I’m not totally sure why people are talking about food availability to me. The fact that there’s enough food means the earth IS meant to have 9 + billion people on it?
There will be some painful short-term consequences of population contraction, but no one has really convinced me we need to try to force people to have children yet, and “we could totally feed them” isn’t a compelling reason for forced reproduction either. Let the population decline if it’s going to!
BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk 12 hours ago
Food isn’t everything, we’re overusing resources in other spaces too; People don’t really want to slow down on electrical consumption, travel or general waste/plastics
Dojan@pawb.social 10 hours ago
It’s not so much overusing as wasting. Capitalism has lead to an overproduction of low quality garbage that ultimately ends up in landfills. Fast fashion brands that produce more low quality clothing than they can sell, just for unbought good to end up in landfills. Food that is thrown away because there’s a surplus that can’t be sold because it doesn’t meet particular standards despite being perfectly edible.
We could optimise processes, make waste and overproduction the more expensive alternative. We don’t, however, because it’d lead to lower profits and we hold up profits above all else.
The average person doesn’t really need to travel less. A family of 2-4 people commuting by jet with another ~100 passengers once or twice a year is going to have way lower emissions than say, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, or fucking Linus Techtips.
Sure, individuals can change their habits, and in large swathes it will make things better. But it won’t fix anything, because the problem was never the average person. The problem lies with corporations and the mega rich. They’re the ones that need to go.
JayDee@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
We actually had hit a peak on water consupmtion per houshold. I think it wouldn’t be farfetched to see we would have hit an energy consumption peak had the internet not been invented, and that we would have hit a cap even then if LLMs and crypto hadn’t become widespread. We just keep coming up with stupid reasons to burn electricity!