A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Yes! Cover the earth in medium density mixed zoning tram neighborhoods! Anyone who doesn’t want to give the entire planet to one species is Malthusian!
What in the fuck is an ecofascist?
Is there some alternate universe you people come from where overexploitation of arable topsoil doesnt happen?
ecofascism is an authoritarian approach to addressing global climate change. they believe that poor people are a strain upon the land and that left to their own devices humanity would destroy the planet out of spite.
often, they ignore the top heavy causes of climate change. i can elaborate now but i need to go to the store
Rich people are a bigger strain on the land. Get rid of them first.
Do enlighten us when you've done your shopping.
Essentially - people who claim overpopulation is killing the planet, therefore we need to remove the undesirables to fix it. I wouldn't argue it's the most common position.
Overexploitation is killing the planet. We used to have millions of buffalo across America farting up the atmosphere with zero issue for tens of thousands of years. Less than 200 years of industrial scale beef exploitation later and suddenly cow farts are destroying the atmosphere. Is is the cows fault for farting? Or is it the humans fault for breeding 500 million cows?
Cheap Chosen Slavery?
Overpopulation and billionaires can be part of the problem at the same time. We can produce so much resources because of the capitalist approach of cutting corners and going cheap at the expense of environment. More ethical ways of producing stuff would mean significantly less than what we have now which would require less population. Moreover it is funny to call this the ecofascist rhetoric because implementation of the idea presented in the OP would require forced displacement of billions of people living in cities to rural areas at best, to deserts and tundras at worst.
Also people like Elon who thinks they should distribute their sperm all around the world is at the intersection. So no matter which way one choses they are always the problem so maybe we can agree to start with them and see if it gets better.
It's ecofascism when people pin it on humanity in general and not capitalism. The solution is changing our economic system to one that would allow us to live alongside nature rather than destroying it, and not to simply kill off a chunk of the population to address "overpopulation".
I think the point is that we already live in a post-scarcity world, or rather in a manufactured-scarcity world
If everything about Human society was completely different we could live sustainably on the planet. Great insight.
We are producing enough food (and clothes, and appliances, etc., etc.) for 10 billion people, and the planet is burning. It is not sustainable long term. And, by "long term", I don't mean "the next 20 years", I mean "the next 100-200 years".
And the "manufactured crisis" of population decline hits really hard if you're 12 and have no clue how the retirement system works.
They arrive at the right conclusion (capitalism is currently the cause of all suffering), but through completely stupid reasoning.
We should be ecstatic about the population decline. The surplus production from automated/industrial systems can more than make up for the decline in population. The resource issues are purely a matter of distribution. The people who oppose the common sense solutions to the distribution issues can be sidelined or composted.
I would agree with you if we went all in on UBI, including Universal Basic Pension. Because without that, population decline means slowly starving out the elderly, or throwing so much work on the younger generations, that they reproduce even less.
If everyone is old and nobody is left to work, it doesn't matter how big the pension is, there's nothing to buy
We are producing enough food (and clothes, and appliances, etc., etc.) for 10 billion people, and the planet is burning. It is not sustainable long term.
That's not necessarily true. How much of our overall greenhouse emissions come from which sector?
From this chart, decarbonizing electricity and transport will go a long, long way, and decarbonizing manufacturing and construction could also give some room to reduce overall emissions by more than the entire agricultural sector produces.
And it's not just some kind of pipe dream. We're doing real work at decarbonizing electricity, heat, transport, shipping, construction, etc., as the prices of low or zero emissions options start to outcompete the higher emission options for many applications.
Plus if the data center boom crashes as a bubble, a lot of the infrastructure investment into increasing energy production and distribution with both high carbon and low carbon sources will at least have financed a lot of low carbon energy and the potential for curtailing the least carbon efficient generation methods.
Overpopulation is not a myth. 36% of the earth's mammalian biomass is Humans, only 5% is wild mammals. 71% of avian life is livestock. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
Half of all "habitable land" (which includes everything except deserts, tundra, salt flats, beaches, or exposed rock) is used for agriculture. Half of all land, for agriculture. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/12/agriculture-habitable-land/
Industrial farming is not sustainable at the current rate and relies on either mined or petrochemical derived ammonia which supplies the nitrogen necessary for protein. Synthetic Ammonia alone feeds half the world population and requires an additional 2% of the world's power to produce.
The global ecoystem is in rapid decline.
I gave up finding appropriate sources halfway when I realized this post will just get removed eventually.
IMO the biggest problem with the post is that it is ignoring that natural world completely.
We can't colonize mars, not because it's far away and hard to get to (although those are problems). The real issue is that we don't really understand our own biosphere enough to build even an imitation one somewhere else. The ISS is orbits so close it's barely out of the atmosphere. It's still well protected by the Earth's magnetic field, and gets regular deliveries of food, water, spare parts, etc. Every time we've tried a closed biosphere (biodome?) on earth, it has failed.
The bigger Earth's population, the shorter the timespan we have before we can realize we screwed up somehow (i.e. overusing artificial fertilizer, emitting too much carbon, etc.) and having to urgently fix it or the whole planet is wrecked. If we had a "planet B" it wouldn't be so urgent. If we knew perfectly how the ecosphere worked, we wouldn't screw up. If we had "save points" and could just load them if we screwed up, then we could run closer to the edge and go back if we messed up. Unfortunately, this is the only planet we have, and we still don't know how it all works. Because of that, we should really run with a much lower population so that when we inevitably screw up there's a buffer to protect us while we adjust.
It's not the growth of ethanol (maize) and animal feed (soybeans) producing crops on the last 30 years, highly fucking inefficient and produced in the worst way possible, not even that pasture uses A LOT more land than agriculture while being a lot less energy dense, both using a lot more water than producing direct food, it's the poors.
Edit: And also, beef is the major cause for deforestation too:
total emissions = emissions per capita * capita
Unless we figure out carbon neutrality without cratering HDI in the next year or two maybe lets work on reducing birth rates. 'we could have 20 billion people if we all live like subsistence farmers' is fucking stupid.
except that not all "capita" have same emissions. someone in Eritrea has a much smaller "carbon footprint" (a term invented by BP to distract from their own wanton disregard for the environment) than a billionaire in the western world
From memory, the choice of an american to become vegan makes up for a nuclear families worth Nigerians.
Yes that means it's less important to reduce birth rate in Eritrea than in the US or Australia or whatever. As long as you're either not concerned about raising their HDI rapidly or you think it can raise without per capita emissions rising with it and good luck with that.
fuck these climate change deniers
It's wild how ideas like this continue to exist despite being so contrary to evidence and reason, just because it shifts blame away from systemic issues and the ruling class.
This is a much less cool post when you realize that the Earth can only sustainably support 10 billion people if we never fly, give up a lot of our modern tech, and have rice make up 50% of our diet. Basically any meat is completely off the table, as with personal cars, and probably standalone houses. If I'm given the choice between not having kids and not flying to see my family for holidays, I'll take the no-kids option.
Your thesis doesn't match up with this chart:
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
We're working to decarbonize the highest categories on that list, with rapid adoption of solar/wind, some potential for more nuclear and geothermal in the medium term, and maybe even fusion in the long term.
Then, while decarbonizing electricity, we're electrifying heating for homes, water, cooking, and we're electrifying transportation.
US carbon emissions per capita peaked in the 70's, and peaked as a whole in the 2000's. US carbon emissions per capita still greatly exceed those of other rich nations.
It's very much possible to have modern first world living standards, even with significant reductions in our resource use and net emissions. We just need to line up the incentives (aka pricing) with what is good for the Earth. And we're already doing that in many of the heaviest polluting sectors.
So let's build lots of highspeed rail? We went to the moon on less compute than your cell phone and modern tech could be way more sustainable if we properly optimized. Rice is fantastic and works for a significant chunk of the current population just fine. Meat? Just gotta grow that protein in other more sustainable/efficient ways. Cars are useless in a dense urban environments and make everything worse. Fuck cars. Standalone houses are a giant waste of space and when you design your neighborhoods around this idea, everything is too spread out to actually have proper density and utility.
This is a very cool post that does point out that all of these things are in such excess. You should give StrongTowns and NotJustBikes a watch on youtube for much more on the topic of urban design.
As a Mexican I can confirm I'm already eating a lot of rice and beans, and I take the bus instead of flying. It's really not that bad, it's mostly over production of resource intensive corps and fossil fuels, which we could have already transitioned from without any real detriment.
Aviation is about 2.5% of global emissions.
In the long run then yes, we need carbon neutral fuels, but it should be possible for people to fly a little and not destroy the planet.