These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and significantly reducing inequality.
The one thing not mentioned is that only actual solution: managing populations. The number of people on the planet has nearly doubled just in my lifetime! Also on HN today
We're already at or very close to "peak child". There are about two billion children in the world, a figure we don't expect to ever significantly increase. We expect the population to grow to between 9 and 11 billion by the end of the century, but the cause of that growth is simply survival. Increasing life expectancy means that the population is turning over more slowly - there's no increase in the number of children being born, but people are surviving longer.
Most of the developed world is already at or below a replacement fertility rate. The developing world is catching up very quickly. The birth rate in India has fallen from 5.91 per woman in 1960 to 2.4 today. Bangladesh has done even better, with their birth rate falling from 6.95 in 1970 to 2.14 today.
If you're proposing that we reduce the global population, you have two options. Option one is to reduce the global fertility rate to well below replacement and accept an increasingly ageing society. With current trends in life expectancy, this option would leave us completely unable to care for the elderly. At best, this means millions of elderly people being warehoused in robotic care facilities; at worst, it means leaving people to die, especially in middle-income countries. Option two is some kind of genocide.
Unless you're willing to volunteer yourself or your child as a sacrifice, I suggest we all figure out how to share our resources more equitably and use them more efficiency.
We're already at or very close to "peak child". There are about two billion children in the world, a figure we don't expect to ever significantly increase. We expect the population to grow to between 9 and 11 billion
Who's "we" in this context? Because every time someone makes one of these predictions the human race blows through it and keeps going. I wouldn't be surprised if we reach 20Bn. I expect it only to be curtailed by environmental catastrophe.
Unless you're willing to volunteer yourself or your child as a sacrifice
I'm child-free, so I can look at this objectively.
Homo sapiens. The global fertility rate has more than halved over the last 50 years. The developed world now has a birth rate substantially below replacement. Birth rate in the developing world is falling precipitously, matching the rate of decline that happened in the developed world 50 years ago.
This isn't a blip. It isn't speculation. It's an undeniable and epoch-defining change in how our species reproduces. The age of Malthus is over.
The rate may be dropping, but we're still adding 80m+ real people every year. N*rate is holding steady because N keeps increasing even though the rate is dropping.
You're just confusing the issue. Population growth is decelerating and is expected to plateau within the next 80 years. Overpopulation is not going to be a problem, depopulation may actually become a problem.
Overpopulation is already a problem, everywhere you look: pollution, climate change, depleted marine stocks, loss of biodiversity, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, melting ice caps, resource wars, all have one single root cause: too many people fighting over too little planet.
> Overpopulation is already a problem, everywhere you look: pollution, climate change, depleted marine stocks, loss of biodiversity, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, melting ice caps, resource wars, all have one single root cause: too many people fighting over too little planet.
No, there is not one single problem. I can just as easily blame incorrect market structures which enable negative externalities. A carbon tax corrects one such market distortion, for instance.
The Earth can support many more humans than are currently living if our production methods didn't allow for negative externalities.
Let me make this very clear: real population growth is not decelerating; it is holding quite steady. The rate (i.e. percent) of population growth is what is decreasing (and very slowly, at that). But we are still adding an additional billion humans every 12 years.
With 7.6 billion humans already on the planet, the idea that "depopulation" could become a problem is utterly laughable. Four billion people could die tomorrow and the world population would only be set back 50 years. 90% of the human population could be wiped out, and there would still be 760m people in the world; hardly a crisis, unless you think that depopulation was a risk in 1760. Remember that Malthus first sounded the alarm on overpopulation in 1799, when there were "only" 1 billion people.
> Let me make this very clear: real population growth is not decelerating; it is holding quite steady. The rate (i.e. percent) of population growth is what is decreasing (and very slowly, at that).
I feel like you're misinterpreting my words just to be disagreeable. "Rate" is a velocity term, and the first derivative of the population count. "Deceleration" is the second derivative of the population, and the first derivative of the rate. Therefore, what you said is exactly what I said: population growth is decelerating.
> With 7.6 billion humans already on the planet, the idea that "depopulation" could become a problem is utterly laughable.
All of our social programs are based on the assumption that the subsequent generation will be larger than the previous one, and so can support them in their old age. This likely will no longer be the case within our lifetime. That's no laughing matter.
Your arguments that eliminating a large fraction of the population would still leave plenty of people around are a complete red herring. What exactly is the fact that 760 million people would still be alive after 90% of the population is eliminated supposed to prove exactly? Are you even remotely aware of the problems this would cause? How supply chains for critical goods would simply collapse? How our rate of progress would grind to a halt? There are all sorts of metrics, like the rate of scientific progress, that are directly tied to population growth. Depopulation is a huge problem for many reasons.
I mean population control is completely a solution to resource consumption problems. We would never have heard the words "climate change" if the world population was in the 500 million range. A society with a large elderly population will have some consequences, but so will expanding our population to 13/14/15 billion.
I watched a video last night that was full of optimism. Pointed out that as countries got richer less children died and people had less children. So eventually the population will level off. It seemed to overlook the fact that we are currently using up resources 1.5 times faster than they are being replenished (amongst many other related problems).
Have you got any numbers on that?
I am aware that things are becoming more efficient, but we are still adding a lot of people to the world. And more and more people are moving from relative poverty to more western lifestyles and corresponding increased levels of consumption.
There is some debate surrounding this, known as Jevon's paradox. There have also been some papers where the rebound effect has been studied and found to be low to moderate, so efficiency improvements do have a positive impact:
Indeed the population is still increasing, but population growth is decelerating. Population will likely plateau within the next 70-80 years, and then possibly decline.
The one thing not mentioned is that only actual solution: managing populations. The number of people on the planet has nearly doubled just in my lifetime! Also on HN today
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16339467
But making more people is not a problem the human race has.