#UpGoer5 As the number of people gets bigger in an area, the number of stuff that is able to back them up gets lower. The number of people found in a place, is controlled by what is going on around them; such as how much food, water and homes is found. But when the total of how much of these is found around them gets lower, the total number of people coming into this world gets less. They then reach a still state where the number of people
stops getting big. #CarryingCapacity #McGillUniversity

“The Ultimate Resource [Humans] is Peaking”

TLDR:
Backslapping group think economists with little understanding of #CarryingCapacity restraints suddenly realize we’re driving 100mph toward the wall that is the #TechnologicalMyth — while all their high minded tech innovation bafflegab essentially served to silence any dissent that might have served as the brakes.

Once again …The study of #economics is not #science. It’s #philosophy. And within the field of philosophy, it can most accurately be characterized as #philosophistry.

https://cgdev.org/sites/default/files/ultimate-resource-peaking.pdf

@evanwolf @aljazeera

Phil, if I take your meaning, you're agreeing with me that this thing they're reporting on is the managed approach, and saying that an unmanaged approach is when we hit the famines and people just go away painfully. That seems a reasonable and concise way to sum it up.

I've had discussions with people about the carrying capacity of the planet. People often tell me that technology can improve that a lot. I think the opposite. Technology can make us ever-more-fragile because each tech-engineered bit of our system that we depend on in order to support a too-large population is an opportunity to fail, affecting still more people than if that same part had failed if fewer depended on it. We're ratcheting up the stakes per acre even as we're avoiding addressing the basic threat to each square acre of food production.

(Not even to mention that when it fails, there will be cascade effects beyond just some people not getting fed.)

The carrying capacity of the planet is measured in how well we can carry people when things are NOT working, not how well you can construct a clever story about how when things are working great, everyone is doing fine. We do NOT want to test that bad case, but we are tempting fate.

#population #overpopulation #journalism #deGrowth #society #economics #sustainability #FossilFuels #oil #technology #ethics #metrics #CarryingCapacity

How Many People Can the Earth Support? (1998)

... I hope to offer a perspective that differs from the views of those who say that rapid population growth is no problem at all and those who say that population growth is the only problem. A rounded view of the facts should immunize us against both cornucopians and doomsayers. I give more details in my recent book How Many People Can the Earth Support? ...

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/10/08/how-many-people-can-the-earth-support/

Paywall: https://archive.is/E5AB8

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29450230

#Population #Overpopulation #CarryingCapacity #LimitsToGrowth #BigProblems #JoelECohen #RockefellerUniversity #ColumbiaUniversity #NYBooks #NewYorkReviewOfBooks #Books #BookReviews #Reviews

How Many People Can the Earth Support? (1998)

Paywall: https://archive.is/E5AB8

Cohen is the leading authority on Earth's poplation limits and carrying capacity. He's the first to say that the question and answer are complicated, but that does not mean that there are no limits.

In his book, How many people can the earth support?, Cohen visits many estimates and/or claims regarding carrying capacity and explores the assumptions or logic behind many of these, which range from a low of about 100 million to highs over 12 trillion. Most such estimates cluster around 1--10 billion, and seem more credible than outliers, especially of the high-end group.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-many-people-can-the-earth-support/oclc/898942239

https://archive.org/details/howmanypeoplecan00cohe

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28904625

#population #JoelECohen #overpopulation #CarryingCapacity #limits #LimitsToGrowth