Municipalities in most of Urban India are hand in glove with these water tanker mafias.
Good governance is the answer.
Not if they’re taking it from folks who now don’t have enough.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/23/pepsi-coke-b...
But there’s also a lot of truck-delivered water used in construction/dust control.
No shortage of reports/charges: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fire+hydrant+water+theft
Show me the computer program that knows how to create a pencil? And then a toaster? How does it know how many toasters will be needed? Is a toaster more important than a smart watch?
Also, if you have such a Computer program, you could use it to beat the markets. You could use it to compute the perfect prices of futures (because you know the future demand and supply). So I guess there is your answer: if you had such a Computer, you could beat the markets, as long as you don't do that, markets are better.
What can you call a chronic 20 year drought when it stretches to 40 years?
What's more, we tend to think of the "West" as "won" but these states are mostly still growing as part of the American Westward expansion. A lot of Western State land only became easily accessible with the completion of the interstates in the 1960s 1970s and even 1980s. Therefore, the material abundance necessary for truly large scale populations to live in comfort has only come to these places in the last 40 years. This has caused a consistent population boom in some places which is not yet tapering and will lead to increased stress on these resources.
R/O is expensive. Tons of opportunities in the average home for re-use. Can use that shower/sink/laundry/dish water for toilets. A selective automatic bypass system could save the (mostly soapless) water to replace plant/garden watering (though that’s evaporation!).
On the one hand, this is true in a literal sense. On the other, there are as many people (~20M) in the SoCal triangle southwest of the Transverse Ranges as there are in the remainder of the Colorado and Great Basins (NV+AZ+UT+CO = ~20M) combined, yet we continue to ship water from Lake Mead and Owens Lake to Los Angeles. Improving the situation in California would take a lot of stress off of everyone else.
I thought this was a deliberate approach: the city would round-robin supply water and if you’re wealthy, you fill your tanks when it’s your turn, and if you’re not, you do all of your water consumption during those periods.
Is boiling water not option or am I missing something? On a world scale having a potable tap water is more of an exception than a norm.
To be fair, waterborne illness is very often organic related: microbes, viruses, bacteria, etc.
Even if heating with gas/electricity, aiming for boiling is hard to screw up, but an overshoot of what’a required.
This is only good for bacteria/viruses.
In this case, it sounds like what's needed is better city planning and more equitable distribution of water. I don't know the specifics here, but I suspect there's plenty of water but it's probably being tied up in industrial applications.
Also, instead of letting the market decide where to build houses, why not build them where there's infrastructure to support them, instead of building them where the profit is highest?
Also, have you even considered what a one-child policy entails? It's forcibly sterilizing or aborting pregnancies.
Over 70% of surface water in India is unpotable. The main problem is inadequate or non-existent waste water treatment, but agricultural and industrial runoffs also play a large part.
There must be a real limit to how many humans this planet can support.
It takes water to make a human. You will pass the point where you can't expand the population before you get to the point where you can't maintain the population that already exists. If something does decrease the water supply, you will in a short period of time have a smaller population to support. Such is the nature of carrying capacity.
If you get a million people to build a city in the Sahara and don't build any infrastructure to get water to this city, of course they are going to have water shortages, but this does not suggest some global water crisis nor is a limited birth rate going to fix the problem. Likewise if someone sticks their head in a plastic bag they may run out of air, but that doesn't mean air is any less abundant. There are some resources of which there is an actual scarcity such as arable land and energy sources, but water is not one of them.
In fact, China is already considered to be suffering from water availability issues, and while this still happened with a one-child policy it almost certainly would be worse had Chinese population growth had the same trajectory as India's. (This is not an argument for the general good of one-child policy, and I do not endorse such a thing.)
On the demand side, if moving is not legally or socially acceptable, what is the difficulty of changing the laws or culture? If cities are sticky, move the things that attract people to those cities elsewhere. If new cities are difficult to set up, how difficult is that compared to modifying an existing city?
there's a big difference between "there isn't any water" and "we won't take actions to get water." Now you may be saying "but those things are hard and expensive" to which I will respond "yeah, providing for the needs of 20% of the world's population is going to be hard and expensive," but on the brightside 20% of the world's population is an incredible resource if utilized properly.
The problem with new cities is generally trying to move employment. Unless there is a specific reason to move employers tend to like clusters of other employers. Most planned cities without a specific employment reason either fail or become big suburbs.
Making it easier to move to other countries is not exactly within the realm of possibility, given that India is not in control of how the US makes legislation and pressure would pretty much result in backlash that would probably make the situation worse, not better.
The GP comment I was responding to was specifically talking about water being "a real limit to how many humans this planet can support." Literally the first thing I said was that regions could run out of water. That said, how we frame our problems influences how we think about solutions - how we solve a water infrastructure crisis is very different from a water scarcity crisis.
> There's technically no such thing as peak oil either, but there is a point where it becomes economically infeasible to produce more oil
Peak oil is the point when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum is reached, after which it is expected to enter terminal decline. Peak oil is most certainly real, and likely in the near future. Oil is an energy source and it takes energy to extract it - eventually you will hit a point where it takes more than a barrel of oil to produce a barrel of oil. Further, oil is destroyed when used, and it takes more energy to recreate it than you get from using it, so there is no sense in replenishing it. Conversely, you don't need to spend water to get water, nor does it cease to exist when you consume it. You can replenish a region's water supplies indefinitely.
> The problem with new cities is generally trying to move employment. Unless there is a specific reason to move employers tend to like clusters of other employers. Most planned cities without a specific employment reason either fail or become big suburbs.
If the companies won't move, tax them enough to build the infrastructure to support their employees. Either you'll have no problem getting them to relocate, or there will be no need to.
> Making it easier to move to other countries is not exactly within the realm of possibility, given that India is not in control of how the US makes legislation and pressure would pretty much result in backlash that would probably make the situation worse, not better.
1) The US is not the only country to move to, or even the best option 2) The US is a nation of immigrants which could most certainly be convinced to take immigrants from India with the proper incentive structure 3) As an emerging powerhouse, the assumption India has no negotiating leverage and is simply at the mercy of other nations seems extremely unfounded
As someone descended from poor subsistence farmers who moved to the other side of the planet to avoid famine, I am extremely skeptical of the claim that millions of people will just sit back and wait to die of dehydration as the water supplies dwindle. History is a long tale of people migrating to greener pastures when they are available and making pastures greener when they are not, and I see no reason that this time around will be any different.
If you haven't been following the news in the last decade or two, that has been causing an increasing array of other issues.
Why does it entail that? And do you mean forced abortions?
And no, forced sterilization, as in the surgical procedure to permanently end the ability to conceive, is a thing.
More relevant, historical precedence in India:
> As the fertility rate began to decrease (but not quickly enough), more incentives were offered, such as land and fertilizer. In 1976, compulsory sterilization policies were put in place and some disincentive programs were created to encourage more people to become sterilized. However, these disincentive policies, along with “sterilization camps” (where large amounts of sterilizations were performed quickly and often unsafely), were not received well by the population and gave people less incentive to participate in sterilization. The compulsory laws were removed. Further problems arose and by 1981, there was a noticeable problem in the preference for sons. Since families were encouraged to keep the number of children to a minimum, son preference meant that female fetuses or young girls were killed at a rapid rate.[25]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_(medicine)#Natio...
Don't push politics and ideologies into things that have little to do with it. What you describe is the underlying problem, one that needs to be solved as well (though how, is another thing). But solving that, even today, won't bring water to the people who need it today.
The fact is that environmental conditions worsen each decade in India and quality of life is lower than in the 70s when the population was 555million (currently 1.3b).
Meanwhile the upper castes flee the country en-masse to the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe.
The Indian population will rise to 1.6b by 2050. It will be substantially easier to fix water infrastructure if this number was hundreds of millions lower. Population management is a bigger part of the solution than pipes and dams.
And on an ethical note, managing populations is something you do with sheep and cattle, not human beings.
The population boom over the last 100 years is not due to people reproducing too much, it is due to a decrease in child mortality, that and development from agricultural to industrial economies meant a cultural lag time in reducing the number of kids a woman has.
Once you have an industrial economy, the pressure then becomes to have less kids. You don't need to be told in a classroom to do that, it happens naturally. If you need proof, these education programs didn't exist in the west during development into industrial economies and yet the fertility rate decreased simply due to economic pressures.
A fertility rate of 2.3 (the .3 accounting for child death and people who don't ever have kids) is replacement rate. At that rate population does not increase.
Long story short, at least in cities (where the water shortage we are talking about is happening) you won't see a doubling of the population due to sustained fertility. So the shortages you see of water and other resources can be entirely attributed to inefficient resource allocation, and once capacity is increased to match population you won't have to worry about it again and again.
This is a good point which often gets overlooked in the heated debate of population explosion.
Coincidentally just a year or two ago Indian growth rate reached replacement levels[1]. As per the latest data (not sure if it's been reviewed/confirmed) it's now slightly below the replacement levels.
Also, if you notice, the southern states's growth rate is well below that of replacement level.
[1] https://niti.gov.in/content/total-fertility-rate-tfr-birth-w...
I don't think it is impossible to bring the projected population of India up to decent living standards, I think this is highly unlikely, but my point doesn't account for that, so it could very well be.
That's just a theory, and if you're wrong, then what? A description of what you think will happen needs better evidence. At least one other factor is religious/cultural inertia encouraging people to have lots of children, and that is somewhat characteristic/unique for each given culture s.t. you can't really generalise it too much.
There was a similar theory about non-democracies being unstable (Democratic peace theory, wrt greater public wealth), and how free trade liberates nations. How did that turn out for Chinese superpower?
China is an emerging superpower, and economic powerhouse, and anti-democratic to the extend of suppressing democracy in HK. It also does lot of trade that never seems to encourage an increase in civil liberties.
Now, maybe the theory was all an illusion caused by the domination and coercive power, of existing democratic nations.
Their issue here is poor governance, economic inequality, and climate change.
Is every progression on human DNA eugenics? Is every new law facism?
"Family planning" suggests agency. Humans have agency. The comment I'm responding to explicitly recommends forced reduction in fertility rates, removing agency, something you don't do to human beings unless you think of them like sheep or cattle. Equating a one or no child policy with "family planning" is extremely disingenuous.
Any law that tells human beings how many children they are allowed to have is fascism, yes. Any directive telling human beings how they have to reproduce is eugenics by definition.
It could be dysgenics, depending on what the instructions are. :-P How about private charities that provide voluntary incentives for some people to self-sterilize and others to have more kids? How about private charities that subsidize birth control and abortions? How about friends and family encouraging people to marry someone smart, or telling people with genetic disorders that they should adopt? Do you draw a line somewhere in the above between "eugenics" and "not eugenics"? I think your line would be far from universal. dictionary.com says "the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population", which would indeed encompass all of the above. I'm afraid the word "eugenics", like "fascism", has been corrupted into "something whose exact definition is unclear, but it's definitely a bad thing".
> Any law that tells human beings how many children they are allowed to have is fascism, yes.
So what is there to prevent some people from having 10 children, every generation, until the system collapses under their weight? If you say "it's the parents' responsibility to provide for the kids, and if they don't manage to do so from their own resources or persuade anyone else, then the kids may starve and that will limit the process", then, fine, that would work; though many people think the state should always prevent kids (or perhaps people generally) from starving, and I think policies with that effect have been enacted even in the U.S., and I doubt they will get repealed anytime soon.
You say that people with increased access to education and health and such naturally reduce their birth rates. That may be. But I think it would be only a matter of time before they got selected for impulsivity, high libido, inclination to adhere to the parents' religion that says to maximize children, or whatever other traits would lead to a bunch of people actually having tons of kids they can't support. (Perhaps the singularity and/or genetic engineering and/or other stuff will happen and make that irrelevant long before it becomes an issue.) Maybe those traits would also lead to doing things that land them in jail for years, getting a reproductive penalty that way; I dunno if that would be enough.
> So what is there to prevent some people from having 10 children, every generation, until the system collapses under their weight?
The fact that if they can't feed those children those children will die and the standard of living of their other children will be significantly reduced. Natural economic pressure handles this problem already.
>You say that people with increased access to education and health and such naturally reduce their birth rates. That may be. But I think it would be only a matter of time before they got selected for impulsivity, high libido, inclination to adhere to the parents' religion that says to maximize children, or whatever other traits would lead to a bunch of people actually having tons of kids they can't support.
That's more speculative than anything I've said so far, everything I've said so far has a historical example to reference. Even if that were to happen, not bring able to support the people you create means reduced standard of living, and therefore reduced resource consumption, at best. Again, the problem is self correcting.
This is not how people works. I have seen people who gives 10 children due to religion thing. Sure the quality life is low but they don't care. There children are also doing same thing. You may be open to ideas but many religious people don't think like that. They will simply trade low quality life thinking more children brings more money.
meh, not really. The OP may have worded it bluntly but the distribution of free contraceptives, access to birth control is just the 'nudging' version of the same thing. I always find it a little bit hilarious how you can reframe population politics in terms of some technocratic wonk policy or language and then it's total cool, whereas just doing a one-child policy is evil despite having virtually the same goal
I was basing my response on what was clearly stated. You can't just reinterpret what someone else said for them. There is a big difference between "distribution of free contraceptives" and "one child policy" and you can't wiggle your way around that.
In 'free' societies when governing elites want a policy outcome they dress it in women's liberation and rights language, put a tax on something or hand you a subsidy to remind you of what you're supposed to do, in China they don't give a crap and send you somewhere by fiat. tomato tomahto
In that sense authoritarianism actually treats you less like cattle, because authoritarians think highly enough of their subjects to actually perceive them as a threat. The modern western technocrat on the other hand pretty much just thinks everyone's a number in an excel sheet.
your alternative is to eliminate a significant potion of the population
managing populations is something you do with sheep and cattle, not human beings.
> The comment I'm responding to explicitly recommends forced reduction in fertility rates, removing agency
where does it? It's a comment previous that the same poster talks about Chinas 1cp, and as I understand it, it was implemented as a fine for having more than one child.
Do punitive fines, and tax/welfare incentives/disincentives count as being "forced" or "non-agency"?
> Any law that tells human beings how many children they are allowed to have is fascism, yes.
I disagree. Point me to a commonly accepted definition of fascism that agrees, without requiring too much subjective interpretation. Anyone can have their own notion of what constitutes freedom/oppression etc.
> Any directive telling human beings how they have to reproduce is eugenics by definition.
Again, show me that definition. Most that I've seen limit the choice of who can procreate. A flat rule of 1-child applied to everyone equally doesn't seem to apply to me as there is no differentiation based on genetics. But in any case, a rose by any other name: deciding something fits a definition doesn't really change the semantics, so it doesn't really make any difference, especially if you are using a special-case, or non-standard application of the definition (e.g. like arguing abortion is bad based on whether it counts as murder, or not).
Managing populations does not have to include killing people. China's one child policy strictly and explicitly prohibited couples from having more than one child. You're softening the definition of what I was responding to to discredit my response.
I consider Fascism as authoritarianist, but not necessarily the other way around: there are plenty communist regimes that are authoritarian (including maybe China) but that are not considered Fascist.
> China's one child policy strictly and explicitly prohibited couples from having more than one child
Sure, but you seem to assume what this means. I don't read what you assume into the original post. Again, what about Chinas 1cp specifically do you believe to be fascist and/or immoral?
"Population management" is a road leading straight to ethical catastrophes, to murder and other horrible forms of suffering. There have been many of these - genocides, "Lebensraum im Osten" aka Nazi Germany invading Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, China's "1 child policy".
The best way a society can handle population management is fact-based sex education and safe, cheap access to contraceptives and medical abortion, and general access to healthcare and a social security network so that people don't have to have half a dozen children if they want one or two to survive to adulthood and care for them at old age.
You can say that about anything: socialist policies, "no-tolerance" policies, anything that looks like censorship.
You say there have been many such example, then trot out Nazi Germany; The fact the Nazis purposefully initiated a genocide (the holocaust) out of hatred out the Jews undermines the suggestion that there was a genuine attempt at population management.
Chinas also has a pretty poor human rights example, aside from it's 1-child policy.
Do you have any example of a modern (first-world, developed) country with a good human-rights record, and QOL index pursuing population management?
india will run out of resources(and water) before population hits a peak. depopulation is a statistical guarantee. reducing population voluntarily is the only way to assure a reasonable stock of the gene pool before the country completely runs out of resources and scarcity escalates into wars of depopulation(historically, it has been proven that war always follows drought or famine on a larger scale..from genghis khan to african tribes to vikings to the last syrian war, if you can collect enough data sets about world famine/droughts/scarcities, wars always follow.)
now..how to go about it. its a multi pronged approach:
1. stop incentivising children. what does this mean? instead of punitive measures or coercive one child policy, the state should incentivise responsible procreation and reward the child free. like an UBI for those who dont contribute to population growth.
2. provide free preservation of genetic material(sperm/eggs/dna) in a gene pool databank for posterity. this may not mean anything. it may amount to something. the idea that a 'legacy' might have a chance in a better world through frozen dna is a perk. it is a small cost and a nice gesture to reward selfless action for the nation. also: who knows what we might need in 300-500 years later.
3. go back to village or rural economies. by this, i dont mean that indians should start turning back time wrt sci and tech. what i mean is that people should go back village size communities. these have to be self governing and self sustaining units that can manage their own resources.
4. diversity is a double edged sword. i am not talking about social diversity, but diversity of resource expenditure and resource scarcity. there are too many people in india and to a certain extent, more cohesion and homogeneous living/way of life will give smaller communities more agency over how they manage local resources.
example: a meat eating population has a different resource expenditure pattern than a vegetarian/dairy inclusive one. rural communities differ from urban community's needs. droughty areas have different management starategies than those with monsoons.
5. it's very easy wrt water. dig more ponds and save rain water. protect watersheds and prevent ag/industrial runoffs. adopt 'nile valley' model of digging canals. take whatever you grow indoors into hydroponic systems. india still gets a lot of rain during the monsoons. development of rural areas and relieving the pressure in urban density will help. but only if there is a limit on the number of people per resource budgeted zone.
6. more importantly..before the depopulation occurs due to scarcity of resources, there is a real danger for india. if the wet bulb temperatures[1]rise as predicted, the heat and humidity will kill people in their sleep. they'd go to bed and die in their sleep.[2]
[..]He and his colleagues previously looked at how heat waves would evolve with warming in the Middle East and found that region will likely be home to the highest wet-bulb temperatures the world will see. (Bandar Mahshahr in Iran hit a wet-bulb temperature of nearly 95°F during a 2015 heat wave, which translates to a heat index of about 163°F (73°C).) But South Asia poses the bigger concern in terms of threats to people, as it is home to one fifth of the world’s population and is an area of deep poverty.
“That combination is what makes, what shapes this acute vulnerability,” Eltahir said.
Eltahir and his colleagues found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory, parts of eastern India and Bangladesh will exceed the 95°F threshold by century’s end and most of South Asia will approach that threshold.
If emissions are substantially curtailed and global temperature rise meets the 2°C (3.6°F) limit agreed to in the Paris accord, no place in South Asia would exceed 95°F, though wet-bulb temperatures over 88°F would be widespread. Such temperatures can still be deadly, especially to already vulnerable populations like the elderly.[..]
[1]https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/climate-change...
[2]https://www.climatecentral.org/news/extreme-heat-india-most-...
Yeah but people have a survival instinct. They won't just say"Hey, it's so hot I will die before I wake up. Let's go to sleep!". They'll go somewhere where they won't die. They will go to where we are...
and how and where will a few hundred million people migrate?
[..]Currently, about 2 percent of the Indian population is occasionally exposed to extreme wet-bulb temperatures (between 89 and 94 degrees). According to a 2017 study, by 2100 that number could increase to 70 percent. [..]
https://scroll.in/article/931865/the-human-body-cant-cope-in... : Human body can’t cope infinitely with rising temperatures – and in India, it is close to its limits At a certain temperature, sweat stops evaporating – shutting down the body's cooling mechanism, causing death. Parts of the world are already there.
When the air temperature exceeds 35 degrees Celsius, the body relies on the evaporation of water – mainly through sweating – to keep core temperature at a safe level. This system works until what is called the wet-bulb temperature reaches 35 degrees Celsius. The wet-bulb temperature includes the cooling effect of water evaporating from the thermometer and so is normally much lower than the normal dry-bulb temperature reported in weather forecasts.
Once this wet-bulb temperature threshold is crossed, the air is so full of water vapour that sweat no longer evaporates. Without the means to dissipate heat, our core temperature rises, irrespective of how much water we drink, how much shade we seek, or how much rest we take. Without respite, death follows – soonest for the very young, elderly or those with pre-existing medical conditions.
Wet-bulb temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius have not yet been widely reported, but there is some evidence that they are starting to occur in South West Asia. Climate change then offers the prospect that some of the most densely populated regions on Earth could pass this threshold by the end of the century, with the Persian Gulf, South Asia and most recently the North China Plain on the front line. These regions are, together, home to billions of people.[...]
Peak temperatures don't occur during the night. How do you figure heat wave will kill people in their sleep?
Seems like the Brits have done a lot, historically in Indian and China, but have their hands full at the moment with Brexit to reunite the "kingdom." My money is on the Chinese and their scientists in exchange for concessions that will further isolate the United States due to xenophobic thinking some people in the states perpetuate. How long before "their" water born illnesses become our airborne viruses?
India could undergo governmental reform and hire, say, German experts (or Indian experts!) to help revitalize their water infrastructure. Just illustrating a scenario where things change for the better and neither China nor America is involved whatsoever.
The things that need to be done are public knowledge or easy to find out. Most of the west already does it, and has been for one hundred years or so. There is nothing magical about turning bad water into clean drinkable water. All that India is lacking is the will (probably because of money or corruption - both real problems).
BS. They just don't want to be part of a new "kingdom".
Brexiteers don't trust EU politician, but they also don't trust UK politicians.
> My money is on the Chinese
Chinese aggression isn't much better than US "xenophobic thinking", plus India has pretty good contacts with Europe and other south-Asian countries. Plus there is a large and influential Indian population in the US, I'd be surprised in The Indian population in China are half as influential.
The one child policy has been disastrous for China. Imagine a whole generation of people that have no siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles (after 2 generations of one child policy). The social fabric in China has been gutted by this policy. Also it means that after 1 generation of this policy the number of working people is significantly less than the number of retired people. It destroys economic output and ability to care for a population, the oldest people suffer in a system like this, and younger people spend more of their earnings taking care of older people than improving their lives, so living standards stagnate or go down, you wind up with less resource availability.
A no child policy leads to extinction after one generation. You don't even need to do research on anything to know this, just simply thinking about what you're saying for a moment works.
A reduction in population does not increase resources available to people. Resources must be produced by people, a reduction in population also reduces that output. For historical proof, look at the numerous examples of famines that occurred in previous centuries, when there were less than a billion people on earth, by your logic life should've been more plentiful throughout history until recently but the opposite is actually the case, because resource availability scales with production capacity, it does not simply decrease with demand pressure.
In China's case, even at the height of pre-automation manufacturing economy, the manufacturing sector accounted for 400M jobs. 300M work in agriculture, kept deliberately deindustrialized (until recently) specifically as a jobs program. Today, 600M subsist on less than 2000 USD per year. These are excess people. What do these numbers mean? World demand was/is literally not enough of uplift 1.4B Chinese out of poverty. That's simply too many people. The sooner China can settle at 800M (2100 estimate) the better. There's literally not enough resources in the world for China to consume much above middle income, let alone high income like the west. If everyone consumed like US we would need 5 earths. China is 1/5 of global population.
Long term, One Child Policy was the better moral calculus despite social ramifications, i.e. demographic bomb, which TBF is blown out of proportion. It's better to be less populous and rich than the alternative. At minimum wealth allows you to import cheap surplus labour to take care of aging populations, which China should be able to arbitrage internally due to income disparity. Family Planning and crudely, millions dead under Mao worked in China's favour (well minus purging experts). The alternative is geometric population explosion to support successive generations. We know from overpopulation studies that this is fundamentally a self terminating system that will exceed carrying capacity of Earth.
Every human being alive is made up of biomass, which means that the meat that people are made up of was once animals and plants, also eating, also drinking water. So the idea that food and water shortages are caused by increase in human population is simply not possible. It is not possible for there to be more people than there are resources to create them in the first place.
The only real difference is that human beings consume industrial goods and excess consumption caused by increase in standard of living (for example flushing toilets, something animals and plants do not do). But even considering these things, they're due to an increase in standard of living which can only come from an increase in production. In aggregate, humans cannot consume more than we can produce. So it follows that an increase in population that causes resource shortages can only lead to a reduction in living standards, and only down to the living standards of a subsistence agrarian society. Overconsumption of resources then is a self correcting problem.
Now, suppose human beings could exceed the earth's carrying capacity, which I have just showed you is not possible. This would cause many human beings to die from starvation, as the decrease in living standards would take us below the standard of living of subsistence agriculture in this hypothetical scenario. Even in this extreme case, it is still a self correcting problem. There is no need to artificially correct it.
Any and all problems that appear to stem from overpopulation are actually resource allocation problems, inefficiencies in resource distribution. The problem with China is not that the resources cannot be produced to support the population, the problem is that the resources are inefficiently distributed, in part because a centrally controlled economy cannot possibly distribute resources more efficiently than a distributed (or free market) economy, but that is a different discussion.
People can have different daily-intake requirements as children versus adults, plus a growing populations consummation can temporarily exceed food production by burning trough food stores. Also, local food production can vary, place to place, season to season - what's sustainable during a good year, might not be during a bad one.
Plants and animals can eat and drink things humans can't; e.g. a plant is fine with muddy, faeces-contaminated water, it would even thrive on it. Livestock may happily eat grass/straw long-term.
The killing of one cow won't feed a human for the rest of their lives - multiple cows are needed to provide constant food, and the cow population may as such increase along with the human population.
When the rate at which the cows are eating grass is faster than the rate at which the grass grows, your population is unsustainable, and you will eventually not be able to feed everyone. The only sense in which it's "impossible to exceed the carrying capacity of the earth" is that when you do, people will die.
So I should elaborate, global overpopulation is impossible. Local overpopulation and resource shortages are possible, but this is not due to too many people (as the resources exist somewhere on earth to support them) but due to inefficient resource management.
Local shock increases in population are due to migration, not birth rate explosion, since birth rate follows resource availability. And again, a sudden migration from one place to another of large numbers of people (which we see in urbanization) is another example of inefficient resource allocation.
The increase in resource demand from a person as they grow into adulthood is a consideration, but an indicator that resources are strained is child mortality. The fact that it is decreasing worldwide tells us that we are not at the edge of carrying capacity. Even if we were, the result would be either decreased standard of living or increased child mortality, and thus the problem self corrects. My assertion again is that human population cannot exceeded carrying capacity globally.
Some creatures can consume resources that humans need to process before consuming, but in aggregate the amount of biomass stays the same and so the resources are always available. It is a question of production, not availability. An increase in livestock that depletes the food store of the herd is essentially the same scenario as a local increase in population of humans that strains locally available resources. And like I pointed out talking about that scenario, the issue is inefficient resource allocation, not overpopulation.
The inefficient resource allocation happened because of overpopulation. Managing resource of 1 million is easy but 1 billion (Hello Hello?) is not easy.
And the issue is quality life. Do you think many people from India/China can have same quality of life like that of US? No.
Just tell me how would u make efficient resource allocation? The world simply doesn't demand excess population. When there is more population resources must be shared and when resources are shared quality of life decreased leading to all sort of problem.
You're forgetting the most extreme form of self correction... People killing each other in a coordinated fashion AKA war.
The problem with your argument is that you consider wars to be an acceptable solution.
In such a world where there are too many people, we get suggestions such as instituting a one child policy, forced sterilization, outward extremists even discuss culling populations. What's the difference between that and war? The difference is, in war you have agency. War happens organically between people. An authoritarian solution takes agency away entirely. People are not free to be people, but you wind up with, best case scenario, the same result with regard to resource management. So yes, even in extreme circumstances where war is a response to resource shortages, it is still a preferable outcome to authoritarianism.
>Well, first of all, I demonstrated how this extreme case is impossible, but let's address war.
Did you happen to be an engineer working on the design or marketing of the Titanic in a past life? You sure sound like it. You also sound like you have not once ever grown a plant.
You can go from perfectly green and healthy to dead in a week if you don't pay attention. A seed can flourish just fine, only to eventually die as the energy burden required for it to thrive is no longer met. If this happens before you go to seed, congratulations, your population of plants just went extinct due to breaching the carrying capacity of their environment.
Try raising an orchid some time. I guarantee you'll learn something. One of the Vanilla ones in particular is best.
Your arguments are naive and reek of "not my problem" type thinking. You may believe that carrying capacity is a a priori defined as "I'm here, therefore not exceeded" but it isn't.
We're all hot-house flowers who are facing the possibility of the gardener (humanity collectively) just saying "screw it" and destroying our chances at continued success.
And war... War'll happen, and calling that a systemic self-correction is both callous and wretched beyond all reason. Nevermind that no one tends to factor in environmental damage that occurs as a result of warfare.
Try to stick to discussing the topic and my point rather than attacking me personally, it is much more effective and productive.
War IS authoritarianism. History shows that war pretty much requires it.
Looking at recorded human history, the long term trend consistently is that the population has risen. This means resource availability has increased, either due to discovery of new sources, invention, efficiency increase. Shocking decreases in some or other resource have had little effect on this trend.
Unavailability of some resource just means reduction in standard of living, for everything except food and water. And again, the net biomass on earth does not increase the more humans are here, and so the demand for food and water does not change whether that biomass is humans or buffalo. There can be no food or water shortages from overpopulation, only mismanagement and natural disaster.
The free market is the only thing capable of handling shocks, no other system is flexible or agile enough to quickly resolve a change in resource availability or demand. And sudden change of resource availability is not what we are talking about, we are talking about resource shortage due to overpopulation. A shock decrease in resources would result in disaster no matter how many people exist, so trying to address it by managing population levels is pointless.
I've been filling this bucket with water, and it's never overflown. Therefore the bucket can contain infinite water.
Free market economics don't work so well when the biggest players decide to augment their value proposition with the barrel of a gun. Available biomass is not the relevant metric when determining the carrying capacity of the earth, with the obvious caveat that by carrying capacity, we mean some definition that includes the continuation of modern society.
I'd say a more apt comparison to the point I'm making is "I've been filling this bucket with after and it's never overflown, and it appears that there is no way to overfill the bucket and exceed it's carrying capacity." I never said anything about continuous population growth, in fact, my point is that it is not possible to grow the population beyond the carrying capacity.
Why is that a waste of effort?
We are almost there. In Bangalore, India due to hockey-stick like expansion of houses, mainly high rise gated communities, the municipality is just not able to supply tap water. They all rely on daily supply of water tankers. However, even that water isn't potable. So house holds buy bottled water or have RO machines. Bear in mind, this is the situation for middle/upper-middle-income group. Lower income groups just drink any water they can, waterborne disease is rampant.
This[1] talk from P Sainath about the water crisis in India is revealing.
I would the situation would be similar in other emerging countries. I remember that a few months ago Cape Town, SA ran out of water[2]. Water was strictly rationed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-l2LvA2dSI
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/cape-town-was-90-days...