and where does the energy and fertilizer come from to do that? right, fossil fuels. Last I checked, there's a currently an existential threat linked to use of those that are the main driver for why all these initiatives are going on.

I'm not happy about it either but its a choice between each individual's footprint going down or reducing the amount of individuals.

What exactly is the existential threat? If population is at all time highs, if lifespans are at all time highs, if crop yields are at all time highs, if deaths from natural disasters are at all time lows, what is the existential threat?

well, lets see here.. its currently causing increased forest fires, rising sea levels, desertification, glaciers melting, destabilization of the sea currents, collapsing ecosystems.

DO I need to spell it out for you or are you willfully living under a rock?

> We could quite easily triple our food production if only those limits were lifted.

We don't actually even need to triple the production - depending on the country and crop, anything from 1/3rd to over 60% of production (!!!) is wasted [1].

This insanity has got to stop, and a lot of that waste in Western countries is caused by consumers wanting a 24/7-available selection of all kind of products in their nearest supermarket. And everyone who proposes solutions to that like requiring pre-ordering fresh meat and produce one day in advance (to curb the amount of what has to be thrown away at the end of each day) quickly gets branded a "communist" or comparisons with empty shelves in the former GDR/USSR crop up.

Additionally: It's one thing (and bad enough) if stores keep around a dozen brands of basic yogurt around as that stuff needs a time to expire and stores have got pretty good at keeping that loss minimal, but all that packaged fresh meat... :'(

[1]: https://www.fao.org/platform-food-loss-waste/flw-data/en/

We are producing food to burn it ( Bio ethanol )

Something like 3/4 of US corn production goes to ethanol (mainly for gas, people don’t drink that much) and feed.

Yeah but that's not counted in "waste" statistics.

Sigh.

Why does every discussion about overpopulation immediately devolve to food supply? I get that seems like the obvious thing to talk about, but the real world of supply chains and materials is far more complex than "food". It guaranteed that we can industrially produce far above our current population levels and we'll totally screw up the planet. How do I know?

Because of global warming and mass extinctions.

What overpopulation discussions miss and devolve to also is that it isn't important on the number of people, it is the RESOURCE RATE PER PERSON combined with POPULATION that produces the "are we sustainable".

What doesn't scare me is China and India's population. It's China and India's rapid climb to US-level lifestyles and per capita resource consumption rates.

Here's the most important thing we are not conserving/shows we are overextended:

1) natural habitat destruction

2) everything else (water, metals, food, clean air)

I'm not just talking about the Amazon. The amount of space needed for HUMANS isn't important. The amount of space needed by NATURE very very very much is.

We drain all the swamps. We clear all the forest. We farm all the plains. We trawl the oceans.

This is the most stinging indictment of modern economics: what is the economic cost of destroying a natural habitat? It's not zero, in fact every single economic study will likely point out "well we could exploit this forest for human purposes and gain tax and GDP out of it".

That single failure, a TOTAL inability to quantify the economic value of a natural habitat in terms of sustaining the ecosystems, food webs, species proliferation/redundancy, production of oxygen/removal of CO2 isn't just going to kill us as a species, that's just garden variety extinction. It might kill the entire ecosystem and everything but single celled organisms.

Our developmental economics should STRONGLY prefer cities. A high rise apartment building should be far cheaper, so a 3000 sq ft apartment should be 1/3 the cost of a suburban 3000 sq ft house.

Meat ag is the problem. If everyone had piles of sausages, burgers. and steaks for every meal, food production would be incredibly difficult and expensive.