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If you’re worried about cultural factors, you might find removing any significant percentage of the total population will likely run into even more implacable “cultural factors” than meat reduction would.

This is regardless of the method of population reduction, save perhaps “slow decline” which seems to be promising atm, but that obviously has the downside that it’ll take a few generations to really have an impact.

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Cypher@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I’m not suggesting a method to reduce population its just an observation that there are simply too many people for basically anything to be sustainable.

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- Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  It’s not though, seeing that a very large proportion of the world’s population get by, and that about 1/3rd of all food produced for human consumption is wasted each year. (Checked the UN source it’s 19% of food that makes it to people, and 13% of food pre-end point in the supply chain).
  
  And this is without starting to consider the energy inefficiency of feeding livestock to feed to humans.
  
  Also an awful lot of the world gets by with much less than US or much of Western Europe does. There’s a long way between our surplus of food and food insecurity.
  
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  - Cypher@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Food is only one factor, and no one has the right to dictate the diet of others. Food is a core part of culture, and destruction of culture is one of the definitions of genocide.
    
    Housing, transport, pollution, these are all problems at such collosal scales given the size of the human population that it simply isn’t sustainable.
    
    The sooner that humanity returns to a more sustainable population the better.
    
    There’s a long way between our surplus of food and food insecurity.
    
    Food insecurity is mostly a logistics problem when examined globally. There is no solving that without an increase in energy usage.
    
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    Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    But there’s about enough housing for everyone too… Just that it’s of houses are sitting empty across Europe, North America, and China.
    
    And lots of the food wasted in those places (minus China) is imported from places with less food security, such as Brazil, India, and Morocco.
    So it’s almost like the energy use and infrastructure is already part of the problem and solving it would take less.
    
    My point is that Malthusian was never correct, and the problems are ones of distribution. Not number of humans. (And Malthusian worries tend towards genocide naturally, that they’ve been shown consistently to be wrong should make them doubly suspect.)
    
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- scratchee@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Fair, we certainly won’t see any perfect or even good solutions given human nature and the large population, but I do think we can achieve mediocre success if we really work hard
  
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