OverPopulation Myth??

[St_Francis]

…Are each of you who reject the danger of overpopulation willing to permanently give up your all modern amenities including public spaces, parks and beaches?

Why would we have to do this? It’s not like there is a lack of space in the world.

Willing to reduce you’re intake in food to 3rd world level and send the money you save to feed or help those who need it most?

There is sufficient food being produced and even shipped to feed everyone in the world. The problem is distributing the food. In between corrupt governments who keep *donated *food for their buddies, and roving gangs stealing the food, food does not get to everyone. That is a completely different problem requiring a completely different solution.

No you’re not, I seriously doubt you will give up anything substantial for the sake of others right to populate the world as they see fit.

People do not have to give stuff up. People just have to decide not to buy. When more people want the same thing, the price goes up, people sort out their personal priorities, and figure out what they will do without. This family may decide to stop using several appliances; that family may decide to cut down on driving; another family might decide to close off a couple of rooms in their house.

Al Gore has several houses, at least one of which was enormous and used a lot of electricity (after this news came out in early 2007, they made some changes to their house ot make it more enery-efficient). George Bush built his house to be more energy-efficient in 1999-2000.

You say you are studing energy use. Sounds like you are in college. When I was in college, it was still believed that the world would run out of oil in the 1990s, that we would have global cooling, that there would be mass starvation from running out of food because the world’s population had grown so much… And all that did not happen. Oil reserves in the Persian Gulf were found to be 10x what we thought they were, people starved only because insane and very mean people were messing with the food supply, and global cooling changed to global warming, which was, ironically, announced during an unusually cold winter and has since been changed again to simply global climate change.

We use computers to model future predictions, but those computers are only as good as the information and assumptions with which they are loaded up. GIGO… Moreover, it is very difficult to sort out what kind of information is needed. Vegetarians think that if we all stop eating meat, everyone will be fed. Well, no. Growing and transporting grain in large amounts consumes *enormous *amounts of energy and carried its own environmental problems.

I am not saying that anyone is misrepresenting the truth on purpose, altho I believe that some people are; I am saying that it is impossible to tell. The idea that we would become overpopulated first appeared in the 1700s, when Malthus warned England that its population growth was unsustainable. So far, neither Malthus’s nor any of the predictions since then have come true. So in your studies remember that, keep an open mind, and verify everything.

 

[pnewton]

On the birth control issue - the Catholic Religion is on of the most fundamental in this regards. Even Islam considers it sinful to have more children than you can handle.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_birth_control
I always wonder which belief has it exactly right?

If you are Muslim, then you would follow Islam. If you are Catholic, you follow Jesus.



I do not understand the question though. Perhaps you live more in fear than in faith?

 

[Ridgerunner]

So many things, I’m not sure to whom to reply.

First of all, Oklahoma is Baja Missouri. Just thought I would clear that up.

More on topic, then. It isn’t as if there are no energy resources. There are plenty. We really don’t use much in the way of fissile materials to produce electrical energy from atomic power plants. There is plenty of coal. Certainly, a lot of the “easy oil” has been tapped (though it still flows plentifully) But there is a massive amount of potential petroleum energy in the U.S. alone. No, it isn’t particularly economical right now to produce much from oil shale or some of the resources in the Bakken Formation. But those things are there and await either price or technological advances or both.

I do not agree with those who cast aspersions on the U.S. for consuming a high proportionate share of the world’s oil consumption. Oil is the cheapest present energy resource for many things, and U.S. consumption almost exactly equals U.S. production percentage of the world’s goods and services. Yes, it takes energy to produce things.

I certainly would agree that there are many places in the world where water resources are scarce. But that’s not true everywhere. Where I live, we get about four feet of rain/year. The greatest portion of it ultimately ends up in the Mississippi River, whence it flows out to sea. We sit on limestone formations that hold so much water the upper levels are actually gaining from what they were years ago. And that also flows into creeks and rivers eventually and into the Mississippi and out to sea. A huge portion of the U.S. is like that. Much of the water problem, I think, has to do with the distribution of populations, not from an absolute scarcity. Imaginably, people would do better not to live in deserts, even in the U.S. where a huge number of people do, indeed, choose to live in deserts. And the government supports that with all kinds of expensive water projects. I’m not sure it makes sense.

Food is an interesting subject. In the late 19th Century, fully 1/3 of the agricultural production in the U.S. was used to feed horses. It would have been easy (and no doubt some did) to project that people would soon starve as the population and the number of horses to serve them increased. The vast number of horses in use caused horrific pollution (and disease) problems in cities. That changed. We now rely on fossil fuels instead of horse muscle power. Our cities and water supplies are massively cleaner than they were then. I fail to see why the change is bad.

Not all increases in the food supply are due to fossil fuel (name removed by moderator)uts, though it can’t be denied that many are. I live in a ranching area. Very little fossil fuel is used in ranching if you do it right. And, interestingly, though one would not think it, there are changes going on in that industry that very significantly reduce the grain (thus fossil fuel) (name removed by moderator)uts and greatly increase the conversion of useless (for humans) grass into useful meat protein. Some ranchers now don’t even feed hay (which requires fossil fuel for its production) in the wintertime. You can’t do that everywhere, but you sure can do it in a lot of places. It’s a matter of learning the proper management techniques.

Yes, Haiti, among other places, is deforested. It’s deforested because people use wood for fuel pervasively, and there isn’t sufficient capital to replace it, either in place or with other fuels. In my state, on the other hand, where there is a lot of wood-burning and timbering, forests are on the increase, and significantly so. When farmers and ranchers see value in managing good, healthy timber stands, they’ll do it. And many now do. But, unlike Al Gore, they don’t expect to sell bogus “carbon credits” for doing it. The real conservationists in the U.S. are not the “greenies”, but the farmers and ranchers.

There is a great deal of soil in the U.S. that is not in use at all, even good farmland. Part of that is due to government programs that take land out of production in order to reduce food surpluses.

I don’t buy the overpopulation thing. Somebody talked about how there are vast open spaces in Kansas, and there are. And they’re not deserts either, but good land, with plenty of water, a good climate, good transportation, etc. And it isn’t just Kansas. Most of the U.S. is underpopulated, certainly by European standards.

 

[edwest2]

First of all, substitute the word economical for the term, “the rich can’t make money off it.”

Farmers in the United States are paid billions of dollars to not grow anything:

nytimes.com/2009/04/04/us/politics/04farm.html

Overpopulation? I don’t think so.

guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/02/fred-pearce-overpopulation-nonsense

In 1968 (a big year for “change” in the United States), Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb warned of many of the things being discussed here. This is the revised and expanded edition released in 1971.

amazon.com/population-bomb-Paul-R-Ehrlich/dp/0345021711/ref=tmm_mmp_title_0

Just read some of the reviews.

God bless,
Ed

 

[Luigi_Ma]

A very good priest explained this problem to us once when he simply said that there is no overpopulation just over crowding. Sure there’s hardly space to move around in cities but that that does not mean it’s true for the rest of the world, just the cities. People go there in droves in search for work, better opportunities, studies, etc. hence the overcrowding. But try driving outside the city to the country and the emptiness is staggering.

 

[edwest2]

Please bear in mind as you read this that I am actively studying energy - looking at available resources, how they are being utilized and the effect on economies, the environment etc.

Overpopulation would never occur if everyone lived at subsistence 3rd world levels.
This means giving up all forms of electricity and everything that follows

• access to regular clean water
• ease of storing vast amounts of food
• ease of transport
• access to pharmaceutical drugs, hospitals and operations with anesthetics
• internet
• easy access to paper directly affecting schools
  etc

The result would be a massive increase in deaths due to sanitation problems, increase in child mortality rates, a decrease in age of death, mass fighting over resources, relocation etc.
This is natural population control and it is horrific.
Who could inflict these results on another?

Please bear in mind that unless we have made substantial developments in clean energy and reduced our CO2 output by 2050 - when the world population is expected to reach 9 billion many people will be massively displaces due to severe droughts, excessive flooding and the rise in acidity of the sea (major affect on the fish population).

This is only a small proportion of the problems facing us in the future.
Are each of you who reject the danger of overpopulation willing to permanently give up your all modern amenities including public spaces, parks and beaches? Willing to reduce you’re intake in food to 3rd world level and send the money you save to feed or help those who need it most? No you’re not, I seriously doubt you will give up anything substantial for the sake of others right to populate the world as they see fit.

Your views cite no sources. The means exist, right now, to alleviate global hunger, to cut energy consumption and all the rest. But making money comes first. It’s that simple. And if we’re all going to die - why worry? Take it a day at a time.

There is zero danger of overpopulation. It was a big scare tactic in 1968 and is exactly the same today. However, if there was a way to make money solving any of those problems, things could be fixed quite quickly.

Yes, it’s a myth.

To be repeated here endlessly.

Peace,
Ed

 

[J_Peterson]

On the birth control issue - the Catholic Religion is on of the most fundamental in this regards. Even Islam considers it sinful to have more children than you can handle.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_birth_control
I always wonder which belief has it exactly right?

What ever happened to “it’s my body I’ll do what I want”? That’s the mantra I’ve heard my whole life from the pro-choice folks. Guess it doesn’t apply when women use their bodies to have children.

 

[Matilda_Bennett]

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