Please allow me to take a few minutes of your time and watch this video.
It’s not the best of quality and atleast 10 years old, but don’t let that deter you for this video is, to say the least, great debate worthy.
It is cut up into 8 parts but you don’t have to watch them all. Just the first 2 is enough to debate the issue given in the title of this thread.
Can’t be bothered watching the video. There’s no such thing as infinite growth.
Obviously, thnx 4 the bump
Write a post is you want a debate. That’s how we do it here, not just posting links.
What’s the debate? See, I might watch the videos, but I’d have to have some reason to believe that watching the videos wouldn’t be a big waste of time. So, unless you can convince me that they aren’t a waste of time (by, say, explaining what the videos are about), we’re not going to have much of a discussion.
And before you complain that I spent all this time talking about how I’m not going to watch the videos, and it doesn’t make sense, let me explain. I find it is worthwhile to try to educate people on better ways to write, think, argue, debate, and shoot the shit. So even though it isn’t worth my time watching the video, it is worth my time explaining to you why I won’t watch the video.
See, it makes perfect sense.
I don’t remember where I read it, but I saw a document (an official one dammit) that said energy growth is closer to 1% a year in OECD nations and 3% a year in developing nations. I have no idea how true that is (nations like China seem like they are growing faster than that in their energy demands) but technological advances help us do more with less energy. A fluorescent bulb uses 1/4 the electricity of a traditional. Cars in the 80s got 10mpg, now they get 30. Appliances (washing machines, fridges, AC, etc) use far fewer KWH to operate.
he makes the argument that energy demand grows by 7% a year, doubling every 10 years.
Between 1985 and 2005 world energy consumption went from roughly 9TW to about 13.5, supposedly to 15TW by 2008. That isn’t a doubling rate every 10 years.
Then he talks about population growth, but TFR drops to replacement rates once a nation obtains about 5k per capita wealth. There is no reason I can see to think the world will overpopulate beyond 9-10 billion. He claims everything we regard as good makes human population worse, which is bunk. Wealth makes families want to stop having more than 2-3 kids each.
Then he implies nature has some sort of intention to cull the human race. Nature has no intention or agenda, it is just dumb mechanics that has nothing to do with us. Nature is apathetic to what humans do. Nature isn’t going to ‘invent’ some disease or famine to cut our numbers if we overpopulate. That is arrogant as hell. That is like saying the moon is going to change its gravitational pull based on whether surfers want higher waves or not.
All in all, that was a pretty bad video and that guy doesn’t know what he is talking about.
Well, to me the debate is more about the sustainabillity of continious growth, no matter the actual percentage or the timeframe. When we reach the limit of the exponential growth, time is clearly not on our side. Yet somehow we first need to be confronted with these limits before we act upon them. The fact that we are focussing more on the efficiency of our (energy) consumption only confirms that we are on the right side of the curve were supply starts decreasing.
He’s not saying makes population worse, he’s saying makes population continue to grow. And having 2-3(2.4 on avg. ?) kids still results in a net growth instead of a replacement rate.
That is arrogant? How is that arrogant? I think it’s the other way around, this kind of reasoning is arrogant. How can overpopulation not lead to increased famine or disease? Is it because you are overconfident in our abilities? Do we not rely on nature to provide us with everything single thing we need? Can we do without? I think you are grossly underestimating or dependance on nature.
I remember watching this series a long time ago. My only question is what a zero growth economy would even look like, especially since if growth rates fall below 3-4% economists become sad pandas. Zero percent or negative growth would be a permanent recession, no?
No he doesn’t. He first mentions 7% growth = a 10 year doubling rate as a way for his audience to get an intuitive sense of what the growth rate number even means. He then cites a couple real world examples, including electrical consumption in the United States until, like he said, it slowed down.
Yes, but wealthy nations have much higher per capita resource consumption than poorer ones. At current technological levels seven billion people can’t live like Americans. Or Western Europeans.
One thing that bothered me though is he said everything on the right side of his graph is “bad” and implied no one would want to campaign on it. Contraception is a pretty popular invention.
It was a figure of speech.
From 1976-2006 the Danish economy grew by 93% whereas energy demands only grew by 6%, and on top of that energy is increasing being obtained from renewable sources.
I can’t be bothered to watch the video, but it sounds to me like the same old arguments, so here are some of the same old responses:
Economic growth doesn’t entail increasing resource use.
Population size is not proportional to resource use, and relative population growth looks to be flattening off.
If we’re talking long term for humanity, then the amount of energy we can harness through, say, nuclear fusion is many orders of magnitude greater than all our energy use to date. Trillions of times before we’ve even exhausted the amount of hydrogen we could trivially extract from this planet.
And a single 2km asteroid could provide more precious metals, rare earths etc than could be mined from the earth’s crust. So I’m not too concerned about the people of the far future.
But yeah, in the short term, we have an energy crisis. Which is why all the options need to be on the table: renewables, nuclear, coal + carbon capture etc.
It is arrogant because it assumes nature cares what we do. Overpopulation won’t lead to famine because we waste most of the food we grow now.
Of the food crops like corn grown, the majority are used to either feed beef (which requires 5-10 calories of corn per 1 calorie of beef created) or used for ethanol. I think only about 20% of corn is actually eaten. The rest is ethanol, used to raise beef or for other purposes.
Not only that but most farms in the world aren’t nearly as productive as they could be. Plus there is farmland that isn’t being used in areas like eastern europe or new england, to name a few places. So there are new farms we could develop if we needed to.
Supposedly if all farms currently in use on earth grew corn for human consumption, and had US levels of productivity the world could feed 30-50 billion or so people.
Plus projections show crop yields will likely double or triple by 2050.
So you add up the increased crop yields, the new farmland we could expand into and the fact that most of our agricultural products aren’t used to feed humans, and we have enough food as far as I can tell.
So I don’t think famine is a problem anytime soon. As far as disease, I don’t see how with public health being what it is that we could really go back to things like the black plague. Pestilence is a historical issue due to people who didn’t understand how infectious diseases were caused, transmitted or cured. Even with HIV we still know how it is spread, how to avoid contacting it and how to control the symptoms (more or less) after you get it.
To expand on Wesley Clark’s post, the sheer wastefulness of our current use of resources isn’t a cause for gloom, it’s a cause for optimism. We pour water all over our crops because water is so damn cheap it doesn’t matter if we waste a lot of it. We throw food away because we have so much. Farmland is taken out of production because food prices are so low it doesn’t make sense to cultivate marginal lands anymore.
If we were already using water and arable land efficiently, then it would make more sense to be worried. But we aren’t. If in the coming decades we had to use half or a quarter of the water we use now, that wouldn’t mean a 50% or 75% drop in food production.
Assuming things that (supposedly) aren’t true is not arrogant by definition. And to care about something is a trait only humans possess, nature is a complex system of cause and effect.
So once overpopulation sets in we all become vegetarians and stop producing bio-fuel thus avoiding famine?
Or waiting for food prices to rise in order to have more farms so that those already affected by foodshortage get hit even harder by higher food prices?
You’re right. It’s already a problem, maybe not for you and me but it is a problem for alot of people on this planet. Sure there is plenty of food, it’s just not being shared. But that’s another problem, much like the wastefulness.
Treatment of disease once you identify it is one thing but that doesn’t take away from the fact that having more people in the same space makes it easier for disease to spread. And the more spread out a disease gets the harder it becomes to treat that disease, not to mention the chance that the cure no longer works for that disease.
I didn’t watch the video, but it should be clear to anyone with an open mind that human population (along with associated industrial production) not only has an unsustainable growth rate, but is already too high. Global warming, ocean acidification, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity are only some of the major problems which result directly from man’s activities.
Plastic waste in the ocean is a huge problem. Man’s actions have bred super-bacteria and perhaps super-viruses. Important resources are becoming scarce. (On a lighter note, I learned at SDMB that helium may soon be very scarce.)
If the “goal” of a living species were to convert as much as possible of the Earth’s biomass to itself, then Homo sapiens might be on the verge of declaring victory, but I don’t think that should be our goal.
Are you suggesting an experiment to see how large the human population can become? I’d prefer to remain on the Earth that is the “control group” for the experiment, were there such a thing.
I don’t think I usually disagree with Wesley Clark, but I’m not sure he has a realistic idea of expanded farmland efficiency. The water usage of concentrated animal feeding operations is horrendous, the pollution even more so. And high-yield plant agriculture, so far, means genetically engineered staple crops grown with massive chemical assistance, including fertilizer made from mined components, some of which are running out.
phosphorus scarcity