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masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 days agoDo you have a source for that?
Literally just the amount of fertilizer that we need to produce to grow crops at our scale causes downstream environmental harms. I fail to see how you could sustain 7B people at anywhere close to a comfortable modern lifestyle.
A more just economic system doesn’t even necessarily reduce emissions. Yeah it’s wasteful when a billionaire takes a private jet, but it’s also incredibly wasteful when a million people install air conditioning.
bumblefumble@mander.xyz 1 day ago
It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to this episode of the Climate Town podcast, but as far as I remember they give a very good overview of why “we’re too many people for the planet” is climate misinformation.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
No, they did not.
It’s not until the very last 12min of that podcast that they even talk about the question at play which is the sustainable carrying capacity of earth.
And they do not even remotely seriously cover that topic. They literally just mention that estimates are all over the place and one is a billion and then cherry pick the most optimistic one that says a trillion and literally do not remotely talk about why there are differences or what those estimates are measuring.
That’s 1.5hr of them covering the history of politicians talking about overpopulation and being like ‘haha Kissinger said it, therefore wrong’. It does not remotely cover an actual scientific understanding of what the earth’s sustainable carrying capacity is or even broach that question in a real way.
bumblefumble@mander.xyz 1 day ago
Fair points. As I said, I haven’t listened to it since it released, so I can’t remember exactly how it went. But there is a point that using “overpopulation” to deflect the conversation from other more important topics when it comes to climate change mitigation is an issue. The same thing a lot of people do with nuclear energy. That while there is truth to it, the intentions behind bringing it up is malicious. Not that that is the case in this thread at all.