes Friedman. 'One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability.' According to the Global Footprint Network we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth's resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. 'Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,' says Paul Gilding. 'We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid.'"
No.
The Earth wasn't supposed to be able to support half the current global population.
Then Norman Borlaug came along, and turns out we could support more. Who knows this time around?
Where's Paul Ehrlich when we need him?
Didn't corn prices go way up because more of the food corn is being used for fuel... that is less efficient to make and use than fossil fuels?
It's a little early to include the tornadoes as part of a discussion on global climate change. Just like one hot summer doesn't prove it and one cold winter doesn't disprove it (even ignoring the false notion that global climate change != getting warmer everywhere all the time) we'd need to see evidence of increased storm activity for multiple years in close succession before we could draw any conclusions. In general i'm a "believer" in global climate change, but i'm not in favor of using incorrect data to try and prop up the idea.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
This approximate point seems to be repeated constantly.
Is anyone really willing to sacrifice anything ($) to solve it?
The World is Flat :
is another Malcolm Gladwell clone; therefore, ignore. He's just a regurgitator of past news.
"Zzzzzzzz".
Yours In Moscow,
Kilgore Trout
This overpopulation problem is just a "rich man"s issue.
The general solutions to these overpopulation claims is for the poorer/not western countries to grow at a slower rate, or their populations decreasing.
Its just a rich mans intellectual racism.
Rich europeans and their descendants have been warning over overpopulation now for over 2 centuries - they thought half a billion people was enough back then.
He has a 9.6 million dollar, 11,400 square foot home.
Oh and his wife used to own a company developing mall properties, those high square foot, poorly insulated buildings surrounded by heat absorbing asphalt.
See: tragedy of the commons...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Didn't we all learn about Malthus in school? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
Welcome to the last 6000 years of human history...
'We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid.'
On the contrary, everything I have seen so far in my short life points in the same direction: we are stupid.
Examples? Chernobyl. Fukushima Daiichi. 'nuff said.
We may have a flash of inspiration, but that is once half of humanity has disappeared due to hunger and wars. THEN, and only then, will the survivors come to their senses. But mass extinction is a very distinct possibility.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The earth clearly can't support infinite people, so at some point we must stop increasing our population. It makes sense to stop increasing our population not at the maximum level we can possibly get away with, but at the level that is most desireable.
Accordinly, we should ask has it reached the maximum desireable population size? Is each person we bring into this world helping (through diversity of labor, resistance to disaster, increased likelyhood of some genious being born to greatly improve the world) or harming (decreased per capita resources for the rest of the living creatures) more?
I suspect we've already reached that point. More discussion would of course be required.
This scumbags is only one of the many who routinely put out such predictions based on "models". Ask yourself- When have people like him been right? If not why not? and why do they continue to make these predictions?
"We may be slow, but we're not stupid"
No, but we are selfish and act independently. The tragedy of the commons will ensue
I roomed with a couple "zero population growth" guys when I went to school. I guess this is what people were into before AGW became the religion for the non-religous. Trying to put forth the idea that it might just be a shift to a new equilibrium due to sudden input of beneficial tech was pointless. Confronting them with the fact that Western nations were only growing due to immigration was pointless. There was only one way the graph could go in their minds, and it was up. As I once joked, "if present trends continue, my Mom will fill the house to the ceiling with throw-pillows by y2k".
don't eat meat. That alone alleviates the largest part of the problems mentioned, as 1) much less crop will be needed to feed the same population and 2) CO2 emissions from animal farming will disappear. These are actually the reasons this anonymous coward turned vegetarian.
is the cause of the higher prices.
"but we're not stupid."
Sorry, we are stupid. Joe Sixpack doesn't give a shit about the future impact of his choices today, as long as it's beyond his lifetime.
Clearly as population goes up at an exponential rate and the rate of increase of technology is linear according to moors law. And since we obviously are using our resources to the maximum potential people must start jumping off buildings right now in order to be sustainable and green. Clearly Thomas Friedman has volunteered to lead the way in this endeavor. So he's going to set an example by jumping first.
What the planet can sustain, and what we can live with, are two different things. We need some headroom, just like a CPU on a server.
If we can't absorb a natural or man made disaster without a huge toll on the lives of us earthlings, then we're overbooked.
This gets me wondering how long we can cheat Malthus, until we have a big population die-off?
When it happens, it will be a chain reaction. Famine, disease, and wars tend to go hand in hand, and if a population of an otherwise stable country starts starving essentially in toto, they will be doing desperate means to find a food source, even if it means overrunning a neighbor.
We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter.
I wish I could be as sure. Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed does a nice job of documenting societies that, when faced with the same choice, picked collapse. Granted, they didn't have Jared Diamond's book to read beforehand, but neither did they have our capacity for self-immolation.
That's some serious optimism he has there...
Can you point out *any* low incidence, high impact risks that Humanity has dealt with effectively?
Humanity might be smart enough to learn from its mistakes, but it's not smart enough to avoid those mistakes in the first place. In this case, the mistake is likely to be fatal, we won't have a chance to try again.
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. 'One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability.'
- well that's plenty of nonsense.
Prices today are pushed up by artificial demand, created by the inflated currencies of the world. US Fed is printing like a maniac, buying up its own debt and is giving the US dollars to all the banks (and likely central banks) around the world, so that they would also buy US debt - this is an attempt to trick the bond market into believing there is an actual demand for US bonds, but all of this is designed to prolong the day of reckoning - when the US bonds are no longer bought and US dollar plunges ahead of all currencies and US is in hyper inflation, because Fed will likely buy out all the debt and default that way, rather than let the market restructure US debt and rebuild the economy.
The prices for food and energy around the world are going up as US is creating inflation around the world, but for now US is still shielding itself from the ultimate catastrophe - currency crisis, but who knows how much longer it can do this? Of-course the oil production will continue declining, as OPEC cannot actually bring more and more production on line, even though it pretends to say that it can, but it can't.
Cartels do not work, because the members have only incentives to cheat. They agree on quotas, and then they produce as much as they can, since they see high prices (even though in reality, the oil and gas are lowest price ever in history if counted in gold.)
As to the population size - the only problem with population size today, is that the governments of the world are distorting the free market and not letting the businesses provide everything the growing populations need in real competitive market. There are a small number of largest companies, that work with government to make sure they keep their monopolies, but of-course monopolies have about as much incentive to maximize their efficiency and compete on price/quality, as any government, which means zilch.
Do not lose the sight of what is really going on: globally the world's central banks are engaged in destruction of currencies in order to maintain the US currency high relative to their own, since there is likely political and personal profit in it for them. This is causing the massive inflation and then prices rise around the world, only so that they stay relatively stable in USA. Do not be fooled by the so called economists, that the government calls 'main stream' and who work for the governments - they are no different than the shamans and witch doctors of yesteryear, who also worked for their kings.
As to the global warming, etc. - how about getting government hands off the energy policy of the world, allowing the businesses to compete on best ways to provide energy, be it nuclear or whatever it is? And how about getting rid of the subsidies to the auto-industries via government sponsored infrastructure, which create the energy policy that we are observing around the world today, complete with wars and pollution?
I am sure this opinion will be highly popular on this site.
Good night.
You can't handle the truth.
When you get past the big, scary headlines to the inside of the Times article, you see statements like this:
"We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.” (Emphasis added)
Wait, we're gonna have to come up some new technologies to lessen our environmental footprint?! Help!
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
This is a facile analysis of the global situation, just like all the previous pronouncements from various luminaries that have predicted the end of the world. Extrapolating anything as complicated as the global economy forward will inevitably predict some sort of catastrophe, and the history books are littered with all the previous times people have made this mistake.
For french people around here, there is a formidable analysis of this question in this month's newspaper "Le Monde Diplomatique". The take-away is, among other things, that rather than overpopulation, the dominant and important trend is the aging of the population, which creates huge problems, such as in China, where the one baby policy created a young generation having to support much more elderly people than before.
"Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in."
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Weather is not the same thing as climate, dumbass!
However, one can say that a particular event is more likely to occur under one scenario (no climate change) than under another (climate change), and this is a conceptual approach being taken to say whether climate change "caused" a particular event or not.
In the case of the extreme tornadoes this year, very preliminary analyses say they're not easily attributable to climate change.
we need to let go of. Most of the so called economic growth of the last few hundred years has been entirely based on digging things out of the ground and consuming them. Nothing grew, we just reduced the value of our asset base in favour of revenue to spend. Yes we could find other assets to strip that would keep us 'growing' a while longer but really, can we keep pretending?
Korma: Good
I was forced to read "The Earth is Round" as part of my MBA. When it comes to amazing him, the bar is set pretty low. He could probably write a column on how the sun rises in the east
"Empire of Debt" has a delicious and well-deserved excoriation of Friedman. If it wasn't such a great book in and of itself, it would be worth reading just for that.
Long-run commodities prices have trended downward since the stone age. Agricultural productivity continues to climb. Human beings are the ultimate resource. http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
... tornados plowed through cities, ...
Ah yes, I remember the good ol' days 'fore we had them thar tornadoes. And the road was paved in gold. And taxes were rock bottom.
There have always been tornadoes, and always will be, and long as the world turns with an atmosphere. So this just kinda leaped out at me as being split-second sensationalism trying to capitalize on the raw emotions of recent tragedy. This guy can DIAF. Or a raging tornado.
Also, "tornadoes" has an 'e'. A Pulitzer eh?
In 1971, Paul Ehrlich predicted a maximum sustainable world population of 1.2 billion people. By 1994 Ehrlich raised his estimate to 2 billion saying, "the present population of 5.5 billion [..] has clearly exceeded the capacity of Earth to sustain it." Two decades later we're closing in on 7 billion souls the overwhelming majority of which are not expected to starve to death or otherwise suffer a Malthusian catastrophe.
Overpopulation alarmism has become trite and hackneyed.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
What? When did that happen?
If we don't as a race accept the simple fact of humans being the major force in the livability of this place, and consciously take control of our actions which affect it, we're in for a large die-off.
Most people reading this will not survive.
It won't be pretty.
Individually, we aren't that stupid. As a species? Yes, we are that stupid.
I think any post referencing Thomas Friedman requires a link to Matt Taibbi's classic article:
Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses....
According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from eating with lions to devouring with them.
Carbon dioxide does not cause catastrophic runaway global warming. It may cause approx. a degree or so of warming. Any more would require positive feedback and there is no evidence that is happening. We've measured the radiation in at all wavelengths and we've measured the radiation out at all wavelengths. The evidence for positive feedback is just not there.
Carbon Dioxide is plant food. Carbon Dioxide is good for farming. In other words, Carbon Dioxide will help us sustain our population.
A study found that we've been exhausting resources faster than they can be restored since the early 80s. Why is this so unbelieveable to most on this site? The Grand Banks was an ocean of fish a couple of hundred years ago but it's been fished out for most of the last 100 years. Most of the fisheries are already depleted. The US was covered in forest and virtually all the old growth is gone. The Amazon rain forest will be gone in 50 to 100 years. The top soil is virtually gone in the central US so they need petroleum fertilizers to grow crops, see a problem there? Water resources are maxed out in many areas, ask Atlanta about that one. Copper prices are through the roof due to most of it having been mined already. Do you see a trend here? We haven't even gotten to things like peak oil which helps provide a huge percentage of the food grown. They aren't making anymore planets and technology can't replace resources.
Have you ever been to India? Have you ever been to Bangladesh? Have you ever been to China? Have you ever been to basically any African nation, especially those near the center of the continent?
All of those places, which comprise probably 75% of the world's population, show just how wrong you are.
The first logical question to ask anyone lamenting the detrimental impact of humanity on the environment is why they haven't killed themselves to help alleviate the problem.
what's pushing up food prices is that Bush deregulated the commodities market. Specifically, he removed the law/regulation that required people investing in farms to be wholesalers who can accept delivery of the goods. Now, you can 'buy' bushels of corn/apples/hog bellies/ etc without ever taking delivery. So we've got rich investors buying this stuff up, reselling at a profit, and never adding any value. They're just parasites, in the most literal sense of the word.
Restore the regulations and prices will drop.
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I've been saying this for years. But now that Thomas Friedman says it I am having serious doubts.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
The situation is kinda shitty so it's nice to hear that he's an optimist. I'm not. I think we're lemmings.
The solution is very easy! There is no population problem in 'western' nations... If not for the
practically unlimited amount of immigrants we accept from them.
Why blame this problem on 'western' nations? All 'western' nations have 'responsible' birth rates.
What all 'western' nations need to do is to completely ban all immigration from any nation that
has a birth rate greater than replacement level. If we take the extras they keep producing into our
nations, then our nations will be destroyed. Our infrastructure, our economies, our environments.
If we refuse to take in extras from countries producing too many, than those countries will finally
feel the pressure that they create. Only then will they have an incentive to reform. Only then will
it even make sense for them to reform. Life will expand to fill what it can adapt to. If we allow
life from these irresponsible countries to expand into our countries, we will be consumed. We
must stop artificially removing the limit to their growth by sending them food aid and allowing their
extra population to be dumped into our countries.
BAN ALL IMMIGRATION FROM COUNTRIES WITH IRRESPONSIBLE BIRTH RATES!
We need to develop economic models of prosperity that are not dependent upon economic growth.
a system which amasses 71% of everything on average (with good estimates) at the hands of 5% of the population, who are in power to decide what they want to do with this 71% ~ power/wealth of our civilization at their own whim.
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html (it is worse in world averages)
in such a system, no population size is sustainable.
Read radical news here
A better question is "have we reached the maximum sustainable resource consumption/conversion rate per person times population".
A US citizen is responsible for 10 to 20 times more resource and energy consumption than a Chinese or Indian citizen, for example.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Why are people so incessant about the apocalypse? I'm only 25 and have already grown weary of Malthusian predictions, and that's just one subtype! It's also rather odd that Mr. Gilding suggests that we have merely two options, and omits the one that has continuously disproven such predictions for the past 200+ years.
We didn't collapse or (really) become more sustainable over the past two centuries, what happened was resource gathering increased in proportion with population. If one believes that current technology is end-game, i.e. that any further advances will have diminishing returns, then one lacks imaginative foresight and any perspective of history. A mere pawn of the present, which can only see the square in front of him.
"We may be slow but we're not stupid," is an interesting remark, considering that public stupidity is the major weapon in the battle of Greedy Bastards vs. Everybody Else. The small number of people who can't stand to live in the world unless they own it have been actively cultivating mass stupidity for years. Their arsenal includes kneejerk emotional responses, supersitious fear of science and academia, leadership cultism, and other ignorance-based aspects of human psychology. It's like a giant football team with a handful of quarterbacks standing safely behind millions of big dumb linemen who are willing to charge out and get their knees broken for the cause.
If we're going to save ourselves from disaster we had better start using the public's stupidity for the public good. Stop offering up facts and reason and switch to trite, mindless slogans and overblown imagery. People will respond much more to a scary picture of a boogeyman than to a reasonable explanation that there is no boogeyman. Instead of trying to explain climate change, draw a cartoon of a family and their dog huddled on the roof of a floating house. The American public has been conditioned to believe fear and stupidity, so I say give them fear and stupidity.
"But that makes you just as bad." No it doesn't. Using other people's stupidity to save them from disaster is much better than using it to screw them over.
There is a multi-thousand-year history of people using things up or destroying the environment and then finding a way forward. See "Why the West Rules-for Now" by Ian Morris for examples over the last 15000 years. Lets hope we can keep it up...
Individually we aren't. But collectively we've shown, time and again, just how stupid we are. And we'll never be able to reach a consensus on a new economic model because of it.
I can't speak for people in other nations (I'm an American) even though I suspect I know how they would react. But I have a pretty good idea of how Americans will behave. Many of them will scream "socialist" and want nothing to do with it. Many others will complain about having to pay for it, even though they themselves are already beyond broke and use more resources than they actually contribute back. Some will never want to relinquish the (illusion of) control they believe they have over the world. We can't reach a consensus amongst ourselves, let alone with people who have different political philosophies. In other words, good luck getting us to agree with the Chinese or the Russians.
If there's going to be an intelligent solution found it will have to be found by the people with the rapidly growing populations. The future really is up to the Chinese, Indians and Africans. Don't blow it guys.
Of course it's just as likely some pointless war will greatly reduce the population pressure before the century is out...
This is the same crap that was pushed upon people at the turn of the last century and led to increase in Communism and Socialism. The fear tactics never die, just the people who use them.
I mean those that steathily adress our intellect as something superior. You will be led astray. Our Earth has no trouble sustaining us, it does! What it does have trouble with is a pillaging industry that uses 20 times more energy than the actual population. This type of talk really reaches an audience that wants to get rid of people..
The US has lots of undrilled oil and lots of farms. and if things get really bad stop sending food out and drill baby drill. while finding other way to fuel cars. Maybe merge Canada and the usa on to one.
Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich, peak oil, etc, etc. Now Friedman.
A succession of people saying all will be disaster unless you immediately do X that, by the way they consider wise to do for other reasons.
In the reign of Emperor Augustus, historian Livey claimed that if Rome did not return to its founding values (which didn't really exist during its founding by a pretty savage lot) it would surely fall.
He was right. 500 years later for the western part of the empire, and 1000 for the eastern part.
One day such doomsayers will be right. But thus far they have been wrong so many times.
Has anyone noticed how similar this is to the preacher that was saying the world would end on May 22nd?
Like him, when the world fails to end, they say they didn't account for something and set a new date. Now in October, I think?
Similarly, it's now not 1975 or 1980 when it falls apart and we all starve. It's 20xx and we've really got it right this time. We think...
Yeah. Uh huh.
(Note I don't think wasting resources, unending population increase or not conserving energy is wise. I'm highly in favor of efficiency increases. But the claim the gas tank is empty hasn't agreed with what actually happened.)
And what if those claims of how cheap and plentiful solar/renewables are really work?
The same shining lights of this game, Ehrlich, Lovins etc. have stated that a truly cheap clean, plentiful energy source/sources would be a disaster for the world. Mankind would use it to further destroy nature and thus should be limited in energy availability.
i believe we are past it.
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
and Paul Ehrlich want's his prediction back.
But let's be fair here, a great deal of the advances we've made have been in the field of digging things up and consuming them -- energy, plastics, computers, etc. etc.
If our consumer-oriented lifestyle is to be sustainable, we need major advances in clean energy and recycling technology.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Overpopulation is the reason I have stopped giving to charities except those that advocate birth control. Because you know what, it may sound harsh but there are waaaaaaaaaaaay too many fuckers on this planet already, and if I prevent some from starving/dying of malaria/whatever, all they are going to do is turn around and create more people to starve/die of malaria/whatever. The poorest places in the world are often the places with the highest birth rates, this isn't a coincidence. If you really want to improve people's lives, give them the means to limit the number of kids they have. Then we will see some real improvement.
Monstar L
...LA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc4HxPxNrZ0&feature=player_embedded The only resource we are using up is oil and there is growing interest and use of Hydrogen for Fuel (do a youtube search on HHO) Things that are using up and killing resources are oil and Nuclear leaks that damage the ecological cycle. And both of these can be greatly reduced. Its not a matter of using up natural renewable resources at all, but rather at best just a matter of how we are using the resources. And there is another issue at hand... the intent of the ruling elite to hang on to their positions at a time when they are in fact becoming obsolete, for with 7 billion people on this planet it is easy math to see that its some fraction of 1% messing things up for the rest of us, and we all know who they are because we can now see that there is no boogie man to go to war with. The US defense Budget is near half the whole worlds defense budget. Add in the allies for which we would never go to war with and ask "who are we going to war with that we need over 60 of defense spending (given that the remaining 40% is divided among many poor countries). Economy is not a problem if they would simply stop taking out trillions of dollars from the economy but rather put more in to keep a balance with population growth. Sept 10th 2001 Donal Rumsfeld made a public accessible statement the pentagon cannot account for 2.3 trillion dollars of spending and since then there has been the 9.7 trillion dollar bailout which also cannot be accounted for as to where it went. And lets not forget the "Trillion dollar bet" which drained south east Asia economy in the 90's as well as stealing from many american retirements via losers in that bet of the likes of Enron and Worldcom, etc.. Nobody wants to hear about "conspiracy" but come on, trillions of dollars of unaccounted for spending and the economy around the world is diving? So where did the money go, follow it to where? There is only one answer. It was removed. For the conspiracy readers, well they probably already know of the 180 FEMA camps in the US (barbwired to keep people in), the half a million or more 3-4 person cremation coffins FEMA has, the Tripple decker train cars with bars to handcuff people to that also can roll right up to many of the FEMA so called "Detention centers", the Chemtrail poisoning that even main stream news is now covering and verifying toxic chemicals are being dumped in teh shys of all NATO nations. And for those who have been watching, there is effort to trash our countries founding documents (Declaration of Independence, US Constitution and Bill of Rights) not to forget teh unaccounted for spending of tax payer money being a huge denial of the Boston Tea Party. And now this about having to many people on the planet...... For those who want to believe this BS, feel free to help out with the BS you believe and kill yourself.
I'm your Huckleberry!
So do your part, Hugh Pickens, and kill yourself.
Then, when the rest of the world realizes the US has what they so desperately need, say hello to WWIII.
Bilderberg is hot
Bankster Terrorism
The eugenics science czar
The Bio Lab e-Coli
Fukashima
Daini
Mainstream Media has an extended weiner break
Fuck Friedman
I mean I was watching some program with that idiot and it basically took a guy with a Phd in physics to explain to him why the car they were developing was so fuel efficient. (Answer it was really light. Of course the moron didn't ask them how they were going to reduce the cost of the carbon fiber needed to make the thing because he's a moron.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
"In 2005 there were 13.4 billion hectares of biologically productive land and water available and 6.5 billion people on the planet. This is an average of 2.1 global hectares per person."
Global hectare
They just need to wait for middle east to kill it self off be for they can tell all about it.
Every so often someone has to come along with doom and gloom predictions.
The developed world, especially Europe and some Asian nations have been suffering population decline for quite some time. Some nations have avoided it because of relatively open immigration policies. Even China is starting to see a marked decline in population growth. They're feeling the consequences of both their one-child policy and reduced birth rates that always come with an improved standard of living. The expectation is that over the next few decades India will surpass them as the world's most populous nation.
I forget the exact details but I recall hearing some time ago that enough food is produced to feel the world several times over. There are countless reasons, global food shortage not being one of them, why we still have people in starvation. There are many other factors contributing to the price of food.
I'd say a more realistic threat is the potential for energy shortages. But even then, we already have numerous alternatives for fossil fuels. There may currently be a shift away from nuclear, but if we run out of coal or oil I'm sure it will start looking quite attractive. And discounting that there are quite a few other energy sources.
If we ran out of oil the one mode of transportation that would be hit hardest is air travel. We currently have no viable alternative for powering aircraft. We'll be faced with going back to international travel times of a few weeks. Of course, this may also result in the resurgence of domestic manufacturing which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Reality is always far more complex and less extreme than some would like to believe.
From the summary: "We may be slow, but we're not stupid.'" Yes, we are. It's all downhill from here, boys and girls...
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
We have reached our maximum sustainable population size ONLY if we do not make a step to evolve past our fundamental human nature. The world can support a trillion people if all of those people work together. If we choose not to do this, then we are most certainly reaching the end of our population tether. We can see this in our education crisis, climate crisis, economic crisis, family crisis, and so on.
Our fundamental human nature is our egoism i.e. our will to receive for ourselves. Nature created us essentially like a cancer - we spread and evolve independently, sometimes to the detriment of others. We only work for others when it benefits ourselves - this is nature's law. It is the most efficient way for a young organism to develop, and we need only see a baby to understand this.
However, it will not always be like this. Like how cells work together to form a human body, we as individuals will begin gradually to arrange ourselves in a pattern. We will overcome nature's biggest limitation (the limit as to how much we can each receive ourselves) by working together.
Either we come to this conclusion through education, or we come to this conclusion through suffering. Nature is forcing us into this position by bringing us closer together. We may hate feeling so hemmed in, but it is a necessary process in our natural development.
As always, our maximum population size is up to us.
Friedman said that once oil hit $100 a barrel that gasoline would be over $5 a gallon and the US would demand an alternative energy source. Of course, oil is almost $150 a barrel, gas is high but less than $5 a gallon and Mr. Friedman still has a job.
There is no justice in this world. This man is a laughing stock. If he hadn't published "The World is Flat" a few years ago (a truly remarkable book, despite its author), no one would listen to him.
Let's let ratings work; ignore him and he'll go away. He has no credibility.
If "sustainable" means will 10% of the human populace dies for every 9% added from now on, ...nah, quite the reverse. If "sustainable" means we'll be increasingly discomfited if we keep doing things the way we have been, then sure that was reached about the time the Bee-Gees were popular. In the long run either the population growth will be halted by uncaring conditions, or we'll have to pursue the Hawking plan and "get our butts to Mars"... and lo': the states just retired its last functional human orbiter ..yep.
When we say sustainable, it means a lot of things. It means that we aren't overfishing the oceans. It means that we aren't over-extracting water from underground aquifers (google "Ogallala aquifer" as one example). It means that we no longer use petroleum, which means no petrochemical-based pesticides unless we find ways to cheaply make them out of something renewable. And it means no more fertiliizers where the nitrogen content consists of ammonia created from natural gas via the Haber process. Consider what happens to food production with more limited availability of pesticides and fertilisers.
And once you have considered all of that, then google "Overshoot". There are examples of this phenomenon in nature.
The U.S.A. and several other first world nations (to my knowledge) have policies in place preventing crops from being grown at maximum production rates/acreage.
I'm under the impression that first world nations (U.S.A., Britain, Japan, etc) have a near flat population growth curve. It is the up-and-coming third world nations that encourage massive overpopulation (China, Africa, India, etc).
If these nations cannot produce enough food to feed their own populations, let them starve and their societies collapse. Problem solved. Darwinism at it's finest, and it keeps the first world nations in a social/cultural position of preeminence.
As an alternative, repeal the policies keeping first world farms from producing the wanted crops and selling them to anyone who wants to buy. However, that would require Politicians to admit there was something they or their predecessors screwed up. Good Luck!
As a side note, China doesn't need too much help reaching a Malthusian solution. Check the male to female ratio in China. http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/03/14/sex-selection-china-india.html
People this irresponsible frighten me.
You would have to go with World War 2 to match such criteria.
We ARE talking about the human population on the entire planet, right?
Even at 1939 numbers ALL the causalities lie between 3 an 4% of the entire population.
~78 million dead, biggest and dirtiest war in history, fought on almost all parts of the planet, only nuclear war in history (so far) - and still not even 1 in 20 humans were killed.
And not for the lack of trying.
Barring AIDS-flu or global thermonuclear war or alien invasion there is no chance we are ever going to reach those 0.001% of population with one shot.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
North America's birth rate is stable, it's the people coming in that are creating pop growth here.
China and India, each, have four times the pop size of the third largest, the U.S.A.. 1.3 and 1.2 billion as opposed to 300 million. Combined they have 2.5 billion people which is well over 30% of the total population of Earth in a relatively small area. Given how close they are to each other I'm wondering when those two are going to reach critical mass and start accusing each other about eating the other out of house and home. Things could get very messy at that point....
It's certainly not good due to high non-renewable resource consumption. We'll have to start using renewable resources and find a way to obtain food more efficiently (unless we want lots of people to starve, which they already are). The summary says that humans are not stupid, but I disagree. I think that they're stupid for filling up the planet with their useless offspring instead of helping keep the population down so that we don't have so many people dying due to starvation (which isn't necessarily caused by overpopulation).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Paul Gilding - "We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid."
"We" may not be stupid, but Paul Gilding shows every sign of being stupid. Catastrophes are not "chosen;" they happen (the Black Death of 1348). The race of mankind has no history of undertaking global strategic decisions for the benefit of the whole. Certainly the response to hypothesized anthropogenic global warming is not such a strategic decision in any positive way, since the consequences of the proposed cure will be far worse than the disease.
The time to tackle the question of "what is a desirable global population level and how do we maintain it" is long since past.
Individuals are smart or stupid. Races just ARE. A race is not a person. To make that mistake is truly anthropomorphising on a grand scale.
Yadda yadda, David Hume (I mean, objection I independently thought of in my independent educational institute), yadda can't derive an "ought" from an "is," yadda yadda, (default financial frame regarding my actual day to day actions goes here...)
In conclusion, I've got mine, and fuck all of you.
Depending on what "sustained" means. I'm projecting a population of zero any time more than 15 billion years from now.
Overpopulation alarmism has become trite and hackneyed.
Yes, you are correct. We should continue on our present course without considering the consequences. We will never run out of anything.
I personally think that unless some steps are taken to bring world population growth to zero fairly quickly that there are going to be some truly horrible wars in fifty to one hundred years. First world countries will be very reluctant to give up all their modern amenities, and developing countries will be unwilling to curb their population growth to keep competition for resources to a minimum. At some point, there are going to be some very serious shortages, and the wars that result will not be conducted around the traditional goal of military conquest for resources, but rather the goal of making the world population much smaller in a very short time. I certainlly hope that doesn't happen, but there are enough despotic people in power around the world that I think it might.
The fact is that there are not infinite resources. If there are too many people using those resources, you will run out. The problem is that when this happens, it will basically be like an inflection point on a graph, where change will happen very quickly.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The UN estimates of world population now indicate an increase until around 2075 (9.2 billion), and then a decrease after that.
Birth rates in all developed nations are falling fast, many are under replacement rate already. The US population would be lower than the replacement rate right now if it weren't for immigration.
The problem with Malthus is not the math, it's the model. Anyone can pick assumptions and make a model, and from there make predictions. Mathus erred in assuming that things would not change. An exponential curve is indistinguishable from a bell curve at the long tail beginning, so the evidence seemed to support his prediction.
What's changing is the demographics. Once raised out of poverty, people naturally start having fewer children. There are a variety of proposed reasons for this, and the evidence is very strong.
The prediction now is that once everyone is reasonably above the poverty line (mostly Africa, with some contribution from SE Asia) population growth will reverse.
Interestingly enough, in 75 years time there may be the reverse problem - population *shrinkage*.
A very few handful of people are holding back humanities potential.
This will change, but before it does people will have to be taught a very painful lesson about being indifferent, careless and uninvolved in their communities.
Greed has humanity in a grip right now, and won't let go.
Once it does, and people are permitted to achieve, the Stars will beckon.
But before that happens, all of you are about to experience a very very historic and troubling time in humanities history.
Terrible weapons are about to be released by the few who are trying to hold onto their power, and have so many million enslaved in poverty and hopelessness.
Even now they meet and discuss how they will build a 1,000 year dark age where they are the masters.
They won't succeed.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
As a true Geek the maximum sustainable population size is 1.
e.g. will we start letting the excess die in a gutter? The question isn't, can we feed these people? It's: Will we? We don't need these people. There's no jobs for them. Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no. I don't know of a third answer (that doesn't boil down to one or the other in practical terms).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
please explain how we use 1.5 Earths. Are there that man meteorites?
Give or take a couple a hundred million or so...
Also, we could all live in Texas.
And still there be room even there, cause we would have to send of millions to farm African savannah so that everyone in the world could be fed.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Maybe 2 billion.
We are beyond sustainable population already.
It ends ugly in about 50 years.
Political and societal rules won't fix it.
Any attempt to limit the population will result in higher breeding populations coming to dominate the population and then rejecting the value to hold population down.
It's going to take a mass die off. We are no better than deer.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's not that you can't drown in a pool of Thomas Friedman's wisdom. It's just that you'd have to be face down and drunk to do it.
First world countries all have below zero population growth rates, or would if it wasn't for immigration. In a rich country, children cost more to raise, and increased women's rights mean that women don't get used as baby factories to increase the status of men.
This is a non-issue for just about anyone who would actually be reading this.
If you want to see a pessimist, check out George Mobus at http://questioneverything.typepad.com./
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I beg to differ. History demonstrates just how stupid we are collectively, because collectively the ones that aren't stupid tend to get silenced or drowned-out, especially when "tough" controversial choices like this one are at issue. Better minds than mine long ago estimated the truly sustainable limit at half a billion; if that's even vaguely accurate then we're waaaay past the sustainable maximum, and have been well before the 21st Century arrived.
food prices cause political instability in the Middle East
[sarcasm]wow, I love that he is able to dump all this instability on food prices, and am esp glad to hear it has nothing to with them being bat shit crazy and at war for over 2000 years[/sarcasm]
it's all circling the drain, and you ain't gonna stop it, so you might as well enjoy the ride. -parse
Yeah, I saw a yard gnome once, it didn't scare me - Space Ghost
Humans++ => Human Capital++ => Inovation++ => Real Price--. Julian Simon laid this out quite clearly. He even put $10,000 on the line in a bet with Paul Ehrlich that his idea was correct, and won.
It is becoming more and more apparent that a lot of these problems could be easily remedied if something like "anti-gravity devices" existed for macro mass applications.
I did a back-of-the-envelope computation a while back to see what it would be like if there were one trillion people. It would not be anything like what we see now, but it could actually work. Many things that we consider essential would be gone - but that is also true of how the earliest explorers to the Americas would think about our present life.
IIRC, population density would average about 14,000 per square mile - about twice the present population of Bangladesh. Of course, that counts deserts, mountains, etc. but does not include expansion into floating systems on the oceans. (The Pacific Ocean alone is more than twice as large as all the landmass combined.)
The energy computations would be quite different but not impossible to contemplate. I don't recall the details, but it would work. The Sun provides a lot of energy, and oddly enough, the more dense the population the less energy each individual needs.
I personally do not like big cities. I grew up in a semi-rural area, and I get uncomfortable in a crowd. But a college friend from China told me that he got nervous any time he _wasn't surrounded by many people! So the people who grew up in that environment would be reasonably adapted to it, and would consider my present lifestyle (outside the range of 4G) something akin to orbiting an asteroid - an alien, scary environment.
So, bottom line - it's all about what gets lost, not what survives. Many species will not survive, many cultures will disappear by absorption. New species will become part of this new very different ecosystem. In the US for example, I could see most if not all present national parks still in existence, but admittance restricted to research personnel, and the borders surrounded by high rise buildings filled with people who eat food grown in a vat (synthetic yogurt?) from recycled waste. I'm not the first to foresee such a high density lifestyle.
Probably the biggest problem will be management of infectious disease, and social disease (such as gang warfare - a kind of localized inflammation in the social body.) Behavior and travel will become increasingly restricted - it may well be a 'hive'-like environment where most people never leave their locale - much like cells in a body. That is what we will have, really, a large 'body' composed of individual humans and integrated organisms, some of which may well be hybrid carbon-silicon entities.
Again IIRC, at present rates of growth it will take 1400 years to achieve 1 trillion people. In that time, we might well have populated near-earth orbital space. That will not move a large number of people off the Earth, but it will provide an outlet for the minds of those who remain. And, since shipping things down from orbit is much cheaper than sending things up, it may be cost effective to grow food in orbital farms (using materials from the asteroids?) and drop it down to the hungry mouths on Earth - in return for up-shipments of hard-to-get minerals, perhaps?)
All of the above is speculative, but the lesson is that every argument about the limits to growth makes critical and false assumptions about the failure of adaptation, technology and social patterns. Life is _very_ adaptive, and in that sense we are life^2. We are replacing classical bio-evolution with social and technical evolution, which will drive bio-evolution. I suggest reading Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (at Amazon - does /. get paid if we link to Amazon?)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning buffoon.
'One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability.'
"Global warming" has been happening for milennia, and often happens after things like ice ages. Man isn't big enough to cause it, and if you believe that, I've got the perfect electric car to sell you. It's a bogus charge, and it certainly isn't pushing up food prices, because the rising cost of crude oil and diesel fuel, coupled with the increasing use of corn for ethanol, are doing that quite handily. Furthermore, "rising food prices" aren't causing political instability in the Middle East; Islam is. I'll say it again, because it bears repeating: rising food prices aren't causing political instability in the Middle East; Islam is.
Higher oil prices? Currently caused by the Obama administration: stopping US offshore drilling while supporting Brazilian efforts, making it impossible for oil companies with valid land leases to drill anywhere in the US, keeping US refineries from expanding or in some cases even repairing existing infrastructure...the list goes on.
Here's the solution:
1. Stop using food for ethanol! E10 is eating older cars up, and E15 will do it worse. Only cars specially designed for ethanol can properly use it, and that includes mechanical systems as well as fuel systems. Ethanol-containing fuels retain enough water to cause damage to many vehicles, and the alcohol itself can dissolve fuel lines and other engine seals. And, ethanol as fuel quite literally takes food out of people's mouths!
2. As Sarah Palin says, drill baby drill! Seriously. The US is sitting on the largest oil reserves on the planet! We have enough in proven offshore wells, oil shale, and traditional land-based wells (nearly triple current Saudi reserves) to tell OPEC where they can stuff their oil prices. And with revelations earlier this week that researchers have developed a way to turn natural gas (of which the US has plenty) into a form of crude oil, the US would be the largest oil-exporting nation on the planet, for decades to come.
3. More nuke plants for power. Shut down coal plants and replace with with nukes. No more "green energy"; it doesn't work. Solar would require the space of a planet to power the planet, and wind kills hundreds of thousands of birds a year, including lots of endangered varieties. We've learned a lot from TMI, Chernobyl, and even Fukushima, and we could get some pointers from the French, too.
4. Oh, yeah, and decrease taxes, too!
When we had presidential administrations who believed that the US was an exceptional nation, and stayed out of the way of private industry and food production like they're supposed to, we literally fed the world. Now we have a President who believes that the US is just like any other nation, no better (and in the opinion of some, plenty worse), and he's taking the whole world down with him. His predecessor increased subsidies to the ethanol industry, which helped propagate that particular disaster. Mr. President, get out of our way. Let the oil industry do what it does. Let the farms produce food instead of fuel. Reduce the tax burden on citizens and companies. Do all that, and the unemployment situation will magically resolve itself. Amazingly enough, the national debt and deficit should begin to ease as well. And you know what, Mr. Friedman? There won't be such a big population problem after all.
Which will more likely be fought in other parts of the world. Destroying even more of their own resources.
we've gone WAY past it.
I read numerous articles showing that while there were more tornadoes in one day than usually occur the real problem was that they spawned in places where more people lived. Considering that it has only been fairly recently in the limited history of this nation that we could even track the things I find it amazing how many do miss populated areas. Quite a few funnel clouds detected on RADAR never touch ground which I am not sure how they account for those. While population density might matter if measured over an area the size of a state how many times do we read about tornadoes going through a decent sized city? The Joplin could have had a much higher death toll if it hit during school as the tornado did run over two of them, again just random chance
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I rather dislike Thomas Friedman, his little dog and anyone else who would dare predict the future in a way in which I happen to disagree.
We have a responsibility to help the rest of the world have what Al Gore has without fucking the world or people over in the process.
We can start by not artifically tieing agriculture to energy by not attempting to fricking grow it ... At least in the half-assed bearly break-even way we now insist. This is crap.
Also farmers should not have to deal with scum of the earth biotech shenanagans. This is crap.
Friedmans feedback system between feed and energy seems a bit absurd concidering energy use by farming and direct support industries (fertilizer production..etc) has been falling steadily and substantially for decades. You could argue transportation logistics cost but effeciency here continues to increase as well. All I see are negative pressures on all of the points he implies would be reinforced. He is confusing short term artifical pressures in the form of market speculation for the real world... There is a point in that the dependancy graph for high tech is massive and brittle. Look what happened recently with Japan.
No, we're pretty damn stupid.
Much of the population growth is presently in poorer nations. In most richer nations, and particularly nations where men and women are seen as equals, the introduction of contraceptives have dramatically reduced population growth to the extent that many western nations would see no population growth at all if it was not for immigration.
In addition our agricultural methods at the moment are not optimized for maximum efficiency. If we would cut our consumption of meat and animal products down to healthy levels, and stop using arable land to feed livestock ( you could still let them graze on land unsuitable for crops ), then this would drastically reduce the amount of land required to feed our population.
Taking it even further the farming methods themselves can be greatly improved. Greenhouses, crop rotation and improved irrigation systems would dramatically increase agricultural yield while simultaneously reducing the need for fertilizers and pesticides.
This is before you even start to consider the controversy that is genetic engineering. While I'm not a fan of GM patents and monsanto's business practices, it is quite feasible to use GE to increase the nutritional value of various food crops.
The problem is that all of the above relies on governments doing their job responsibly, and electorates actually voting sensibly. Sadly we have a great deal of people opposed to contraceptives on religious grounds, inefficient farming subsidies that are little more than a bribe to buy support from the agricultural sector, lack of regulation of pesticides and food quality because "the free market will sort it out", and the ridiculous idea that obtaining a patent, even for living organisms like plants , is some form of inalienable right as opposed to a mere tool to stimulate innovation.
TL,DR:
From a technical point of view the problem is easy to solve, but a bunch of moralizing and greedy fucktards are going to mess it up.
I noticed that this website is in English, German, Spanish, French, and Italian--meaning it is mostly directed to the west. The fact that it doesn't even have Mandarin or Cantonese despite China's 1.3 Billion tells you that he is more interested in extracting money from guilt-laden westerners than solving any problems. French! Less than 2% of the earth speak French as their native language. Heck, more people speak Bengali or Telugu or even Marathi than the entire population of France!
Most of the western countries are stable or have declining populations. The United States is an exception, however much of that is due to immigration. Yet you have India with 1.2 Billion and growing, Indonesia with 237 million and growing, Nigeria with 158 million and growing, Bangladesh with 150 million and growing---and the site is dedicated to telling Westerners why it is all their fault. Solving the real problem, 3rd world population growth, isn't going to get done by telling Westerners to reduce their "footprint".
Ultimately Malthusian. Hence rubbish.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEBa9vWVjF0&feature=player_embedded
We surpassed it long ago. Just look at all the tricks they have to do to get food on the plate now. This is not going to end pretty.
Money, power and greed at the top of the economic food chain is what gives the appearance of stupidity. In short, (and here comes the sweeping over-generalization) there's little hope for 90% of the world's population as the top 10% horde everything for themselves using astronomically high prices to starve everyone else.
how is babby formed?
facts:
We produce enough food EVERYday to fed everyone in the world 3 times over. It's the economics of distribution, not scarcity that causes someone to starve. 8 billion people in the world could stand arm to southern California. You think the world is really populated till you hop on a plane and look down and see nothing between LA and Denver.
It's meaningless to ask if we have reached maximum sustainable population size unless you also specify what standard of living you are talking about. I can recall reading about 20 years ago that we had already passed the point where it was possible to give everyone on Earth the same standard of living as the average American.
But standard of living really is a proxy for resource consumption and not a very good one because as technology advances it can produce more from less. Eventually you reach a wall though. Pick a resource utilization number and multiply by population. Is it greater than the available resources? If yes then we have passed the sustainable population. OTOH divide available resources by population and you have the allowed resource utilization to maintain that population.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you treat resources as finite.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you try to factor in the effects of growing technological capabilities.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you try to factor in the effects of human nature.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Space elevator
Hey, how's it going?
Hans Rosling has some some quite convincing numbers & arguments why population isn't soaring (much longer, anyways)
Here is an exerpt of an article I was writing called the "Sustainable Status of America" on why the ecological foot print is inflated, and what it really shows.
The way the ecological foot print works is that it calculates how big of an area of the planet each of us needs - in "global hectacres per capita". Here is a graph of the ecological foot print from many nations vs the human development index.
At first blush, this report would seem to refute my point - the USA is one of the least sustainable nations on the planet. However, taking a more complexed and detailed understanding unvails many interesting counterpoints. The first counterpoint I would like to point you to is the graph of footprint over time. What you can see is that the footprint of most nations goes down, while the HDI goes up. What this means is that we are on the right track, which is better than nothing. If we project out the lines, what we see is that we should be for the most part sustainable by 2050.
After looking at the ecological footprint, I quite like the way it measures impact. However, it has one huge, IMHO, design flaw. It considers CO2 to have a physical footprint in global hectacres per capita. For example, in the graph of Switzerland, you can see that most of the footprint is energy, I.E., CO2. If you were to ignore the CO2 requirement, you would find that Swizterland was actually sustainable (but barely). Worldwide, the carbon component of our footprint is over 54% of the foot print. The way CO2's footprint is being calculated is by taking into account the amount of CO2 captured by acres of biomass, such as forests. What this means is that it essentially calculates how big of a fuel farm we would need for the world using first generation biofuels. The results are rediculus for energy instensive countries such as the USA. This is because first generation biofuels are incredibly ineffecient - often less than 0.1% efficient at converting solar energy into useful power. A solar panel is 20% efficient. A recent IEEE report concluded that to power the world with switch-grass ethanol would require essentially the whole planet be converted into one big fuel farm. Meanwhile, solar panels essentially on our roofs could charge up all our electric cars and power our houses. This CO2 calculation pollutes the ecological footprint data with tangential information that depends on technical change.
The ecological footprint makes a good point. Our current mode of operation is unsustainable, but what it also makes clear is what our number one sustainablity priority should be: reducing CO2 emissions. Fortunately, thousands if not millions of my fellow capitalist pigs have responeded to the call. The solution, and this will be clear, is not to reduce our energy use but instead to develop new technologies to solve the problem. We have been told by environmentalists "we must change our behavior instead of wait for technological fantasy", but history has had other ideas. The whales were not saved from the whalers because activists told everyone to turn of the lights. The whales were saved because technologists and capitalsts drilled for oil. JD Rockefeller saved the whales, not Patrick Moore. CO2 will be stopped because higher fossil fuel prices are already pushing renewables - the solution is already happening, but you don't often hear about it. For example, wind power is growing at around 30% annually - a phenominal growth rate in the business world. The consequences of this growth are the colapse of off-peak electricity prices - which I hope will result in the shifting of industrial production and transportation "fuel" production to windy nights. Wind currently makes up 1.8% of our electricity. What that means is that in 15-20 years at the current growth rate, wind will make up all of our electricity production.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
the population which use the most resource , the west mostly, is the most stable , somewhat declining population. The population exploding is the poorest population, which do not use msot resource. The proportion is probably 20% of earth population using 0.9 earth and 80% of earth population fast growing using 0.6 earth. The bad news is from that 80% , about 60 points does not seem to be making ANYTHING against overpopulation, whereas 20 points (CHina essentially) do.
rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East
He is obviously pointing to any and everything as a why his argument is right.
The middle east has been unstable for 1400 years at least. India, China, and many other populous regions are developing like crazy, even though they haven't had literally trillions of dollars pumped into their economy through oil sales. Instability in the ME is NOT about food prices.
is civilization, current global one. Things are not sustainable as we are driving them, and is easier to kill/let die some billons of people than change whats wrong. Memes persist over people, even negative ones.
Is climate change outside of what is normal for Earth. Change is the only constant on Earth, climate is just a part of that. The temperature (among other things) fluctuates by day, week, year, decade, and so on. So that average measurements are different than the were in the past is not surprising, it is expected.
So the issue, the reason there has been so much talk and research going on, is we are observing a change that does not appear to be part of documented trends. Then of course comes the issue of what is it. Is it a larger natural trend, not directly recorded since we've only been recording temperatures for maybe a century? Is it a change due to human activity? Etc.
Nobody questions that the climate changes, only why.
The issue is with the thought that the last 100 years have been "normal" somehow. They have not because there is no normal, only change.
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html
http://pesn.com/2011/01/17/9501746_Focardi-Rossi_10_kW_cold_fusion_prepping_for_market/
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
http://www.remineralize.org/
Lots more if anyone looks..
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I get real tired of people unwilling to practice what they preach, particularly when they are claiming that what they preach is extremely important, necessary to human survival, etc.
If you truly believe that of your dogma, then I expect to see you follow it chapter and verse. Whatever you are saying needs to be done be the average person, you need to do. You don't get a free pass, you aren't special.
So if someone is advocating doing things to improve efficiency, like using LED lights, having efficient appliance and so on, then I'm fine so long as they do that, even if their overall usage is higher than mine. However if someone is advocating drastic cutbacks, that everyone needs to live on much less, well then they'd better be living at whatever level they say we need to go to.
People like this really need to STFU until they are willing to eat their own dog food. I am not ok with begin told "You have to make big sacrifices to save the world, but I can't make the sacrifice to even live at the level you do now."
This is not about how many we can support NOW, heck we could probably support 7 billion people in a "western style" for decade, *IF* we completely waste our non renewable resource within those decades. This is about how much of the population we can afford, compared to our non renewable resource, and with a certain resource consumption rate. And that comes to a much lower number.
In the past, we had plagues, wars and other natural calamaties to reduce the population. The downside of these methods (over say a policy to not having too many children) is that it appears more arbitrary and unfair and to cause lots of immediate suffering (or in your words more radical). However, you might also argue that it is probably more effective and less prone to manipulation and a tragedy of the commons.
There is no "we". Different groups of people will have different outcomes.
Human populations can easily recover from losing vast numbers of people. Nature is harsh, some succeed, some don't. The wise save their own tribe first.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Reminds me of the TED talk about washing machines. http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html
No really. Reason why is that Hans Rosling points out that the majority of humans alive do not have even a washing machine. Which is a rather fundamental minimum of home appliances that we take for granted. It gives some idea of just how little resources about 5 out of 7 billion humans actually consumer per head. By some measures you'll hear the 1 billion wealthiest humans have a resource footprint equal or greater of the other 6 billion combined. It's not a sustainable inequality from any point of view. I don't see how it will stablise without a heroic effort of foresight and planning (not gunna happen), or a huge readjustment by either highly disruptive technology (hopefully) or socio-economic upheaval (include unpleasant war and terrorism in that).
So it's by that accident things are reasonable sustainable now - in the short term at least until everyone wants a washing machine.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
we passed the permanent, sustainable population level some time ago. The question is, on what time scale is sustainable measured. most of the measures look at the next few centuries. we are hoping to sustain human civilization forever, so we need to balance energy in (solar, geothermal) with energy used so that what is left is enough to sustain the ecosystem and avoid butterfly effects. we also need to reuse/recycle elements and compounds as efficiently as nature (ie infinitely recycled with no actual waste). to live in this kind of world will require that the industrialized nations will have to scale back the resource use of their citizens drastically, and all other nations stop their resource use increase. we also cannot have too large a discrepancy between the highest and lowest users. I think that we could have a comfortable, if somewhat more physically strenous, lifestyle for humans worldwide, sustain our ecosystem, and have enough resources to create enough high tech stuff to explore the outer limits of our minds capacity for creativity, our planet, and space, (and provide for people with disabilities, reduce disease and eliminate starvation) with about 100 million people. i could be off by a factor of at most 10, but i doubt it. this would be enough people to be sure each generation had plenty of geniuses, savants, artists, leaders, saints, and all the interesting and rare human types. with more resources for individualized education, people would have a better sense of how to fit into the world, and would be less rapacious users of resources. we might even have more wisdom. however, humans love sex, love raising children, think tribally, and are good at dumping their waste where they cant see it. Any chance of this happening in a manner that isnt catastrophic and likely plunge us into further cycles of ignorance and suffering: slim to none. anything we can do about this: nope. anything we do now is futile and only makes us feel better individually. aside from a deus ex machina coming down and slaughtering all the idiots who stand in the way, and leaving the rest of us to enjoy our paradise, we are doomed, like the moties from mote in gods eye.
You hear about the person who didn't rely on anecdotal evidence to support his belief system?
Of course the question isn't about reached, it is about exceeded. Or is it?
If we have exceeded maximum sustainable population as they say, then unless we intelligently eliminate half the current population some 50-100 years from now depletion will do it for us. Most intelligent way to do that is to start with areas with the highest population density ... but you really think anyone will go for killing over half the people in China and India?
Conversely, the people on the production side (farmers, etc.) will say they are now producing several times what they did 50 years ago due to advances in genetics and production techniques. In fact, I've already heard commercials to that effect. I'm sure Mr. Ehrlich (quoted in an earlier comment) will say that is why his estimates have increased over the years, but the producers expect that they'll be able to meet rising demand for several years to come.
Well, it's all moot at this point. If we have exceeded sustainable population size already, then we will crash - perhaps sooner rather than later. Of course, when we're back to only a few million survivors I doubt they'll have a chance to worry about it either.
Wrong on both counts. The world is already run by corporate greed, empowered in the first place by morons, and we're all getting fucked by it at an exponentially increasing rate as they find new ways to profit off creating people's misery.
The Point was we are borrowing from the future. Using water faster than it rains. dumping waste faster than it can biodegrade. Using increasing amounts of energy to make up for the short fall.
This can starvation and war, or has it already started.
Google Easter Island.
This issue is complex. It is not a cell life simulator or even a simple equation. We are not going to see cells fading out quickly- we will not see people starving to death because we are in the advantaged areas and for our "survival" we will need to take from the poor so we don't go down. We also justify it irrationally - its in psychological studies - people will "think" the lotto winner is some how better than the loser because it fits into their just world delusion. The bad reasoning is even more likely when it involves justifying your own unfair advantages.
Humans are far far more wasteful and unorganized. Its not merely a matter of resources, environment and physical space to move a little -- as it would be for something simple like ants (where one could toss out insignificant factors to simplify the problem... and its still not simple.)
People who claim we have enough of everything but merely need to get it to the people are being extremely naive. If only humans didn't act.... human... If only reality didn't make food spoil or transport cost resources.... If only we could give away basic resources for free... If only we had utopia.... and unlimited resources so selfish people can have as much as they want and try to get as much as their greed addiction asks (its an addiction cycle; you never have as much as you'd like if you are hooked. Even if you are not, some will have to try more just to find out if more can be had; being content isn't enough you COULD be more content...)
It does not matter if we produce 100x the food the world needs, it may as well not exist because its not being utilized and our economics and politics prevent it above all the REALITIES impeding maximum utilization.
Our pollution and resource use is already screwing up the planet there is so much going on-- you'd think people would start to THINK a little when the scale of our existence now has PLANET size impacts.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
No. We are not using up the earth's resources. We are just temporarily governed by wild eyed Bolsheviks.
an ill wind that blows no good
Toothache and lack of sleep impacts my math skills. By about 100%. XD
Still, unavoidable natural disasters that happen once in a century or so are not really something you can blame on human stupidity.
It would be like calling citizens of City X stupid for not being prepared for that meteor shower that devastated their town.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Japan, Germany, etc are already facing a contracting and aging population as result of declining birth rate.
Paradoxically, give people in third world nations a higher standard of living, and longer healthier lives, they will stop having excessive children.
Of that, the most important part is quality of life, health and education for women.
This new infrastructure needs to be built with sustainable resources, rather than repeat mistakes of old.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
No we have not. Why? Solyent green that's why.
Freidman blames it on population and global warming...
What warming?
The temp hasn't increased in the past 12 years!
see hadcrut3 from 1999-2011
Truly, all these cities must be pure hell to live in.
Rishra, India, the city on the bottom of that list has almost twice the population than what that hypothetical "City of Texas" would have.
Also, even for an Anonymous Coward, aren't we being a bit too literal?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Just because you don't expect the majority to die of a Malthusian catastrophe doesn't mean that a lot of them won't.
The rub is this: all our growth for the past 100 years or so has seriously outpaced anything in all history before it, and all that growth has been dependent on cheap energy and new farming techniques. Mostly cheap oil and coal though. And readily available water. So to think that there won't be a Malthusian crisis requires faith that applied science will keep the growth model running when the oil and/or good weather it is dependent on are likely to run out.
There will always be some people who starve, if history tells us anything. Sometimes it's decided by economics, sometimes by violence, sometimes by weather, pests, and acts of God. There are a lot of technologies that have the potential to mitigate the loss of oil as an energy source, but as a whole, commercial, industrialized agriculture is not ready at all for that transition. Cuba lost their oil imports from USSR after their economic collapse, and tilled over every bit of land they had for organic agriculture, and barely made it. What will happen to you and me when the oil to run the tractor is $800 a barrel, and the weather burned the crops?
It's all a matter of supplies and demands.
[In response to this question by Bill Moyers: What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?] "It's going to destroy it all. I use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.
Interview by Bill Moyers on Bill Moyers' World Of Ideas (17 October 1988); transcript (page 6) - audio (20:12)
Anybody who says we're having an overpopulation crisis never took a drive thru the mid-western United States.
There is plenty of land for everybody for both farming and residence so the problem is in invisible fences; politics and economics. Landowners horde huge amounts of land and in some cases horde it for particular purposes like tourist development (I'm looking at you Hawaii!) and in the end land ends up being too damn expensive to be of any use for anything pratical.
I could go on with a list of reasons but it boils down to the fact that most of the world is based on civilization that promotes monetary or political gain.
Maybe the singularity will save us. The AI can dominate all of our affairs according to the precepts Ray Kurzweil programmed it with.
Try discussing this after we stop burning food as fuel.
That's why the rise in people claiming to be homosexual. Natures way of slowing down the growth rate.
It's a natural process and all the handwringing and calls for change in the world are not going to stop the progression. So chill and watch the movie.
E Proelio Veritas.
"Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." - a t-shirt I owned in highschool.
"The question isn't, can we feed these people? It's: Will we? We don't need these people. There's no jobs for them. Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no."
So please tell me: Has starvation historically been most prevalent in socialist or market economies?
Wow. Just, wow. This is the kind of thing that creates global warming deniers.
I mean, the guy may even have a point, but how am I supposed to tell? He's also doing the classic "the weather sucks this year" approach to evaluating climate research, and somehow bringing the Middle East in as the nexus of the global economy.
I know it's just an opinion piece, and it's not that I disagree with it, really, but it is just so dramatic and unsubstantiated. So, there's a dramatic paradigm change coming to a happiness-based economy, but let's not say anything about what that might look like?
People keep suggesting interplanetary colonization as a solution to excessive population, yet this is clearly not a viable solution. We don't have sufficient fuel/oil to send even a large percent of the population to mars let alone build homes and farms there.
You're an idiot.
Sure, if the world really is like a test tube, we're all screwed. But growth rates have changed over time, and new technologies have changed the quantity and patterns of consumption.
It's a bit rich to quote exponential growth from your high school math course and then call people illiterate.
There are two factors to standard of living, not one.
Food, travel, things that wear out quickly, all either use up or process resources on a continuing basis.
More durable things are also part of a standard of living. A big, comfortable house can be made mostly of wood. When the area that provided trees for that house is replanted, very little in the way of resources has been consumed, but someone's standard of living may have been vastly upgraded.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Accommodating an Earth constrained "sustainable" population is dependent upon our efficiency of resource utilization. Efficiency is (currently) the weightiest variable in this equation.
is the answer. The amount of ignorance in the highly rated comments is astounding. No one understands exponential growth. The simple example is of the water lily and the pond. The water lilies double in number every day and will completely cover the pond in thirty days. At what point do humans notice a problem? On day 29 when the pond is half covered.
Humans are already past the sustainable limit. Now we may come up with new technologies that make the current population sustainable. The Haber-Bosch process allows the Earth we support 2 billion more people than it would otherwise. It would take 6 Earths to sustain everyone at American style standard of living. The future is hard to predict. We have some pretty good ideas of what is likely to happen but how it unfolds may be very different than how we imagined it. With climate change overuse of resources and reduction in biodiversity humanity is potentially heading towards a disastrous collapse. However we have a lot of bright people trying to prevent that from happening. And if food becomes scare, well, we'll always have Soylent Green.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
We, we, we. Who is he talking about, who are “we”?
Are US having too much population and growing? Not really. Canada? No. European Union? No! Russia? No! Australia? No, no, no, no.
It's arabic, african, chinese, indian people who bear too much children, overpopulating the planet, causing problem for everyone.
THEY need to develop, not “we”, okay?
If you have to move food from one area of the world to another in order to live. You are talking about an unsustainable system. If you have to import resources to create your food you are talking about an unsustainable system.
Lets define "sustainable" first as something which can be continued indefinitely. Well if you have to consume one drop of a non renewable resource to run your system, it is unsustainable. You WILL run out of that resource.
Our agricultural system... Basically converts energy into food. Not solar energy, in addition to solar; You have to power huge machines to tend the land. You have to pour fertilizers which are produced using industrial processes. You have to power huge machines to harvest the food, you have to power huge machines to transport the food.
Agriculture is one of the more energy intensive of the industries. So what allows population growth is growth in energy consumption. It is a direct correlation. Go take a look at charts of energy and population.
So... Energy production defines the world population. Oil peaked in 2005 BTW.
For some reason everyone always assume things can only get better.
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"Look ma.
That police man is hitting the starving person!"
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Not yet... In germany a lot of vegetables are thrown away these days because nobody buys them, even though they have been tested for EHEC and are secure. So there are still a lot of possibilities for better sharing of the resources that we have on earth.
I don't want to be skeptical, but neither men-in-black nor TV-sheeps are able to do something, neither you and I would risk leaving job to fight for someone's kid in 100 years, unless .... quran.com/103
Have a look at the Global Hunger Index. I don't see many communist countries in there.
There is always one serious flaw when talking about maximum possible Earth population. Namely, it's always assumed that all people consume the same ammount of resources. Sure things are limited, but majority of resources is consumed by minority of people (Europe, USA & East Asia). I assume that you can correlate resources usage to GDP of a region (if you have more money, you are able to buy more resources). USA's GDP is (according to wikipedia) about $15*10^12 for about 300 million people. GDP of Africa is $2*10^12 for about 1 billion people, so you have 7 times less money for three times the population. Majority of people are poor, so then large number of people doesn't necessairly say anything about resource usage. The question is, what kind of population are we talking about? There is mostly increase in poor people, not the walthy ones (I read once that poor conditions corelate naturally to large families). If you have 1 billion more people using barely anything, there is much, much difference than 1 billion more people living à la USA style. I think that there is space for many more people, but for the poor ones. The real problem is not population growth, but population getting wealthier. If all of China grew up in standard up to Europe it would cause much bigger resource shortage than new 5 billion starving children in Africa.
My Windows is NOT slow, it's special!
is not an organization I know anything about, or care about, or consider credible, relevant, or useful, in any way, shape, or form.
We may be slow, but we're not stupid.
Citation needed.
So did education, housing, healthcare become cheaper?
This business law prof says, they didn't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A
And we are very content with our two dogs, 400 partridge, and two squirrel.
First of all, developed word countreis are fine, population is shrinking now due to low number of children.
Looks that problems are caused by so called developing countries. Should we really care? Are we able to effectively help them somehow?
For me this is a sort of Maltuzjan trap, poor people got many children because they are poor. They are poor because there is too much children and country fragile economy isn't able to support so many people.
When population becomes more advanced the number of births decreases. Isn't that a solution? To learn people to take care of themselves?
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/Images/226299-1210036921678/grain_prices050508_400.jpg
A billion new middle-class consumers are the cause of rising food prices. Monetary inflation is just one method through which Chimerica transfers that food from where it is grown to where it is consumed.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
In other words, it's the same discussion we have had in the 1950's, and the 1900's, and the 1830's, 1870's, and ...
There really isn't anything to add here. Really.
The short version : This specific prediction has been made as often as the end of the world predictions. Needless to say, most dates of "civilizational collapse" have passed, and nobody noticed. Every time something appears to go wrong, whether it's the real fucking great depression (1870, just not felt that hard in America because America played the role China plays today), WWI, the spanish flu, the great depression, WWII, the conflict with Japan, the oil crisis, the various crisises in the 80's, 90's and even the 2000's (how do you even call those ? The 00's ?) there is a new cohort of Malthusians that predict that "this time" it's really going to happen !
Let's now all mention the corollaries : peak oil, peak grain, peak food, peak corn, peak water, peak God's goodwill (this was the original version : God's "good will" will only support about 800 million people, so we'll never exceed that population), peak cows, ... and, to some Global Warming is just another version of the Malthusian argument (given that we don't actually know very well what will happen with Global warming, there is something to be said for this : Global warming won't kill us even if we just let it happen, we'll have to move a few cities. You could say that's simply "stimulating the economy". Perhaps that's even true)
It is no surprise to me. There exists a movement in the Elite (banksters, politicians, etc) to cut down wages in those countries, as well as cut down the social welfare services, increase the number of working hours per week etc.
There was a proposal in the EU a few years back to make the 40 hour work week a 65 hour work week, with no changes in wages, of course.
German workers have not seen a raise in their paychecks the last 10 years, because they are told the economy cannot sustain those raises, but most German businesses have huge profits over the last years.
They have got to "persuade" us somehow that we should accept lower salaries, and a good way to do that is the threat of overpopulation: if we have smaller salaries, then the money will be used for more jobs; but that does not happen in reality.
And after the dev cycle is complete, production no longer requires intellect.
I know a lot of industrial and manufacturing engineers who would disagree with you.
You might not expect a malthusian catastrophe. It's certain not the mode. However, I think that a hard analysis of energy and resource data, combined with growth projections, shows that a malthusian catastrophe is almost certain in the lifespan of most people currently living. It is no surprise that our culture and psychology vehemently denies this, so it is not a popular view.
A hard, cold analysis of the facts strongly suggests that human population die-off is the default outcome of our current trajectory, and in just a few decades. The only way to alter this default outcome is to change our political/economic system to be 'outcome oriented' rather than 'process oriented'. This is unlikely, to say the least.
I am energyscholar, and I am not an anonymous coward. Someone has to stand up and speak the truth. Human population has clearly far exceeded sustainable human population on planet Earth. If you have the guts to actually learn about this topic, I suggest you start by learning about The Reindeer of Saint Matthews Island.
Should we let that poor starving man and his wife die? Bleeding heart liberals say no, others say yes since otherwise we'll come back in 20 years and have their five starving children to deal with with the exact same problem.
Over the past two years that has been drought in Russia, Flooding in the US, Drought in China, flooding in SE Asia, Drought and Flooding in Canada, Drought in East Africa.....notice a pattern? There may be speculation in food commodities, but at the heart of the problem, developing countries are finding it more expensive and difficult to find the food to feed their people. This shit is real. Sure, there is no famine...yet. But the world is two failed harvest short of that. The world is balancing on a knife's edge.
Because Malthus was wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe
First of all, population growth is by no means exponential due to the demographic transition. Even bacteria do no grow exponentially, but logistically. Second, Malthus assumed a constant technology level -- which was a wrong assumption even in his own time. It's a typical example of a far-fetched and over-simplified mathematical analogy.
>>I can recall reading about 20 years ago that we had already passed the point where it was possible to give everyone on Earth the same standard of living as the average American.
Typical environmentalist hokum. 20 years ago, they also said 1,000 species a year were going extinct, and yet we've only seen a handful of species in America go extinct since even the mid-1960s.
By the Year 2000, we were all supposed to have run out of fresh water, and be eating each other for dessert by now, since all agriculture is supposed to have collapsed.
Is it due to environmental laws? Well, partly. But environmental laws have also made it impossible to build new water reservoirs, or even worse, have been forcing us to flush 100,000 acre-feet of water into the Sacramento Delta (costing, according to wikipedia, 16,000 jobs) in order to keep an invasive fish species alive.
>>But standard of living really is a proxy for resource consumption and not a very good one because as technology advances it can produce more from less. Eventually you reach a wall though.
Silicon is cheap and effectively limitless.
Wondering how many of Friedman's prediction have turned out to be true so far? Is he able to beat even a zeroR prediction model?
"I noticed that this website is in English, German, Spanish, French, and Italian--meaning it is mostly directed to the west. The fact that it doesn't even have Mandarin or Cantonese despite China's 1.3 Billion tells you that he is more interested in extracting money from guilt-laden westerners than solving any problems. French! Less than 2% of the earth speak French as their native language. Heck, more people speak Bengali or Telugu or even Marathi than the entire population of France!
Most of the western countries are stable or have declining populations."
This is largely irrelevant. The world could easily support 10 billion people if we all on average consumed as much as the Nigerians. You thus have it completely backwards. The western world consists of over 1.5 billion people that consumes many times more than the other 5-6 billion people on this planet. And our consumption is not going down.
It is shameful to tell the third world to stop having children so that we can buy more iPads, eat more beef and drink more beer. I personally need to have a look at myself in the mirror here.
I no longer have any respect for this Friedman. His only claim to fame are insightful sound bites (mainly for the daytime talk show crowd) that he carefully crafts for one sole reason: moving product. Seriously; if you see him on TV for more than fifteen seconds, he will spew out some BS phrase like 'The Lexus and the Olive Tree'.
About 5 billion ago. Quality is more important than quantity. If quality goes low enough the quantity will go away (die).
And don't believe this crap about abundant resources. We're already strained. We've passed several peaks already.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
NO, I am afraid that we are in fact "Stupid" and the collapse will overtake us. Not necessarily because we don't try some attempt to fix it but we will forget to account for some incident/thing and it will be too late. Not to mention that what the economist call the "free rider dilemma" is really what often gets us into this trouble repeatedly, the lesson we continue not to learn.
Europe and Japan already has well below replacement fertility. US is at equilibrium. Africa continues to be a hell hole. Nothing new here.
On the Internet 99% of posters talking about "club of Rome" haven't read " Limits to Growth " !
They think they know what it is about after having read some random rant about it, written by people who haven't read the study either...
I do have read "Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update", the 3rd edition of this report written by Meadows' team.
The point is that they were remarkably right in their first report (1972). Of course they didn't anticipate specific crisis such as the subprime crisis, this isn't the report goal.
If you don't have much time, at least read the book introduction and/or the abstract of this short study: A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality.
Contrary to popular belief, The Limits to Growth scenarios by the team of analysts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not predict world collapse by the end of the 20th century.
The whole book is very interesting, it has many facts about humanity Earth "burn rate".
What you should keep in mind: even with VERY optimistic discoveries, a good deal of technical breakthroughs, wise politics... in the very next decades we will face a growth halt and a decrease of average well being, production, etc. We could have maintained the well being and the population if we had done the right thing in 1990, but it is two late now to avoid this decrease.
We're in overdrive since the 90's, has many over studies show, often stated as "1,5 Earth needed".
And no matter how optimistic you are, how strong your faith is in technical advances, this won't make ocean fish replenish as we fish more and more with advanced techniques, this won't make available oil fields expand as we discover less than we pump out (even with more advanced techs), this won't make damaged farmlands heal as we over-exploit more and more lands, etc.
The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compare favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario called the "standard run" scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century.
And idiocracy (and some statistics agree) says that those who can't feed themselves will keep reproducing if we feed them, and those that are providing the food are not reproducing fast enough to replenish their population. THAT is the real unsustainability. The number of moochers is vastly growing and the number of producers is dwindling.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
'We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid.'"
Yes, we are stupid, as least in America. Because short-sighted moneyed lobbyists have all but hijacked our federal government we are being discouraged or prevented from coming up with solutions to prevent the collapse. Also most Americans don't believe the collapse will happen in our backyard. Every attempt for the informed public to take back the government has been resisted the entire way by large news organizations backing their point of view, which is in part motivated and/or delusion thinking on the news bureaus' part. For this most of the blame is on Fox News and MSNBC but the internet has allowed people to find out "news" that fits their personal views, even if their personal views are extremist.
By the time these issues will be addressed it will be too late to do simple fixes. Reducing our carbon footprint and replanting trees where forests used to grow now will be easier than more extreme measures later. Raising MPGs by 15% now is easier than having to raise it by 200% later to get the same effect.
While we have not likely reached a maximum population size with more people the likelihood that there exists someone who will do something to doom the human race goes up. Even unintentional outbreaks are more likely. Larger populations play host to more and diverse diseases.
The higher the population goes , the more comfortable it is the harder it will crash.
The population of pine trees is crashing hard because of pine beetles. What will evolve to kill us?
We are more and more statistically likely to crash hard if we let our population reach close to what is maximum.
As we increase in technology each and everyone of us more potential to affect the environment or the world. This potential is building. Even if our population was to stay the same our mastery of technology may facilitate a crash.
Faith in human intelligence is locked to the very young. Human history remains a list of deadly, dark and evil actions. We have been bashing in the heads of others as our featured mode of life since the dawn of human life. If we can't even stop our government from torturing people how are we going to get the world to let go of the madness that infests them.
We do know what needs to be done an politicians dare not mention it.
And here comes the population control justification. Let the old die so they don't use our medical resources and put limits on how many children are born. Oh what a wonderfully morality system humanism can be. Frankly, stop encouraging mismanagement from becoming a parent to farming to governments. In the U.S. welfare recipients get "bonus pay" for having children. Not that they should be forbidden to have more children but they certainly shouldn't be given incentive's to. This is a multifaceted problem. If this guy is right, though, global warming, floods, storms, and famine will take care of the problem.
As we discover/invented new technologies, we increase the "Maximum Sustainable Population Size."
As long as we continue to increase technology, that number will keep going up.
Honestly, right now most of the oil the US burns comes from sources we could NOT access 50 years ago. Deep Water Drilling, Canadian Shale, etc.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
That's why eliminating Medicare (by issuing inadequate vouchers and calling the "Medicare") and eliminating Social Security (by having people gamble in the stock market) are key to encouraging larger families in America. If we don't do this, poorer, less secure parts of the world will continue to outbreed us. Only by assuring that our seniors will have no security beyond that offered by their descendants will we return to the 12-child family that was the ideal in America in the 19th Century.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Almost every major problem we face on Earth could be fixed with a LARGE reduction in human population, I'm all for mandatory birth control, and if Mother Nature is up to it a little 12 monkeys / Spanish Flu Redux wouldn't hurt either.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
e.g. will we start letting the excess die in a gutter? The question isn't, can we feed these people? It's: Will we? We don't need these people. There's no jobs for them. Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no. I don't know of a third answer (that doesn't boil down to one or the other in practical terms).
You asked a yes or no question, so it makes sense that yes and no are the only two options. The "socialism" question should be "how could we handle the problem"? We could improve economic stability in countries where warlords take what they want. It doesn't currently make sense to invest time and money in something that will probably just get stolen from you, so those countries have farmland but produce very few crops.
Or we could distribute condoms and tell the third world "no, this isn't an evil conspiracy to give you aids."
We can't solve the problem by throwing food at poor people, period. It cannot be done and will never work. But that doesn't mean we can't try. It, alone, cannot solve the problem, but it does not require us to oppose the catholic church, police the world, or start down a slippery slope of imperialism, so that's the plan we're going with.
YES WAKE UP PEOPLE
Most places have valuable resources or at least are valuable markets. But, when the local elite in poor nations is more worried in being in good terms with powerful western countries than taking care of their own countries is obvious that things will go wrong. For example, here in Mexico, most, if not all of "our" government policies are made in Washington, this is the main reason for the current mexican war on drugs; the lack of proper investment in the public energy sectors to force a privatization of public goods for peanuts; the collapse of our railways and the severe restrictions on abortions to please conservatives in Mexico and USA. So, since the needs of citizens are not meet by the state or by the economic system, people run away from this hell and this is what makes USA's illegal immigration problem. The same pattern applies for most of Latin America, Africa and Middle East.
Individualism is good to a point, but is stupid to think that we can enjoy the benefits or living in a modern society without thinking in community/nation terms. If that were easy, the disparity in development between modern nation states and tribal societies would be far, far smaller than what it is in reality.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
In case you haven't noticed, if for instance you are part of the 4/5ths of Americans who don't hold a passport and never travel out of North America, everyone in China and India and Africa and South America wants to live like Westerners. So the model we Westerners put forward for how to live well determines the future of resource consumption unless a time comes when everyone else stops looking with envy in our direction.
Closer to home, the rise in ostentatious lifestyles for the rich and famous has driven much of the American middle class deeply into debt. Go back a few decades, to when the rich largely viewed it as "without class" to be ostentatious about wealth, and you'll see an America in which the typical family set aside significant savings each year. Now envy has led millions into personal financial destruction.
And it can lead billions into collective environmental exhaustion and destruction. To believe otherwise is to totally fail to understand human psychology.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
We need more contraception.
We need to recognise that people like Mother Theresa and the Pope are the cause of more suffering in the world, through encouraging people to breed offspring who can't be fed properly, than either Uncle Joe or Uncle Mao.
Its not just catholic religion. Many islamic fundementalists (not necessirally terrorists, etc.) ALSO see their relativly high population growth (Birth rates) as a way to 'conquer' the West. I have listened to many Imans preach about how they will soon 'conquer' england, germany, france, and the USA, via having more population than the current 'westernized' peoples currently living in those countries.
Also, many protestant christian groups have very high bith rates, mostly mennonite, Amish types. (They mostly just want to be left alone.)
China successfully cut their pop[ulation growth rate down significanly. I'm just don't agree with some of the 'abuses of the 'one child' policy. I don't think kicking women until they spontaniously 'abort' their baby just becuase they already had one baby already is a manner i would propose. Nor do I think using ultra sound to determine of the gender of fetus/unborn baby and aborting it if its a girl, is acceptable. But one child per 'couple, for ALL PEOPLE, ALL NATIONS, ALL RELIGIONS, ALL WEALTH LEVELS, is one way to cut back. This must be world wide, so as to give no advantage to one partictular religious / ethnic / political grouping that is usning, or decided to use, the 'population bomb,' to conquer another nation.
That is totally false. We have socialism right now, not capitalism. Socialism has destroyed the jobs that those people could be doing, and is feeding them, allowing them to not work. Further, it imposes minimum wage requirements, meaning that jobs that need to be done go undone because they don't produce enough productivity to support someone at minimum wage.
The truth is that socialism only supports those people until it has no more "other people's money" to steal, then it lets them die. Capitalism hands them a shovel and tells them to get to work.
The Top 2 Things To Remember About Overpopulation are:
1. It matters for the West.
Even if are a super eco-friendly vegan doing everything you can, if you live in the West you use as many resources and generate as much pollution as 11 people in the 3rd world. It isn't your fault. A lot of it is built into our infrastructure. The most meaningful way to lighten your footprint is to have smaller families and if you already have a family teach your children to have smaller families.
2. You can still have kids and help the overpopulation problem
The global population replacement rate is just over 2 children per women. Thus you can have up to 2 kids of your own and NOT contribute to the population increasing. You can also make a contribution by teaching your children about population issues
What is the mechanism that will rectify this? Zambian miners forming a union and demanding jobs at the Glory Hole in Alaska?
It's a bit of a wild idea and would have huge ramifications, but applying a COLA pegged labor adjustment tarrif on all imports could. If it take 10 man hours for a pound of sellable material, and the COLA in Zimbabwe was ~$10 US ($0.005/hr) compared to similar labor costs of $60,000 (~$30/hr) in the US, then the tarrif would be just shy of $300 per pound.
It would be a huge equalizing for as it would give international vendors a choice: Sell cheap, but pay a huge tarrif, or pay your employees comprable rates to the US labor force, and get no tarrif. The impact though, is that prices for cheap stuff in the US would skyrocket, and that international vendors would look at automating as much of their labor as possible.
I'm not sure if it would be a good idea, as it would have some huge ramifications, but I think it would be an interesting idea to have some economist debate over.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Current Population:
http://tinyurl.com/currentpopulation
6.9 billion people
World fertility rate for population replacement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
2.33 children per woman
From:
http://tinyurl.com/futurepopulation
According to the United Nations, the global population could be as high as 11 billion in 2050 or as low as 8 billion, if the right programs are put in place now.
Population growth stretches natural resources to their limits. Deforestation, food and water shortages, and climate change are all intensified by the addition of nearly 80 million people a year to the world's population.
...it's that we're selfish. Or at the very least, self-centered. This won't matter to the majority of the people until it rises up and bites the majority in the ass. Many of the comments here are proof positive of that.
It took us from Adam and Eve (figuratively) to Jan and Dean (1963) to put three billion people on this earth. It only took us fifty years to put the next three on. That's just facts. And that looks like severe exponential growth to me.
If you honestly believe we're compensating for that kind of growth somehow, you need to either double the dose or cut the meds in half, depending on whatever the heck it is you're on.
This is an excellent and *SHORT* video by the National Geographic. The National Geographic has a well deserved reputation for getting the facts straight. The video is a quick and jazzy introduction to the overpopulation issue and explains how by the end of the year the world will have 7 billion people on it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc4HxPxNrZ0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
But at the same time the starving man and his family don't just go off and die peacefully in the gutter. Maintaining social order is impossible once a large enough percentage of the population is starving. People will grab guns, clubs & rocks to get at the food if they need to. Generally this is considered a bad thing for society at large. Perhaps for those behind the gated communities it may just be a nuisance, but I think that is wishful thinking on their part.
Call it blackmail by the starving masses, but we all are part of the same interconnected system.
This is precisely the problem: keeping resource consumption fixed. While indeed many seem to view the problem as keeping the population fixed, that is only because they feel rather comfortable with the status quo. If resource consumption is fixed, then 0% economic growth is possible only when we can produce more product from the same resource base. Technology is limited by economics, so it can't improve without more investment (which ultimately depend upon resources). The problem is that the economic units and model employed by virtually every nation today requires exponential growth in resource consumption (the modifier being the "constant" in the exponent) to maintain a given standard of living for each person.
For example, if I can be personally satisfied with my standard of living by making and selling 100 chairs this year, I have to sell perhaps 103 chairs next year (current US inflation rate for April 2011 is 3.16%) to maintain that same standard of living, assuming that everyone else simply increased their prices to deal with inflation in the monetary unit. Every year, I have to increase the number of chairs that I sell to maintain that same standard of living, even though I have to work harder each year to make more chairs. It seems natural, then, to simply increase my prices to meet inflation so that I don't have to work any harder each year. Assuming that I don't just increase the prices beyond what is required by inflation, all I have done is passed the work off to someone else. Eventually, someone has to work harder (and consume more resources) to keep up with inflation.
If one replaces debt-based monetary units with fixed monetary units (perhaps time, but certainly not another physical resource), then the pressure to produce more stuff this year compared to the previous year is no longer a necessity to maintain a given standard of living. Resource consumption could be freed from its current necessary ties to the economic model of virtually every country in the world. Indeed, our current model has logically led to basic resources (food, shelter, clothing) being expensive and luxuries being relatively inexpensive, which is precisely the opposite of any desirable policy on "sustainable living." This inverted value system has been transposed upon western society (and is being exported to other societies) giving rise to institutionalized greed.
To me, this problem about sustainable living is simply a conversation about how we wish to measure our values. Simply put, is a "rich" person a substantially harder worker than the average person, or is it the over way around? If we want to keep resource consumption flat, then we need to answer this question differently. In my opinion, it seems more humane and sustainable to answer this question rather than increase the death rate through abortion or hormonal "contraceptives" (they are all technically abortifacients).
As long as the EU can still spend 500 million € every year to destroy surplus food, I'm not worried about overpopulation. What we may have reached is the maximum sustainable imbalance between first and third world. How much longer do we think the third world will tolerate it?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
... we just don't care. FTFY
His heart was definitely in the right place, but as the saying goes - the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Green Revolution certainly alleviated the immediate issue of his day, which was to feed hungry people, but now we've realized it leads to a humongous demographic bulge of the under-30 population. Even if we can use technology again to feed people, provide energy and extract raw materials, it'll take more energy (human and physical) and political will to do it and in less time. And in time the need for even more will strip the ability of that technology to sustain us. Why can't people just admit there are just too many humans? Why do some people, especially over-religious ones, press for policies that will lead to the suicide of humanity on this planet?
The vast majority of our problems are directly or indirectly a result of that issue - food and energy consumption, sub-standard education, illegal immigration, employment, the need for more raw materials, pollution/global warming, government spending for healthcare and entitlements, you name it. Fortunately the solutions are very straightforward: more education for girls and expanded access to birth control.
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Mod parent up. At no point in history has technology ever solved the energy use problem, regardless of how efficient we become. The problem is that technology also has the unique characteristic of finding new ways to use more energy.
As long as people have lived, we have endured the harshest of conditions and more than a billion of us still live in those conditions. From deserts where you can cook an egg on rocks to arctic landscapes that make your fridge's freezer seem like a trip to Honolulu. Just as the destruction of wildlife will force animals into urban areas to look for food, our insane economic, environmental, and infrastructural practices will force a good many of us into places we would have never dreamed of surviving in, and force a fundamental change in the political structure of the world. Just look at the Arab Spring as a current smaller-scale example. We would be seeing something similar on a worldwide scale if we ever reach this theoretical limit of sustainable development, and yes, people will die on a genocidal level, but as long as we don't bring the nukes out, there should still be enough of us to start over Desert Punk style. We're no exceptions to natural selection, and those who think we are will probably be the first ones to die in the coming shitstorm because they didn't bother to learn practical enough skills to survive in any environment.
Oil & Natural Gas. Let us talk about the real argument that there is a "bubble."
One cannot belittle the major roles these resources have play in current agriculture.
However it looks like, in my lifetime, they will need to be treated as if they are scarce:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_gas
Things we will need to replace:
Oil based pesticides and oil-powered-mechanized farming apparatus.
Oil based food transportation will need to be replaced.
Natural Gas derived nitrogen fertilizers will need to be replaced.
If anyone is serious about discussing overpopulation, you have to talk about replacing these. "Alarmism" is the new banner for the sheeple. Pretending things will work out themselves is insulting to those working to fix it.
. Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no.
lol
Point taken, but I couldn't help but do a quick fact check:
Bengali: 207,000,000
French: 78,000,000 (French speakers, that is, includes more than the population of France)
Telugu: 69,666,000
Marathi: 68,022,000
3 out of 4 ain't bad!
Source: http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1257013011437361
Who cares? Thomas L Friedman is an obnoxious windbag mostly famous for being wrong about pretty much everything.
Good job redefining terms to suit your position. Your post is effectively nonsensical to anyone that understands economics. To join a real conversation you should probably learn what capitalism, socialism, and a mixed-economy are and how the USA fits in. I'll give you a hint, we don't fit in on the Socialism side of things.
No, but you can find Cuba here. It's interesting.
Funny, all that money we have been giving to the banks tells me otherwise.
Socialism for the rich is still socialism. We haven't had capitalism in the United States since the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913. PERIOD. We have coasted since then, as they have allowed government to grow and grow and grow. Prior to the installation of the Federal Reserve, the US spent between 2 and 5% of GDP on government. Now it is 40%. That is TWICE the amount spent by China! A supposedly socialist country!
Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no
- free market capitalism wouldn't waste resources like that, that's just stupid.
These people would have jobs if government wasn't preventing them from having those jobs by driving capital investment out of the country, by destroying the value of the currency, by regulating businesses till all competition is destroyed and only the government preferred monopolies stay in power.
Since when is the government + monopolies government creates is capitalism? It's fascism.
You can't handle the truth.
Plenty of people have written about overpopulation, but no one has actually demonstrated their dedication to fixing the problem by killing themselves. Go ahead, Tom, lead the way.
Food prices are rising because the gov't wants them to. We have diverted one of our major cereal crops - corn - to energy production. Low-value energy production, less energy produced than was consumed producing it in the first place. Net result: higher energy costs. Taxes and regulations on producing energy also raise energy costs. Energy costs drive the entire economy. It governs how food is produced, how far it can travel, what it costs when it gets there. So long as it is the official policy of the gov't that energy should cost more, the price of food will rise.
We have less farmland under cultivation than we've had in a generation. Yet we produce far more food. We use tax money to put base prices under many foods to keep them from becoming too cheap. We pay farmers NOT to produce food. Both of these make food more expensive.
Finally, despite all the foregoing, food is still produced in massive quantities, and continually drops in percentage of budgets dedicated to it. People starve now not because there is no food, but because it is the policy of some gov't - usually their own - that they DO starve. Even at the height of the last Ethiopian famine, donated food rotted at the docks because the Ethiopian gov't didn't want it used to feed people who didn't support it - which was most people.
Starvation is not caused by lack of resources. It is caused by policy. It is that simple. If we were "running out of resources" then the price of those resources would be climbing. Well, they are - but not because of the market, because of gov't policy. We tax, we regulate, we intervene constantly in favor of pushing up the price of every conceivable commodity. It is our only consistent policy, and it works very well. Yet the reserves of any resource you can mention - oil, coal, metals, rare earths, anything - are constantly expanding because higher prices make practical extraction of these resources from places not practical before. Our response to this is to ban access to these resources, thereby driving up the price of resources.
The world does not have a shortage of resources. It does not have too many people. What it has is too little freedom and too much gov't control. Governments do not make things more efficient, they do not produce wealth or resources. They are far less efficient than the free market, and they burn vast quantities of wealth and resources and produce nothing of profit for having squandered them. Case in point: the National Recovery and Reinvestment Act - which managed to prop up local gov't jobs using federal money. Jobs that are vanishing now that the money is gone. No new roads. No new sources of energy, no new sources of wealth have been created or developed. We haven't even seen a mild reduction in the rate of crumbling of our national infrastructure. That money - that wealth - a trillion dollars of it - simply vanished like so much smoke. Yet still we will pay for it - with interest - and assuming we eventually do pay it off - and that is by no means certain - it will cost far more than the trillion dollars spent to retire the debt. And still no wealth will be produced, and prices will rise as the debt and the cost to maintain it creeps into the marketplace, and again, everything - including food - becomes more expensive.
We have to work hard to create this much want and misery. It isn't easy or cheap to starve this many people. But, alas, it's the one thing our gov't is good at.
If resources became more scarce relative to our technological improvements (more efficient or creative use of resources), then their prices would go up. People will choose to have fewer children, as children are expensive and would become even more so. That means people are not prevented from having children, but they have to make significant contributions to society in order to afford them.
On the other hand, a centralized evaluation of "have we reached the optimal population level" is bound to fail. First, optimal by what measure? Second, the more centralized the evaluation the less granular the information (individual preferences are lost, knowledge of local diversity and conditions).
What do you mean there are no jobs for them? There aren't a finite amount of jobs in this world. 100 years ago there wasn't enough jobs to keep half the current population employed, yet we don't have 50% unemployment, do we?
In short, your argument is based on a fallacy, go back to school and and learn some Economics.
That's facism? You urgently need a dictionary!
We will solve the population problem by making weather disaster aid dependent on serious planned parenting, and forcing governments to support their elderly.
Medicare for ALL. Humans.
free market capitalism wouldn't waste resources like that, that's just stupid.
Free market capitalism brought us suburbia, the single largest waste of resources ever conceived.
Most of those thugs are non-government party supporters - either hired, or part of typically criminal activities which support the governing party. Or, occasionally, popular supporters fed propaganda to incite them.
In other words, the money and orders are flowing to the government, not from it. The fact that it's government is incidental, and often irrelevant - see Somalia, where "government" means whatever local crime bosses are on top at the moment, these things also happen.
This is the kind of gem post/thread that I read slashdot for. Thanks!
perhaps its to direct the west in the chopping the foot off the east.
There's a reason for them not being there: they don't exist. There has never been a communist nation in the history of the world (unless you count some small, obscure island nations). What you're probably referring to are fascist dictatorships that use communist rhetoric (USSR, China, etc).
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Genetics and intelligence are more complex than that. We don't know what makes a persons genes the 'smart ones'. e.g. Albert Einstein came from a pretty humble background. What we DO know is, health & intelligence is heavily dependent on prenatal care and nutrition. That's what the US WIC program is all about.
And if your solution is to let them die, isn't it wrong to let them die painfully of starvation? Even a dog gets the basic decency of being put down. Why not do the same for the poor? Even if you're unwilling to put down the poor for humanitarian reasons, you can't deny that for social and hygienic reasons it would be a viable solution (as it is with dogs).
Certainly I'm baiting with this question, and it's obviously not something you'd be willing to put in practice. But it does bring to light a hypocrisy. People are perfectly willing to let other people die, as long as they don't have to pull the trigger. In the meantime they never offer any real solutions.
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"We can't solve the problem by throwing food at poor people, period. It cannot be done and will never work. "
At the risk of sounding facetious, "Citation Needed". We're devoting a lot of time, money and resources to maintaining an army whose sole purpose is to enforce the will of the super wealthy. If we build tractors and desalinization plants instead of bombs and guns, whose to say what we couldn't do. I guess what I'm saying is, the debate has already been framed in a way that says we've already lost, and we need to stop that. We can't hope to solve these problems unless we agree they CAN be solved. Mathew 26:11 was bunk.
As for a 'yes' or 'no' between dog-eat-dog capitalism and socialism, I'm open to suggestions, but I haven't really heard any that don't boil down to one or the other. Why the dichotomy? Because left free power bunches up in the hands of a lucky few, and we're seeing that with corporations. Who else, besides a strong, socialist government, can counteract the destructive impulses of multinational corps? That's what I can't get another answer for. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but what good is that without POWER?
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Further back than that. The Railroad companies got huge amounts of free money and land from our government.
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Free market capitalism wastes TONS of resources. There's a Sheik in Saudi Arabia that built his own indoor ski resort in the middle of a desert. And the CEO of google just burnt half a million dollars of jet fuel flying to Tahiti for a solar eclipse (I think, can't remember if it was an eclipse or some other astronomical event, but really, who's counting).
And there's jobs and then there's quality of life. You probably make a good wage. You can thank unemployment insurance for that. It keeps desperate people from taking ANY job just to eat, which keeps your wages up. Unless your independently wealthy, but if that's the case why the heck are you wasting time posting on Slashdot? Don't you have an eclipse to be jetting off to?
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You're right, I don't have a solution. But at some point one comes to realize that everybody dies. At the end of the day, I know that if starving children are dying somewhere, that I am not the cause. If you advocate "putting them down" you are directly responsible for their deaths. I know it may sound more cruel, but deaths due to starving are not my fault. Deaths due to euthanasia would be if I were to support it.
What I am trying to say is that the poor keep spawning more poor, and the rich are spawning less rich. If the poor don't strive to become rich, we end up with everybody poor.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
That'll happen either in a planned, managed and equitable manner, or in a chaotic bloodbath. It's up to a combination of the intelligence and foresight of politicians and the forbearance of the populations to choose which way it's going to happen.
I'm pretty sure which way it's going to go. But I'm not terribly concerned. It's not going to hurt my children. Your children are your responsibility.
[I'll add that I'm unclear on whether the human species will be anything approaching stable by 2100. I'd like to think so, but somehow I doubt it. Resources are, after all, finite.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I'm assuming that we can't solve the problem with food production alone because people will continue to breed until something changes. There are plenty of ways that such a change may occur, and I won't rule out the possibility that a large-scale effort to bring resources to a country will work, but only if it is on such a large scale that it can fundamentally change the regions. It sounds like I am talking about attempts to place a bandaid on a wound, while you are talking about the kind of medical care they gave the "6 million dollar man".
And, yes, I am wrong, or short-sighted, in that I assume that we will never do it on a scale large enough to work, but I also feel that there are alternative strategies that should be coupled with such an attempt.
The less people we have on the planet, the less fighting over resources. But the money loving type want bigger populations because that creates more consumers that will give them money for products or whatever.
Somebody who gives a shit in the government should start pushing limits on having children to protect the children that we do have!!!