I think this is a very important world view conflict.
Fossil fuels are a bit of an exception, but the transition to non fossil fuels is in full swing, and will be complete long before the oil runs out.
Land is a better argument, though multi story buildings is a partial answer. Either way, we are very far from running out of land.
This has been the case for several years and is a trend that still accelerating. Fun fact: human fertility per person is shrinking faster than GHG emissions per person are growing.
Even with a handful of countries still breeding like rabbits with 6.0+ TFR, the world population is set to peak before 2100 before entering a prolonged decline.
Ecological overshoot is a bunk idea. From wikipedia: "Global ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made by humanity exceed what the biosphere of Earth can provide through its capacity for renewal."
Earth's capacity for natural resource renewal is routinely increased by human activity.
For instance, when humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, earth's capacity for natural resource renewal rose rapidly as many new reccuringly-planted crops sprung up in places they never had before.
Another example, the invention of fertilizer. Food scarcity used to be a real problem for large swaths of the planet. It isn't a problem for most of the planet now, in spite of the fact that demand has grown, and demand growth accelerated by orders of magnitude relative to e.g. 1000 AD. In fact, human activity has made the renewal capacity for earth so much greater that we now have an entirely different problem: for the first time in human history, there are more people consuming too many calories than there are people consuming too few calories. Clearly, food isn't the problem.
The sun provides enough energy to desalinate every ocean on the planet hundreds of times over even with our current rudimentary PV technology with efficiency rates in the ballpark of just ~20%. Water isn't the problem.
While fusion may still eternally be 20+ years away, we've had fission for decades now. You can power the global electricity needs of twice the population of today's planet with reactors taking up less space than Rhode Island. The waste can be permanently and safely disposed of continuously by launching it into the sun for something like 0.000001% of the annual global GDP.
Of course, the sun is also blasting us with the product of nuclear fusion constantly, so we could just massively scale solar to humanity-sized installations. Imagine using a bullet train to get from one side of the humanity-scale PV installation because driving takes too long. So ultimately, electricity isn't the problem.
In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not kill it right after it started crawling.
I must be missing something here because it seems like we have pretty straightforward roadmaps to meeting the water, electricity, and food needs of a population 2x the current global population - just what demands are being made by humanity that our solar system is incapable of meeting, when combined with human ingenuity giving us the stream of groundbreaking technological improvements that pretty much everyone on earth is not only accustomed to, but continuing to expect more of?
The problem is collective action. It's ALWAYS collective action. As long as people keep lapping up petrochemical lobby propaganda, it doesn't matter that we could pretty easily solve our climate crisis, nobody is going to DO it.
Too bad hundreds of thousands of species are going to have gone extinct by then. Hope we don't kill the wrong ones.
Just a sidenote, I know.
All I know is they're never coming back. If that doesn't hurt you as a fellow living organism in this, as far as we can measure, dead universe, there's nothing left to say.
Enjoy your meal while it's still plentiful. Just recently they found a thousand starved birds (1) near the North Sea, who couldn't find food because their hunting grounds are overfished.
(1) these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_murre and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razorbill
> the invention of fertilizer
Nitrogen-based fertilizers are made with hydrogen from natural gas. The agriculture industry, at its base, is like the rest of modern economy: based on drawing down a vast reservoir of non-renewal fossil fuels, with the unfortunate massive externality of altering the composition of our atmosphere and the global climate in a bad way.
While technology will play a role in how humans adapt to the changes we've brought on ourselves, it's important to take realistic stock of where we are and where our trajectory is. Human population peaking will happen--the question is whether it's gradual or whether it's sudden. You don't want the global equivalent of this: https://www.geo.arizona.edu/Antevs/nats104/00lect21reindeer....
Massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer are wasted because it's so cheap [3]. There's headroom for bringing back crop rotation of nitrogen-fixing crops. Nitrogen-fixing microbes are an emerging technology [4].
I am not convinced that we're all going to die.
[1] https://itif.org/publications/2023/04/17/climate-tech-to-wat... [2] https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/09/fertilizer-prices-... [3] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/06/07/nutrient-challeng... [4] pivotbio.com
So that's not really a problem worth refuting.
On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people dying, 10s of millions of species going extinct, massive migration causing chaos in our current understanding of "nation states", sea level rise causing the abandonment and destruction of many of the world's great cities ... these are actual likely problems. The human race will still exist in the face of them, but what will be lost?
Also, why is it that the people constantly screaming about sea levels rising are the same millionaires and billionaires who own $$$$$ properties in places like Miami or Martha's Vineyard, which are ostensibly going to be underwater within their lifetime, if true?
Migration can be ultimately be summed up as someone else's problem, if you have a political elite with enough backbone to represent the interests of the citizens of their own country above those of non-citizens.
According to the US Republican Party, the USA is already suffering from an invasion that is out of control, when climate change has barely gotten started.
What the US can and will do if and when it faces 100M people trying to get north is an open question. The US military will not be able to use ground force to keep out that sort of mass migration. Will it drop bombs on migrating populations? Is that what you call "backbone" ?
Finally, it seems as if you think that having lots of money somehow exempts you from the same cognitive biases as everybody else, as if the behavior of the rich is an indicator of "the smart move". It never has been, and it never will be.
You're losing credibility quickly
>the USA is already suffering from an invasion that is out of control, when climate change has barely gotten started.
Okay, A. What's happening at the southern border isn't any more of an "invasion" than the J6 riots. If only 1/500 people in your "invasion" even has a firearm, let alone training with it, it ain't much of an invasion.
B. What's happening at the southern border has absolutely NOTHING to do with climate change, it's strictly economic.
>What the US can and will do if and when it faces 100M people trying to get north is an open question. The US military will not be able to use ground force to keep out that sort of mass migration. Will it drop bombs on migrating populations? Is that what you call "backbone"?
What if there were some kind of relatively safe, yet impassable barrier? The kind that doesn't exercise force against anyone, ever. One that's so safe that the only people who get injured by it are those stupid enough to delibarately decide to try to scale it, while being incompetent enough to be incapable of doing so safely. Perhaps one that was tall enough that it couldn't be scaled by 20 or 40 foot ladders? Besides, this is a ridiculous question. Even under the president with the highest amount of illegal immigration in US history, Joe Biden (10,000,000 and counting!), we barely hit a tenth of that figure across 3.5 years.
Sadly, there's just no way we're gonna be able to afford such a barrier. That would have to cost what, $10bn? $50bn? Except that's still less than we've spent securing the border of a country on the other side of the planet that almost no Americans have any real, significant, substantial interests in (besides Hunter Biden, of course, who made millions of dollars per year as a Ukrainian energy executive thanks to his deep expertise and demonstrated thought leadership in the hydrocarbon exploration and extraction business... /s)
>Finally, it seems as if you think that having lots of money somehow exempts you from the same cognitive biases as everybody else, as if the behavior of the rich is an indicator of "the smart move". It never has been, and it never will be.
No, what I'm asserting is that the people screeching about the oceans rising and the sky falling are the same ones buying up all the properties being sold by the people who are afraid of oceans rising. It's a racket.
Of course it will continue to accelerate. There's a mechanism that causes this. Some conspiracy theorists mistake this for an active, purposeful goal, but it may be as simple as children growing up in environments where childlessness has become a norm, internalizing that same norm. Since there are fewer children with each successive generation, the norm is amplified for the next.
> In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not kill it right after it started crawling.
There are some who seem to want to kill humanity. They don't come right out and say it, of course, that would sound weird and awkward. If you're oblivious to that widespread sentiment, they're perfectly ok with that. The curricula they design for your children in school will slowly be modified so that they aren't quite so fond of your Star Trek visions for the future.
So who's doing this deliberation? Again, you're pointing to a conspiracy but also denying its existence in the same breath.
There is a desire that humanity go extinct. But this isn't a goal for them, more like a fantasy. They're not actively working towards it, and they don't like to say it out loud.
They do design curricula (they're in positions where that's a responsibility, quite often). But they aren't conspiring. They're bumbling towards a doomsday, instinctively. They merely want to change the curricula to discourage the Star Trek future. In some vague hand-wavy way, this "makes it better". They're not sure why, and if you were to ask one hundred of them, you'd get 100 answers. And then if you asked months later, you'd get 100 different answers. It's just not purposeful, and there is no actual conspiracy.
If only there were one. Conspirators can be found out, rounded up, the evil plot exposed. But this microbe-like quorum sensing, where none need feel guilty, but simple coordination can take place, they're all innocent. There's no secret documents, no secret plan, no sinister mastermind.
Even you, you're part of it, and you don't even know it. People like you come by, mistake it for some conspiracy theory, and stir up shit as a sort of invisibility cloak. Unless of course, you were doing it deliberately. like when you quote a statement where I said "neither/nor [...] deliberately" with the very direct and simple negation of that idea.
How can anyone prove your intents if you fully conceal them?
That said, I do find your argument here pretty compelling. Hanlon's Razor exists for a reason, at the end of the day.
Basically, the environmental impact of having more kids is sort of drowned out by various consumer choices, which are in turn drowned out by societal choices that no one family can impact at all.
However, I don't know why you are comparing a single billionaire vs a single X kid household. Like, the number of each (or even of private jets) are not even _remotely_ in the same ballpark. Which is why "number of kids" is not at all a strange place to focus on environmental impact, but "billionaire lifestyle choices" is.