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A comment on We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US.

Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by HenryKissinger on Thursday March 04, 2021 @07:42AM (#26341601)
This is a good thing. The carrying capacity of the planet is finite, and our large global population is largely responsible for the destruction of the environment and climate change. Further, the high standard of living of Americans places a significant burden on the resources used to sustain this lifestyle. 300k fewer Americans will have a much greater impact on the environment than 300k fewer people of any other country.

There's also the fact that the global population has to decrease at some point, à la Japan.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by chriskanan on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:06AM (#26341819)
I highly recommend David Attenborough's 2020 Netflix documentary "A Life on Our Planet."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough:_A_Life_on_...

https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393

It is his "witness statement" on how he has personally observed enormous environmental damage over his ~70 year career documenting wildlife throughout the world.

He argues that the solution is to reduce our population growth worldwide.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by kmlx on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:17AM (#26341916)
on the other hand our planet has seen 5 mass extinction events.

at the same time, 56 millions years ago the planet was extremely hot: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

and, to top it off, all we're doing is prolonging the inevitable warming of the planet.

things aren't so clear as that documentary makes it unfortunately.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by adrianN on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:27AM (#26342046)
There were no humans 56 millions years ago. I'd like the planet to remain in a state that is good for humans for at least a few more millennia.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by kmlx on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:30AM (#26342068)
“a few more millennia” is basically nothing in terms of the planet’s history.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by adrianN on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:31AM (#26342092)
The entirety of human civilization is basically nothing in terms of the planet's history. That doesn't make it less important to me though.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by kmlx on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:41AM (#26342233)
to me it’s an important aspect. try as we might, we’ll still be subject to planetary forces outside of our control.

the planet is warming. we can delay it for a bit, but the planet will continue to warm no matter what we do.

of course we should manage our impact on the planet. but this will represent just a small delay in the grand scheme of things. a few generations, maybe even a few thousand years as you’ve put it.

but a multi generational effort to tackle either moving to a different planet or something like living underground will be needed.

unfortunately our extremely limited existence will make these efforts extremely hard to tackle.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by nindalf on Thursday March 04, 2021 @10:02AM (#26343238)
What has this got to do with anything?

The planet used to be hotter, agreed. But the species alive then were completely different, adapted to living in those conditions. The species alive now (including us!) can thrive in current climatic conditions. A drastic change in a short span of time will lead to a mass extinction.

Unless you think a mass extinction event is ok because it happened millions of years before humans existed? It happened to the dinosaurs so it's no big deal if it happens to most living creatures alive today?

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by leesalminen on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:21AM (#26341964)
> things aren't so clear as that documentary makes it unfortunately.

I’ve been wondering lately what happened to the documentary genre. When was the turning point where they started becoming political in nature, driving an ideology based off FUD and pseudo-science? Or have they always been this way and I’m just realizing it now?

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by adrianN on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:37AM (#26342177)
I suppose the turning point was when we stopped living in a shared reality where scientific consensus was worth something.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by ben_w on Sunday March 07, 2021 @01:43PM (#26378456)
I grew up with “documentaries” about aliens and ghosts, so I think the problem has been here for ages.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by neogodless on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:22AM (#26341977)
It's really odd to me. 200 years ago, the population was about one billion. Now it approaches eight billion. If the trend really is lower over the next 100 years and it drops... don't we think it would eventually reverse again? Why do we want the population to be stable or always growing? Why would it be bad for it to be going down for a while?
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by rocgf on Thursday March 04, 2021 @09:49AM (#26343091)
Because our economy is somewhat of a Ponzi scheme, in which everything needs to keep growing forever. We are perpetually borrowing from the future, with the assumption that everything will be growing forever.

As people get older, they start getting more expensive. If you don't have a larger generation coming from behind to provide for that ever-increasing older generation, then the costs have to be spread among fewer people.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by adrianN on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:26AM (#26342034)
Many parts of our economy assume perpetual growth. The easiest way to ensure growth is to increase the number of humans. Look at countries with shrinking birth rates for a glimpse of the problems an aging population can cause.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by jfk13 on Thursday March 04, 2021 @09:29AM (#26342879)
Perpetual growth based on an ever-increasing population is a recipe for eventual disaster.

The earth's resources are not infinite. We may not be able to say precisely what its carrying capacity for humans is (and the answer would depend to some extent on the conditions in which the humans are prepared to live), but I am entirely confident that there is a limit.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by rocgf on Thursday March 04, 2021 @09:51AM (#26343124)
It definitely is, and believing anything else is delusional.

With that said, would you like to be the politician to stop the madness, if that's even possible? Things will not change until we have a crisis.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by toomuchtodo on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:26AM (#26342029)
It would not reverse if woman have universal access to contraceptives and are empowered and educated. It’s a one way ratchet.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by neogodless on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:34AM (#26342124)
That's an assumption though, based on the current conditions and population. You can't extrapolate that same assumption to a future modernized world that has returned to one or two billion humans. Perhaps in that world, women happily choose to have more children than they are having now, for a variety of unforeseen reasons. Perhaps the world is just so great for everyone that women choose to bring additional children into the world, knowing just how much joy that children will experience. Perhaps children become a new popular hobby or some entertainment scheme we would find abhorrent in today's world.

I don't believe there's anyway to know today that it's a one way ratchet forever.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by JoeAltmaier on Thursday March 04, 2021 @07:56AM (#26341726)
Many places have less than replacement now. Spain is very much less. Nearly every country on earth is headed asymptotically toward that. We've just taken a jump ahead by several years on that path.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by Peepootoler on Thursday March 04, 2021 @10:32AM (#26343659)
It's a good thing, but I expect politicians to just use this as another excuse for more mass immigration. They've been using this narrative for decades now after all.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by rocgf on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:08AM (#26341843)
It is very hard to understand why your comment was downvoted this badly.

I thought everyone understands that the planet is overpopulated as it is and that bringing as many children into the world as possible is not a net positive.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by kmlx on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:11AM (#26341870)
it's not overpopulated.

this is a myth that has been going on since the 1970s:

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/12/16766872/overpop...

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by Tepix on Thursday March 04, 2021 @09:22AM (#26342799)
The author Lyman Stone writes mainly for IFS Institute for Family Studies, which is moderately to strong biased to the right according to https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/institute-for-family-studies/

He also writes for The Federalist, another biased publication: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-federalist/

If you look at the destruction of natural resources world-wide, you don't have to be an expert to see that the current resource usage is unsustainable. At the same time the rich countries are unwilling to give up their status. The trend is going in the wrong direction.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by RankingMember on Thursday March 04, 2021 @11:08AM (#26344150)
This is a super-anthropocentric perspective. If we could talk to the non-human inhabitants of the planet, they'd have much to say about the encroachment of humanity into every corner of their world and its unremittingly negative impact upon them.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by toomuchtodo on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:28AM (#26342055)
700 million people in the world face food scarcity at any one time. The world is overpopulated and its resources strained by the existing 7.4 billion humans (CO2 budget, natural resources reserves, etc).
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by jnwatson on Thursday March 04, 2021 @09:31AM (#26342895)
Practically speaking, we make enough food for all the humans on this planet, and we'll likely be able to until at least 10 billion people exist.

The reason that folks face food scarcity is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We don't do a good job at making sure people don't go hungry, even in the US.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by leesalminen on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:30AM (#26342077)
It seems like that’s artificially constrained food supply though. There’s plenty of land to grow crops on the planet. It’s not like there’s not enough seeds or dirt to grow food.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by kmlx on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:33AM (#26342118)
those are two unrelated ideas.

again, overpopulation is a myth. a convenient and lazy one. but still a myth.

there are too many resources on the web explaining this.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by rimiform on Thursday March 04, 2021 @11:46AM (#26344708)
More people than that are overweight. The total amount of food might be enough, but simply ill-distributed.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by inglor_cz on Thursday March 04, 2021 @12:41PM (#26345417)
How many people are fat from having a calorie-rich but nutrient-poor diet?

We may produce enough calories in sugar, but stuffing the world with cheap junk food is not a solution. Total amount isn't a good metrics; total quality and availability would probably be better.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by rocgf on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:52AM (#26342379)
> it's not overpopulated.

I'm sorry, but this is just a ridiculous statement to make, except maybe if our opinions on what overpopulation means are vastly different.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by tremon on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:36AM (#26342153)
The earth is not overpopulated in the same sense that Covid is just a flu: people argue their position with anecdata instead of statistical trends.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by JeremyBanks on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:12AM (#26341873)
My impression is that most people who talk about overpopulation are basing it on old trends before population growth rates dropped off so much.
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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by adrianN on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:24AM (#26342006)
It is a fact that we're currently using a large number of resources much faster than they replenish. That seems like a good criterion for calling the planet overpopulated.

One can of course argue that sufficient technology can curb our resource consumption without reducing the number of humans, but I find it a bit odd to use hypothetical technology deployment as an argument against the planet being beyond its sustainable carrying capacity today.

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Re:We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US by RankingMember on Thursday March 04, 2021 @11:26AM (#26344402)
I think a lot of the disagreement in the comments here comes down to different ideas wrt the definition of overpopulation. When I talk about overpopulation, I talk about a human population that reaches the point where it's detrimental to quality of life for all beings on earth. Sure, we can sustain population growth for a long time by continuing to destroy more and more of our natural resources and wantonly disregarding the existence of all other life on this planet (and ultimately, our own), but can anyone who cares about the whole of the planet really look at that and consider it a net positive? In my mind, an anthropocentric perspective is as misguided as a purely misanthropic one, and is certainly more evidently virulent.
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