The dangerous part of that video is its a half-truth. It is ideologically driven to suit a particular biased narrative.
The “Demographic collapse” narrative chosen is framing today as glorious and tomorrow as catastrophic. Today, while impressive by many accounts, is already catastrophic. Earth’s ecology has Planetary Boundaries, limits to what can be sustained. We have crossed 7 of 9 that have been identified to date. Human populations, multiplied by our consumption patterns and waste streams have conscripted nearly all usable land for human purposes leaving “wilderness” ecosystems as a rarity. We have killed off so much wilderness, that we call this moment The Sixth Great Mass Extinction. Yes, humanity’s appetites are loosely comparably destructive on the level of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
The word sustainable, means “that which can be carried on indefinitely”. Humanity is so far from sustainable, we have an official Earth Overshoot Day. A day that symbolizes when Earth’s renewable resources have been consumed and humanity degrades the environment by “eating into our principle, rather than living off the interest” to borrow an analogy from finance.
If humanity were at 2.1 children today, the situation would be enormously MORE catastrophic. Think carefully here - a planet in overshoot that is living off all the ecological “interest” nature provides AND we eat into our principle as well, means next year, there will be even less principle to earn interest. With a stable population, that means each year you eat more and more ecological principle, until there is no principle left, and no interest either.
This is the other half of the truth omitted in that video. We are already more fucked from ecological overshoot, than demographic collapse. Climate change, pollution, soil depletion, groundwater depletion, biodiversity collapse and the conflict over what remains are all contributing factors.
The hope here is Degrowth. A sane, sober, ethical, scientificly based approach with a simple premise. Let’s deliberately shrink humanity’s ecological footprint until it not only fits sustainably on the planet (interest only) but lets reinvest a small surplus back into the wild so we can restore the ecological principle we so gluttonously consumed. Let’s stop the 6th great mass extinction and slowly reverse it.
Now looking at the full picture, falling birthrates are a total and unequivocal blessing. It won’t be easy or pleasant, but its the only chance we have to save humanity and some semblance of the natural world that nursed our species into existance. If we are lead by perpetual growthers, we will fight, try and die. If we Degrow, farms turn back into wild forests, savannas and grasslands. Suburbs not only empty, but are actively mined for resources repurposing their glass, brick and copper and aluminum to support our efficient, but smaller urban centres. Many mines are closed, as circular economies and a shrinking population can recycle metals infinitely. What is left can be retreived from the bloated dead corpse of our previous civilization.
Humanity has a collapse built in 100%. The choice before us, is do we Degrow - a managed deliberate attempt to get to a smaller sustainable future based on proven methods and technologies, or do you fight the inevitable and consume all resources until depleted and we are left fighting over the scraps until humanity is snuffed out as are most of the flora and fauna we knew and loved.
When humanity lives on the ecological interest only, then we can stabilize our populations, and maybe grow a bit and shrink as our abilities allow within a sustainable framework.
One can agree that humanity and its actions are an ecological disaster, but what makes you think a shrinking population won’t be even worse than a growing population?
On a country by country basis, the low birth rate countries (that is, the rich ones) consume a lot more natural resources than the high birth rate countries.
This is because the actual amount of resources consumed by any given individual can have several orders of magnitude more or less resource consumption than some other individual, so that you can’t expect per capita stats to hold up in a world where population dramatically shifts.
what makes you think a shrinking population won’t be even worse than a growing population?
Short answer: An education in environmental science, ecology and systems theory that says that when faced with such existential challenges, everything, and I mean everything is easier when you take pressure off rapidly depleting resources. Edit: asking people to solve this problem with only consumption, is tying one arm behind their back. Asking people to solve 100% of the problem by just being poorer, presents its own problems and assumes that the problem can be successfully managed only that way. No one wants to be poor. Fewer people through a lower birthrate also means that you get closer to the goal without having to be quite so poor.
On a country by country basis, the low birth rate countries (that is, the rich ones) consume a lot more natural resources than the high birth rate countries.
You are selectively framing the question. I didn’t say rich countries are forcing us into overshoot. I said we’ve already grossly dove into overshoot headfirst. The reckoning is baked in and unavoidable.
Those low consumption high population/birthrate countries are suffering biodiversity loss, groundwater depletion, have PFAS in their rain, microplastics in their brains and a changing climate that will be hostile to their needs. All we have left to do is decide if we want to have a managed collapse, or a chaotic collapse as we dick around with tangential issues at best.
Distrubution of resources, now, during our collapse and after with regards to anything remaining while important, are secondary to getting all of humanity’s ecological footprint down to sustainable levels. This necessarily means fewer people AND less consumption. The exact number of people, aggregate consumption per capita and the distribution of consumption within that population are secondary. It’s also a moving target. The longer we wait, the more permanent damage we do to earth’s carrying capacity and the lower all those numbers become.
We must move with haste and purpose, or die trying. ;)
Distrubution of resources, now, during our collapse and after with regards to anything remaining while important, are secondary to getting all of humanity’s ecological footprint down to sustainable levels. This necessarily means fewer people AND less consumption.
That doesn’t necessarily follow, and is inconsistent with past observations. At a micro level, take the example of greenhouse emissions from the United States, which peaked in 2007 and have come down since (despite population growth and economic growth). On a per capita basis, the United States peaked in 1973.
At the same time, we simply cannot afford for other nations to increase their emissions to US levels on a per capita or per GDP basis. None of that has anything to do with the birth rate, and comparing the birth rates of different countries doesn’t reliably predict whether their CO2 emissions equivalents change (either by amount or by percentage).
Simply put, the relationship between birth rate and effect on environment is so loosely related that pushing down birth rate is likely not going to push down pollution or environmental destruction. The solutions are actual engineering and economics, not family planning and demographic policies.
At a micro level, take the example of greenhouse emissions from the United States, which peaked in 2007.
Looking at CO2 during a selective period and deliberately limited space where they outsourced their emissions to poorer countries is not instructive. The emissions were just taking place in a way you chose not to measure. The waste was still there, but only made worse because we now get to add the emissions from shipping raw materials from Canada to China, goods made in China to the US for primary consumption then the garbage gets shipped to the phillipines for disposal as one of many similar examples.
Simply put, the relationship between birth rate and effect on environment is so loosely related…
Not loose. Complex but direct. People consume resources. Find me the example of people who don’t and I’ll concede this point.
The solutions are actual engineering and economics, not family planning and demographic policies.
Right-o. More business as usual will surely solve the problems it caused. We just need to double down on our current trajectory. Lol.
Something, something… problems solved… something something… level of consciousness that created it, or something.
Complex but direct. People consume resources. Find me the example of people who don’t and I’ll concede this point.
You don’t need to dip into the negatives to show that one group of 1000 people consumes less resources than a group of 10 person. If personal resource consumption varies by several orders or magnitude between individuals, where one private jet trip over the course of a day can represent more than the annual consumption of someone else, then it is very easy to show that the correlation between population size and aggregate net resource consumption is weak.
The emissions were just taking place in a way you chose not to measure.
No, running the same analysis by place of consumption doesn’t significantly change things, because the biggest drivers of greenhouse emissions are still local consumption: transportation (especially air travel), heating, and things like concrete manufacturing (where the concrete tends to cure on site).
My point is simple: anyone who believes that climate change is solved by depopulation is dead wrong. We should still be working to reduce emissions in places that have stagnant or dropping populations, because everything we’ve seen in the last 50 years (which you describe as a selective period, but I select that period because it’s been the worst in world history for carbon emissions and climate change) is that countries significantly increase their resource consumption right around the same time they slow down their population growth.
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding my point as an argument for the status quo, that what we as humanity are doing enough. No, I’m arguing that actually making the right changes are going to be orthogonal to population growth. Decarbonization is important, and needs to be done, even if you Thanos snap half the world’s population, because there’s nothing stopping the remaining humans from being even more resource hungry.
It’s like you are deliberately misunderstanding. Degrowth is the voluntary, ethical managed reduction in consumption and people. Saying “Thanos snap”, tells me you don’t know what you or I am talking about.
There are a million important conversations to have about consumption and its distribution, they are just of a secondary order to solving the problem. Yes billionaires on private jets should not exist. But ~8.2 billion let’s say for simplicity’s sake, lower middle class (I’m assuming here your goal is not to maximize people at the expense of abject poverty and primitivity) are not going to fit in their environments in any environmentally sustainable fashion. It absolutely must be both population and consumption. You don’t realize how far over the line we’ve gone.
The extact numbers depend on the details, but 1 billion mostly vegetarian humans living mostly in efficient urban centres defined by electrified economies, public transit, passivehouse can keep a modicum of techno-industrial civilization like modern medicine and probably not cross any planetary boundaries and can rewild much of the planet so the biodiversity loss gets plugged.
8.27 Billion poor humans you suggest, will collapse on their agricultural needs alone. The exhausted groundwater, soil depletion, chemical loading and transportation let alone the floods, droughts, and other extreme weather exacerbated by climate change will exceed earth’s carrying capacity in many respects, let alone all the other consumption for human life that goes with those numbers.
Edit:
My point is simple: anyone who believes that climate change is solved by depopulation is dead wrong.
Fine. But that is not what I was ever talking about. Climate Change is one small facet of sustainability. Degrowth is about dealing with all the planetary boundaries we’ve crossed. Sustainability is all factors combined. Land use, soils, pollution, biodiversity, all of it.
Edit 2: Here is a thought experiment to illustrate. How many people do you think we can clothe sustainably? All our polyester, nylon, rayon clothing is shedding microplastics into the environment. You are full of them now. Fibres are shed each time your clothes go in the wash. So the sustainable solution is to use decomposable materials only. Mostly cotton, linen, hemp and wool. How many people do you think you can clothe with global production of just those materials, without synthetics? How much cotton can we reliable grow every year, accounting for floods and droughts etc…
In a sustainable world, are you still wearing your synthetic Nike Air Force 1’s, or are you wearing leather shoes with leather soles? How many cows and sheep are you growing for those shoes? On what land, with what feed. Where do you put the cows emissions?
Tackling sustainability is an enormous job. Solutions are often difficult and limited and imperfect. But every single solution gets magnified and multiplied by having fewer people.
Collapsing birth rates, as required by degrowth are a big part of that solution.
Extinctionists are vilified because some tech bros believe it literally, but it’s more about the fact that the world population necessarily needs to go down to something that can handle the ecological overshoot.
I’m not sure what you mean by Extinctionist. But I will say that many who understand the situation choose to go Vader and would rather go down the eugenics, pogroms and impoverishment of “others”. Any good idea can be corrupted by assholes.
Overshoot has a price to be paid in lives through conflict and deprivation. I believe it is preferable for that price to be paid by people never having been born in the first place. It is a key pillar of Degrowth.
Edit: I’m fully aware of other variations and “solutions” to the predicaments we face. I’m just saying of all the possibilities and modalities, if you want to rank :minimize suffering" as a no. 1 goal. This is the way to go.
I read a few years ago that it’s already too late.
Edit: It was last year and a video from Kurzgesagt: https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk
The dangerous part of that video is its a half-truth. It is ideologically driven to suit a particular biased narrative.
The “Demographic collapse” narrative chosen is framing today as glorious and tomorrow as catastrophic. Today, while impressive by many accounts, is already catastrophic. Earth’s ecology has Planetary Boundaries, limits to what can be sustained. We have crossed 7 of 9 that have been identified to date. Human populations, multiplied by our consumption patterns and waste streams have conscripted nearly all usable land for human purposes leaving “wilderness” ecosystems as a rarity. We have killed off so much wilderness, that we call this moment The Sixth Great Mass Extinction. Yes, humanity’s appetites are loosely comparably destructive on the level of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
The word sustainable, means “that which can be carried on indefinitely”. Humanity is so far from sustainable, we have an official Earth Overshoot Day. A day that symbolizes when Earth’s renewable resources have been consumed and humanity degrades the environment by “eating into our principle, rather than living off the interest” to borrow an analogy from finance.
If humanity were at 2.1 children today, the situation would be enormously MORE catastrophic. Think carefully here - a planet in overshoot that is living off all the ecological “interest” nature provides AND we eat into our principle as well, means next year, there will be even less principle to earn interest. With a stable population, that means each year you eat more and more ecological principle, until there is no principle left, and no interest either.
This is the other half of the truth omitted in that video. We are already more fucked from ecological overshoot, than demographic collapse. Climate change, pollution, soil depletion, groundwater depletion, biodiversity collapse and the conflict over what remains are all contributing factors.
The hope here is Degrowth. A sane, sober, ethical, scientificly based approach with a simple premise. Let’s deliberately shrink humanity’s ecological footprint until it not only fits sustainably on the planet (interest only) but lets reinvest a small surplus back into the wild so we can restore the ecological principle we so gluttonously consumed. Let’s stop the 6th great mass extinction and slowly reverse it.
Now looking at the full picture, falling birthrates are a total and unequivocal blessing. It won’t be easy or pleasant, but its the only chance we have to save humanity and some semblance of the natural world that nursed our species into existance. If we are lead by perpetual growthers, we will fight, try and die. If we Degrow, farms turn back into wild forests, savannas and grasslands. Suburbs not only empty, but are actively mined for resources repurposing their glass, brick and copper and aluminum to support our efficient, but smaller urban centres. Many mines are closed, as circular economies and a shrinking population can recycle metals infinitely. What is left can be retreived from the bloated dead corpse of our previous civilization.
Humanity has a collapse built in 100%. The choice before us, is do we Degrow - a managed deliberate attempt to get to a smaller sustainable future based on proven methods and technologies, or do you fight the inevitable and consume all resources until depleted and we are left fighting over the scraps until humanity is snuffed out as are most of the flora and fauna we knew and loved.
When humanity lives on the ecological interest only, then we can stabilize our populations, and maybe grow a bit and shrink as our abilities allow within a sustainable framework.
You spell this out well–in a way i often struggle to put into words.
One can agree that humanity and its actions are an ecological disaster, but what makes you think a shrinking population won’t be even worse than a growing population?
On a country by country basis, the low birth rate countries (that is, the rich ones) consume a lot more natural resources than the high birth rate countries.
This is because the actual amount of resources consumed by any given individual can have several orders of magnitude more or less resource consumption than some other individual, so that you can’t expect per capita stats to hold up in a world where population dramatically shifts.
Short answer: An education in environmental science, ecology and systems theory that says that when faced with such existential challenges, everything, and I mean everything is easier when you take pressure off rapidly depleting resources. Edit: asking people to solve this problem with only consumption, is tying one arm behind their back. Asking people to solve 100% of the problem by just being poorer, presents its own problems and assumes that the problem can be successfully managed only that way. No one wants to be poor. Fewer people through a lower birthrate also means that you get closer to the goal without having to be quite so poor.
You are selectively framing the question. I didn’t say rich countries are forcing us into overshoot. I said we’ve already grossly dove into overshoot headfirst. The reckoning is baked in and unavoidable.
Those low consumption high population/birthrate countries are suffering biodiversity loss, groundwater depletion, have PFAS in their rain, microplastics in their brains and a changing climate that will be hostile to their needs. All we have left to do is decide if we want to have a managed collapse, or a chaotic collapse as we dick around with tangential issues at best.
Distrubution of resources, now, during our collapse and after with regards to anything remaining while important, are secondary to getting all of humanity’s ecological footprint down to sustainable levels. This necessarily means fewer people AND less consumption. The exact number of people, aggregate consumption per capita and the distribution of consumption within that population are secondary. It’s also a moving target. The longer we wait, the more permanent damage we do to earth’s carrying capacity and the lower all those numbers become.
We must move with haste and purpose, or die trying. ;)
That doesn’t necessarily follow, and is inconsistent with past observations. At a micro level, take the example of greenhouse emissions from the United States, which peaked in 2007 and have come down since (despite population growth and economic growth). On a per capita basis, the United States peaked in 1973.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
At the same time, we simply cannot afford for other nations to increase their emissions to US levels on a per capita or per GDP basis. None of that has anything to do with the birth rate, and comparing the birth rates of different countries doesn’t reliably predict whether their CO2 emissions equivalents change (either by amount or by percentage).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
Simply put, the relationship between birth rate and effect on environment is so loosely related that pushing down birth rate is likely not going to push down pollution or environmental destruction. The solutions are actual engineering and economics, not family planning and demographic policies.
Looking at CO2 during a selective period and deliberately limited space where they outsourced their emissions to poorer countries is not instructive. The emissions were just taking place in a way you chose not to measure. The waste was still there, but only made worse because we now get to add the emissions from shipping raw materials from Canada to China, goods made in China to the US for primary consumption then the garbage gets shipped to the phillipines for disposal as one of many similar examples.
Not loose. Complex but direct. People consume resources. Find me the example of people who don’t and I’ll concede this point.
Right-o. More business as usual will surely solve the problems it caused. We just need to double down on our current trajectory. Lol.
Something, something… problems solved… something something… level of consciousness that created it, or something.
You don’t need to dip into the negatives to show that one group of 1000 people consumes less resources than a group of 10 person. If personal resource consumption varies by several orders or magnitude between individuals, where one private jet trip over the course of a day can represent more than the annual consumption of someone else, then it is very easy to show that the correlation between population size and aggregate net resource consumption is weak.
No, running the same analysis by place of consumption doesn’t significantly change things, because the biggest drivers of greenhouse emissions are still local consumption: transportation (especially air travel), heating, and things like concrete manufacturing (where the concrete tends to cure on site).
Ocean-based shipping is so energy efficient on a joules per kg (or per cubic meter) per kilometer traveled that shipping a container 10,000 km from Shanghai to Los Angeles uses significantly less energy and emits lower carbon emissions than a 1,000 km route over land.
My point is simple: anyone who believes that climate change is solved by depopulation is dead wrong. We should still be working to reduce emissions in places that have stagnant or dropping populations, because everything we’ve seen in the last 50 years (which you describe as a selective period, but I select that period because it’s been the worst in world history for carbon emissions and climate change) is that countries significantly increase their resource consumption right around the same time they slow down their population growth.
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding my point as an argument for the status quo, that what we as humanity are doing enough. No, I’m arguing that actually making the right changes are going to be orthogonal to population growth. Decarbonization is important, and needs to be done, even if you Thanos snap half the world’s population, because there’s nothing stopping the remaining humans from being even more resource hungry.
It’s like you are deliberately misunderstanding. Degrowth is the voluntary, ethical managed reduction in consumption and people. Saying “Thanos snap”, tells me you don’t know what you or I am talking about.
There are a million important conversations to have about consumption and its distribution, they are just of a secondary order to solving the problem. Yes billionaires on private jets should not exist. But ~8.2 billion let’s say for simplicity’s sake, lower middle class (I’m assuming here your goal is not to maximize people at the expense of abject poverty and primitivity) are not going to fit in their environments in any environmentally sustainable fashion. It absolutely must be both population and consumption. You don’t realize how far over the line we’ve gone.
The extact numbers depend on the details, but 1 billion mostly vegetarian humans living mostly in efficient urban centres defined by electrified economies, public transit, passivehouse can keep a modicum of techno-industrial civilization like modern medicine and probably not cross any planetary boundaries and can rewild much of the planet so the biodiversity loss gets plugged.
8.27 Billion poor humans you suggest, will collapse on their agricultural needs alone. The exhausted groundwater, soil depletion, chemical loading and transportation let alone the floods, droughts, and other extreme weather exacerbated by climate change will exceed earth’s carrying capacity in many respects, let alone all the other consumption for human life that goes with those numbers.
Edit:
Fine. But that is not what I was ever talking about. Climate Change is one small facet of sustainability. Degrowth is about dealing with all the planetary boundaries we’ve crossed. Sustainability is all factors combined. Land use, soils, pollution, biodiversity, all of it.
Edit 2: Here is a thought experiment to illustrate. How many people do you think we can clothe sustainably? All our polyester, nylon, rayon clothing is shedding microplastics into the environment. You are full of them now. Fibres are shed each time your clothes go in the wash. So the sustainable solution is to use decomposable materials only. Mostly cotton, linen, hemp and wool. How many people do you think you can clothe with global production of just those materials, without synthetics? How much cotton can we reliable grow every year, accounting for floods and droughts etc…
In a sustainable world, are you still wearing your synthetic Nike Air Force 1’s, or are you wearing leather shoes with leather soles? How many cows and sheep are you growing for those shoes? On what land, with what feed. Where do you put the cows emissions?
Tackling sustainability is an enormous job. Solutions are often difficult and limited and imperfect. But every single solution gets magnified and multiplied by having fewer people.
Collapsing birth rates, as required by degrowth are a big part of that solution.
Extinctionists are vilified because some tech bros believe it literally, but it’s more about the fact that the world population necessarily needs to go down to something that can handle the ecological overshoot.
I’m not sure what you mean by Extinctionist. But I will say that many who understand the situation choose to go Vader and would rather go down the eugenics, pogroms and impoverishment of “others”. Any good idea can be corrupted by assholes.
Overshoot has a price to be paid in lives through conflict and deprivation. I believe it is preferable for that price to be paid by people never having been born in the first place. It is a key pillar of Degrowth.
Edit: I’m fully aware of other variations and “solutions” to the predicaments we face. I’m just saying of all the possibilities and modalities, if you want to rank :minimize suffering" as a no. 1 goal. This is the way to go.
Me too. Pretty horrible way to go for a culture
A horrible way to go for a culture is just no babies being born anymore?
I can think of about two or three ways that are more horrible. Which are actually occuring right now. :P