Fertility is not as important anymore. What is important is the percentage of people on the planet living in a modern, industrial society. That percentage is growing. That's the issue. You can't compare the resource requirements of 1,000 Bangladeshis living in a village to the resource requirements of a 100 home US suburban development. I guarantee you just the trash produced alone is incomparable between the two - let alone the energy consumption. Yet as globalization continues, living standards increase in areas that did not exist on the globaleconomic map 30 years ago. Second. Let's assume that the world population levels off - as it has in much of the western world. What does that mean to a debt-based monetary system that requires constant growth - both monetary and productive - to maintain its ability to service ongoing debts? I'm not saying its the end of the world starting tomorrow - I'm just saying that there is another side to globalization we in the West have not yet experienced. In the past 20-30 years, we experienced cheaper goods and the growth of a FIRE economy - up until now, good things. The next twenty years will be far different. And please, no responses with yet unattained "magic wand" technologies that will change everything. Let's be realistic.
Well, according to both US and UN estimates, global population will top out at 8 or 9 Billion. The rise is not expected to be geometric largely because of third world industrialization and the income-fertility relationship already described. Further, once peaked, population will subside back to 6-7 Billion as Chinese and Indian fertility rates decline under 2 children. China's population already stabilized (a good case example of higher income = reduced offspring). The worst case scenario isn't really the most likely case, imo. If the third world achieved Western levels of affluence, global population wouldn't hit 9 Billion. On the contrary, if most of the third world industrializes slowly, wages rise, but not commensurate to Western consumptive standards = less consumption to support. Either way, I'll assume the worst and answer the question, 'could earth support 9 Billion people at Western living standards?' I say yes. For all the same reasons already mentioned. Clean goal (gasification/liquification etc) is a real technology. Massive coal deposits (100+ year reserves) are common. New discoveries for rare metals are still made. I have never heard of one metal that's been mined out of existence. Have you? Even if it were to happen, substitution comes into play. Instead of gold, we use palladium, or silver, or silicon. Or draw from tech breakthroughs: nanotech is really cutting edge for material development - atomic designer composite materials. Super-strong, super-light, made from plentiful elements (carbon etc). Capitalism and markets play their role, as BlackJack mentioned: higher prices advance recycling/reclaiming technologies; conservation and efficiency dominate the use of scarce resources; new, deeper mines are built, technologies invested. Then, we have to consider politics. There's a big incentive for miners and oil companies to artificially restrict supply to boost prices. I already posted some info on the thread. How much scarcity in oil and metal markets is real? How much is hype (unreported discoveries to create the illusion of tight markets)? Are there incentives for Governments to scare up global warming? Or Peak Oil? Carbon taxes, gigantic new "green" bureaucracies, and layers of industrial regulation lines their pockets. Peak oil is good business for their donors and gives military-industrial-complex an excuse to make war in the Middle East. Ultra-deep sea oil drilling is now just coming online. The ocean bed is a vast, unexplored resource. I'd say humanity is in the infancy of commercial exploration of just planet earth. Then there's the moon. At the end of the day, I'm an eternal optimist in the creativity and ingenuity of free markets and the human spirit. It's meddling Governments and their insistence to squander private wealth on buddies (Crony Capitalism) that's the real cancer on this planet. Not free humanity. Governments are the ones who destroy free market wealth on endless wars, central economic planning which leads to bubble economics = decades of lost progress, hanging milestones of debt around the neck of Countries so bankers can get even richer. It's the Central Economic planners (ie Governments) that are holding us back. See the mind job here? Governments want humanity to think they're the parasite on the planet. When really its Big Government Corporatism that's the cancer on humanity!! A lot of this stuff is just propaganda, imo.
Yea, the relationship isn't perfect, but good. Having earned an undergrad in psychology and sociology (*flush*) most of the ethnographies reiterated the importance prolific child bearing has on family income and old-age security (no pension or healthcare there etc). Usually, poor families are large, work a piece of land, or scavenge scrap metal from dumps, pool the income to put the eldest through school (then college), then the eldest, once employed, pays secondary education for younger siblings. That's what my ex girlfriends father did (filipino). Education and birth control also play a big role as the outliers like Brazil (poor with reduced fertility) and parts of Africa (ex South Africa), don't always fit the mold. Either way, the solution to ballooning population is raise incomes. The best way we know to accomplish that is free market capitalism, private property rights etc. This is a real no brainer, and something Western Governments should be pounding the table for. As we all know, wealth is not zero sum nor is it dropped from heaven, like mana. It's created. Third world countries can replicate Americas same success, if their Governments and people were illuminated with these economic truths and had the fortitude to implement them. Imo, that's why Western Democracy is precious. Once Dictators and Despots get control, they work to keep it. In effect, killing free markets and all the attendant wealth creation benefits that go along with it. Explains why Africa, India, China and much of South America was such a hole, for so long. Doesn't help our Governments actively courted third worlders into over-indebtedness, only to blow apart their currency and set them back 50 years. But that's something for us Westerners to confront our own Governments on. History is just awash with examples of corrupt Governments bent on control, who gladly wreck free markets and their attendant wealth, only to condemn generations to grinding poverty. Why? For power, control and money = GREED. It's these Central Planner, Big Government Corportists that are the cancer on humanity. My 2 cents.
That is an important question, and often overlooked. Much of our social policy is predicated on an ever-increasing population base. Much of our economic activity is likewise based on an ever-increasing class of consumers - probably easiest seen in Real Estate. In the end, depending on loan repayment is going to be a tricky proposition. I agree with you that the next 30 years for us will look much different than the past 30 years.
This argument is about as credible as the "magic scientific discovery will save our bacon" fantasy. While I agree that rising living standards do slow population growth, the proposition that the planet can support say 7 billion people with living standards similar to western countries in a business as usual scenario is completely unsupportable. The GHG emissions alone (without even considering any other environmental/resource factors) would be catastrophic. And for anybody under the misapprehension that issues of climate change and ecological destruction after the "south" has achieved some sort of economic parity with the "north", the grim reality is that the damage incurred in achieving that goal in a business as usual scenario is for practical purposes irreversible. Not that any sort of parity is likely to happen anyway in a business as usual scenario - more likely the reverse. Climate change is "forever" (centuries at least) There is no rational way to reverse it. The same is true of species extinction on a large scale and a host of other issues of ecological damage. Carbon capture schemes are basically a crock - too expensive, too inefficient, too unsafe and too late. Plus they do not address the many other environmental consequences of coal mining and transport. Coal has got to go. Lots of hand waving and fanciful projections about all the wonderful things that are going to happen if we proceed "business as usual" (minus a bit of regulation) really are a joke when the problem IS business as usual.
Indeed. Capitalism historically has depended on growing markets otherwise known as economic growth (through population growth, technological advances, globalisation, imperialism and other factors) . And economic growth has depended on increasing consumption of resources. Can economic growth be decoupled from increasing resource consumption? Can capitalism continue in it's current form without endlessly growing markets? The answers are not simple and far from obvious.
why do you guys insist on assuming that resource consumption correlates to population? it doesn't! it correlates to PRICE of the resource. case in point: rewind to summer of 2008 when gas prices rose to $4/gal and almost overnight, sales of high MPG cars skyrocketed and sales of SUVs plummeted. companies suddenly put resources into designing fuel efficient vehicles and into innovating new energy sources. population change didn't cause this change in oil consumption habits. price of oil caused it. the free markets will ensure we never run out of natural resources. we had a preview of what happens when a resource becomes expensive: humans become more efficient in its usage and search for cheaper alternatives.