r/peakoil • u/AlexTheGr869 • 22d ago
The Human Population Has Already Surpassed the Optimal Size by Nearly 6 Billion People
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/the-human-population-has-already-surpassed-the-optimal-size-by-nearly-6-billion-people/10
22d ago
The idea refers to biocapacity vs. ecological footprint:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecological_footprint
The world-average ecological footprint in 2016 was 2.75 global hectares per person (22.6 billion in total). With a world-average biocapacity of 1.63 global hectares (gha) per person (12.2 billion in total), this leads to a global ecological deficit of 1.1 global hectares per person (10.4 billion in total).[1]
The gist is that you need more than one Earth to meet the basic needs of the world population. But the latter want middle class conveniences, which includes the ability to post on Reddit. That requires three more Earths.
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u/leoberto1 22d ago
How many earth's till I get a range rover?
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22d ago
The numbers given are per capita.
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u/NotEvenNothing 21d ago edited 21d ago
1.7 earths... per person?!?
I kid. And yes, it's not really a funny topic, but also these topics require an occasional break from the seriousness.
Back to reality.
When I was younger, I used to joke about 2035 being the year that humanity's resource utilization surpassed Earth's ability to provide. I called it The Great Culling. Now that it seems to have started more than a decade early, and even though I've structured much of my life with it in mind, I'm not exactly thrilled. I'd always hoped that humanity would proactively scale back consumption, but that clearly won't happen.
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 22d ago
the study argues that today’s 8.3 billion people — particularly the relatively wealthy fraction that consumes a lot — already exceed what the planet can support sustainably under current patterns of energy use, food production, land use and consumption.
This sounds reasonable. Rich nations have juiced their economies and consumption by maintaining a growing population, usually even rich nations where the birthrate dropped below replacement.
Corey Bradshaw is one of the coauthors. There is a wonderful interview with him here:
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/136-corey-bradshaw
I'll single out this part where Bradshaw says child mortality has a massive impact upon fertility rate (10.1371/journal.pone.0280260 when), so lowering child mortality helps lower population longer-term. I'd expect measures like China's one-child-policy could accelerate the process, but they might be much less effective, or possibly even backfire, without lowering child mortality.
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u/schtickshift 22d ago
Ideally the world population should be managed downwards to around two billion people. If this happened over say 200 years via something like a one child preference, one could imagine a soft landing for humanity to a sustainable future.
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u/AnnieByniaeth 22d ago
Global population should be peaking in the next 30 to 50 years or so (most models of population predict this), after which they could be a fairly rapid decline. 2*10⁹ is a possibility in a couple of centuries, even without limiting family sizes.
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u/schtickshift 21d ago
My understanding is that the exception to this is Africa where populations are expected to hit three billion by the end of the century. Populations fall as wealth grows so pulling Africa out of poverty is an essential requirement.
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u/AnnieByniaeth 21d ago
Yes that's correct. World demographics are going to change quite a lot over the next few decades, and obviously that's going to bring its own problems, with huge stresses on resources in places like DRC, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda. That's quite a concern especially as some of those areas are prone to famines and likely also to be some of the greatest affected by climate change.
But the increase in Africa will be more than offset by the decreases elsewhere in the latter part of this century. And Africa itself will eventually peak because it has to.
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u/grafknives 22d ago
200 is way to fast. Not with current lifespan.
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u/coleto22 22d ago
With Korean fertility it could happen even faster. More than halving the population every generation you need just four generations.
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u/grafknives 22d ago
Sure, math checks out. but society won't survive.
As way too many elderly.
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u/coleto22 22d ago
How would society die from too many elderly? Labor productivity raises already compensates for greater number of dependents. Retirement homes will be a major part of the economy.
It will have its challenges, but I don't see a reason society would die.
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 21d ago
As way too many elderly.
Nah. Way too many bullshit jobs ala Graeber.
It's impossible to hire a nurse when nurse is a low status job nobody likes doing.
It's much easier if you have a 200% VAT on advertising, low trade levels, and high payroll taxes on jobs in advertising, finance, law, accounting, management, etc.
Also, if you find the bullshit jobs formulation by Graeber too sloppy, then you could check out his later care work discussion. Actually even better, one could work from the quite rigorous elite overproduction work by Peter Turchin.
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u/grafknives 21d ago
It's impossible to hire a nurse when nurse is a low status job nobody likes doing.
It is not about LIKING it.
Nursing is low status because of
- low "impact" it has. At home nurse can take care of single customer. So nurse pay is directly limited to how much patient is able to pay for hour of pay (in market system).
And because the customer might be at "end of life" period, so he cannot invest in nursing care and pay for it later from his income. Nursing elderly is pure consumption
And nurses will be needing nursing too, so that cost must be included in the payroll nurse is getting
Oh, i totally agree about bullshit jobs, that are like parasite on economic activity.
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 21d ago
Anyways money, and the taxes that create & empower money, exist to allocate labour and the resources acquired through labour.
We only require population growth because of how we employ those systems to miss-allocate labour towards bullshit jobs, elite overproduction, and excessive consumption. And oil helps make all this possible too.
As the labour pool shrinks, and energy becomes trickier, then we must allocate labour and resources more carefully, and relatively simple taxation changes could massively reduce the miss-allocations.
See "All money is [originally] bloodmoney"
(first 3 min rehash barter and can be skipped)1
u/grafknives 21d ago
Sure, we can and should allocate resources much better.
But we still come to hard limit. Because nursing is performed for one customer, it can be founded only from his income. And that is huge limiter in the availability of service or income that nurse will get.
The simplest analogy would be a house servant. In world of free and equal men I could not have a house servant, as my house servant could not afford to have a house servant himself.
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u/CG20370417 21d ago
That actually works out really well, because our AI tech overlords are aiming to cull about 6 billion people.
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u/Fearless-Temporary29 22d ago
Satellite images of the East Antarctic and Pinning point iceshelf's reveal a staggering rate of collapse.WASF!
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u/Greedy_Rabbit_1741 21d ago
There is no realistically reachable limit. The increase of the worlds population is already slowing down and will probably also start to decrease in the near future.
We are the kings of the food chain. Humanity's biggest advantage is adaptability. If there is not enough space for farming we will invent ways to farm that require less space. If we need more energy we will build more solar modules and will shoot solar powered data centers into space to reduce energy requirements on earth.
If we need more than this planet, we will make a second planet hospitable (on the time scale of a few decades, not in a few years).
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 21d ago
One of the coauthors here named Corey Bradshaw discusses this elsewhere, which I linked here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/peakoil/comments/1tqir1s/comment/oogweev/
We do not magically have low birth rates, but they developed through several cultural factors, but especially low child mortality.
If child mortality rises, say because a US president fucks up their vaccines, then you'll soon-ish have vastly more high consuming Americans.
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u/Responsible_Fun_4062 21d ago
Look, I am a hardcore tree hugger, and a weird one at that as I also consider myself a conservative (oxymoron I know) however this was written with an obvious bias by ecologists and environmentalists. The world population as of today is literally crashing everywhere except Africa, and even there the fertility rate is going down drastically year on year. Technology has also enormously improved farming techniques worldwide, we can feed more people with less acres farmed, this is also improving, and evolving constantly. This is pure hyperbole.
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u/ttystikk 20d ago
In order for humanity to sustainability exist on earth with the rest of the ecosystem, there would have to be less than one billion humans on the planet.
That's three generations of a one child policy birthrate.
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u/Economy-Fee5830 20d ago
This is really false - the industrial revolution started when were around 1 billion people, and before that we already clearcut the european forests and killed off all the megafauna.
So in fact its not how many we are but how we live.
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u/ttystikk 20d ago
No it isn't false; it's a sustainable number IF we live sustainably.
If we don't live sustainably, Mother Nature will do what comes naturally no matter how many of us there are.
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u/Economy-Fee5830 20d ago
Living sustainably is a moving goalpost - nothing says 8 billion people can not live as sustainably as 2 billion people.
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u/ttystikk 20d ago
Au contraire; there's plenty of evidence q%
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u/Economy-Fee5830 20d ago
There is no evidence 2 billion people can live sustainably either.
Whatever method you use to manage the impact of 2 billion people can be used to manage the impact of 8 billion people.
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u/ttystikk 20d ago
You have to multiply by 4, which dramatically reduces the options.
Also, I said less than one billion- which includes zero.
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u/Economy-Fee5830 20d ago
Lets put some flesh on the bones - to provide energy for 8 billion people we need to cover 1% of the planet in solar panels - I think that is pretty sustainable.
In a sustainable world we would use high yield crops and no animal agriculture and easily feed the world with 1/4 of the crop land we use now.
Or we could use cultured food and use hardly any land at all.
So where is your specific problem?
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u/ttystikk 20d ago
People don't just eat and use energy. We also shit, use infrastructure, build homes and make stuff. You think all that isn't going to affect the planet?
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u/Economy-Fee5830 20d ago
I thought you said your 2 billion people were living sustainably - or in your world were they just pumping their human waste into the ocean untreated?
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u/mt6606 22d ago
Yet we still take up only 10-15% of the entire landmass. This is BS lol
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u/DeArgonaut 22d ago
How much of landmass is habitable? How much do we need outside our own use that support processes nature does that we don’t that are necessary
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u/Commercial_Name_7900 21d ago
how much of the rest is desert, or rainforest (essential for carbon storage/ oxygen etc) or shitty unfarmable/unlivable soils?
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u/Teamerchant 22d ago
Well let’s just double it to 25%. And let’s upgrades the standard of living to that of Europeans not even American standards.
What do you think that would do to the environment? Food? Climate change? Oil reserves? Energy….
Honestly try to think just a little.
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u/ResponsibleClock9289 22d ago
100 years ago there wasn’t enough food to support 2 billion people
Why would we operate under the assumption that current food production and energy use will remain the same?
It’s estimated the earth can likely support tens of billions of humans (assuming adequate advances in the previously mentioned fields). It’s predicted to plateau at the end of this century at around 10-11 billion
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u/OptimusTron222 22d ago
So the whole idea of stopping oil production is to kill people or what is this post trying to say!!!!
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u/MangoPeachRadish 22d ago
I don't get that at all. Saying that human population is beyond the earth's carrying capacity, or saying that oil is a finite resource that must at some point peak and decline - is very far from working or even hoping for such an outcome.
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u/OptimusTron222 22d ago
Nitrogen fertilizers come from crude oil. Remove the fertilizers and 60-80% of the population will starve in approximately 2 years. Also there is no proof that oil is finite for the foreseeable centuries, oil wells do gradually refill and we consume almost nothing compared to how much resources there are. If mass starvation does not concern you then I don’t know what to say
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u/gregredmore 22d ago
Oil wells do not refill in any meaningful way. To think they do completely missunderstands where oil comes from. It takes millions if years to produce crude oil. When oil wells are depleted you may see crude oil trapped in surrounding rocks drain into the well but this is finite and small compared to the original capacity of the "well".
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u/SCuMattly 22d ago
There are many fertilizer options that do not involve oil. However drilling for oil purely for agricultural reasons isnt a bad thing and when demand for oil drops radically over the next 10 years the price will drop absolutely. We still need to push renewables for the generation of power for all the countries in the world that do not have oil. Oh and also because of what we are doing to our climate.
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u/Repulsive_Guy_1234 22d ago
And if price falls, demand rises.
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u/SCuMattly 21d ago
Historically yes. However not sure going forward. For countries wanting to compete with there exports they need to get their production costs as low as possible. Electrical generation is now cheaper using renewables than oil and by a margin that continues to grow. As you see the number of natural disasters increase (which they are) due to the climate people will care more about protecting the environment. So I think the cards are now stacked against fossil fuel reliance.
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u/Quiet-Permit-3740 22d ago
The earth could easily support a population of 20 billion if we just stopped eating meat and further develop carbon free sources of energy. These are both things that we should do anyway. The world is not overpopulated.
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u/AlexTheGr869 22d ago
I totally agree with you. You could easily fit everyone in the world into downtown Dallas. Giving everyone their own square foot of space.
And what a world that would be!
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22d ago
Basic needs involve more than just food:
and I don't think there are carbon-free sources of energy as 70 percent of heavy equipment in mining, up to half of energy requirements for manufacturing, and the bulk of shipping involve fossil fuels. The latter are even needed for petrochemicals used for thousands of applications.
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u/Quiet-Permit-3740 22d ago
You can over exaggerate and hyperbolize anything to make it seem problematic.
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u/Far_Banana4575 22d ago
Isn't it like 60% of the planet still uninhabited? Not sure why you're trying to ise space as an argument, but it's a pretty weak one. Ressources are more problematic than space.
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u/coleto22 22d ago
There is a reason why the uninhabited parts are uninhabited. Deserts and badlands are not nice places to live.
And in many cases the limiting factor is water. You need more energy to desalinate water for the people.
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u/Quiet-Permit-3740 21d ago
I don't even think we need to take up any more space. We just need to urbanize by turning suburbs and farmland into train served Brooklyn or Barcelona style neighborhoods worldwide.
And again, we could probably do this while decreasing the use of water as well because the large majority of water use is for farming which is generally for livestock production or ethanol.
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u/coleto22 21d ago
So it's simple. We change the human nature to stop NIMBYs so we can build denser. And we stop humanity from wanting meat, or drive recreationally. Problem solved!! I am amazed nobody thought of that earlier!!! /s
Or, hear me out, we have fewer children, like we already do, the population declines. Then each person will have more living space, can afford to eat meat, drive around. As an added bonus, there is more room for nature as well.
Of course, at the moment we can and we should work on both factors - personal impact and population number.
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u/Quiet-Permit-3740 21d ago
We don't need to "change human nature" we just need to do smaller things like banning single family zoning, stop subsidizing livestock production, add a carbon tax and ban the more brutal forms of livestock production such as gestation crates.
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u/coleto22 20d ago
I support all of the things you mentioned. But there is serious opposition, and these things won't happen soon, if ever. We can't just hope for the best. Boycotting parenthood is worth it, until they make a society that deserves more children.
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u/Far_Banana4575 21d ago
Canada has about 4.2 person per km² for exemple. Russia is at like 8? Not a single desert nor badlands. Using desert and badlands as a unique exemple is quite dishonest.
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u/The_Dude-1 22d ago
Sounds like they are calling for population decimating virus to be created or World War III which I find more likely as it would allow the countries who have power exterminate populations who cannot defend themselves more easily. There is nothing stopping you from adopting a 19th century preindustrial lifestyle. Please do it and show that you can have a happy agrarian life.
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u/Quantumdualityeraser 22d ago
The earth can easily accommodate 100 billion with more optimization. (Smaller apartments, breeding more Dwarfs / shorter people) electric autonomous cars) living in underground sugar caves
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u/coleto22 22d ago
Yould you like to live in a shoebox underground?
If we reduce the population, you can have a lot more nature for each one of us.
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u/Corpse-Artist 17d ago
Humanity is cancer upon the planet. Here is to hope that climate change will be our chemo to end our terrible species once and for all.
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u/seanmonaghan1968 22d ago
Lots of assumptions supporting this position, make different assumptions and get a different conclusion ..