Comment on We produce more resources than we could ever consume in the least sustainable ways possible.

FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• potatoguy@mbin.potato-guy.space ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It's not the growth of ethanol (maize) and animal feed (soybeans) producing crops on the last 30 years, highly fucking inefficient and produced in the worst way possible, not even that pasture uses A LOT more land than agriculture while being a lot less energy dense, both using a lot more water than producing direct food, it's the poors.

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  • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    1. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, we can tackle multiple solutions simultaneously.

    2. Developing nations have proven to increase their carbon footprints over time, e.g. China, so the fact that they’re the fastest growing populations on earth is a serious issue we can address with solutions such as: empower women’s rights and advancing access to education and upward mobility in society. That was the same exact solution that the UN came to in their meeting in Cairo, Egypt in 1994.

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    • potatoguy@mbin.potato-guy.space ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Producing beef is the most inefficient way to produce food, in both use of space and water, and energy. We don't need to impose things on people if humanity reduces its beef consumption.

      If we cut beef consumption by half, literally oligarchs would not have an economic reason to deforest the Amazon, because of the price drops. But no one wants to do that.

      Developing nations have proven to increase their carbon footprints over time, e.g. China, so the fact that they're the fastest growing populations on earth is a serious issue

      You're conflating a lot of words, gives an example for China, while Chinas population is not growing even (or will start to diminish on some years), associating different things into the same sentence is hard to pick what exactly you're talking about, China or Africa (the last place where population growth is happening at large beyond the 2.1 fertility rate).

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      • Senal@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        This mix of “things that are possible/reasonable” and “things that are wildly speculative” is interesting.

        Producing beef is the most inefficient way to produce food, in both use of space and water, and energy.

        Reasonable/possible

        We don’t need to impose things on people if humanity reduces its beef consumption.

        Wild speculation / nonsensical.

        This is not at all how large societies have worked, in any time period, ever.

        While it might be technically true, it’s missing a whole bunch of steps in the middle for it to be a practicality.

        If we cut beef consumption by half, literally oligarchs would not have an economic reason to deforest the Amazon, because of the price drops. But no one wants to do that.

        • Palm Oil
        • Real Estate
        • Mineral Speculation
        • Wood

        And that was just off of the top of my head.

        Oligarchs gonna oligarch, removing one revenue source isn’t going to suddenly kill interest in the amazon, with it’s abundant resources and space.

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      • vorpuni@tarte.nuage-libre.fr ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Beef is heavily subsidised either by giving money directly to the producers, or letting them get away with pollution (or deforestation in places like Brazil) and using terrible food and/or drugs for their product.

        Without subsidies I’m pretty sure beef wouldn’t be affordable even in rich countries.

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      • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        They also sell the rainforest lumber, but lifestyle changes aside we should always pursue a lower total population via lower birthrates until we can restore natural order.

        China was a developing nation, and since 1700 their population has grown 11x over, and now they produce more emissions and utilize more landmass than any other nation on earth.

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      • tar@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Producing beef is the most inefficient way to produce food, in both use of space and water, and energy.

        I’m sure that I can come up with something less efficient

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  • boomzilla@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Also: animal ag uses 80% of all arable land with most of it destined for grazing land (which a lot of (rain-)-forest had to be razed for) while only producing 17% of global calories and 38% of global proteins. The rest comes from human edible plants. A global switch to a plant based diet would reduce land usage from 4 to 1 billion. But that would be eco-fascism, I guess. Wonder if this is eco-fascism too.

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    • tar@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      A global switch to a plant based diet would reduce land usage from 4 to 1 billion.

      this is based entirely on poore-nemecek 2018, and is not a reliable claim

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• deranger@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  What is the ideal amount of biomass for mammals, then? Same question for agricultural land. What’s the ideal amount? I’m torn between thinking this is just how things go or maybe I’m just terribly ignorant. At some point the majority of biomass was dinosaurs or something, so what? That’s the ebb and flow of life. It wasn’t the biomass of dinosaurs that caused their extinction.

  I can’t disagree with the industrial farming and overall ecosystem points you raise but the biomass bits seem awfully arbitrary.

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  • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The whole human biomass question is difficult to me. Half of humanity doesn’t have access to proper toilets. I have cheap products produced by contemporary slaves in asia. Fewer people with better conditions sounds good to me. There was an article released this year that found 2-2.5 billion humans to be the carrying capacity of the earth. I’ve only read the abstract though.
    …edu.au/…/global-human-population-has-surpassed-e…
    Open access:
    iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/…/ae51aa

    Berries in swedish forests go ungathered because the work pays so badly swedes refuse it and our new anti abuse laws stops the thai workers who did it for pennies earlier from coming here.
    Good riddance, I say, people can gather their own blueberries and make their own jam - if the alternative is working conditions no one should have to suffer.

    If the aim is to have no one live in squalor and have everyone live a luxurious, but preferably more eco friendly, western lifestyle then how many humans can the planet support with degrading over time?
    How can we make 4-6 hours of daily paid work enough to live on, globally?
    How can we change society to stop chasing growth and find a system that allows future generation a planet with wildlife, clean air and water and a temperature that humans can enjoy not just survive?

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    • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      That was a weird ass study, they calculated the number based solely on historical population numbers and not any actual metrics. I have my doubts how useful a calculation that actually is.

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      • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        They do use some more data than that, see my quote.

        2.5. Indices of global change

        We compared global human population size in the three main phases of facilitation, transition, and the negative r∼ N phase (see Results) to the global temperature anomaly obtained from the HadCRUT.5.0.2.0 ensemble prediction anomaly [56] relative to the 1960–1991 baseline (data available from 1850 to the present).
        We hypothesize that the strongest positive relationship between human population size and climate change occurred during the negative phase because of consumption externalities such as increasing natural resource exploitation and loss of biodiversity. This can result from societies in the period of declining r and resources subsequently driving environmental degradation. In contrast, societies in the facilitation phase might have adequate resources to fuel increasing population growth rates.
        We also used two additional indices of global change in the analyses to corroborate the results using global temperature anomaly: global ecological footprint measured as the number of Earths required to meet consumption rates [29], and total annual CO2-e emissions (ourworldindata.org).

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    • bufalo1973@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      If the benefits of a trade is on the back of the worker then it’s not a trade. They should rise the price so they can pay enough.

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  • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Personally I’d say 10% each humans and livestock, or some similar ratio such that wildlife remain 80%.

    Another option is to return as far as the proven stable number of 2 million humans total, though that would take many many many generations to do and isn’t even guaranteed to be better for the environment since sometimes forest management and natural disaster response can actually be helpful.

    Definitely lower than 2 billion. It’s going to take a lot of figuring out since we clearly have no idea what number will bring global ecostability.

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    • Brummbaer@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The 36℅ you cited is for Mammalians, that doesn’t mean the rest of Biomass can be compared to it.

      Animal Biomass is around 0.5℅, so that puts it into relation.

      Also the earth consisist of 70% Water, this means Land mass is 30℅ and from that 30℅, around 46% is used by Humans.

      Also Land use has been steadily falling with modern agriculture. There was a time when Europa barely had any forests left, because of the extensive agricultural need for Farmland.

      I know “numbers scary”, but I think a bit of contextualisation can’t hurt.

      NB: Ecofascism is still Fascism.

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      • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        You’re gonna sit there and tell me it’s fine if only 5% of mammals are neither human nor livestock? That’s a horrifying thought alone, it means we’ve consumed or destroyed all of nature that we had the capability of doing such to. We should not be the 95% under any circumstance. We should not be 50%. We need there to be nature, we need there to be a natural order.

        For the record, the larger groups are fish and arthropods. That’s it. Sauropsida or Reptiles and amphibians are such a small amount of biomass that they’re completely negligible.

        BTW, it’s super cringe when you call the advocacy of women’s rights and education as “Fascism”.

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  • Viceversa@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    0%

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• JayDee@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Those numbers mean nothing to refute the overpopulation as a myth. The core premise of overpopulation is that humans can no longer produce enough food to sustain its people. So mammalian biomass doesn’t matter, total amount of farmable land doesn’t matter, and percent of avian life does not matter.

  It’s never been a question of our impact on the environment. it’s a question of our impact on ourselves and how much past our means we are.

  How much of our farmable land is currently being used to produce non-edible crops such as maize used for fuel additive or soy used for cosmetics? How much farmable land are we sabotaging with pollution which could be cleaned up? These are more pertinent questions for this, because if we could be making more food instead of maize or soy, we could still feed our people.

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  • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The core premise of overpopulation is that humans can no longer produce enough food to sustain its people.

    No, it absolutely isn’t that, idk where you even got that from. The core premise is that it is unsustainable for any reason.

    Producing food is one reason for evidence of current overpopulation, as I mention 50% of the world’s food production is with synthetic ammonia sourced from mining and petrochem which are finite nonrenewable resources.

    Another reason is that the world ecosystem sustains all life including humanity, and when it collapses the human population will collapse with it.

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    • JayDee@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Literally from Malthus himself. He argued that due to overpopulation we’d cause mass famines, leading to war and societal collapse. And he solidly pointed blame on developing countries overbreeding and called for population control and oven culling in those nations. All arguments directly derive from his original argument.

      Because that is the only solution to overpopulation, is population control and population culling. Population too big, either start killing people or forcing couples to not have children. That’s what you’re arguing for every time you agree with an overpopulation argument.

      The new twists of ecological destruction are also highly misplaced. You’d have to pin the blame on the places which are reproducing the most, which is not the case. The damage we do with deep sea fishing, fish farms, and meat farms is not the fault of the poor nations overbreeding - the only groups we could blame for overpopulation right now.

      In reality, we’d not be causing nearly as much damage to our environment if we weren’t using fossil fuels, weren’t transporting a massive portion of our goods from overseas, weren’t getting most of our meat from cows and other methane producers, weren’t fishing in such a vay that destroys the seafloor, etc. There’s literally hundreds of ways I could list that we’re doing which if we switched to an alternative would solve large portion of our ecological damage.

      We all are carrying out these unsustainable practices, regardless of population. Those practices are the problem, not overpopulation. We could still be producing enough food with sustainable methods that don’t destroy the world ecology.

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      • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Well I can compare your anti-population-reduction stance to Elon Musk. Do you feel good knowing that Christofascist and Technofascist oligarchs hold the same view as you?

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• merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  IMO the biggest problem with the post is that it is ignoring that natural world completely.

  We can’t colonize mars, not because it’s far away and hard to get to (although those are problems). The real issue is that we don’t really understand our own biosphere enough to build even an imitation one somewhere else. The ISS is orbits so close it’s barely out of the atmosphere. It’s still well protected by the Earth’s magnetic field, and gets regular deliveries of food, water, spare parts, etc. Every time we’ve tried a closed biosphere (biodome?) on earth, it has failed.

  The bigger Earth’s population, the shorter the timespan we have before we can realize we screwed up somehow (i.e. overusing artificial fertilizer, emitting too much carbon, etc.) and having to urgently fix it or the whole planet is wrecked. If we had a “planet B” it wouldn’t be so urgent. If we knew perfectly how the ecosphere worked, we wouldn’t screw up. If we had “save points” and could just load them if we screwed up, then we could run closer to the edge and go back if we messed up. Unfortunately, this is the only planet we have, and we still don’t know how it all works. Because of that, we should really run with a much lower population so that when we inevitably screw up there’s a buffer to protect us while we adjust.

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