>But the notion that this planet can only support 5, 7 or 10 or 15B people is patently false.
It is also a strawman. People don't say that, they say that the world can only support X many people with our current lifestyle. I do not want to make my life, and the life of every other person on the planet worse, simply to increase the population of humans. We are not endangered. We have more than enough humans. There is no need to breed even more replacements, we're covered. Why cause every single person on the planet to have a worse life simply to pack more people onto this rock?
I pondered raising this issue in my above comment but decided not to since the comment was already long enough but the issue has been raised nonetheless.
I agree that "the planet can't support X" is code for "I don't want to change my lifestyle" or, by extension, "I want my children to have the same lifestyle".
Lots of animals return to the point where they were born to breed. Some cross vast distances. The human version of this is a mix of normalcy and nostalgia.
By normalcy I mean however the world was when we were in our formative years we view as "normal". I really wonder what life was like 500 or 1000 years ago when politics may well have changed but largely there were few if any substantial everyday technological and societal differences from one generation to the next.
The problem with this is that ew can easily start seeing everything through this lens such that things that diverge from our view of normal are (more likely) "bad" and those that don't are (more likely) "good". This I feel is a big part of conservativism/traditionalism.
The nostalgia is obvious. The time when we were young is often romanticized, even fetishized.
So as to maintaining lifestyle, let me put it this way: assume you're fo middle or upper class in the US. Could everyone in the world live as you do now? No. So by some measures we're already living beyond our (collective) means. And as hard as you may have worked, as smart as you are the biggest difference between you and a resident of some far less well off country is just plain old dumb luck that you were (probably?) born "here" (wherever here is).
Granted some people from more disadvantaged backgrounds do better their lot in life but the odds are stacked against them in a way that just isn't true for someone born in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, Western Europe and a handful of other places.
Fun fact: the population density of Tennessee is 160/mi2. The land area of the US is 3.8m mi2. If you populated the entire US at the same density as TN you'd fit 6 billion people there.
Would you consider TN overly dense?
You may not have ever been there but it doesn't matter. No one is piled on top of each other (like, say, Hong Kong at ~7000/mi2). People live on large lots in big houses and there's still wilderness.
We only live on a tiny fraction of available land. The vast majority of it is farmland but if farmland can produce 10 times as much per unit area then we need an awful lot less of it to support a much bigger population.
Unfortunately preserving one's way of life is so often just code for NIMBYism, excluding certain groups (eg segregation in the US) and maintaining the status quo just because you were lucky enough to be born in the right place.
Where is the logic in your statement? That makes absolutely no sense. You honestly think the world can support the same number of humans as it can chickens? And even if it did, do you want to live the way those chickens live?
A single prediction being wrong does not mean the concept is wrong. Especially a single prediction that was not based on evidence and that the scientific community said was nonsense. Al Gore said there would be no snow on any mountains by 2012. Since that was wrong, climate change is debunked right? Science is all wrong because one guy said something dumb one time!
Technology can not magic you up some more land. The earth is finite. When people say "technology will save us" they actually mean one of two things. Either "I don't want to think about this so star trek will come true!" or "we can develop the technology to completely eliminate all non-human life on earth and live in pods being fed an industrial slurry that has the highest % return of solar energy to chemical energy so stop worrying!". Both are dumb. Our standard of living is already going down. It does not make sense to choose to have more people living worse lives rather than fewer people living better lives. There is no benefit to increasing our population.
Not only is it not a good argument. It is a dangerous argument. We need innovation and maybe it will come in the form of “whacky” ideas, but please don’t replace the work that climate scientists have been doing for decades with a few “back of the napkin” calculations.
The fallout myth isn't true. And chernobyl is a perfect example. It caused the accidental creation of a huge nature preserve where species thought to be locally extinct are now thriving. Most wild animals don't live long enough for the slightly increased cancer rates to matter. The lack of humans destroying everything makes a huge difference on the other hand.
>The tree cover is almost back to pre-contact levels
The number of trees is not the issue. The ecosystem is. Huge plantations of SPF in rows that are all the same age and size does not make a natural ecosystem, and biodiversity is very low.
>lakes & rivers are potable
Public drinking water isn't even potable in many places, nevermind lakes and rivers. This is pure fantasy talk.
>IOW, local environmental problems have been solved
No, they have been relocated overseas so they are out of sight and out of mind.
>The challenge is global problems; climate change is a fairly classic tragedy of the commons.
Yes, I am sure the animals going extinct really just wish we could come together and tax people for breathing. Of course they don't care about their ecosystem being destroyed to grow corn for 5 years before exhausting the land and burning down another 1000 acres of forest for another 5 years of corn.
>Our track record in culling is much worse. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot only managed to kill about 1% of the population
None of them were trying to lower the population. Funny how you want to equate "lowering global population" with "mass murder" even though you clearly are aware that limiting births is the actual strategy, which actually works.
Or more accurately, destruction is slower in developed countries, largely because there's so little left to destroy. It is pretty hard to deforest Scotland any more than it already is.
Well, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot were actually trying to lower their target populations pretty explicitly. But grandparent is way off about the numbers.
The populations Hitler targeted lost about 50%; if he won the war they'd have done much worse.
Pol Pot killed 25% of Cambodians, not 1%.
Stalin also had a greater impact on his targets. When he created the Holodomor in Ukraine, he killed 10 million, which is much more than 1% of that population.
He didn't say anything about targets though, he was talking about total population. Which is exactly the thing, none of them were trying to reduce the global population, so their lack of success in that endeavor is meaningless. The fact that the non-violent solution actually worked is very important, but is slipped in at the end after the red herrings about mass murder.
Except that my diet and car have absolutely nothing to do with the problem. You're fixating on CO2 when the problem the article talks about is clearly environmental destruction. Canada and the US produce all of our own beef. There is no environmental destruction happening here for beef production. We can in fact produce much more beef using the existing idle grasslands we have now. And the only relevant problem from cars here is the mining, which is worse with an electric vehicle. Nothing you suggested even attempts to address the issue at all.
The energy, land, and water required to produce 1 lb of beef is several times greater than the resources required to produce 1 lb of chicken, which in turn is several times greater than the resources required to produce 1 lb of the average vegetable.
Not only that, but methane emissions from cattle contribute to climate change. About a third of anthropogenic methane emissions in the US are from livestock.
Not saying we need to stop eating beef completely, but if diets shifted away from beef it would have a number of positive environmental impacts.
You should be comparing calories, not pounds. Also, it really depends on what vegetables you're comparing (there is a 50x range in the amount of calories provided per input for plants as a class). Beef is generally less resource intensive than leafy green vegetables, but more resource intensive than most starchy vegetables. Chicken is less resource intensive than basically all plant food sources except for peanuts, potatoes, oils, and grains.
A brief glance at what most vegetarians and vegans are eating leads me to believe that their diets are probably not that much more environmentally friendly than your average meat eater. The real key is shifting toward inexpensive cheeses, milk, and oils for protein and fats and then consuming a lot more carbohydrates in the form of potatoes and grains.
And, really, the biggest impact environmental impact that most people can effect with their diet is not eating out as much.
Yes if you want to get into detail, one should compare environmental cost per calorie. Even then, beef still is worse than chicken and most vegetables.
I recognize that some vegetables are far more resource intensive than others, which is why I stated 'the average' vegetable. If we wanted to shift diets towards being more environmentally friendly, we'd have to be selective and deliberate about how we do it.
I would argue that shifting diets rather than trying to get everyone to become vegetarians (that don't eat lettuce) is the most sensible path. It would be hard to convince everyone never to eat a steak again, but if you can get people to go from eating 50 lbs of beef a year to 30 or 40 lbs and shifting to chicken and legumes it could make a sizable difference. Would be even better if the developing world went straight to sustainable diets rather than roaring towards beef-heavy diets.
None of those things have anything to do with the discussion though, which is developing nations torching natural ecosystems. Neither my beef nor my car is in any way a factor in this. Also, your comparison is disingenuous. A pound of beef or chicken contains far more calories and protein than a pound of any vegetable. And grass fed beef actually requires less energy to produce than vegetables.
Beef is a product made from cows. Cows require land, food, water, and infrastructure. Producing beef leads to the destruction of ecosystems, like the Amazon Rainforest [1]. By consuming beef, you are contributing to this phenomenon the article discusses. The emissions from your car, similarly, contribute to climate change and the destruction that goes with it as well. The lifestyle one chooses to lead, the products one consumes, and the decisions a person makes are all very much factors in the reduction of animal populations.
I'm starting to believe that you aren't arguing in good faith, in part because your statements are just thrown out there without any evidence or citation. Sure, a pound of beef or chicken contains more protein or calories than a pound of vegetables. But that's a nonsensical and misleading claim - many more pounds of vegetables went into producing that pound of beef and chicken. Many of those calories, by the way, were exhausted by the metabolic processes of those animals too. A much more efficient utilization of resources would involve just using those vegetable calories directly.
I do not understand the relevance of that tabloid article. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. I live in Canada. All my beef comes from Canada. The fact that people in other countries burn forests to graze cattle does not mean that Canadians consuming Canadian beef cause those other countries to burn forests. My beef consumption is 100% irrelevant, they will burn the same amount of forest regardless of what I eat, because they are not burning it to feed me.
Literally all beef in Canada and the US is grazed on open pastures. The majority of it is sent to feed lots for the last couple of months of their life to be fattened on grain, but they spend the first year in pasture no matter what. Second, absolutely none of the feed is imported from South America. It is from Nebraska and Iowa in the US, and Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada. Both nations produce massive amounts of grain, far more than needed to feed all the livestock we raise, much less just the cattle. Third, this is the point, it isn't attempting to minimize deforestation. My eating beef or not eating beef does absolutely nothing, as my beef did not cause any deforestation. My habits do not cause people half way around the world to change their behavior.
And just as a note of interest, your first link is quite incorrect. It uses the lowest production pasture figure for its math rather than the average, it does not consider the idea that grass fed beef becoming a major industry might involve people switching to more productive grazing systems which we know produce at least double the calories per acre. It ignores the huge quantity of idle grassland we currently have which could be used for cattle production. And it neglects to factor in the millions of acres of corn and soy fields that would no longer be needed for cattle feed and can be converted to pasture.
Thanks. I'm inclined to believe you on this as it seems reasonable, although I have to say that a blogpost is not the most trustworthy source of information :)
> You're fixating on CO2 when the problem the article talks about is clearly environmental destruction. Canada and the US produce all of our own beef.
Exactly, environmental destruction caused by the beef industry, an incredibly inefficient process if you compare the land and water requirements vs other types of protein.
> There is no environmental destruction happening here for beef production.
This is a huge blanket statement to make as well as being factually inaccurate.
That's a story that's often repeated here on HN. But it doesn't hold up much under scrutiny. American pasture lands, for instance, are not normally arable lands (cannot be used for cropland). And meat animals use less resources per pound of protein that vegetable sources. Certainly less plowing.
I'm always stunned by the idea that somehow raising millions of cattle is destroying the planet, yet the millions of buffalo that roamed the prairie before we arrived were natural and therefor good.
Edit: Where do you think the protein in cattle comes from? Isn't it… plants? That the cattle eat? Once eaten, the cattle expend some energy to live and then we kill them for meat.
By not eating animals, you cut out the middleman and waste less energy.
That premise is only accurate if you are planning to have everyone consume livestock feed. If that is the plan, then you shouldn't be fixating on beef, you should be going after almost all crops we grow, which produce just as few calories per acre as beef, and even lower protein per acre. Depending on where you draw the line, your argument effectively requires all farms to only grow a small number of very high calorie crops like field corn and potatoes.
Edit: I can't reply to child anymore, max comment depth reached. Anyway, I think my work here is done :) I am not demanding we stop growing lettuce, I am demanding we stop raising cattle for proteins. We can keep growing lettuce for vitamins / minerals. As for the so-called "absurd fake figure" for protein/meat land utilization, that figure is from 1970's. I'm willing to concede that number may have risen slightly with the use of antibiotics as growth stimulator ;)
P.S.: Legumes are a whole family of plants, divided into 11 major types.
You can't say "you are completely wrong" and then support that by showing I am right. You showed 5 crops that produce more protein per acre than an absurdly low fake figure for beef. That's precisely what I said, that we would have to cut down to just a small handful of highest value crops. 5 is a small handful, we currently grow thousands. You know full well lettuce produces fewer calories and less protein per acre than beef. But you are not demanding that we stop growing lettuce, just beef. Your demands are inconsistent with the premise you use to support them.
> American pasture lands, for instance, are not normally arable lands (cannot be used for cropland).
This is a fair point but unfortunately intensive animal agriculture (in feedlots) dominates US and world beef production which requires the growing of corn and other grains to feed entirely or supplement grass-fed beef, introducing further environmental impacts.
feedlots do not dominate US beef ranching. It is regularly used but the average head of cattle spends less than six months in a feedlot per it's average 1.5-2 year lifecycle. Even so advocating that feedlots are replaced by grass fed cattle is much more likely to happen and the growth of the grass fed beef industry shows that it is/can happen.
>Exactly, environmental destruction caused by the beef industry
Not in Canada or the US. We have vast prairies that used to be inhabited by millions of bison. Now a fraction of it is inhabited by cattle instead.
>water requirements vs other types of protein.
How is temporarily using local water in the US, which is returned to the natural water cycle, causing deforestation in South America or Africa or Asia?
>This is a huge blanket statement to make as well as being factually inaccurate.
Then provide contradictory evidence. I can not exhaustively prove every single ranch in the US isn't clear cutting forests. You only need to provide a single example to disprove me. Please do.
I wasn't sure about this so I did a quick google. There may have been an estimated 20-30 million bison at one point across North America. And currently something close to 80-90 million cattle today in the US alone. To answer why this is bad and bison were fine you have to remember how these creatures are being used. The cattle will be concentrated today in ways the bison never were, so the impact will be less diffuse. Second, the industrial processes around cattle production will use fuel to grow feed, pump water, and transport the beef product that previously would have stayed in the ecosystem when the bison died. These externalities are what cause the problem apparently.
No one single ranch is necessarily causing problems. It's a collective issue. No single person needs to withdraw enough water from the well to run it dry, a town can do it one cup at a time without anyone intending to cause his neighbor to go thirsty.
None of that has anything to do with the subject of discussion though. How are those US ranchers burning down the amazon? US beef consumption and production are completely irrelevant to the developing world burning forests to produce their beef, which again is what the article we're discussing is talking about.
There is no evidence that any acceptable behavioral alteration will help. The kind of behavioral modification needed is horrifying dystopian nightmare stuff, people naturally resist things like that. The population is going to be reduced no matter what. The question is purely "are we going to do it by lowering birth rates, or are we going to wait until India or Africa unleashes an antibiotic resistant super plague on the world that kills a few billion people?"
Rethinking our property system need not be draconian. The economic solutions to a steady state economy have been on the shelf for years. The ideology of growth will need a humiliating defeat, and then folks will be ready to accept alternatives.
The ideology of growth being dealt a genuinely humiliating defeat would involve massive depopulation event anyway. It seems far better to shift away from growth-dependent economics before any humiliating defeat rather than hope the people who survive it happen to be well-versed in regenerative economics.
I've started a meetup group for the purpose of discussing how a grassroots effort could shift some of the resources of the growth-economy to a steady-state economy while the former is still in place, but interest has been miniscule in my midsized college town.
That's stopping growth, that's what I am suggesting we do. The alternative which I think can only be draconian is "modifying our behavior" to accommodate a huge population. This means eliminating almost all food in favor of the half dozen highest producing crops. It means eliminating all natural spaces and consuming all resources for ourselves and leaving nothing for non-humans. I can't see any reason why a high population is a good thing, much less so good that it warrants making all those lives as miserable as possible. A billion people with high quality of life and a diverse planet full of billions of creatures beats the hell out of a hundred billion people living like factory farmed chickens on a planet virtually devoid of non-human life.
>so they weren't targeted because they're white, they were targeted because they proved to be the highest risk.
Which is precisely why blacks are "profiled" or "targetted" even by computers. And yet the media tells us this is because "AI is racist" and because of the "legacy of colonialism" and absurd nonsense like that.
The issue is that the pattern matching reinforces the problem based on race when race is not the cause. There are lots of historical reasons someone could be be a bad credit risk for example, but it isn’t because they’re black or some other race.
You want the algorithm to account for cause not correlated patterns that reinforce racial divisions and then perpetuate the inequality.
You simply want race to not be the cause. But all available evidence says it is. When people try to "fix" the evil racist computers by restricting the algorithm from using race, it simply finds proxies for race like "number of liquor stores per capita".
That’s because race is correlated with everything since racial divisions have a long history and share a lot of circumstances.
It’s not because of the color of someone’s skin. It’s not even clear where racial lines are drawn and previously distinct “races” have disappeared into the general “Caucasian” label depending on time period.
Your comments are why it’s a problem - people are unable to understand the difference and overfit to patterns in the data. Our learning shares a similar problem to ML.
When you don’t correct for this it hurts people of that race and helps to perpetuate the imbalance - reinenforcing the historical data and increasing inequality.
You can only make that claim by examining a single locus. When you examine multiple loci, human populations are clearly separated into distinct groups. The fact that this oft repeated myth is so commonly addressed that it is a named fallacy should be an indication that it warrants a little investigation into its accuracy. Here's a handy graph to help visualize how Lewontin's claim is dishonest and false: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03069877090053...
If you want to argue about the science, please research the subject first. There's no way anyone could do even a cursory bit of research and not come across this as it has been beaten to death, resurrected, and re-beaten to death.
I appreciate that it's a Claim To Authority but I'm going to take the collective word of the American Society of Human Genetics in 2018 over an anthropology student's blog post from 2009 without an astonishing amount of evidence to the contrary.
It is also a strawman. People don't say that, they say that the world can only support X many people with our current lifestyle. I do not want to make my life, and the life of every other person on the planet worse, simply to increase the population of humans. We are not endangered. We have more than enough humans. There is no need to breed even more replacements, we're covered. Why cause every single person on the planet to have a worse life simply to pack more people onto this rock?