Peak population may be coming sooner than we think
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Sadly our western capitalist societies and probably the rest as well will collapse.
Our present arrangement is based on growth. As the population declines so does growth potential. (though that requires the market to be already saturated. If you are a new company creating a new widget that people want you will naturally see growth. If you are Apple much less so).
https://www.weforum.org/publications/quantifying-the-impact-...
I personally don't see any problem with this.
There has been much stagnation in many markets due to the Apple/Google/Microsoft behemoths squashing competition, even if its through generating fear of them banning you.
There'll be a lot more bullets and missiles shot, even if countries might not be officially at "war" with each other. I can imagine China "invading" Russia for water/fertile Siberian land, the EU killing^W letting more people die in the Mediterranean, and "civilized" countries having trade (and probably later bullet) wars for food and water.
When Europe faced an energy crisis because they had to stop buying Russian gas (since the money was suddenly funding the killing of Ukranians), they bid more for LNGs, and tankers of the stuff headed for India turned around at sea.
And Covid has shown that even friendly countries got protective and abandoned "friends" in times of crisis - when it spiked in Italy, the Schengen open border policy/EU freedom of movement was suspended, there were even talks of countries blocking shipment of vaccines because they needed it for themselves. And let's not forget how it was a vaccines galore for the rich countries, and "Please wait your turn" for the poor ones...
A lack of drinking water can be solved with desalination (which, today, is insanely cheap for drinking water, too expensive for agriculture though), we can improve the productivity of existing agriculture and switch from a meat based diet towards a more plant based diet, etc.
This will require adjustments but I don't see China (with a shrinking population) attacking Russia to maintain the price of steak.
I mean just think about it: you're putting food that grows mainly by direct energy from the sun (which is already a lossy process) and processing it through animals before eating it (in the form of that animal's meat). This is by definition an inefficient process, and we'd recover something approaching the entirety of the American continent of land by making this switch.
Obviously this is hard to accomplish given how deeply ingrained meat-eating culture is.
There are a few ways to reduce the impact of growing animals for food. One path is incorporating various practices like regenerative grazing and agrivoltaics into the food supply chain. Another path is to restrict all agricultural activities that drain aquifers. I suspect that those irrigation-dependent lands easily supported herds of buffalo, and returning those lands to animal raising, especially using regenerative grazing practices, would replenish the soil stripped of nutrients by modern agricultural practices.
Plant based diets can be so varied, more than people understand.
To keep insulin resistance at bay, you don't want your BG level to spike more than about 50 - 75 mg/dl 1 hour after your meal.
Intermittent fasting also helps bring down insulin resistance but depending on your families relation to snacking in the evening that can be a hard path to follow as well.
That said, I would say for the vast majority of people in the developed world who have access to plethora of plant based whole food options and who do not suffer from dietary restrictions for health reasons, massively cutting down on meat and dairy consumption would be good for both the health of those people and for the planet.
Rising sea levels are much less of a problem than a constant series of rain bombs, storms, droughts, and fires.
When you get a Milton and/or a Helene every few years - or every year, or more than once a year - there's no practical way to rebuild, and insurance will be a distant memory.
The only reason most people don't know this is because extreme weather events around the world aren't making the news unless they're local-ish.
Hardly anyone in the US has heard about Acapulco after Otis, or the recent rain bomb storms in France, Spain, and Italy, or the flooding in Iran, or the fact that large areas of arable land in the UK are waterlogged and farmers are promising significantly smaller crop yields.
Given enough money, anything is possible of course. In my country we grow things like cucumber and tomatoes during winter in heated greenhouses with artificial light, even though it's dark and freezing outside. They just cost 2-3x more than same stuff produced further south.
2023 update: https://apnews.com/article/pakistan-flood-anniversary-ebd919...
2024 update: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/world/asia/pakistan-flood...
Sure, life in the future will be different than life in the past but that has always been the case. Perhaps it will (temporarily) be worse in some areas and perhaps it will be better in other areas. That'll be very hard to predict.
I don't think an economic collapse will happen, we'll have to adapt but a collapse is not in anyone's favour.
Less people does mean lower real-estate prices and potentially more nature. Perhaps we'll have to settle for less gadgets and exotic holidays but we'll have nicer homes and more nature around us.
That seems like a decent trade-off.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/02/07/japan/society/j...
Time will tell but I really worry what the next generations will have to deal with, I cannot find it in my heart to be optimistic about this. It will be extremely painful I feel and sometimes I have the impression the only way for our earth to get better is if humanity gets significantly worse, like back to middle age.
18th century economics are not the endgame. There are many other ways to organize societies that existed before and will again.
Infinite growth in a closed system isn’t a sensible objective and Adam Smiths work has been horribly misunderstood simply because doing so benefits an elite.