the end of the world - and how to avoid it

elon's got this guys. stop worrying.

https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/twelve-billionaires-climate-emissions-jeff-bezos-bill-gates-elon-musk-carbon-divide

I went to school with an American kid whose family was old money, somewhere in the mid 9 figures back in the 90s. They had an advance team of designers and chefs who would deploy to their summer/winter/Alps/etc. home before the family arrived, and furnish the house and wardrobes. Everything from the swim trunks to the tennis whites (in case they felt like playing tennis at all) was new. The pantry was of course stocked with more fresh food than they and their visitors could eat. When the holiday was over, it would all stay at the house and be distributed among the staff or simply binned.

For one of their friends’ birthdays, the parents took the friend group to the Caribbean, and hired a company to design and implement a week-long pirate adventure trip for the kids (muppet treasure island had come out recently). The children’s adventure cost $50,000 and involved actors, trained parrots, sailboats, period correct bespoke costumes for the kids, muskets firing blanks…

Worth considering that musk and bezos have an additional 000 to their name. The consumption of the ultra-wealthy is truly beyond what most people can imagine.

the problem may not be population numbers per se, but the "use of machines" and related industrial "progress" is what has allowed the population to expand in the way that it has. i'm not sure that the two things can be decoupled.

It's well-established that the main driver of extreme population growth is poverty. Obviously, public health is a complex subject, and you need to factor in the impact of hygiene, etc., but populations have grown the most in the past century in areas where there is comparatively little technology (understood in the modern sense; I guess you could also interpret traditional modes of sustainable agriculture like in India and China as technology).

yes, the privileged few consume the most and do the most damage by a massive margin, albeit that "few" is now circa 1bn people.

I'm not talking about an 'ordinary' Westerners consumption. Astonishingly, the worst polluters are just a few thousand people. That's not to try and oversimplify it; of course it has an impact if 'ordinary' Westerners fly to the Maldives on holiday. However, we're talking about people who take at least several flights a week. The ratio of that to an 'ordinary' Western household is mind-boggling.

Obviously, even if all those people changed their ways, it would still leave that kind of 'lifestyle' as 'aspirational' and the cycle would begin all over again of people jockeying to get into that kind of position and perpetuate the nonsense that got us here in the first place.

Yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I was referring to.

the "use of machines" and related industrial "progress" is what has allowed the population to expand in the way that it has. i'm not sure that the two things can be decoupled.

If anything, we've seen a really strong decoupling in the wealthiest nations to the point where fertility rates have declined pretty rapidly. Maybe Malthus had a point in earlier industrial stages before the 20th century, but even then it was divisive to say the least. After rapid urbanisation and birth control, it seems like most people just don't really want to have more than two kids, which is what we'd need to exceed replacement rate. It doesn't really look like that's anything to do with resources aside from, maybe, land, which tends to have the effect of declining rather than increasing fertility rates.

That's all to say that, today, thankfully, we get to side step all of the nasty stuff that Malthusianism and obsession with population control started:

[Malthus'] scenario influenced policy makers to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting in draconian measures to restrict particular populations' family size, including forced sterilizations.

The belief that “those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak” led directly to legal actions based on questionable Malthusian science. For example, the English Poor Law implemented by Queen Elizabeth I in 1601 to provide food to the poor was severely curtailed by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, based on Malthusian reasoning that helping the poor only encourages them to have more children and thereby exacerbate poverty. The British government had a similar Malthusian attitude during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, Ridley notes, reasoning that famine, in the words of Assistant Secretary to the Treasury Charles Trevelyan, was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.”

(From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-malthus-is-still-wrong/)

I mean, this is still the same argument about benefits that many are having today, but we're still facing declining fertility rates:

based on Malthusian reasoning that helping the poor only encourages them to have more children and thereby exacerbate poverty

Bah, beaten to it by Schick

but populations have grown the most in the past century in areas where there is comparatively little technology

I'm not talking about an 'ordinary' Westerners consumption.

I know you go on to address this slightly but we should talk about it. Yes the ultra wealthy are highly destructive from a resource consumption point of view but the ordinary western consumption, especially in areas like the southern US states, middle east, affluent far east pockets is not sustainable if others aspire to it.

I don't have time to look for it but there are reasonable estimates that the global population could live a western 1970's-80's level of consumption sustainably. This would see a massive uplift in living standards for the global majority, a minor reduction for many and a unthinkable level of reduction for the wealthy.

We can't afford to perpetuate that the current 'typical' western lifestyle is without harm or just

There is a large body of work in the degrowth/ steady state economics looking at this but it challenges societies political and economic expectations of endless growth

The reminder about Malthus is useful, though.

We can't afford to perpetuate that the current 'typical' western lifestyle is without harm

Completely agree. I was just trying to make the point of the exponential sides of the pyramid. Yes, the 'energy crises' of the 70s were a major tipping point when use of technology increased massively (smaller, but far more, cars, computer technology (unrelatedly) coming along for mass consumption, etc.).

If anything, we've seen a really strong decoupling in the wealthiest nations to the point where fertility rates have declined pretty rapidly

Yes the current forecast is 8 in 10 people will be from Asia or Africa by 2100, with Africa trippling it's population between now and then. Asia will be declining by 2100 but continued growth from now until 2080.

We are ill prepared for the coming demographic shifts and thier seems little appetite for discussion or planning for it. Europe has seen tiny changes so far compared to what's coming and already sees it's politics not fit for purpose and populations resistant and unprepared.

If we add that by 2100 there will be a mostly uninhabitable belt around the equator taking in a lot of sub-saharan africa, some of the middle east and asia, it makes things a bit spicier.

We are ill prepared for the coming demographic shifts

Totally agree. I think one of the more hopeful aspects of this, though, is that the development of poorer nations tends to be quicker and effectively skip past the more extractive industrial processes of older western nations.

The question then becomes more entwined with economic equality and political will. Who will be making decisions about resource usage as well as pushing for the technology and ecological practices required to reproduce society through more sustainable means?

I guess Europe will also experience mass migration from African countries in the search for more temperate climates when agriculture is no longer productive?

Who will be making decisions about resource usage

Well if we look post war, the oil rich countries realised they could nationalise natural resources and tell the imperialists to do one (worked out better in some cases than others I.e Iran). So I imagine you could see popular movements for resource rich countries to take control of thier resources again. Probably see more of things like this as well
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-09/congo-wants-to-pivot-away-from-china-s-dominance-over-its-mining
Obviously none of this promises a ecological or just transition if you land up with a bunch of corruption and oligarchs

There's some interesting work going on to create a green belt beneath the Sahara to stop the expansion of the desert southward. Not the greatest video, but okay to get the gist of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCli0gyNwL0

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00524-4

This is purely heat related but gives you an idea of which areas will be challenged

Make tool use illegal. Use the Banhammer to ban hammers.

I'm avoiding the end of the world by being dead before it happens.

HTH

but populations have grown the most in the past century in areas where there is comparatively little technology

i realise that population growth is currently centred outside of the "developed" world, but nonetheless, something changed 300 or so hundred years ago:

https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-over-time

so it could be that we can do a bit of levelling up / levelling down at a global level, population peaks somewhere between 9 and 11? Bn and we muddle through. it just seems unlikely to me.

This makes feel old. Has Woody been cancelled since then?

https://youtu.be/Dj0GZQdCct8

The answer is mainly hygiene. You have to remember that people in cities basically used to drink water enriched with shit and life expectancy was far lower. Improving this didn't start with John Snow, although he was tremendously important in taking hygiene to another level. Of course, it wasn't monocausal, and there were other factors, too. Technology mainly benefited only a small percentage of the population, as today (although most people use technology today, you still have a huge discrepancy between those with the massive data centres and those with their little computers at home).

I reckon I'll just sleep through it

The problem is absolutely not overpopulation.

Population growth isn't the cause, and the motivations for saying so are often racist. But it's a symptom, and a magnifier of the side effects of the whole shitshow. Consumerism depends on population growth all the way across the board, from providing ever more consumers and workers to paying for the welfare state.

May I try a philosophical take? Our species has a powerful sense of self-awareness. This makes many of us search for a meaning to our lives.

But there is none. So we try to find meaning by making our mark with excess consumption and displays of power. It's a sad paradox that self-awareness, which we think of as our unique advantage, is driving us to consume excess resources and extinguish ourselves. We need to accept that our lives are trivial, inconsequential, just a molecule in a planet-sized brownian motion.

I have done this. It's quite calming but it has an unfortunate label, absurdism, which doesn't sell it that well. And to be honest I wouldn't have accepted this willingly. It's been forced on me by having ME for 30 years. I'm 62, with almost no friends and family and no money or self-determination, and I realise my life is never going to add up to anything. Anything at all. This is my enlightenment.

I wish I had come to it willingly when I was 16 and agonising about what to do with my life. Are there people here who have always known this? Maybe the zen and yoga types? Perhaps more likely to be women than the often egoist, selfish, aggressive men?

This is another way of saying that the patriarchy has doomed us. A matriarchy could save us from ourselves, but the patriarchy is in the driving seat and will not share it.

further to this, if you buy dates, buy ones from tunisia, farmers there help prevent desertification.