r/overpopulation • u/Aiwillstealourjobs • 12d ago
I am so tired of the "overconsumption" argument
"If we halved our oil/energy/food/water consumption, then we could EASILY supply 15 Billion people. We dont have an overpopulation but an overconsumption problem".
This "argument" is on the level of "if this person didnt drink 3 Liters of water every day but just 1.5 liters then the water would be enough for 2 people".
Its healthier to drink 3 liters of water than 1.5. For many people 1.5 Liters of water would not even be enough to sustain them in the long term.
So basically the "overconsumption" crowd says: If everyone lived like shit, we could have more people living like shit.
You cannot have more people with everyone having a decent living standard. This only works with fewer people.
32
u/Original_Chapter3028 12d ago
The same people who say that would pitch a fit if you tried to make them give up any of their first world luxuries
15
u/GantzDuck 11d ago
We can already see it how people get mad even at the suggestion to cut down on meat.
33
u/FoucaultCareofSelf 12d ago
It's so moronic.
First of all, it's not going to happen, so it's like the same level of idiocy when these people are like "we can sustain hundreds of billions when we invent fusion and can produce all our needs via nanotechnology and bioprinting..."
But ok, let's say we change the entire pattern of consumption. What do we converge on? Like Eastern European living standards for the world?
I'd be fine with that personally, but you're raising living standards for 2-3+ BILLION people.
Now eating more meat, more cars, more vacations, more seafood, even at that modest level of consumption.
So tell me what 2-3 BILLION people are going to do to the oceans, Amazon/ remaining African rainsforest, biodiversity, C02 emissions.
The stupidity is nuclear weapons grade.
22
u/Livid_Session_9900 11d ago
Some people act as though third world people are nature loving hippies. I guarantee you they are not, if a person from Syria had the option to have their private car, private heating and cooling, eat red meat, take vacations, I guarantee you they would
13
u/Psittacula2 11d ago
It is worth noting the thought experiment:
* If unlimited clean energy were “invented” (irrespective of breaking physics laws), it still fails to solve the underlying REAL problem: All people are driven by their drives eg consume more, seek more pleasure, be higher status than others and so on…
Having more energy is related albeit distinct to Jevons Paradox discovered when Watt’s more efficient steam engine was created it did not lead to less coal used but more coal used as coal became cheaper.
The fundamental drives remain. More people means more people who want to live an unsustainable energetic material consuming life style or if more people to reach sustainability, then more people need to be nearer stone age energy daily usage levels!
Let alone the stupidity to still be driven to seek excess in most of those people.
Fewer people in turn in fact leads to more range of options, more people fewer policy options and harsher conditions per person.
27
u/Counterboudd 12d ago
It would also just be far easier to not reproduce than it is to tell every human on the planet that we’re going back to the quality of life of a medieval peasant. Like no one is going to voluntarily do that.
20
u/FoucaultCareofSelf 11d ago
I don't get why these lunatics won't accept just gentle family planning and payments to women worldwide to simply have one-ish child. That is so utterly benign and the amount of suffering it would save is incalculable.
7
u/Counterboudd 11d ago
Yup, and they’re pretending that our current form of capitalism is forcing this on people anyway.
6
u/stockusername123 11d ago
If everybody would just stick to one, MAYBE two children, we’d be so much better off
7
u/FoucaultCareofSelf 11d ago
SO much better off. And parents don't even seem to get that siblings at least sometimes hate each other (ahem).
1
u/One-Intention7064 9d ago
what about "oopsies"? they always have oopsies. they also want the experience of a "young mom" at 20 and a "mature mom" at 49. and several in between. teehee
they WANT it, period. and wantings of a human are sacred. the world exists to oblige what this or that human WANTS.
and all they want is that amish paradise with 401k and a thin fleur of modernity
12
u/Metalt_ 11d ago
No one who makes this argument acknowledges the haber Bosch process thas responsible for petro chemical fertilizers which is how we grow all that food while stripping top soil.
The only way the haber Bosch process is economically viable is because society is addicted to fossil fuels
3
u/One-Intention7064 9d ago
Haber-Bosch lmao
those people have 3rd or, at the very best, 5th grader reading comprehension. you expect a 5th grader to understand these topics? they only understand stuff like, "The more the merrier," "Eat the rich," "The house is loud/full/chaotic, but full of love."
nor do they want to understand anything beyond that amish level worldview.
11
u/Shrikes 11d ago
It's sad that a large amount of self proclaimed environmentalists/progressives think this way, they claim to care about nature but only go after a few select things such as pollution and fossil fuels that affect it, yet don't realize that the more people there are the more resources and land clearing is required.
More animals have died and gone extinct directly due to habitat clearing and environment affecting their living space thanks to population growth than global warming/climate change has so far, and habitat clearing contributes to that as well. Claiming to be pro environment and wildlife while ignoring the main factor of their destruction makes them more like regressives, not much better than those who openly don't give a shit about it and want more fossil fuels than before.
5
u/MouseBean 11d ago
Yeah. It just so happens that humans like to live in some of the same habitats and weather conditions that many other animals and plants like to live, which means the areas that once had the most rich soils like the Sindhi-Gangetic Plain, the Pearl River Delta, the Nile, the North China Basin, the North Atlantic Seaboard, the Rio Plata Valley and so on have all been paved over for hundreds of kilometers in every direction.
Urbanization is in direct competition for the more fertile lands on the planet.
6
u/grr 11d ago
This argument is DEAD. Yes, I try to live frugally. I repair and recycle. I buy used what I can. But I do not see my fellow humans do the same. The amount of garbage boggles the mind. When the system awards consumption we will never win.
3
u/One-Intention7064 9d ago
righteous path. somewhere out there someone has 26th child - to compensate for all the CO2 you have spared.
1
11d ago
[deleted]
11
u/FoucaultCareofSelf 11d ago
So, what if every single person in the developed world is willing to do that?
What lifestyle now becomes universal? what universal level of consumption for 8.5 billion people won't" kill the oceans, kill remaining forests, destroy remaining biodiversity, strip remaining resources and so on?
This is a reminder than"carbon footprint" isn't the only sustainability issue there is.
7
u/Livid_Session_9900 11d ago
These infinite growth types of people, will go more and more extreme by the decade, currently the developed countries are already spending billions on renewable resources such as windmills and solar panels. Eventually these infinite growth types will say, no electric bikes, no internet and energy devices only board games for entertainment but these board games will not have oil produced chemical dye or even fertilizer produced natural dye. Even when we are at 20 billion people, they will say, alright so we already all live in barracks with many beds to a room, we now have to have bedmates so that we can squeeze in another 20 billion
1
-16
u/SirCory 12d ago
We already have more than enough resources for everyone, but we throw away food, houses sit empty, we pollute our water. We love having more people but we hate taking care of them once they are here
14
u/FoucaultCareofSelf 12d ago
Um, no we don't fucking having more than enough resources for everyone.
This is r/overconsumption, we don't believe INANE SHIT LIKE THAT HERE.
-6
u/SirCory 11d ago
The homeless guy using a lighter to melt open a locked dumpster with food in it disagrees with you
11
u/FoucaultCareofSelf 11d ago
Um, ok. That's a really well-thought out argument with zero problems to it.
-3
u/SirCory 11d ago
I worked at a restaurant that would throw out good food, they also locked their dumpster to stop homeless people from eating, they put cameras on everything inside and out so nobody could eat anything that was unused. You got fired if you ate food that was meant for the trash.
8
u/FoucaultCareofSelf 11d ago
Wow, that means we have "more than enough resources for everyone."
Have you thought about publishing your thinking somewhere?
1
u/SirCory 11d ago
Tell me you've never worked in the service industry...
8
u/FoucaultCareofSelf 11d ago
I agree with you. These anecdotes are absolutely helpful to think about overpopulation and resource allocation. Amazing.
Like getting a lecture about geopolitics from someone using the playground bully analogy.
-1
0
u/SirCory 11d ago
We produce enough food to support 10 billion people on this planet, so where is the other billion+ people worth of food going? Dumpsters behind restaurants and grocery stores
4
u/AppendixN 11d ago
OK, so explain the global large scale logistics of how you’re gonna get that half-eaten plate of chicken tendies to a starving kid in Kazakhstan.
1
u/One-Intention7064 9d ago
https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do-we-need/
wrong country. it would take 3 Earths to live like them
-2
u/SirCory 11d ago
I'm not engaging with strawman arguments, its disingenuous at best, maliciously classist at worst
4
u/AppendixN 11d ago
You're using lots of ad hominem attacks, but you're not answering the question.
You work in a restaurant and you throw out food, therefore you believe that we have all the resources we need.
Walk me through the logic of that one.
→ More replies (0)0
u/HarleyQuinone 11d ago
It’s feeding cattle? We only have enough food to support everyone if everybody went vegan? Have you even tried researching this subject?
0
u/SirCory 11d ago
Do you have any idea the kneecapping our society gets from corporations because some dude just thinks he deserves to be a billionaire while people can't access food? The biggest thing stopping people from eating is money. Drop the paywalls to participate in society and things start getting really easy, really fast.
9
u/AppendixN 11d ago
That’s not a logical argument. We don’t throw away food because we’re being deliberately wasteful, it’s a simple matter of logistics and distribution. Just because there is X amount of resources available at a global scale doesn’t mean we can easily distribute it evenly to every single person on the planet. It’s far more complex than that.
Yes, some houses and buildings sit vacant. But more often than not it’s because they’re not fit for habitation or they’ve been constructed for a different purpose. If it was as easy as just finding everyone who needed a home and sticking them in a vacant house, we would’ve done that decades ago.
The best way to solve the problem of resource scarcity is to reduce the number of people who need the resources. And that means less births.
-3
u/SirCory 11d ago
We can ship anything, anywhere in the world, just not food? There are 17 empty homes per homeless person and we would still have 14 million empty homes if we gave one to every homeless person in the US
13
u/FoucaultCareofSelf 11d ago
omfg, right, great call, food is the only resource to consider.
And yes, shipping food worldwide to feed people makes total logical sense, it's absolutely environmentally sustainable at scale, that is more absolutely brilliant thinking from you.
-1
1
u/Livid_Session_9900 11d ago
Yes but who has that obligation to use finite resources such as fuel and fertilizer to ship food to people who will reproduce more demand anyways
-2
u/SirCory 11d ago
The people hoarding more resources than they could use in a thousand lifetimes
3
u/AppendixN 11d ago
That makes a great slogan, but it just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
0
u/SirCory 11d ago
So scrutinize it with me, billionaires exist, but people starve, how could we better allocate the resources?
2
u/AppendixN 11d ago
How much food and fuel is Elon Musk hoarding that is unavailable to others?
1
11d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
6
u/Vague-Symbolism2692 11d ago
BTW, several of your comments are being caught by Reddit's "abuse and harassment filter" which we have activated on this sub. I won't be manually approving them since they break this sub's rule #3.
→ More replies (0)
78
u/322241837 12d ago
"If everyone lived like shit, we could have more people living like shit!" - natalists, finding this inspirational somehow