231–240 of 283 posts
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Well, the day that humans manage to wipe themselves off the face of the planet will be a day of rejoicing for all species other than rats, raccoons, and cockroaches.
It’s unlikely humans will wipe themselves off the face of the planet without taking most species with them. Cockroaches are a likely exception.
It's amazing and wonderful how much environmental damage seems to be recovering. Air pollution is down, carbon emissions are down as much as 17%, fish and sharks are repopulating shorelines and beaches - and to think, all it took was the most severe public health crisis in 100 years, a catastrophic global recession, and an overpowering wave of human misery and death
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To be fair, mmaunder didn't say which 10% he thinks should be allowed to live. He may be in favour of eliminating the rich cheap-airline flying, consumerist car owners first.
"Because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right" The birth rate is falling in the West. Seems thinly veiled to me!
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> But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population. I can't imagine maintaining that in anything other than a brutal and arbitrary way. It's very difficult to separate humans from their humanity, and even in countries where birth limits have been tried, we know that it is an ineffective policy and is ultimately cruel. > Clean, abundant, and without the catastrophic extinction event already underway. Just…
Not at all, just increase tax per child per household. 0-2 children at a normal rate, and increasing per extra child.
A growing population leads to numerous economic, militaristic, and scientific advantages. Why would any country willingly shackle themselves to their detriment
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Not at all, just increase tax per child per household. 0-2 children at a normal rate, and increasing per extra child.
So if your first pregnancy is triplets you're fucked?
This is why we need less humans on this planet. No one says that, because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right. But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population. Clean, abundant, and without the catastrophic extinction event already underway.
Malthusians do, and have, for more than 200 years. Two hundred years.
Now, if we keep growing our population, then yes, eventually the Malthusians must and will be right. And perhaps that eventually is now. It's worth exploring that, even if Malthusians are like the boy who cried wolf.
But I'm skeptical that we're finally at our and the planet's limit for the simple reason that population is already predicted to go flat and then begin declining very soon.
Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, Russia, China, India, Iran -- all of these are below replacement rate fertility now or nearly there and getting there fast. Much of Latin America is well on its way there too. That leaves places like Nigeria, for example, as having high fertility rates, but even there it's a pretty safe prediction that fertility will eventually go down.
Decreasing fertility correlates very well with GDP per capita, and it's understood how wealth has caused low fertility rates. That dynamic need not be universal, but it's a pretty safe bet.
Meanwhile, Malthusians have been perennially wrong not only because they've failed to predict or accept the reality of low and declining fertility rates, but also because they've consistently failed to predict or accept the market's ability to adjust to demand growth. So far we've always found ways to produce more food and so on -- no, there's no guarantee that we will continue to be able to, but the fact that total population will peak soon then begin declining means we probably won't need too much more in the way of food production revolutions.
Malthusian also complain about pollution but don't seem to understand that more wealth == cleaner environment -- not at first, maybe, but certainly at some point. Just look at Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic: Haitians are so poor that they cut down their tree for firewood, while Dominicans are wealthy enough that they do not -- same island, same climate, different stories. Or look at the U.S.! In the 1930s river fires were so commonplace as to not be news. In the late 40s river fires were rare enough that they made Time magazine's cover. Now they're even rarer. Those are just some examples. Of course, most Americans have no idea how clean the U.S. is because they've not been to, e.g., Beijing, but that's good anyways: we can always get cleaner.
> ... because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right. But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population.
If some family wants to have six children, in a country that has below-replacement fertility rates, that won't move the needle. These are macro trends.
What you write comes across as rather ominous: a threat to impose Chinese-style family planning rules. Not only is it a very bad idea (ask China!) but it's also quite tyrannical, and completely unnecessary given the macro fertility trends.
How do you imagine we'll get to 10% of the current population anyways? War? Draconian family planning? Something worse? How much time do you think we can afford to let pass before we reach that 10%? Centuries? Decades?? If you say "centuries", it might happen naturally. Saying "decades" would strongly imply that you must have some truly awful ideas for how to make it happen.
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> You can't ban a product from being sold in your country on the grounds that manufacturing it in another country is an ecological disaster. Why not? Constituents like it because it brings back the jobs that left because moving them out allowed companies to avoid environmental regulations, which they can now not avoid either way if they want to sell in your country and so might as well bring the jobs back.
> Constituents like it because it brings back the jobs that left If it succeeds. I guess you could do that; a sovereign state can try whatever they like. But has that ever actually happened? I can't think of any case where a country banned import of a product on the grounds that its manufacturing isn't up to environmental standards, even though the manufacturing happens in a different sovereign nation, and is complia…
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isn't the 70B of farm animals just a part of the "7.5B humans" problem? Anyway, i think that it is a crying shame that we're still farming animals instead of growing artificial meat. Once we finally have artificial meat and thus stop killing sentient beings, i think that would result in a great leap in our conscience, empathy, etc. - it will unleash a great deal of human mental development with natural results in soc…
We're consuming much more than we used to: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production "The world now produces more than four times the quantity of meat as it did fifty years ago" "The average person in the world consumed around 43 kilograms of meat in 2014. This ranges from over 100kg in the US and Australia to only 5kg in India." "Meat consumption increases as the world is getting richer." When the earth has finite…
Because there's no dependency here, we can talk about both at the same time.
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Been to Kathmandu several times and I wouldn't say Nepal is industrialised in general, but not even remotely at the level of China. What makes the air really bad in Kathmandu is the amount of old trucks and buses on the very dusty streets of the city. It's a different kind of air pollution to what you might experience in an industrialised nation. When I'm there I always wear a mask, otherwise a cough will develop alm…
Also: burning trash every night
