As far as I can see, you are totally correct. As it is the post you are replying to. Which begs the question: how can the state of all of humanity improve without damaging even more the environment? Will we ever confront that question honestly?
It's hard to even have this conversation without being branded an eco-fascist, but there it is. We are just too many.
I agree that's an answer, but is it the answer?
It seems like reproduction rates in wealthy countries trend closer towards replacement levels, so perhaps you "just" need to get everybody's standard of living up to western levels to take population growth out of the equation.
Then you're left with supporting roughly our current population level which seems... entirely feasible?
Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture (read: focus on producing more efficient crops and less on the intensive stuff like cows), retrofitting buildings with better insulation, and building out more efficient transit, it seems like we could get pretty close with current levels of technology.
Nevermind the developments we continue to make. Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems.
That doesn't match data I've seen. For example, even the Wikipedia article on carrying capacity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity), second paragraph, states there are a number of lines of scientific evidence that we are already over capacity of Earth today. One project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day) does pretty intense data analysis to quantify how far we are over that capacity. The summary is, yes, we are definitely in overshoot, and all economic development to raise standard of living is making it worse.
But it's even worse than that. We aren't just exceeding the carrying capacity, it is diminishing as we reduce biodiversity and biomass through land use (read: obliterating wildlife and forests), overfishing, and over-industrialization of agriculture, which kills healthy soils.
> Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture
It's not just about producing more energy. We are consuming everything too much, from biomass to raw materials, even fresh water.
> Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems.
It might reduce CO2 consumption but ironically it will increase per capita energy consumption, which encourages even more environmental destruction by making everything cheaper to build and buy. So more land use and more consumption.
That seems unlikely, given that total fertility in wealthy countries is well below "replacement" (2.1 children per woman). Reproduction rate, number of daughters per woman, could only be approaching replacement if the sex ratio is massively skewed in favour of girls.
1. UN chart of TFR for "more developed regions": https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...
Observe the assumed but never yet seen floor to fertility rate.
A deeper problem is that the benefits / "slack room" provided by real growth are constantly eradicated because people's wants (and needs) keep growing along commensurately.
Some changing expectations are fairly uncontroversial, e.g. better medical technology and doctor training costs more. Others are arguably less good, e.g. private jets (or taken to the extreme, passenger planes in general!)
I think the problem is still the one I pointed out, whereby if increased efficiency halved the number of man-hours required to make an iPhone 15, instead of "being happy with the current iPhone 15 for half the cost", AAPL/the market/people's demands would result in the same number of man-hours being utilized to produce the next fancier iPhone 20 (or VR headset).
So I think a significant cultural shift would be required for increased productivity to translate into less work, rather than "more/better stuff" for the same (or an increased) amount of work.
I guess we just need to change what we want out of mechanisation: historically it's been; more, cheaper, convenience, etc
We need to change to: sustainable, fair, necessary
The fact is, I can buy cheap plastic crap from somewhere to entertain myself for a day and get it shipped same/next day - but I don't _need_ to, nobody does. Like sugar is addicting, so is a lot of stuff in our modern lives. New phone every 6-12 months? There are people that do this and it's possible because everything has been set up to support it because we're _so_ concerned about our addiction to this sort of thing but not how it impacts the environment or social equity and so many other things.
Our species needs to change priorities so badly, but we're too weighed down by the cruel calculus that evolution gave us.
People are also having less kids because they are too poor. It's hard to pair off in an economy where 4 typical incomes are needed to make basic bills.
I know young people who aren't dating because there's presently no point. They aren't in the minority who earn enough to pay for half a household - nevertheless afford children.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
Not in a wealthy country like the US they aren't.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov...
Poor people get the burdens of a rich economy (ex: increasingly complex living) but have far fewer resources to offset them.
Why are you confident that having fewer humans would help with the standard of living? Doesn't most of the scarcity of what we consume come from the labor necessary to produce it, rather than the cost of physical stuff?
With food for example, for every dollar you spend on food only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc
(https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-dollar-series/do...)
With fewer people, those things become even more scarce.
Part of the reason we need to do all of that is because we have too many people to feed. If the population is 1/10 of the number of people we have today in the US, suddenly we only need 1/10 of the cows, which domestically we can raise sustainably. No longer to we need to grow alfalfa in Arizona, ship it to Australia or Brazil where they raise the cows and then ship the meat back to the US. We’ll need 1/10 of the avocados that can be sustainably grown in California instead of importing it from Mexico.
Things used to be built to last. Planned obsolescence coupled with a human drive to consume needlessly are completely unnecessary to happiness, but decades of propaganda have convinced us otherwise. People don't need to keep driving to their fake jobs, etc.
Some cast iron statues made using solar power as an energy source aren't a relevant climate issue.
As such, the proper response is a CO2 tax and proper landfill practices.
You can look at, say, Hans Rosling presentations over the past decades and see just how highly correlated education and women's rights are with reducing population expansion rates.
Free quality public TV | streaming doesn't hurt either.
It's easy enough that the bulk of G20 countries got there sans the USofA which still struggles with public healthcare.
Of course doing something isn't as easy as sitting around doing nothing save moving a bar along and just asking.
Projection wise, for now, globally we're headed to peak and decline in population so much of this jawing is moot.
‘You will own nothing and you will be happy. For the good of the planet, of course.’
Unfortunately in our flesh and blood world as much as we have a dalliance with forming a society it still all comes down to violence at the end of the day. We hate it, but it's true.
Keep in mind my definition of violence is expansive, not only drawing blood but I would count imprisoning someone (who has broken laws) against their will as (a necessary) violence.
The problem is there, regardless of anyone who keeps their head in the sand. Humanity will meet the limit, and people will be unable to afford children. There's no if, there's when. The only question is whether future-we will be able to have 2, 1 or 0 kids on average, and how much fucked the planet will be at the point of realization. If your vote goes for "0 and very fucked", make sure to teach your kids to not whine about it later and to keep the pride.
Economic growth is possible without consuming more resources. That's literally what technology is - producing more output with less input.
Rich countries have grown over the past 20 years without increasing CO2 emissions. Most developing countries have also grown faster than their CO2 emissions.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-gr...
Degrowth is murder, anyone promoting it is evil.
That's some emotive rhetoric there. I'm thinking that you're pretty passionate about the subject, and therefore not remotely objective.
this isn't a hypothetical. Look at any communist regime!
None of that is actually murder. I don't think it's great, but it's not murder. However, I do wonder on your position on abortion? And preventative and responsible birth control? Would you count any of that as murder?
(There are plenty of fascist dictatorships and corrupt regiemes you could go for, but you pick "communism"?)
Is that the best we can do in this day and age? Is this really the level of argumentation that we are at?
OP posted a comment and even provided evidence for his argument in one of his/her other comment. You did not.
You cherry picked 1 fact about CO2 emissions that is not even related to what OP was talking about which was resource scarcity and decrease in biodiversity.
Finally, even if your argument is correct regarding the fact that CO2 emissions are declining in the developed countries, it is only valid if you don't take into account the fact that developed countries have outsourced most of their manufacturing to developing countries.
That means that this CO2 was if fact emitted, just not counted in the stats of the developed countries anymore.
We can hardly call that a victory.
> The fall in CO2 emissions in advanced economies is also seen while considering consumption-based metrics, meaning that the fall in emissions in these regions is not merely a result of offshoring of manufacturing.
And I can also point to many dozens of article that agree with my statement.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume that you are completely correct, that doesn't change anything about deforestation, soil depletion, over-fishing and many other issues that have not been addressed.
All of these issues have nothing to do with CO2. So my original point stands. You are focusing on the CO2 part when OP was talking about resource depletion in the first place.
You can choose to bury your head in the sand and think that everything is fine, but that doesn't make it true.
On that note, considering that you did not address the point in my original comment, I can honestly say that you are arguing in bad faith and I don't have time for that so feel free to not respond.
Deforestation isn't an issue in advanced economies, e.g. in Europe. See OurWorldInData
Soil depletion? What's that? Plants don't need soil to grow, plants need nutrients (and can easily grow in water or even air!). We've been supplying nutrients artificially for more than a century now (see Haber-Bosch process). I'm sure we can continue doing so, just better with newer technology.
Netherlands is a tiny country, one of the worlds top food producers and exporters, and one quarter of its land is reclaimed (used to be the sea). It's not a problem.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...
> Each acre in the greenhouse yields as much lettuce as 10 outdoor acres and cuts the need for chemicals by 97 percent.
Over-fishing might be a problem, but we're solving it rapidly with aquaculture (farming of aquatic organisms). China is the other problem, e.g. they're fishing illegally in international waters off Argentina, probably will need to be reined in by international armed forces.
https://ourworldindata.org/fish-and-overfishing
Resources aren't a problem, peak oil is getting further and further away (because of fracking, new technologies, and new oil fields), and we're finding more and more other useful resources. With the advent of "too cheap to meter during daytime" solar power, we'll have more energy to extract/refine/recycle resources from other places as well (desalination, uranium from seawater, CO2-free steel, artificial (non-fossil) hydrogen and methane etc.).
Biodiversity might be a problem, but as with the above, I'm certain we'll be able to solve it.
Bottom line is, degrowth "green" propagandists are wrong, have always been wrong ("glaciers will be gone by 2020" LOL), and will continue to be wrong. Believe in our high-tech post-scarcity increasingly-moral free-market-capitalist civilization.
They're largely gone already.
And speaking of LOLing at failed predictions, do you know how many decades ago "too cheap to meter" electricity you've mentioned has been promised?
>Biodiversity might be a problem, but as with the above, I'm certain we'll be able to solve it.
Of course. With wishful thinking, anything is possible.
To sum up, technology will magically fix all the mess that growth and technology has created. Anything as long as we can have our cake and eat it too, and never make any sacrifice.
Even Alcubierre engines, so we can go and fetch resources from the Galaxy!
I believe that’s where we at for most topics, we just tend to avoid places where exclamations get more attention than reason.
And the religion even comes with miracles, where for any given problem caused by growth throwing more growth into it will fix it, usually by handwaving about non existing technologies that will "surely" arrive, or existing technologies that never proved themselves beyond toy scale.
And, as we can see from the "degrowth is murder" the religion comes with ethical deadly sins and fire-and-brimstone too.
Are you trying to say that saying only a % of people can have children is murder in regards to those that don't get to? Aren't we already doing this by imposing financial circumstances/classes on people rather than evenly distributing wealth as much as possible?
You elevate standard-of-living to the sacrosanct. The addict's standard of living was never so high as during the rush. Some will always pine for the good old days when their backs didn't ache and their burden of knowledge weighed less great. Parts of society are addicted to convenience and ease, but the standard of living is not singular, this preference is not total. Technocratic institutions require democratic feedback.
Premising our solution with 'the maintenance of standards' ignores the truth that change is hard and many will bear the weight of the necessary adaptations. If the distribution of weights seem fair, we will bear it. Seemliness is a difficult problem in a chaotic world full of untrustworthy actors speaking at a distance, words of disguised self interest. We cannot transfer the burden of responsible living to 'other people' while not committing to appropriate action ourselves.
Irresponsible reproduction does risk diseases of society and the individual, and none of this argument should construe a preference for unrestrained growth.
It can't. There are three to four billion young, new consumers coming on in the third world over the next 30-50 years, and they want what the first world has. And there's no fair argument to telling them they can't have it or strive for it.
That means enormous additional coal power plant production and emissions output.
Just ask India and China, they can't build coal power fast enough. Next comes Africa's energy build-out, and it will only partially be green, the rest will be coal. Take Africa's next billion new consumers and give that block the coal output of China, that's the end of the world as we know it (if the climate change forecasts are correct).
There's no stopping it now. Just enjoy your life, the future is set. Unless someone has an epic cheap energy breakthrough ready to go right now (so that we can have it deployed fully within 30-50 years).
Just what China and India are adding alone is enough to end the world. You could immediately cut US emissions in half and it wouldn't matter at all to the expansion going on in Asia. And again that's before we even get to what's about to happen in Africa. No matter how many times you bring this up to the green crowd, they just ignore it aggressively, pretending that doing little token virtue signaling things in one market (we cut emissions 5% in NY state, it's amazing!) is going to actually contribute meaningfully to stopping the avalanche. Anything that doesn't involve massively slashing the coal output of China and India (and preventing its rise elsewhere), is meaningless.
Notably, this does NOT mean a mass die off and the end of human civilization or even the end of lots of nicely habitable bits of Earth.
China installed 125GW of wind/solar power in 2022 alone, and their power sectors CO2 output is projected to decrease (!!) starting in 2025 [1].
> You could immediately cut US emissions in half and it wouldn't matter at all to the expansion going on in Asia
I know that many people don't like to hear this, but this is just absolving yourself from blame and it's despicable.
Yes the Asian continent emits more CO2 than North America-- about 10 times more people live there, what do you expect?!
What you conveniently gloss over is that the US does ABSOLUTELY NOT "lead by example"-- CO2/capita is the absolut WORST worldwide except for some superrich petrostates (~15 tons/year/person, compared to ~8 for EU/China and <3 for India).
Fact is that ANY contribution you make as US citizen is highly likely to be MORE effective (in terms of CO2/year saved) than anything a Chinese or Indian citizen could do, AND also likely to demand LESS from you (because an American family just has to leave the second car at home more often to save a ton of CO2, and Indian family has to turn off heating during winter to achieve the equivalent, basically).
[1]: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/ci/research-an...
Local county politicians haven't really taken the lead, leaving townships to fend for themselves, in which it seems no-one has an idea what they are doing and constantly on their heels. There are many concerns over the environment and where the water is coming from. Stuff like this is going down with township trustees: https://www.newarkadvocate.com/story/news/local/granville/20...
There is a lot of whining and complaining from residents, but they all gladly accept the check when the players knock on their door with that Silicon Valley money. I think the obsession with growth is ingrained in American life at this point and inevitable. I don't blame the companies for finding cheap land, water, and tax breaks. And I don't blame landowners for taking money. At this point if someone is unwilling to accept growth, they will get left behind or boxed in. However, it doesn't make the decimation of forests and farmland any less sad, and this is the part that really bothers me about the whole thing.
I'm sure it's probably been shared here many times, but this is one of my favorite quotes from Tolstoy about the ideal life, which it seems is becoming a little harder to obtain the more this growth philosophy plays out.
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbour — such is my idea of happiness.”
This really is a big crux of capitalism, there is simply no room for society to take a breather and enjoy life unless one is lucky enough to make it to retirement, and even more lucky to make it there in health. No room to reflect on new technology and inventions and decide whether we are on the right track, as a society. But chaos is inherent to big groups, so I'm not saying there is a different way forward on a planet with 8 billion people.
So, you are saying that the solution is make small habitats outside of Earth :-) ? I would vote for that solution, but it’s so damn unpopular.