Manila today. A prediction of the future for the world ? (overpopulation)

Great Debates
41

Indeed; the basic problem is overpopulation.
There are plenty of resources to support a world population of a billion or so at current western levels.

Most of the world is clamoring to get to the level of the American high-consumption lifestyle, and those with high consumption show no sign of giving anything other than lip-service to anything except a bunch of crapola half-baked feel-good measures. It’s the nature of human beings to worry in general terms about what everybody should do, and pursue in personal terms a much more narcissistic agenda. Al Gore is a lovely poster child, and we are all Al Gores (except for that nutty actor guy–Ed Begley or something).

Predictions that the world population will level off are based on a very specific assumption–that we can get the current high-reproducers rich so they stop procreating, the way the developed countries have stopped procreating. However the only way to get people rich is to get them stuff, and getting stuff is consumption, so it takes a remarkable absence of perception to think we are somehow going to get both a leveling of the population and a diminution of consumption simultaneously.

There is no stomach in academia and the liberal press for population control. The current most rapid expansion occurs in the developed world, and they are hands-off for criticism, period. The religious right is no less inclined to call for population control, because mankind’s job is to be fruitful and multiply–souls for the kingdom, I guess.

In any case, there is no workable mechanism to control the world’s population, so I am personally betting we will just keep consuming Gaia until we git 'er paved over, plowed under, and fish-farmed to the limit. The tragedy of the commons, writ large.

42

It is not just a shortage of energy,

We are also already over-fishing our oceans. We are running out of fresh water, esp underground water. We are cutting down our forests, and bulldozing and paving over our farms and fields. The United States today with just 300 million people already is becoming a food importing country unable to feed itself…just wait to see how bad it gets when the US has 600 million people or a billion hungry people.

Besides, we already are broke, deeply in debt, and we currently do not even have enough jobs for the 300 million people that have already moved here, so why are we bringing in millions more each year, year after year?

43

Where is all that money to invest going to come from?

The United States doesnt have any money ( it is currently VERY deeply in debt).

44

The United States is becoming overpopulated mostly because of too much unnecessary immigration( and not primarily from having too many babies).

The United States is one of the fastest growing countries in the world. It is now the 3rd or 4th most populous country in the world and getting bigger every day, we let in 50,000 more immigrants each and every week, week after week.

However…You CAN do something about stopping the overpopulation of the United States. Eliminate all immigration now, and also immediately deport the 20 or 30 million illegals that are here. It is actually pretty easy for the US to stop overpopulating.

45

Susanne, no, the United States is a food-exporting nation:

On balance, that is. Of course it imports certain foods. It exports much more food.

The U.S. was one of the largest countries in the world a century ago and it’s still one of the largest countries in the world. Relative to the other large countries it hasn’t changed much:

As you can see, relative to other large countries, the U.S. has only gone up from 4th to 3rd from 1900 to 2005, and that’s only because Russia has not grown in population very much.

Chief Pedant, the problem is getting the world down to a population of one billion. This would take at least a century in any reasonable scenario. If you just impose a limit on the number of children per family to bring down the population quicker, the population might go down, but you would soon have a crisis with far too many older people per younger people. It’s necessary to bring down the population more slowly.

The rate of population growth is going down in all countries, and that’s the basis on which the future population estimates are made.

46

Susanann
Quote:
We are also already over-fishing our oceans. We are running out of fresh water, esp underground water. We are cutting down our forests, and bulldozing and paving over our farms and fields. The United States today with just 300 million people already is becoming a food importing country unable to feed itself.…just wait to see how bad it gets when the US has 600 million people or a billion hungry people.

I said it is “becoming a food importing nation”. We are fast on our way to a population of 400 million people by 2050, on our way to 1 billion people by the end of this century.
We will not be able to feed our people long before then.

We will probably become an official net food importer when our population gets to 320 million.

The population of the US is not stable. It has a population strongly and consistently growing very fast. Millions more people, more mouths to feed, less land to plant, each year, year after year.

47

Your facts are off. The United States is ranked 178th in the world for population density (82ppl/mi^2) —if anything, it is underpopulated. (You see this, for example, going from Wyoming into Alberta.) Nor does the United States have a fast growth rate —it currently stands at 129th, or 0.98%. Keep in mind, that includes immigration. Doing the math, current growth would put the US at 753mil by the end of the century. As I’ll explain in a moment, it will actually be much less, but even if it were 753mil, that’s something like 205ppl/mi^2 —a density that at this moment would put the United States in 120th place, close behind such hotbeds of iniquity as Austria and Greece.

Simply put, the United States is not overpopulated, nor is it at risk of becoming overpopulated in the next century.

In regard to immigration, you are forgetting that the rate of immigration depends on conditions elsewhere —if (as you will have read above) the population of the Earth peaks and then declines, then the influx of immigrants into the US will also peak and then decline. A century from now, population growth via immigration may not eve be possible.

In fact, the current experience of Europe shows that underpopulation (combined with aging populations) is a far greater threat to the First World than overpopulation.

48

Missed my edit window. I was going to add:

"ETA: In light of America’s population density (sparcity), the claims that America won’t be able to feed itself with a mere 15mil more people strike me as especially problematic. Have you ever been to the Midwest? Or for that matter, the Northeast? The amount of unused, arable land is pretty striking.

“EATA: Also note that population growth by immigration has no particular reason to be exponential — if policies stay exactly the same, the rate of immigration stays constant, and population increase becomes linear. I don’t feel like redoing my math, but if (as you claim) the United States is growing solely because of immigration, its current rate of growth would put the country at about 400mil by 2100.”

49

We are not fast becoming a food-importing nation. We are not cutting down our forests. In fact, the U.S. has actually slowly become more forested since about 1930. Have you ever considered looking up statistics instead of just guessing at them?

50

Give up peasant superstitions about nuclear technology.

51

Are people in the developing world trying to achieve an “American” consumption level or just a “Western” one? I think there’s a difference. The choice isn’t a binary one between living in a hovel with no reliable drinking water or sewerage and living in a McMansion on an acre of land with a car for every person over 16 years old.

A condo or apartment with reliable water, sewer, and electricity, modern appliances, a computer and a cell phone, riding the subway or a commuter train to work in an air-conditioned office, is a huge leap up in lifestyle for a big chunk of the world. It’s a lifestyle hundreds of millions of people in the developed world – including many Americans – live by choice right now. And, getting to the point, it’s probably enough prosperity to achieve the reduced birthrates commonly associated with improved living standards.

The 1950s American model of every family in a new detached house in a new subdivision in the suburbs, driving their huge car everywhere, is already starting to show cracks right here in America. People are* choosing to sell suburban homes and buy condos in cities to avoid the traffic, the hassle of maintaining a home, and all the other “joys” of that model, which was promoted for so long as the only right way to live (pun intended). (That everyone isn’t expected to be in a nuclear family of mother, father, two kids, and a dog is also a major factor in that change.) Cities that people 30 years ago wouldn’t have dreamed of (re)building rail transit systems – Dallas, Salt Lake City, Denver, Los Angeles – are doing so. The phrase “Los Angeles subway” would have been a joke unto itself in 1980; it isn’t now.

It would be a supreme irony if, at the very time Americans are realizing that the 1950s model isn’t the by-all and end-all that it was made out to be, that model took on new life in the developing world.
*Or at least were before the recession. Of course, the recession, and the earlier gas-price run-up, have caused people to reconsider even harder buying into suburban subdivisions, especially those farthest from the center cities being built before the recession in the midst of farm fields or deserts. The most sprawling metro areas of the '90s and early 2000s – the Sunbelt cities especially – are the ones where the real estate market has fallen the most.

52

I dont need statistics that some snot nosed jack posted on an internet site.

I am not blind, and I am old enough to remember how America was in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

I can personally remember the trees, farms, and fields surrounding lots of cities, Detroit, Milwakee, Cleveland, Louisville, Atlanta, St Louis, Miami and the entire east coast of Florida, etc. etc. and now what I see is all the trees gone, all the farms gone, all the fields gone …replaced by concrete, housing tracts, stores, highways, and too many people and crowds and traffic jams, etc.

I can remember hunting and riding horses in what used to be farms and fields and trees not far from big cities, and what now are crowded dirty smelly suburbs.

I can remember when Disneyland opened and it was in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a bunch of orange groves, and before Disneyworld Orlando was a small town in the sticks. I can remember before Alexandria Va was built up and before got rid of all of its trees and farms. The Los Angeles and Aexandria areas are now terribly overrun with crowds of people.

If you had not seen it yourself, it is unbelievable how many fine and productive farms, fields, and woods and animals we have lost in the last 40 years or so.

We are WAY!!! too crowded now and we already have lost so much of our close in rural and farming lands. Also, at the current rate of immigration, it is going to get worse, MUCH worse.

I can also remember when I graduated from college and me and all my friends were besieged by employers, all of us getting over a dozen firm job offers to start immediately after graduation. Moreover, even high school grads could also get good paying jobs, enough to raise a family.
My less populated world was SO MUCH! better than the overpopulated USA that we see now.

If you want to ruin a country and make it poor, then just overpopulate it.

53

Here are the statistics on deforestation in the U.S.:

As you can see, deforestation on balance came to an end early in the 20th century. The best guess is that the lowest percentage of forests in the U.S. was sometime in the 1920’s. Since then the amount of forest in the U.S. hasn’t changed much. Sometimes in the past 80 years it’s risen a little and sometimes it’s dropped a little. Of course some trees have been cut down since then for some urban development. There has also been a lot of reforestation as some farm land has gone back to forest.

The reason for farm land going back to forest is that agriculture and transportation have become so efficient in the 20th century that it’s no longer necessary to have nearly as much land in cultivation as was necessary in the 19th century and earlier. Only the best land now needs to be used for agriculture, and the crops from it can be transported to further destinations efficiently. A lot of former farm land in New England, for instance, has been reforested, since it was hilly and stony.

You’ll see sometimes discussions of the fact that the amount of old-growth forests has decreased. This is true, but it’s irrelevant to the amount of forest. New forests can’t become old-growth forests for centuries.

Susanne, if you’re not interested in discussing verifiable facts, there’s no point talking with you about anything. Your personal memories are too limited for you to know about the amount of forests in the U.S. as a whole. Your personal memories are too limited for you to know about the amount of population growth in the U.S. I can’t be bothered to have a discussion with someone who rejects the notion of verifiable facts.

54

SteveMB, while we could continue to increase the amount of nuclear (fission) reactors, they have some downsides too. The possibility of meltdowns always exists. To raise the consumption level of everybody in the world, that would mean building nuclear reactors everywhere, we would have to worry about someone stealing nuclear material from them to make a bomb.

55

If you, or anyone else, thinks that after we increased our population by 50% from 200 million people to over 300 million people, and that we now have more farms, more forests, and more fields, then you are totally nonsensical, illogical, and have no understanding of the effects of the destruction that adding 100 million more people have done.

It is not just my personal opinion, anyone who was around 50 years ago witnessed the change, and the loss of our farms, fields, and forests that are now gone and replaced by houseing tracts.

The fact is, that when Disney land was built, it was in the middle of nowhere,and now it is surrounded by people. Same thing for nearly every city in the country. 50 years ago, I didnt feel crowded driving down the Florida east coast, and there was lots of natural beauty back then, because it was not crowded back then. Today, the entire east coast of Florida has been bulldozed and paved over.

You need to look up the history of “urban sprawl” in America and find out what really happened.

IF anyone cannot understand that we have not lost our farms, forests, and fields as we increased our population from 100 million , to 200 million, to 300 million, and now more, then they are not even capable of discussing population growth, and its effect on resources and on a country.
.

56

So, Susanann, what percentage of the land is the US now is devoted to housing tracts, as well as strip malls, freeways, and office parks?

And don’t no one give me any statistics that some snot-nosed jack put up on the internet. I want to know from Susanann’s personal experiences.

57

You’re aware of the concept of population density, right?

58

Fusion technology probably won’t play a significant part of the electricity in the 21st century. The ITER research reactor is planned not to finish their research until 2040. Assuming, rather optimistic, this will lead to a blueprint for a functional fusion plant, then we’ll need another 10 years to plan and bitch about financing. Then 15-20 years to construct a plant. And a lot of plants will have to be built for it to have a noticeable effect on the overall picture. But there are plenty of existing or more forthcoming technologies that can solve the energy problems.

59

All the things you cite are much more to do with how people have changed their lifestyles in the last 50 years than the absolute increase in population.

60

Sicne Japan was also mentioned earlier I’d like to point out why Japan is one of the most heavily forested nations. It’s because they stopped cutting down their own trees and started importing all their wood, and Japan uses a lot of wood. They have exported deforestation to other countries, just as we export many undesirable products of our own lifestyle.

I don’t know for certain that this is also the case for US wood imports/deforestation, but it seems pretty likely. You are probably preserving your own forests at the expense of forrests in other parts of the world that are less regulated.