In general, don’t we want the global population to fall a bit?
8-10 billion people are taxing the planet. Climate change, plastic use that ends up everywhere, …
8-10 billion people are taxing the planet. Climate change, plastic use that ends up everywhere, …
But 50 years ago someone could say (and it’s virtually guaranteed someone did say) that 4 billion is too many. Because 4 billion at the time was the largest number of people simultanously alive on our little planet. It was twice as many as there were just 50 years before.
And I bet in 1922, people were thinking that 2 billion is to many. We had just left behind a devastating war and an even more lethal pandemic. It mustve appeared that the planet just cannot bear 2 billion of us.
So, when you say the world population should go down a bit, do you mean down to 7, to 5, or to 1 billion? Why not 200 million. We were about as many during the Roman Empire and still perfectly capable of astonishing feats of war and devastation.
Look at all the coal we burn,
Climate change is unavoidable at this point…
pollution of the oceans, encroachment onto wildlife, etc.
Humans have done a lot of damage.
also, we grow chickens in cages, overfish the oceans…
Anyway, I’m really amazed that I have to go into detail… I thought we were all on the same page for the “human footprint “ on the planet
We are on the same page on the some things, but not all.
You say we burn too much coal. I say that too. We are on the same page.
I say we need to burn less coal. You say there need to be fewer of us. We are not on the same page.
The thing is, we already are burning less coal. Much less. The US has burned 1 billion tons annually between 2000 and 2010. Now we burn half of that.
We did not need to reduce our population by half in order to achieve that.
We can achieve lots of similar things without reducing our population.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/global-coal-pla...
40% of electricity globally is generated with coal.
US per capita CO2 emissions are still high. If all 8 billion people got to live like the average American, we’d have an even bigger problem.
That does not mean we need to be fewer. Just like the US could reduce its coal consumption by a factor of 2 (and more will come), the rest of the world can do that too. The technology is here. Everywhere you read, they say it's more economical to build a new solar power plant than to operate an existing coal plant. That may be an exaggeration, but solar is getting very competitive. Coal is on its way out.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265507/global-coal-consu...
Solar is 3% of electricity
Just last week, I was told that if we were to place the entire human population next to each other, we would take this and this insignificant space on just one continent.
Apparently, overpopulation is a myth perpetuated by a shadowy group championed by Bill Gates himself, and they are the ones responsible for my disagreement with the fact that "they" (said group of global elite) are trying to reduce the population in order to control the world.
Without elaborate socio-political analysis, falling back to simple biology, one model says there are "K"-type populations and "N"-type populations.. it explains a lot right there.