Hi all…
I’ve been bombarded from every angle to save water, clean our air, recycle everything, switch my light bulbs, etc…
Isn’t all of it moot though if we don’t stop increasing the Earth’s population? If you had one less kid how much garbarge literally would you be saving in your (and their) lifetime…? Isn’t all of this just postponing the inevitable? We’re going to run out of everything if we don’t reduce the number of feet walking around on this planet, right?
Just wonderin’ in Denver…
It’s entirely possible for humans to live without consuming any non-renewable resources. The technology to do so already exists; what’s missing is the political will to make people use that technology. Even with a global population much larger than the one we now have, we could easily survive, live happily, and have plenty of land still preserved in its natural state.
The amount of people on earth today and the way they live - and the expansion of that way of life / those technologies - means that just keeping the population constant won’t help us much. Some “new” technologies are needed.
Even if you believe decreasing the population would be the best option, good luck getting any kind of enforcement approved in any democratic country unless the problems get way, way worse than they are now.
Nothing is that simple. I’ll give you an example from my life - I live in a province of over 2 million people whose livelihoods and quality of life depend directly and indirectly on the vast reserves of oil here - you can’t just tell 2 million people to get jobs in restaurants because we’re not doing oil any longer. The whole interconnected mess is going to take a lot of time and effort to figure out (and hopefully it will be done without throwing my province under the bus).
Oh. I thought this thread was going to be about how pouring money into green job creation only create jobs in the short term while there’s a transition between traditional energy sources and green ones.
No reason we can’t do that at the same time. And in many countries, generally the better off ones that’s happening anyway. But yes, if we just keep increasing in numbers inevitably at some point we’ll increase past what the planet can support.
Still, it’s not “moot”. Our population is increasing, at a slowing rate; eventually it will top out and hopefully decrease somewhat. By decreasing the amount of resources we use as individuals ( preferably by increased efficiency and recycling rather than deprivation ), we can hope to keep from exceeding the carrying capacity of Earth before the population stops growing. We can also hope to stretch out the non-renewable resources we are using until more sustainable alternatives come online.
Off topic, but I read something just a while back that really changed my thinking about efforts to “go green.” Was talking about various changes you could do to single-family residences - solar panels, geothermal, etc. - and said that the majority of such efforts were aimed at getting incremental improvements without really changing what anyone is doing, how anyone is living. No matter how “green” your detached house in the suburbs, it is likely nowhere near as green as a unit in a multi-family housing in a location where you were not as dependent on your car.
I’d chirp in agreement with Dinsdale. Our society focuses on changes such as energy-efficient appliances, not on lifestyle changes. Replacing your dryer with an energy-efficient dryer might reduce the related electricity consumption by 25%. Throwing out your dryer and drying your clothes on a rack is guaranteed to reduce electricity consumption by 100%.
There are other costs associated with this sort of thing, though. Not an issue if all you care about is the environment, though, but some of us have other priorities as well.
Maybe a hijack but I was teaching the students about carrying capacity. According to the formula we were using, the carrying capacity of the United States is only 20 million more people.
It has become politically incorrect to advocate population control, in large part because population expansion is occurring primarily in developing countries, which are hands-off to the politically correct crowd.
The usual answer is given that we can support all the current population and more in a lovely green fashion if we just swap out to green technologies and develop even more green technologies and green behaviours. This is a load of crap. First, it isn’t going to happen; immediate problems will always displace future benefit. Second, it couldn’t happen in time even if it were possible down the road. Third, there has to be some upper limit; at some point the whole earth would be a green parking lot with green land farms and green ocean farms to feed everyone. And the mechanism that’s proposed to get the developing countries to stop procreating so productively is to get them rich so their curve levels off like developed countries. Unfortunately, the way to get them rich is get them consuming; the products they need to consume to get them rich are created with current non-green resources and energy, and so to get them rich enough (assuming they even have a bat’s chance of performing like Western countries) we gotta make the whole problem a whole lot worse.
There are no numbers in the green/Global Warming future scenarios that are much of anything other than smoke and mirrors, and the population numbers are the most ludicrous example of turning a blind eye to the real problem: too many people on too small a planet wanting too much stuff. Those of us who have already won the Lots of Stuff game are not going to give it up until we swap out the production grid, and those who have nothing are not going to continue to under-consume if they can help it.
It may well be a nice personal philosophy to be green; it might be a noble philosophy to try and get the world to go green in the future. Without population control it’s all a waste of effort, and frankly, population control is not going to happen.
I have seen this repeated many times, but based on many sources I check, this assertion looks like a straw man.
It would not surprise me that some PC people oppose this, but based on history it is clear that the opposition to population control is mostly based on religious grounds. Unless something has changed, overall my impression is that many in the green corner does not oppose population control, but some of the methods used. Many realize now that it is thanks to economical development that the people of a nation adopts population control.
What stops population growth?
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/
It is happening, and I do think now that helping the developing world with green technology and industry is one way to go.
I am green. I recycle everything I can. I think it is important but it will not help us if our population keeps increasing.
Some interesting graphs showing where we are headed. I believe the Obama immigration overhaul was shot down.
World population is set to stabilize around 10 billion in 2050. That is an extra 3 billion people. But once a nation obtains per capita income around $5000, people stop having more than 2-3 kids per woman on average.
More than that, they usually stop having enough kids to replace the people who die. The replacement rate for total fertility is 2.1 (meaning each woman needs to have 2.1 kids to replace people who die). The US is one of the few wealthy countries with a TFR above or at 2.1 (I think Israel is the only other one).
Japan has a TFR of 1.27 (1.27 kids per woman on average). Their population might decline to 60-70 million by the year 2100, down from the 127 million they have now.
http://www9.ocn.ne.jp/~aslan/pfe/jpeak.htm
The problem is as we learn more about biotechnology, we may dramatically expand lifespan. As a result living to 200+ could be possible in a few generations. That’ll skew the numbers.
But more people also means more ideas, more thinkers, more innovation.
Cutting human population w/o addressing sustainability won’t work. Addressing sustainability is the most important thing we should be doing.
Again, it would be a problem if we ignored it, this issue is not ignored by many that propose green solutions.
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/09/population-and-climate-change.php