Can we talk about world population?

SVreX wrote: The world will cease to exist as you know it. Because, you're perspective is already that of an elitist 1%er. Don't get upset- mine too. What you are saying is "I like having vast amounts of wild areas for my personal pleasure". But that is VASTLY more than 99% of the world enjoys. Those areas can be protected, and maintained. But a more equal distribution of their access that is fairer to everyone will mean you have significantly less. Because you (and I) already consume vastly more than our share. We are greedy, and won't share with others what we already enjoy. We have less than 5 percent of world population, but we consume 35% of the world’s paper, 25% of the world’s oil, 23% of the coal, 27% of the aluminum, 19% of the copper, and create 50% of the world's waste. It's not a world population problem. It's a US consumption problem. If you would like to split it all up and insure that everyone can have what you already enjoy, well, that's not possible.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Because India/China didn't protect their natural resources, we can't protect ours? You say that we can but also say that I can't enjoy them?

Curmudgeon wrote: That's a result of the population growing faster than our ability to fix our problems and is why I advocate a population freeze. It's a damn sight better than the problems which will come if we don't. I forget which SF writer said this 'the nuclear and biological horrors which followed were not political or religious, more like beggars fighting over the last scraps of bread'.

How do you freeze it? You can only educate and stop incentivising it. The government forcing things on people will never work.

SVreX wrote: In reply to Enyar: So, you are saying that there has not been any technological advancement in 60 years? Which of the 60% of the population would you have liked to eliminate, since they failed to contribute?

I never said to eliminate anyone (see keep your hootus above). There has been TONs of advancement, mind blowing really. It's just come at a significant price to a select few and the environment...that's what bothers me. I'm just saying more isn't merrier...let's figure out the current problems before we keep creating more.

SVreX wrote: I don't consider "liberal" a name. I consider it a reasonable political position, and find it sad that so many liberals reject it as an insult.

I have many liberal views, I don't consider the word an insult. But when you group them all together in an prejudicial us vs them argument it never ends well.

That's another argument. Let's just eliminate parties and everyone votes on everything. 75% of people (dem and repub) for gay marriage? Done. 45% for stricter gun laws, try again in 5 years. Anyone that fits 100% in one or the other party sounds like a weirdo (there I go with the namecalling....damn libs) that can't be trusted.

1st post on the 1st, 3rd and 4th pages....hell yea! Dammit Gameboy, you ruin everything.

PHeller wrote: Make it easier and cheaper to adopt. My wife and I would seriously considering adopting if it wasn't so damned expensive. It's amazing that I can knock her up and if I've got health insurance I can practically have a kid for free, and then I raise that kid on the burden of tax payers. However, if I want to adopt kid who's parents gave it up, I've to prove that I've got $20k in reserve and spend thousands on forms, background checks, jump through some flaming hoops and end up getting stuck with a 5 year old demon child who has been neglected by the foster care system?

If you do some homework (happy to help if you are interested and send a PM) Adoption can be as affordable as doing it yourself. We adopted our son as an infant via a private agency for used Accord money. He was local to our own zipcode and hands-down the best investment I've ever made. having done the "infant" thing we're just getting licensed to adopt through the foster care system. We were license previously in Texas but a job move back to Cincinnati botched that one.
bama instituted a tax rebate of 13,500 available to anyone adopting to defray the cost. That turned the used accord expenditure into a more GRM challenge freindly out of pocket cost.

Sadly the jumping though hoops comment is 100% accurate as the process is much like being thoroughly audited by the IRS. It sucks but is worth it.

Just some fun facts for you. In early 2014 in Texas alone there were 14,000 kids under 18 available for adoption from the system. Just this year in Ohio alone there are currently 4,000 kids under 18 available for adoption from the system.

After age 6 children in the foster single have a sub 30% adoption ratio before aging out of the system at 18 years of age. Yes - that means 70% of those 18,000 kids (Oh+Tx)I just mentioned from two states alone will end up adults that never had a family to teach or love them. As you can imagine these kids are prison system fodder with little chance to excel.

A bit of an off-topic rant on the population discussion but I find most folks have no clue this issue exists in their own backyard...

Enyar wrote: Of all the things that frighten me in the news....over population has me shaking in my briefs. The world population has pretty much doubled since the Lamborghini Miura came out and it's set to triple what the population was back when WW2 was going on. That's really not that long ago!! A lot of problems of today are directly related to the rising population yet I'm the only one freaking out about this. Why aren't we dialing back the child tax credit, why aren't we talking about better ways for family planning, why are we not even discussing this? I'm going to be pissed if once retirement comes around all I get to do is fight famine and chaos. What do you think, valid concern or take the tin foil hat off?

so you're worried about the availability of Lamborghini Miuras in the future? Don't worry, I'm sure there will be another forgotten lambo that you can snatch up for a song in 30 years.

GameboyRMH wrote: Oil should really be a transitional energy source...I'm worried that in the future people will think that burning it for fuel was about as smart as setting nuclear fuel on fire to power steam engines.

I think it's a horrible idea now. We need to stop using petroleum as a fuel as soon as is possible. Not as soon as practical, because human nature will define "practical" as "all gone".

Yeah, my hobbies center around things that burn petroleum. It doesn't have to be that way.

I think about that when I see those plastic grocery bags. Or even trash bags that I use in my kitchen trash can. It won't be too long in the future when people will sit around and wonder why were so stupid as the use precious oil to make trash that hold more trash when we could've used it for something more productive. "All gone" doesn't even have to be reached, since we have already extracted most of the easy to get to high quality oil and we keep having to drill deeper and deeper and in more difficult environments. At some point before "all gone" the cost to extract will out weigh the benefit to have the oil. EROI will end the party before we consume all of the hydrocarbons.

T.J. wrote: ...At some point before "all gone" the cost to extract will out weigh the benefit to have the oil. EROI will end the party before we consume all of the hydrocarbons.

Don't worry. There is likely more. LOTS more. Just laying around in huge lakes / oceans:

http://www.space.com/4968-titan-oil-earth.html

Not cheap to get though

In reply to T.J.:

I thought the grocery bags were made out of corn. PLA

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/corn-plastic-to-the-rescue-126404720/?no-ist

In reply to aircooled:

That is the most misleading headline imaginable. There is no oil on titan. The article says there is ethane and methane. Hydrocarbons yes, but oil no.

If there is a profitable way to get it and bring it back here someone someday will try it.

Enyar wrote:

Curmudgeon wrote: That's a result of the population growing faster than our ability to fix our problems and is why I advocate a population freeze. It's a damn sight better than the problems which will come if we don't. I forget which SF writer said this 'the nuclear and biological horrors which followed were not political or religious, more like beggars fighting over the last scraps of bread'.

How do you freeze it? You can only educate and stop incentivising it. The government forcing things on people will never work.

Then it's time to start educating and incentivizing smaller families. That needs to start in these Third World countries where the population is exploding NOW. Like NOW NOW.

FWIW, China already is trying to keep a lid on their population; this means they've seen the problems of overpopulation and are taking drastic steps to curb it. I'm not saying I agree with their methods, only with their assessment that oh yes there is a problem.

How many countries actually incentivize child birth? I know ours does, but we are far from a population explosion here. Heck, my state is looking squarely at a population decline in the future- as the student population shrinks.

Most of the places where population is exploding are countries that USED to have a pretty high incidence of young deaths- so it was pretty natural that people were encouraged to have lots of kids. Now the health has gotten better, the number of births have not adjusted for that.

China already incentivizes small families. Have for decades. How we force that on other developing countries- good luck with that. They are going to have to learn the hard way.

For those countries, there's not much an individual can do- so why worry? What you can do is have less impact on the world yourself.

I haven't read the first 4 pages, but the way to make people stop breeding like rabbits is to ensure their first 2 kids will likely make it through to adulthood.

Now then... Overpopulation has been a big deal for decades. We were destined for destruction when somebodies math said there was no way the planet could support 6 billion people. Wrong. Also, if you put people in the density of a normal modern city, the entire population of the planet could live in the original 13 American colonies, leaving the entire rest of the planet for food production. This is likely an outdated specification now, but was legitimate 10 or 12 years ago. Add North Dakota (no, wait, we'll use Quebec. Its no good for anything else.) to the 13, and I'm sure we'd all fit.

Wouldn't be fun, but it could be done.

Humans are barely a blip on the screen. Tempest in a teacup. Probably won't end well for them.

Page 4 before I got here. Vacation has been nice, I played in the surf and toasted in the sun.

I may have done a lot of thinking on the subject of population and I may have written a pretty well researched 25 page paper on the topic a while back in college.

The best guess anyone had in 2000 was that the earths "carrying capacity" (a level which the resources are renewed as quickly as they are used) was between 3 and 4 billion. We are now at 7.3ish and climbing by approximately 250,000 PEOPLE EVERY berkeleyING DAY!!!!! That's a small city worth of crawling, consuming, building, polluting humans added to the burden of the planet every single day. Let that sink in for a bit.

Obviously we have the room for the actual bodies. It's the resources that are overtaxed. All the above mentioned things and I haven't even seen anything about the oceans. Talk about a disaster area, we dump everything into them like the biggest toilet in creation and scoop them clean of fish to feed our teeming masses. There are places now where centuries of fishing tradition is simply gone due to commercial fishing operations. So what do the fisherman do? Anyone heard of Somali pirates?

But I digress.

Humans have gotten very good at separating ourselves from basic biological stresses (disease,famine,etc) but at some point our population is going to take a big hit. I only hope that when (not if) it hits it's not so cataclysmic that society breaks down completely. We live in an age of hyper specialization and most people have no idea how to provide basic need items for themselves. They make their widget or provide their single service but not a broad knowledge of how it all comes together.

If the "adjustment" comes in the form of a pandemic flu and we lose 25% of the population, things won't change too terribly (maybe a little less traffic). If the toll is 50% we would be in a pretty good position to retool the new situation in a sustainable way.

It's a 95% clear cutting of humanity that has me nervous. I don't want to see us reduced to scavengers off the bones of society for a few centuries until we get back to a critical mass and can start making things again (only without the benefit of the cheap and easy fossil fuels because they were stripped out of the earth by us).

Am I doom and gloom enough? I hope so. I hope everyone is paying attention and realizes that the only way to have a planet worth leaving to our children is to leave it to fewer of them.

Streetwiseguy wrote: I haven't read the first 4 pages, but the way to make people stop breeding like rabbits is to ensure their first 2 kids will likely make it through to adulthood.

And ensure adequate health care/old age care. If you don't have those, you have a bunch of kids so the ones who live to adulthood can support you in times of need and old age.

Now then... Overpopulation has been a big deal for decades. We were destined for destruction when somebodies math said there was no way the planet could support 6 billion people. Wrong.

Well... It's wrong now. There have been great strides in food production since statements like that were made. Because people were very very motivated to figure out how to feed everyone before it was too late to figure it out.

IIRC there's one man who is generally credited with developing the agricultural means to have prevented our current population (heck, the population in the 80s) from being a catastrophe. Unfortunately, you can only miracle-science your way out of a population problem so many times before the gains aren't great enough.

And then you have the problem of nitwits insisting on wasting those gains by only wanting to eat organic, non-GMO, non-this, non-that foods, which negates all those advances. Maybe that and the apparently growing anti-vaccination movement is a kind of collective subconsciousness willful population control thing.

Adrian_Thompson wrote: It is a valid concern and it directly links to an even bigger issue, water shortages. The only way out of this is governments to put enough money into real science to come up with clean energy and efficient ways to desalinate water. The major religions need to pull their collective heads out of their asses and promote contraception and birth control. Child tax credit should stay the same for one or two, be flat for a third and become very very punitive for the fourth and above. It's morally reprehensible to have large families these days. We live in a very very different world from 20 years ago, let alone 30-40 years ago and almost unrecognizable form 50+ years ago. For all we bitch about China, the Chinese government is putting a E36 M3 load of money into solar and wind energy production and they will eat our lunch on making solar panels and wind turbines in short order because we believe government investment is bad.

my prediction for the next big war is between China and India.. and it will be over water.

As for population.. one of the biggest drivers is that overall health in the world is going up. It was not all that long ago that in some less developed areas of the world, you needed a few kids as "Spares" as most of them were not going to make it to adulthood due to disease, famine, and war.. today, that is not such a big concern.. but they are still having more than a couple of kids per couple because they are still not expecting them all to survive.

alfadriver wrote: How many countries actually incentivize child birth? I know ours does, but we are far from a population explosion here. Heck, my state is looking squarely at a population decline in the future- as the student population shrinks. Most of the places where population is exploding are countries that *USED* to have a pretty high incidence of young deaths- so it was pretty natural that people were encouraged to have lots of kids. Now the health has gotten better, the number of births have not adjusted for that. China already incentivizes small families. Have for decades. How we force that on other developing countries- good luck with that. They are going to have to learn the hard way. For those countries, there's not much an individual can do- so why worry? What you can do is have less impact on the world yourself.

Can't argue with that.

Knurled wrote: And then you have the problem of nitwits insisting on wasting those gains by only wanting to eat organic, non-GMO, non-this, non-that foods, which negates all those advances.

Here's my thing about those kind of foods. Part of the problem is food, gas, water is TOO CHEAP. If it only costs you $50 to fill up your tank, who cares about driving to pick up your mail? Who cares about watering lawns so they look green in the desert? Who cares about letting 50% of your fridge go bad? You're only out a few bucks.

It's wasteful and it's ruining everything. Government is always looking for money....tax it more/remove farming subsidies/tax credits. So in that matter if people start buying organic chicken that's pretty much the same as robochicken but it puts money in the hands or people that farm sustainably then so be it. I shouldnt be able to buy bananas from south america for 29 cents a pop.

Enyar wrote: China already incentivizes small families. Have for decades. How we force that on other developing countries- good luck with that. They are going to have to learn the hard way.

They do it in fairly unpleasant ways, too. 9 month abortions for unapproved pregnancies, or so I've heard

Enyar wrote: It's wasteful and it's ruining everything. Government is always looking for money....tax it more/remove farming subsidies/tax credits. So in that matter if people start buying organic chicken that's pretty much the same as robochicken but it puts money in the hands or people that farm sustainably then so be it. I shouldnt be able to buy bananas from south america for 29 cents a pop.

Keep the proletariat fat and lazy, and they won't have reason to take up arms. There is no rational reason for the American farm subsidy program. You guys give us Canadians a hard time about being socialist. We are way, way below your subsidy level.

In reply to Enyar:

The answer is quit attempting to pass laws that go against the BoR......if there is popular opinion, go through the amendment process.

In reply to Streetwiseguy:

Evidently we're still too small to get those.....

yamaha wrote: In reply to Enyar: The answer is quit attempting to pass laws that go against the BoR......if there is popular opinion, go through the amendment process.

BoR? Best I can tell that's a place in afghanistan or Odin's dad in the Marvel comic.

Enyar wrote:

yamaha wrote: In reply to Enyar: The answer is quit attempting to pass laws that go against the BoR......if there is popular opinion, go through the amendment process.

BoR? Best I can tell that's a place in afghanistan or Odin's dad in the Marvel comic.

Took me a few seconds to figure out, but it's "Bill of Rights"

SVreX wrote:

z31maniac wrote: No, don't bring facts into this. We need to rely on rampant conjecture and speculation about the potential of smart people being born.

The "rampant conjecture" is is about 50 years worth of pedagological research. Why do liberals try to end intellectual discussions when they run out of material by substituting name calling? Let's see... Try "Pedagogia do Oprimido" (Pedagogy of the Oppressed in English) by Paulo Freire for a starting point. It was originally written in Portugeuse, but there are English translations you can find. If you'd like to call someone names, you will have to target thinkers much greater than me. I am not qualified to make this stuff up. But thanks for thinking of me.

I realize that you are very good at coming up with your own definitions for words that fit YOUR narrative.

But please point out in the two sentences I posted where I called you a name, good sir? You will find I did not.

And calling me a liberal? Oh that's a good one, I have some liberal views and I have some conservative views, I most closely see myself as a Libertarian, but I don't agree with everything that label implies either.

Dumb people out berkeley the smart people.

Wow, this is a fast moving thread and I’m so glad that unlike many threads with political connotations we all seem to be playing nice in the sand box even if I was a bit snarky about religion yesterday, my bad.

OK Several things to comments on, let’s hope that it won’t be too disjointed.

I think we all can agree that no one wants to see a mass kill off of humanity, unfortunately we know that eventually it will happen when mother nature next gets PMS and creates a serious killer bug. We’ve had media hype over West Nile Virus, SARS, MERS, Ebola etc. over the last couple decades, but in reality they are not even minor sniffles in the grand scheme of things. The most recent serious epidemic was the 1918-20 flu pandemic, often incorrectly called the Spanish flu (FYI it was called the Spanish flu as Spain was one of the few countries who kept good records and allowed them to be published unlike the media censorship by the government over her to stop panic) That killed off an estimated 5% of the population, completely dwarfing the casualties from the just finished WWI. There have been all sorts of pandemics through the centuries, possibly the worst being the Black death that supposedly killed between 75-200 million people, up to half the population in some countries. None of those have led to a total collapse of society. We picked ourselves up, brushed ourselves off and carried on berkeleying up the world for the future. When the next biggie hits, and I hope I’m long gone before the world sees that, I’m sure it will do the same. It may thrust us into another global recession or depression, but let’s be honest, we bounce back from those pretty quickly, within a generation. I’m more worried about slower moving pandemics. Look at AIDS, that’s killing millions and millions of people and causing a lot of unrest. Third world countries look at the drugs and treatment we have in the west and it breads a lot of understandable resentment and hatred when their population is dying while we have medicine. That’s a world issue that is too much of a political hot potato to go down here, but is actionable if we in the West chooses too, along with education and condoms.

Next, how big a population is sustainable? I don’t know, and I flat out don’t believe any predictions or estimates. Every estimate that has come up in the past has been blown through almost instantly. All our millions of Einstein’s (yup, they may not be as famous, but there are millions of them out there research and inventing every day) keep making food easier to produce with higher yield in smaller areas. I’m personally very anti GMO, pesticides etc., but even ‘conventionally’ grown non GMO crops are getting more production dense. Also we really don’t need anywhere near as much meat as we eat, yeah I love stake and bacon as much as the next carnivore, but we really don’t need that much and livestock is far more energy intensive and space wasting than arable crops. Let’s face it, we all know in the West and in America especially we waste billions of tons of perfectly edible food by leaving it to rot as the price isn’t right, or even worse shipping it all over the continent then buying those tomatoes with the best intentions then throwing them out a week later as they look a bit wrinkled. I’d be willing to be that we will, if not easily, double, triple, quadruple the population and still be able to keep up when we start working as a world not a bunch of ‘keep of my lawn-ers’ No, I’m not talking new world order, Illuminati, black helicopters and UN police keeping order the world over. I mean people in this country, or Russia or China or or or, considering people in the Sudan or Iran or or or as just as important as themselves with the same human rights, wants, needs and fears. The world will eventually have to migrate towards more fiscal equality or we really are screwed.

Water. We berkeleying piss the stuff away in this country. Even compared to most other 1st world countries we use a stupidly large amount of water. Much as we want to bitch here about the cost of our water bills, it’s really really cheap here and we waste it like crazy. Tell people even in most European countries that we use drinking water to wash our cars and water our oversized chemical infested lawns and yards and they stare at us in disbelief. We waste the stuff and agriculture wastes it like there is no tomorrow. I posted on here a couple of years ago after a two week vacation in Colorado I was shocked. For a state that really seemed to be progressive and forward thinking in so many areas the agriculture was still using spray irrigation in the middle of 90-100+F days. What a waste, but people have the ‘it’s my right’ ‘My grandpappy was farming here so I can do it the same way’ attitude. The Colorado river is berkeleyed, but it doesn’t need to be. We need desalination tied to sensible conservation. Stupid lawn sprinklers should be banned in my opinion. Our house had a system installed before we owned it. 15 years ago I was just as wasteful as the normal American household and used it. I have turned it on in 5-6 years and guess what? I’ve still got a lawn. This county needs to get it’s E36 M3 together on water use and we can easily keep on expanding. The world needs to get it’s E36 M3 together on desalination and we can provide water security to hundreds of millions who don’t’ have that now, and safely support billions more in the future.

Space. Plenty of people, me included, have expressed a love for the outdoors. I love walking, cycling, camping, swimming etc., getting away from it and I don’t want to see the whole country paved over with apartment complexes and mega cities, but again I don’t think we have too. Look at the urban sprawl we have in this country. How many times do you pass run down, semi abandoned areas then carry on driving out of town and see a brand new strip mall another 5 miles down the road. The urban expansion even I’ve seen in my 21 years in the country is frightening. OK I live in SE Michigan and we have Detroit, but I travel all over the country and see it in many places. Growing up in England we have ‘Green belts’ That draws a line around a town/city and it’s a demarcation to the countryside. The green spaces and farm land and pretty well protected. You can suddenly find yourself going from a city to open country in a very very short space of time compared with the miles of endless sprawl here. I’m not saying we give up our rights and freedoms, but look in most metropolitan areas at the amount of wasted space. I’m not proposing or supporting this, but just suppose a law was passed tomorrow that said no more new development anywhere in the country, only redevelopment. IF we tried how many more people could we fit in the space we are already using without feeling any more crowded than we do today? I bet we could go up 50% without feeling crowded. Look at the number of new developments and communities that mandate 2 acre minimum lots for single family homes? Then look at some of the cool new places with individual houses all facing a common outdoor area? Look at the number of massive parking lots around cities, how many of those could be under buildings. Why are so many malls just single story? What’s wrong with a 2-3 story mall? Do you need freeway intersections in the middle of cities with cloverleaf on/off ramps that cover 4-5 acres?

Energy. We don’t want to keep burning oil and we hate wind farms ruining the look of our pristine country side. Tough E36 M3, both are here to stay, but that’s not the only way. We have to invest in alternatives. Last time I was in the Netherlands we caught a ferry out of Rotterdam. I was really impressed. IT’s a really heavy industry area, lots of factories, lots of warehouses, docks etc. An ugly place to be, but necessary for the modern work. Guess what, there were hundreds, possibly thousands of wind turbines around the place not ruining anybody’s view as it was ruined already. Also there are new vertical wind turbines that look a bit like a big wiggling stick. No as efficient as the traditional windmills, but they don’t’ kill birds, make a whooshing noise and can be closer together so you can get a greater density so the same energy or more per area. Yes it’s more cost, but who expects things to get cheaper. If we want to keep driving cars as oil diminishes there’s still ethanol. No I’m not talking about heavily subsidized corn ethanol that uses millions of gallons of water, pesticides and energy. Making it from berkeleying wild grass that doesn’t need watering or pesticides or many gas burning tractors running up and down all day. OK Monsanto won’t make as much money, but we can make it with far less energy used so it’s an actual net plus not neutral or minus like it is today depending on who you believe. Get rid of landfills. Modern trash burners have great scrubbers that clean the air. Use our trash to make energy. Keep investing in solar cell efficiency. Add solar panels to houses, factories, shopping malls etc. lots of empty flat roofs around. I’m starting to see mini solar farms next to freeways or unusable areas like the middle of the clover leaves I mentioned above.

I not as scared as the OP. Yes we have issues, but we have millions of Einstein’s to work engineer ways around them. It comes down to some relatively simple steps that we could work towards today, but we won’t, we will make it harder for ourselves and rush towards them at the eleventh house instead. Bu t I’m confident we will thrive and survive. In short we need:
Get more serious about pollution.
Get serious about clean renewable energy.
Get serious about how we use our energy and water.
Full court press on sustainable, clean, energy efficient desalination.
Get serious about global health care and human rights.
Get serious about how we use space. Redevelop and work towards comfortable increase in population density.

We’re going to have to invest. This country is going to have to get over its phobia of government investment and incentives.
What was the ROI to the economy from the GI Bill and giving tens of thousands of returning servicemen a free degree?
What was the ROI to the country on the taxpayer funded space race? We’re still reaping the rewards of that 40 years later while kicking NASA in the nuts today.
What already is the ROI for the Chinese government for their investment in alternative energy production?
Why do spend approx. twice as much per capita on health care compared to most of Europe yet never appear in the top ten for quality of health care.

Here’s to the next 10 Billion rug rats.

E36 M3 I rambled on, I hope at least some of this is coherent!