I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but we’re going to rape the shit out of this planet until it’s a lifeless husk. It is in our nature. And it’s not like we have to rape the whole thing. Just the surface.
Even if we got really good at recycling, we’ll always produce waste and use resources that can’t be reproduced in a reasonable timeframe. 8 billion of us and counting. Raping.
Its not our nature, this entire thing is huffing the momentum of a couple thousand rich assholes who own everything. What we are wired to do is not change jack shit until we get fucked up. If we could conquer that and throw these assholes out you’ll see a better world in a single generation.
Mood AF. I hate feeling this way, but I almost feel things need to get worse before they get better.
I won’t actively work towards that, and I’ll work to make my community and city a better place in the midst of that. But I think humanity will only change when things are really drastic.
If the half of the population includes the part that owns cars perhaps, but the carbon footprint of a person varries greatly. In general the more money someone has the higher the burden they are on the climate.
The problem is mathematically it just doesn’t work. Humans are too good at reproducing. We’d be back in force before too long.
No, the only way is more death note style, taking out billionaires and some of their bootlicking buddies, and those who put profit over the planet’s health. It’s perfectly possible for the rest of us to patch things up—we almost did it with the ozone. (Until guess who decided they wanted to throw money around to force us to stop.)
I think we humans have grown to a population size where anyone’s profit hurting the planets health should be stopped. We need to take protecting the planet’s (in some ways fragile) ecosystem as serious as we take protecting children against abuse for example. Future generations will have to learn or we will find out together what fucking around gets us.
Idk, I feel like targeting living beings is different than targeting structures, even though I know a sudden lack of refined oil would lead to death. I’m just convinced they’ll never stop until their own heat deaths.
I’d go for the quick and painless snap over the long drawn out biotic crisis caused by the removal of a key resource but that’s only because I’m a humanitarian.
4 billion instantaneously without even a chance is just too much for me. At least with the refineries I can lie to myself and say I gave everyone a chance by not immediately removing people from existence.
If I could snap my fingers and have people wake up from the capitalist propaganda they’ve been force-fed their whole lives, I would. Population is not the issue, it’s a deflection.
If your only problem is that you want more resources available for yourself, I can see how you’d come to that conclusion, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problems, and in fact it would create a whole set of new ones. Modern civilization depends heavily on economies of scale, and your magic finger snap does nothing to change how resources are produced, distributed, or consumed.
You’re also assuming that every human consumes resources at roughly the same rate. They don’t. Not even close. A tiny fraction of humanity consumes vastly more resources than billions of other people. Your finger snap doesn’t address that inequality at all. The same people and systems that concentrate resources now would simply have an even larger pool of resources to hoover up afterward. Then what? Snap your fingers again?
And follow the logic to its conclusion. If reducing humanity to 100 million “solves” problems because fewer people are consuming resources and competing for them, then 1 million should be even better. Five thousand better still. Ultimately, zero humans means zero poverty, zero war, zero homelessness, zero human carbon emissions, and zero human suffering. Problem solved!
Except obviously it isn’t, because eliminating the people who experience a problem is not the same thing as solving the problem for those people.
We don’t have billions of people living in poverty because there simply isn’t enough stuff on Earth to go around. We have enormous disparities in who controls resources and who gets to consume them. Fantasizing about eliminating most of humanity while leaving that system completely intact makes you a stooge for the oligarchs.
But even with these slower rates of growth, our population is already far above the sustainable carrying capacity given by Bradshaw and team’s models.
The gap between their optimum number of 2.5 billion and our current population size of 8.3 billion may help explain the problems with overconsumption our species currently faces.
Did you actually read what you provided? It’s really not the defense of your point that you are making it out to be. Lead author, Corey Bradshaw (Who also co-authored Human Population Reduction is Not a Quick Fix for Environmental Problems), argues that our current consumption system is unsustainable. I couldn’t agree more!
The 2.5 billion figure cited within is not some immutable physical limit on the number of human bodies Earth can contain. The authors explicitly acknowledge that a “sustainable” population depends on things like standard of living, economics, social conditions, and resource consumption. Their ecological-footprint estimate of 2.35 billion specifically assumes today’s average material standard of living and current consumption distribution, including the enormous consumption of the wealthiest people.
You’re taking a model of how many people our planet can sustainably support under particular socioeconomic and consumption conditions and treating it as evidence that the people themselves are the fundamental problem. That’s not what the evidence shows, though. Not even the evidence you yourself brought to the table, sorry!
Reality is malleable. Sure, the current circumstances of how resources are divided and used is reality. The current population is reality. We are both discussing ways in which our reality can be transformed to the benefit of all. Your suggested path involves the death of billions of people, while my suggested path involves some people having slightly less exorbitant lifestyles. Your suggested path is not only extreme, but it wouldn’t even work according to the very scholars you are citing. THAT is reality.
The Earth can heal if we stop stabbing it.
I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but we’re going to rape the shit out of this planet until it’s a lifeless husk. It is in our nature. And it’s not like we have to rape the whole thing. Just the surface.
Even if we got really good at recycling, we’ll always produce waste and use resources that can’t be reproduced in a reasonable timeframe. 8 billion of us and counting. Raping.
Its not our nature, this entire thing is huffing the momentum of a couple thousand rich assholes who own everything. What we are wired to do is not change jack shit until we get fucked up. If we could conquer that and throw these assholes out you’ll see a better world in a single generation.
been thinking about this a lot, feeling so accelerationist because of it.
Mood AF. I hate feeling this way, but I almost feel things need to get worse before they get better.
I won’t actively work towards that, and I’ll work to make my community and city a better place in the midst of that. But I think humanity will only change when things are really drastic.
If you could just snap your fingers and half the world’s population would disappear would you?
I was on Thanos’ side the entire time.
If I could snap my fingers and all the world’s billionaires disappear I would, or oil refineries. Not people though. Humans aren’t the virus.
Getting rid of half the population or half the refineries would accomplish the same thing right?
If the half of the population includes the part that owns cars perhaps, but the carbon footprint of a person varries greatly. In general the more money someone has the higher the burden they are on the climate.
Oil is used in the production and transportation of food.
Also fertilizer.
And the plastic that keeps the medical system running.
My point is only that not every person on the world has equal access to those things.
My point is those oil refineries keep a lot of people alive.
Be a fanboy then, I think they’re doing a lot of damage despite that.
The problem is mathematically it just doesn’t work. Humans are too good at reproducing. We’d be back in force before too long.
No, the only way is more death note style, taking out billionaires and some of their bootlicking buddies, and those who put profit over the planet’s health. It’s perfectly possible for the rest of us to patch things up—we almost did it with the ozone. (Until guess who decided they wanted to throw money around to force us to stop.)
I think we humans have grown to a population size where anyone’s profit hurting the planets health should be stopped. We need to take protecting the planet’s (in some ways fragile) ecosystem as serious as we take protecting children against abuse for example. Future generations will have to learn or we will find out together what fucking around gets us.
Idk, I feel like targeting living beings is different than targeting structures, even though I know a sudden lack of refined oil would lead to death. I’m just convinced they’ll never stop until their own heat deaths.
Just the collapse of the medical system alone due to the missing plastics would kill millions.
Aye, so its a rock and a hard place then. At least when it comes to solutions like these.
I’d go for the quick and painless snap over the long drawn out biotic crisis caused by the removal of a key resource but that’s only because I’m a humanitarian.
4 billion instantaneously without even a chance is just too much for me. At least with the refineries I can lie to myself and say I gave everyone a chance by not immediately removing people from existence.
They don’t refine oil for people to consume it, they refine oil to generate shareholder value.
Do they just dump it in a big hole and profit?
If I could snap my fingers and have people wake up from the capitalist propaganda they’ve been force-fed their whole lives, I would. Population is not the issue, it’s a deflection.
Population is definitely an issue there’s no many problem that wouldn’t be instantly solved by going down to a hundred million people.
If your only problem is that you want more resources available for yourself, I can see how you’d come to that conclusion, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problems, and in fact it would create a whole set of new ones. Modern civilization depends heavily on economies of scale, and your magic finger snap does nothing to change how resources are produced, distributed, or consumed.
You’re also assuming that every human consumes resources at roughly the same rate. They don’t. Not even close. A tiny fraction of humanity consumes vastly more resources than billions of other people. Your finger snap doesn’t address that inequality at all. The same people and systems that concentrate resources now would simply have an even larger pool of resources to hoover up afterward. Then what? Snap your fingers again?
And follow the logic to its conclusion. If reducing humanity to 100 million “solves” problems because fewer people are consuming resources and competing for them, then 1 million should be even better. Five thousand better still. Ultimately, zero humans means zero poverty, zero war, zero homelessness, zero human carbon emissions, and zero human suffering. Problem solved!
Except obviously it isn’t, because eliminating the people who experience a problem is not the same thing as solving the problem for those people.
We don’t have billions of people living in poverty because there simply isn’t enough stuff on Earth to go around. We have enormous disparities in who controls resources and who gets to consume them. Fantasizing about eliminating most of humanity while leaving that system completely intact makes you a stooge for the oligarchs.
Earth’s Population Has Surpassed The Planet’s Capacity, Study Suggests
Did you actually read what you provided? It’s really not the defense of your point that you are making it out to be. Lead author, Corey Bradshaw (Who also co-authored Human Population Reduction is Not a Quick Fix for Environmental Problems), argues that our current consumption system is unsustainable. I couldn’t agree more!
The 2.5 billion figure cited within is not some immutable physical limit on the number of human bodies Earth can contain. The authors explicitly acknowledge that a “sustainable” population depends on things like standard of living, economics, social conditions, and resource consumption. Their ecological-footprint estimate of 2.35 billion specifically assumes today’s average material standard of living and current consumption distribution, including the enormous consumption of the wealthiest people.
You’re taking a model of how many people our planet can sustainably support under particular socioeconomic and consumption conditions and treating it as evidence that the people themselves are the fundamental problem. That’s not what the evidence shows, though. Not even the evidence you yourself brought to the table, sorry!
It’s a number of people that the planet can carry based on reality.
Reality is malleable. Sure, the current circumstances of how resources are divided and used is reality. The current population is reality. We are both discussing ways in which our reality can be transformed to the benefit of all. Your suggested path involves the death of billions of people, while my suggested path involves some people having slightly less exorbitant lifestyles. Your suggested path is not only extreme, but it wouldn’t even work according to the very scholars you are citing. THAT is reality.
Without a second thought
*Starts dancing flamenco