Necessity is the mother of invention. Always has been, always will be. Alternative power exsists many places but it really won’t be tapped until necessary.
“Holy crap, gasoline just hit $50/gallon? How much is that natural gas sedan again?”
So even if we are faciong overpopulation - and I don’t thing we are - so what? The population will eventually reduce itself through the usual means of war, famine and plague, we’ll have a bad couple of centuries, and things will return to normal.
You rather answered your own question.
That’s just the thing. It’s all Economics and Availability. Cheap Oil meant that nothing else got developed, just as cheap cars and gas meant death for some forms of public transportation until costs and demand reached a point where it was desirable again. There was no point in tapping the shale sands of Canada until the rising price of oil met the dropping price of the technology required to extract the oil. As prices rise and availability drops, research and development will bring in other technologies on-line.
But they don’t exist in a vacuum and they don’t pop into existence fully formed like Athena sprouting from the head of Zeus.
I agree that we are likely to see population reduction through drastic means, but the problem with that scenario is that we will have used up and degraded so many natural resources by that time.
I read a book recently (Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update) that addressed all of these issues as a whole; what they figured out was that we can reach a state of equilibrium on earth, but we have to change a bunch of things to do so. For us to continue doing things as we are will result in collapse, and collapse is not kind to your average human.
If you really want to reduce population growth, move to Africa and teach school to girls. Education and civil rights for women are the way to reduce fertility, and besides that are good in and of themselves. If you wanna do nothing about population growth, talk about how we should force people to stop having kids.
Because guess what, you’re not going to go over to Africa and start forcing women not to have kids. Give them an education, give them options, and they’ll voluntarily choose to control their own fertility. Draconian China-style population control measures won’t work in places without a strong central government. And note that fertility is dropping all over the world. It doesn’t just happen when people are forced to by the government, it also happens when people can choose for themselves.
Not only do they stop growing and start declining, but virtually all nations start declining in population once they hit a decent level of wealth. Especially the east asian countries. You need 2.1 kids per woman to keep population stable, and east asian nations only have about 1.3 while western europe is about 1.7. Japan’s population is projected to be cut in half from 130 million to 65 million over the next 100 years. I think that Israel is the only nation with a growing population (excluding immigration). The US pretty much breaks even and all other wealthy nations are declining.
The sad part is the nations that lead the world in human rights, civil rights, scientific & medical innovation, etc. are declining while the basket case countries are seeing their populations explode. The populations of Somalia, Uganda, Afghanistan, etc will explode while Taiwan, Japan, Germany, Spain, etc. decline.
Sorry, but I just have to mention that when I read the ‘exploding’ bit, I thought of suicide bombers/terrorism. Very good observation there; news headlines verify this of late 
Good points, though, overall.
The issue isn’t about raw numbers, it’s about impact. If you have 10 million people who live like kings, consume all the resources, and wreck everything in sight, you’re overpopulated. If you have 10 billion who live sustainably, you’re fine. The problem isn’t that we’re literally going to run out of places to stack people (see the Orlando example above.)
Once again everyone else is arguing from a position of political correctness :rolleyes:
Poor countries are going through the same demographic transition that we in the West already passed through. If you count England as a country (rather than as part of the UK), it’s one of the top 5 most densely-populated countries in the world. We’ve had our population explosion, but now we’ve stabilised (but for immigration).
Why do we think poor countries will do the same?
Well, for one thing a country has to be increasing in wealth before its population can explode; extreme poverty is associated with high death rates. And such a country doesn’t need to become anywhere near a Western standard of living before its population start thinking about careers, family planning etc rather than just surviving.
I think a population “correction” is about the worst scenario that’s realistic.
Unless you’re positing something much bigger than catastrophic resource failures, extreme climate change and civil unrest.
Yep. We should put Gaia ahead of ourselves, and commit mass suicide.
Then Gaia can go back to looking unspoiled and the wonderous circle of life can resume.
So…Mijin: to the OP question: is overpopulation a serious problem or is it not?
See here for a hint.
Jesus, that’s not bad enough?
The OP question is what to do about overpopulation.
I have no solution for this. And your implied solution is to shout “Stop having babies!”.
But the real issue of course, is resource use and ecological damage / pollution etc. The fact is that we in the west have a vested interest in saying that the problem is population, and not about responsible resource use because the latter would make it more “our” problem and less “theirs”.
I was responding to the suggestion that overpopulation could imminently cause our extinction. I’m skeptical about that.
I’m obviously not saying “Oh come on, this will just be a worldwide catastrophe of nightmarish proportions, tops”.
Whats normal?
Could we avoid this catastrophe in any way? What about mass sterilizations of random…or selected groups of people?
That’s correctly seen as an enormous violation of human rights and basic decency: you don’t take away someone else’s right to reproduce. Sorry, the Nazis took eugenics off the table as the solution to any kind of population crisis. It’s a non-starter. As is pretty much any part of the overpopulation debate that relies on other groups of people not having sex. This is a resource issue, not a population issue.
Hardly. That’s the sort of thing that starts the wars we want to avoid. Not to mention that the sort of societies that go around forcibly mass sterilizing people are the sorts that should collapse.
Again, it’s not raw numbers. It’s behavior and impact.
Unfortunately, that’s a very old idea – older, in fact, than ideas. Or humanity. Or multicellular life-forms. You are descended from a very, very long line of successful breeders. It’s a hard habit to break.
But the philosophy that the meaning of life is to reproduce does not follow automatically from either the fact that reproduction got us here or that we’re biologically wired up to reproduce.
But I don’t think a campaign to reverse this philosophy would have much effect. Few people have babies on principle.