YouTube video "The Population Bomb? | Retro Report | The New York Times"

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ralfyman said:
Ecological footprint per capita has been exceeding biocapacity.
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No offense, ralfy, but check out the last 90 seconds of the video. Man-made population control is not OK. Are you aware of how awful China’s one-child policy was?
 
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The Population Bomb. Totally fake. Totally wrong. This man was an alarmist.
 
edwest said:
The Population Bomb. Totally fake. Totally wrong. This man was an alarmist.
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Unknown to him were the advances in technology that allow us to have previously unheard of yields in our farms or improvements in waste management.

Today it seems that It’s ago about economics. Morden economics seem to favor smaller families from the individual’s pov. But all human systems are built for an unsustainable infinite growth. The tricky issue is adjusting to a system with fewer workers and shifting priorities.
 
It doesn’t matter whether or not we have man-made population control. Ecological footprint per capita still exceeds biocapacity.
 
The problem is that the same advances also led to diminishing returns and ecological damage plus global warming. Many groups ranging from the Church itself to multinational banks to insurers to military and intelligence groups have been issuing warnings about these crises.
 
True. I’m somewhat convinced that without coercion and provided the means people would reproduce less, especially in dense urban centers. Actually, I think there’s a shift underway that will see shrinking populations in a few decades. Seems that the boomers and before were simply the result of the martial embrace while younger generations seem more likely to be more results of more intentional actions.

Well that and studies suggesting that younger generations are “embracing” less than the boomers at the same age.
 
That’s a good point, but thankfully it seems that the population of humanity is stabilising around 11 billion people. Which is really starting to stretch the limit of carrying capacity of the world. Without cutting down the rain forest, we’re already at a point where almost all areable land has been used.

Getting people out of the worst kind of poverty and lowering child mortality has been instrumental in stopping the constant increase of children, and which is why, thank God, we’ve recently hit Peak Child.

The number of children in the world has stopped growing. They’ll age up and have children of the their own, and we’ll stabilise the growth.
 
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I was checking this web page, and it states that the planet has a biocapacity of around 9.2 billion global hectares (GHs). In 2012, that meant only 1.73 GHs per person. As population goes up, the availability of resources and energy per person decreases further.

That means with a population of around 11 billion, the available no. of GH per person will be less than 1.

To put this in perspective, the type of lifestyle most people want (which includes accessing this forum using the Internet and computers) requires around 3-4 GHs person. Include going on vacation to far-away places annually, and it goes up to around 10. Poor people experiencing a lack of one or more basic needs live only one GH.
 
Ehrlich and Malthus were both wrong. That’s not to say there isn’t a concern, but we have to be exceedingly careful about what and how to do things.

The one child policy was a disaster. Currently Japan, Europe, Russia and even China are facing demographic issues due to declining population. Not everyone agrees that runaway population is going to be a huge issue, especially as populations urbanize and women become more educated.

 
Over population is an absolute myth. All demographic models indicate a precipitous drop in world population in the latter part of the 21st century. This will also solve your carbon footprint problem. Countries that have pursued draconian fertility-limiting regimes have created nightmare scenarios for themselves.
 
The article only looks at the period in which global population will peak. It doesn’t look at biocapacity and ecological footprint per capita, not to mention diminishing returns and environmental damage.
 
This is all too narrow. Ongoing agricultural research is occurring. Crop yields are improving. In the United States, so-called Baby Boomers are reaching their limits. The death rate is on an upward curve. The younger generation in the West that is not poor is having kids.
 
Also, peak oil (leading to higher production costs since 2005), which will eventually affect agricultural and manufacturing output (and which is currently affecting financing, as seen in rising global debt), population momentum (where most countries don’t resemble the U.S. but have young populations, which means increasing global population even with a lower birth rate), ecological damage on a significant scale (e.g., a soon-to-be-published meta-analysis shows that 40 pct of insect species worldwide are declining at high rates), the effects of global warming reported by not just the Church but military and intelligence agencies, multinational banks, and insurers, and more.

Given that, there is possibility that population will peak, but not in the way we wish.
 
Jimbo said:
Ehrlich and Malthus were both wrong.
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There aren’t an infinite amount of resources, nor is the Earth growing in size with the number of people. There is an upper limit, and we’ll reach that limit at some point, though thankfully (through birth control) the world population is stabilising at around 11 billion people.

The Church has never been able to offer a practical answer to population growth, in the past the claim was that “God will provide bountifully”, and we see though that currently we’re using 96% of all areable land that isn’t the rainforest.

We’re hitting the ceiling and it ain’t budging.
 
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Not so. Look up farm subsidies. The US has paid farmers billions of dollars to grow nothing. Why? Say the annual consumption of corn is 10 million bushels. Growing a bushel more is not required. However, we can. During the Cold War, we sent grain to the former Soviet Union.
 
We can certainly get more efficient. Land currently taken up by cows or sheep, can in some cases also become farm land. With genetic engineering our crops can also yield more. However its still finite, and we’re more than a century away from able to carve out more lebensraum in space.

The Catholic ideal of large families can’t be unified with the natural fact that the Earth does not have an infinite carrying capacity.

Pope Francis himself even said that Catholics shouldn’t breed like rabbits.
 
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