It's boringly dystopian reading the comments in these threads. Just the most banal commentary on something so severe and something involving so much collective responsibility.

I think we are too many people on earth, with each of us with an expanding carbon footprint. Including me. With a third of Pakistan now flooded and an expanding population all wanting a better life, it is pretty sad and I have tons of empathy.

I have worked in the environmental advocacy community for a long time. There is a reason this talking point is radioactive and never talked about. You have the environmental footprint of many, many Pakistanis. The moment you start talking in the terms of the population being already too high or the increasing footprint of people from poor nations being a problem, the obvious solutions become terrifying. And if you read through your first comment, I think you will see why. It’s always “too many of them,” not “too many of us.”

And I’m not even saying that’s incorrect, just that there is a reason it’s not talked about.

But the majority of the world population would choose to have the lifestyle and environmental footprint of middle-class Americans if they had that option.

If we want to allow continued population growth, we are saying that 'developing countries' must stop developing, and the wealthy countries need to vastly reduce the quality of not just their middle-classes, but their working class too.

We simply don't have the option of a low-footprint high standard of living right for the masses.

Concur.

> The moment you start talking in the terms of the population being already too high, the obvious solutions become terrifying

Perhaps there are good solutions worth talking about, such as what kinds of crops and foods we incentivize and disincentivize, with concomitant impact on the environment and, ultimately, the space we need to thrive. Or another is giving women access to birth control so that they can make decisions about what they perceive to be an improvement to their own lives and that of their families.

Yes, that’s absolutely where the focus goes, and is talked about very carefully to not run afoul of the cancellers.

The Gates Foundation’s work with vaccination will have a huge impact as longevity increases and child mortality drops, people tend to respond to the lower risk by having smaller families. Plus the general education and empowerment of women is a big strategy to control birthrates as well since it gives women more life options beyond motherhood. You will notice that the overall western narrative is that we have a low birthrate crisis and need to support family life better, but in Africa the effort is to bring that birthrate down. Touchy, touchy subject, especially since a massive population increase in the global south is already baked into the math and is as close to inevitable as it gets.

Zero-sum thinking can get you into a whole lot of trouble here, which is why I am basically a solar punk. If that’s not realistic we are screwed anyway and will tear each other to pieces over the last scraps of the biosphere.

Of course it’s always going to be too many of ‘them’. Wars are always about limited resources. It’s crazy to think the planet can handle exponential population growth forever. At a certain point hard decision are going to have to be made, and I doubt anyone is going to volunteer to be culled.

At the rate the climate hysteria is growing, we are going to have wars specifically aimed at culling large populations. Maybe biological sneak attacks, I mean accidental releases.

Yup, that’s the stuff right there that makes this the radioactive topic. It’s just one teeny tiny step from it will happen to it should. A seemingly rational ideological conclusion. It has been tried before. A memorial stands on the spot in my Polish city and the ashes are still in the soil.

Wars have historically never been a particularly effective method of population reduction though - I gather during WWII the number of humans killed on the battle field was pretty small compared to those who died from disease or natural disasters.

Soviet Union lost 20 to 27 million people during WWII, which amounts to 10-15% of entire population at the moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...

And terrifying graph for percentage losses by country:

https://topforeignstocks.com/2016/04/19/chart-world-war-ii-c...

Yep, that does stand out as a historical exception. But even a once off 15% reduction over a few years isn't necessarily going to matter much in the face of sustained exponential growth - if it happened in Ethiopia, the population would recover within 5 years.

Before people moved around a great deal, war was the most effective way to spread disease. USA's entry into WWI spread "Spanish" Flu from rural Kansas to the world, killing between 17 and 100 million.

Highly contagious diseases have inevitably spread worldwide for centuries now, ever since ships got fast enough. Wars only accelerate the process slightly, which hardly matters in the long run. There was another worldwide respiratory virus pandemic starting in 1889 which killed a lot of people despite the lack of large-scale wars.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lpm.2022.104111

Assuming that the "Spanish Flu" originated in the USA (possible but unproven), it would have spread everywhere even if we never entered WWI.

That link appears to describe an earlier epidemic that did not coincide with a world war and killed far fewer people; what is the relevance of that?

It is well known that "Spanish" Flu originated in Kansas. It certainly would have spread beyond in the absence of USA military action, but it also certainly would not have killed 100 million people. Exposure rate drives incidence rate, which in turn drives mortality. If only ten people in a location have been exposed and only one of those has become infected, the resources of that location are better able to cope with the epidemic than would be the case if 1M were exposed and 100,000 were infected. Both treatment and isolation are more successful with more resources. This was why Americans were urged to isolate in the initial stages of covid, to prevent a shortage of hospital beds.

A very wrong way to handle an epidemic is to transfer tens of thousands of people to ground zero, expose them for weeks, and then transfer them to various other continents.

Our #1 export is death.

That’s why this line of thought is shunned. It’s because the best historical precedent for intentional population reduction is not war, it’s genocide.

This malthusian crap needs to end. The earth can happily support 8 billion people if we just use a better energy mix. We already (in the US) emit less CO2 than we did in the mid 2000s, and it's only going to keep going down. It's literally financially unreasonable to run coal plants, and the developed world should be doing everything in it's power to fill india and the middle east and africa with solar panels.

With a little help, most of these nations could jump straight past the pollution of a fossil fuel based economy and directly into a renewable/sustainable economy, while only improving their lives.

This is also completely orthogonal to the fact that if you want less people on the earth all you have to do is send women to school, allow them to start a career, and give them easy access to birth control. Population drops pretty reliably after that.