The same old rant that we hear for like 100 years now "when we reach 1 billion people everyone will starve", "peak oil is just around the corner (back in the 70s)", and all this kind of bullshit.
Resources are plentiful as long as you are ingenious when it comes to harvesting them.
Why are we breeding cattle which has modified genes for not sweating ?
You say resources are plentiful but apploud (?) modified cattle so they don't sweat, so they don't pollute and so we all can keep eating meat. You really don't see a flaw in that ?
Of course we are too many people. Denying that is really naive.
If you’re primary concern is the welfare of humans (not saying it should be) rather than wildlife and natural ecosystems there almost no evidence which would suggest that an increase in global population results in a lower QoL for an average person.
If we all lived like hunters and gatherers, the population limit would be a mere few tens of millions.
Conversely, if we imagine arbitrary technology, the maximum population that can live simultaneously and sustainably on this world is somewhere in the trillions.
Technology such as the stuff you’re trying to use as evidence there’s too many of us, is in fact the technology that allows there to be more of us.
Our use of technology is using increasing amounts of our planets resources (e.g. land), and is often questionably ethical (exploiting the other creatures we share our planet with). At which point you have to ask the question: is an expanded human population worth that cost?
But we don’t have trillions of people yet, and the difficulty of supporting the current population sustainably is more one of organisation than technological inability — much closer to irrigating and enclosing in greenhouses Nevada, Utah, and Arizona [0] than it is to colonising Mars. (I’m told greenhouses are way more productive than open air farms, just not cost effective in most cases; the example given by proponents is the Netherlands).
> is an expanded human population worth that cost?
To whom? I’m vegetarian and pushing myself in the direction of veganism, partly because of ethics. Ethics are however are relative, and many humans only care about other humans. Heck, given that the nature of the rich inner world often called “self-awareness” or “consciousness” is not yet sufficiently well defined to even be testable, such people may even be correct. I’m not even sure at what threshold to stop caring myself — lobster brains aren’t very complex, and bivalves (despite being animals) don’t even have brains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bivalvia#Nervous_system
[0] for illustration purposes only; this is almost certainly a suboptimal set of locations.
https://borgenproject.org/how-many-people-are-starving-aroun...
It's true isn't it?
Resources are also plentiful until they're not. The idea that people have been saying that resources are running out for a long time is not evidence that they are infinite.
You'd have to be quite ingenious to maintain the fossil fuel supply indefinitely through your harvesting tactics, unless the tactic you use is to slow to a stop.
IMO, given the scale of everything in the USA, it’s more luck than anything else that the world is getting sufficiently cheap renewables and batteries on the right schedule to avoid peak oil actually harming civilisation in general and the USA catastrophically — the principle is a valid one, and in a hypothetical alternative world where global reserves had been half what they were, American rural areas would have had a much harder time than European equivalents adapting to electric power and long distance transport in the 70s.