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Comment by lucubratory | Hacker News Reader

World population was 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, and 4.5 billion in 1980. Today the world population is a bit under 8 billion. The Earth could easily support many more than 8 billion people with the right technology install base, I don't want to give the impression that population is an issue in itself, it isn't. However, with the predominant technologies being oil-based transportation, coal-based power, and carbon intensive agriculture throughout that period and continuing today, the size of our economy (enabled by the size of our population) is capable of a much greater degree of warming through GHG emissions than we were in the 1960s, let alone the 1800s.

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This is such a terrible situation. We need depopulation but every country's economy seems to be based on infinite growth and can't deal with an aging population.

I'm scared the best case scenario will end up being "the world gets so hot it kills enough people to stop getting hotter." I don't know a lot about climate change but I don't thing the Earth will simply reset when enough people die, considering the melting ice caps won't just unmelt because of that.

We don't need depopulation. We just need to stop eating cows, riding cars and planes so much, and buying everything from across the world.

(and dozens if not millions other things, neither of which is harder than depopulation)

While this ist part of what we need to do, you are forgetting the industry sector, as the first and biggest polution source, that provides living standard to us, and that needs to be regulated the most for the biggest effect.

That's exactly right. We are taking carbon that was sequestered under ground over a period of hundreds of millions of years and releasing it back into the atmosphere in just a few hundred years. That genie will not go quietly back into the bottle.

Although there are ways to bring it back under the earth: Burry trees deeply underground. Which is of no economic value, but that might be a way, if we dig deep enough and do it on big scales.

In terms of population reduction we're actually handling that by ourselves, as the absolute number of births peaked somewhere in 2014-2017 and started declining since.

Overall most of the population growth now is younger, larger generations replacing older ones, with the demographic pyramid looking like a sausage being filled with meat.

World population will peak by 2086 at ~10.4bln.

That's still too many. Sure, it'll probably level, but why not get in front of that and find a good balance today instead of assuming it'll all just sort itself out magically?

It is sorting itself out "magically". If anything, we don't know what to do with ageing populations.

The previous estimate put the population in 2100 at 11bln and growing, but then China had its census, which revealed a very different demographic situation than anticipated and the pandemic happened, upending those projections.

Recently also India went below replacement fertility rate - that now makes the two most populous nations having crossed that threshold - also way ahead of previous projections.

Estimates of populations of African countries are most likely overstated, just like fertility rates.

That's only a prediction, an extrapolation by the UN I believe. Many things can change until then and we don't know anything for sure. Even if it peaks by 2086, the population mass until then, with our current way of living, will have devastated the planet.

Yes, I'm using UN numbers, as they have the best track record.

Looking at past projections the population was typically slightly below the estimated figure, so the most likely scenario is that this will be the case here as well.

In any case I don't think that devastation will come to pass, as China's emissions pretty much plateaued already and India's are looking like they did as well. The west has been in decline in that regard for years now.

It's going to get worse - that's a given - but with the recent estimates giving a more precise number for emissions connected with land use change, global CO2 emissions might have plateaued, or even peaked a few years ago already.

I think that would depend a lot on whether depopulation led to rapid restoration of our lost wetlands and I am going to assume no one is making models of that because the wetlands issue gets so little attention generally.

> We need depopulation but every country's economy seems to be based on infinite growth and can't deal with an aging population.

There is no way of organising an economy that will allow it to support having the demographic of net producers significantly outnumbered by the demographic of net consumers. This is an economic problem, but only in the sense that if you want people to have access to good and service then you need people willing and able to produce those goods and services is economic problem. If you have a demographic collapse, then you don’t have that any more, no matter what system of economic management you’re using.

The idea that we need depopulation is also about as intellectually and scientifically valid as the voluntary extinction movement is, yet somehow a lot more people seem to think it has some credibility.

That doesn't seem to make sense because we're talking about how many people produce and consume things, not the rate of which they produce and consume things.

We just need the working age populace to produce more than everyone can consume. Automation was supposed to achieve that. In fact, I think it has already achieved that long ago?

I'll reword it in a depressing, pragmatic way. We can already produce enough to satisfy the NEEDS of the entire population. So if you only need X jobs to produce for everyone, but extra people are getting born because nobody can just set a limit to how many people are born, then what do these extra people do in their lives? What is going to be their job?

If they produced things, it would be a waste of resources, because the needs of the entire world are already satisfied. But that's exactly what they do. Do we really need fancy clothes, and fancy houses, and fancy food, and TV shows and music? Do we need art? We don't really "need" them, but we already produce enough that we can afford to have people whose jobs is just making these things. But by this logic we don't really need computers either, you can't eat them, so I guess I'm superfluous as well.

I guess the point is, how many of these "superfluous" things we should produce? If population goes down, some jobs won't get as many workers as before. I can't really say "artists are unnecessary, we should just get rid of the entire profession and replace it with Dall-E because it's more productive." In fact, I'm not sure there is any job we can just get rid off to state "we will birth no more people to do that job. It will have 0 workers assigned to it."

And this is of course just speaking theoretically, assuming you could control births and professions with precision, which we can not in practice. People are going to get born and they will do jobs that aren't as productive as other jobs and there is nothing we can do about it. But to say we can't produce enough doesn't make sense if we can't even define how much is "enough."

> If they produced things, it would be a waste of resources, because the needs of the entire world are already satisfied. But that's exactly what they do. Do we really need fancy clothes, and fancy houses, and fancy food, and TV shows and music? Do we need art?

The majority of society’s basic needs have been catered for since ancient Mesopotamia. The only significant innovation we’ve had since then is modern medicine. In regards to needs, everything else since then has just been fine tuning and improving access.

The majority of human development since that period has primarily been delivering for wants. The basic premise of your argument here is “how about you do without _everything_ that you want”.

This also ignores the fact that no, we cannot make “enough” of only the needs, and just remove all of the wants, because they have the same supply chain. You might argue that I don’t need the spark plugs in my car, but a farmer would certainly need the spark plugs in their tractor.

Depopulation is the last thing we need. We are carbon based life forms. We can just sequester carbon in human bodies.

We do not need "depopulation, as I specifically noted in my comment there is no issue with our population numbers being significantly higher than they are, let alone at our current levels. The issue is the kinds of technology that we are using and policies that we have, oil-based transportation, cow-based agriculture and to a lesser extent meat-based agriculture, food waste, coal-based energy generation, etc. We need to decarbonise the grid and transportation (we already know how to do this, it is only a matter of doing it), significantly reduce GHG emissions in agriculture through selecting different crops and livestock as well as increasing efficiency (this will need large scale public buy-in, so it needs to be led by the government), and put serious R&D into decarbonising heavy industry like steel and cement production. Once we get that far, we can focus on solving the remaining GHG issues like synthetic fuel for planes + high-speed rail replacements, and carbon capture & sequestration for what we can't solve in a cheaper way. "Depopulation" is an absurd, unrealistic, and unworkable proposal that does not actually solve the central problem and would actively make it worse. Population size is a huge part of what makes us able to achieve significant scientific and technological progress, "depopulation" would actively harm our efforts to restructure our economy and distribute technology as necessary to combat climate change.

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