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:

What is the ideal amount of biomass for humans? Same question for agricultural land. What’s the ideal amount? I’m torn between thinking this is just how things go or maybe I’m just terribly ignorant. At some point the majority of biomass was dinosaurs or something, so what? That’s the ebb and flow of life. It wasn’t the biomass of dinosaurs that caused their extinction. How do these biomass stats indicate overpopulation?

I can’t disagree with the industrial farming and overall ecosystem points you raise but the biomass bits seem awfully arbitrary.

I’d also say feeding 50% of the world’s population for 2% of the world’s energy seems pretty damn efficient.

It's just blatant disinformation.

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.

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.

Or you could just take a train

So basically it's perfectly fine? But for some reason you made it sound horrible?

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.

Source: my ass

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.

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.

It's also just wrong, humans use half of all habitable land for agriculture alone. Unless everybody moves to Antarctica doubling it would result in destroying literally all of nature on habitable land.

Haven't you read the top comments on this thread? It's impossible to feed people our excess and continue paying for things like USAID because of overpopulation.... Apparently.

The "let them starve" eugenics propaganda is strong in the pseudo-science community.

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

First world lifestyles are indeed unsustainable, but not due to food scarcity. We have a global overproduction of food, due in part to logistical inefficiencies but in a larger part due to free market economics with artificial scarcity to drive up prices.

Organic farm practices currently yield about 20-30% less than less sustainable ones. Current US food wastage is 40 % of produced goods. So at least the US could switch over it's food supply to organic farming and still feed everyone on the same acreage.

There's plenty other resource usage that first-worlders need to cut back on, mostly petrochemicals and plastics in everything from travel (make walkable cities) to novelty consumption (buy it for life).