Went to a cool talk on world population last night with Alan Weisman (author of "Countdown")

[Recursion]

He was speaking about his book Countdown as well as his earlier book The World Without Us (warning: that one autoplays a video with sound).

Things I took away:

1. I really, really loved how much importance he gave to agricultural technology. He in particular spent a long time talking about the Haber Bosch process of Nitrogen fixing and Borlaug, correctly pointing out that Borlaug remained a Malthusian his whole life. (He also liked that in India he never has to tell people who Normal Borlaug was, unlike the rest of the world.)

2. As it is we are set to have a world population of 10 billion by 2050 and 12 billion by 2100 (he doubts that is within the carrying capacity of the planet; I think there's another Borlaug out there somewhere who can torture the ground enough to make it happen).

3. Even if the Global West reduced its carbon emissions to zero, the impact simply from population growth in the developing world (particularly the agriculture needed to feed that population) absolutely erases all of those gains -- there is no solution to carbon without addressing population.

4. (He doesn't propose this; he just was making this point) A worldwide adoption of a one-child policy a la 1970s China would reduce the world's population to 1.1 billion by 2100.

5. The most effective population control program in human history was in Iran in the 1980s. Iran did not at any point attempt to limit how many children a couple can have. Instead, they gave women education and jobs, and made family planning education and contraceptives available for free (and actually the family planning education was mandated for all marrying couples). Fertility dropped by two thirds in ten years.

6. I've often said here that the most effective contraceptive in the world is economic development, but Weisman is persuasive that that's incomplete. The most effective contraceptive in the world is female education and female economic liberation. The fact that that tends to go hand-in-hand with overall economic development is just a correlation; the cause of both salutary effects is the liberation of women.

7. And now the bad news: we simply don't have economic models or theories that can deal with a growth-less economy. Which means we need to develop them.

[LWolf]

1. I have long been aware

that there could be no real solution to the planet's many problems without addressing population growth, and that the growth model we function in is not sustainable.

We need to develop those growth-less models. We needed to last century. Who is working on doing so?

[Recursion]

2. Weisman says, "nobody"

Nobody is actually working on that.

[LWolf]

4. I can understand why.

It's in direct conflict with reproductive rights. Yet the future of the planet and the human race might depend on it. Where to begin?

[ryan_cats]

3. Sounds

Sounds as prescient as Paul Ehrlich.

[The2ndWheel]

5. Funny thing about #4

China has the most people, and now they want to drop the whole one child policy.

We've got 4 options.

1) More people doing more
2) Fewer people doing more
3) More people doing less
4) Fewer people doing less

#1 is the world as it is right now in the big picture. #2 is the developed world. #3 is the developing world. #4 isn't a functioning society in any relatively modern sense.

#4 isn't really an "option" per se, so, there are really 3 options. By my count, the word more is in there 4 times within those 3 options, and less or fewer, only there twice. More will win out. Our entire civilization is based on more consumers and more tax payers. Every institution we've built needs more people to function.

It's not just about population, or just about consumption. It's about both at the same time, and humans don't do well with limits. We're not good at making tough choices. That's why it's always about growing the pie. We can't figure out who gets to play God, so we can't figure out who gets to tell who no, or how to do it fairly.

There aren't even 3 options. There's one option, and it's #1, because who gets to tell who how many kids they can have, and who gets to tell who what options and access to various resources they can or cannot have?

Plus we'll probably have robots doing a lot more work in the coming years, so, that'll complicate the equation even more.

[Octafish]

6. Is that the same Weisman who wrote about Richard Perle?

"Prince of Darkness"

https://books.google.com/books?id=zxpQihBscvcC&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8&dq=alan-weisman+speaking+engagements&source=bl&ots=Gh-W1Qd5pG&sig=S2jNli7SDX4P5xFL-i7sFT_xh54&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CFMQ6AEwCWoVChMI8NvM5aXqyAIVA2ImCh3H1gNN#v=onepage&q=alan-weisman%20speaking%20engagements&f=false

If so, he seems to approve of the PNAC solution for overpopulation.

[GliderGuider]

7. It's ironic that most people see Norman Borlaug as having "proved Malthus wrong."

Population and food supply growth are just opposite sides of the positive feedback loop of all populations. At some point limits cut in and the game changes.

By my estimate there are about 1000x too many people in the world, each of us doing on average 20x too much. There is no way to voluntarily rectify such a 20,000x overshoot.

Weisman is right, there are no realistic zero-growth economic models. I've been following Herman Daly's Ecological Economics ideas for a while, but it's an academic pipe dream that has no intersection with the real world as far as I can tell.

I've been saying for a decade now that issues of scale and psychology mean that there are no solutions to the human predicament. We are too big not to fail.

Here's an article I wrote on the subject: No really, how sustainable are we?

[GliderGuider]

10. I'm not arguing for it. However...

What I am saying that anything more than that is not sustainable.

If I'm arguing for anything, it's for greater awareness that the human presence on this planet is inherently unsustainable by any measure.

Yes, I'm saying that the greatest amount of human activity the planet could support in perpetuity would be about 7 million people with a per capita economic activity level equivalent to $888 per year.

I don't think we can or should strive toward such a goal. I'm saying that the goal will eventually find us.

[GliderGuider]

12. Getting resources from off-planet is now technically unfeasible.

And in fact it always was.

Not to mention that we have already trashed the biosphere here to such a point that getting more resources from somewhere else wouldn't help. We're drowning the planet in our waste products, and there is no habitat left for much animal life beyond humans, cows and pigs.

Global civilization on this planet may be approaching a drastic transition point. When it will arrive is hard to say, as is how it will unfold in different regions. That it will happen is indisputable, except to human-omnipotence ideologues.

Yes, my numbers are shockingly low. A total world GDP of 6 billion dollars wouldn't leave much room for iPhones. Nevertheless I'm convinced the numbers are correct. Not believable, perhaps, but correct.

Here's the state of the animal portion of the biosphere:

[smirkymonkey]

8. +1000