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[–] 6 points 1 day ago (10 children)

If you could just snap your fingers and half the world's population would disappear would you?

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  • [–] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    Straight half? No. A select 3% a year for five years? Maybe. If you’ve seen any of the realistic critiques of the Thanos snap you know that doesn’t go well. Trimming down the fascists, oligarchs, nationalist, theocrats, tech barons, and similar greed and hate mongers should be enough without crashing everything.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 minutes ago

    Well resource consumption wouldn't go down THAT much. Outside of private jets and the like, most shit is still consumed by people.

    Making it all illegal works, killing the people who make it possible for us does not because new ones will spring up.

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  • [–] 5 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

    Holy fuck why does Lemmy have so many ecofascists

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  • [–] -1 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    Resorting to calling people ecofascists feels pretty reductive. As the world currently exists, and under current economic systems, population growth is a pretty huge issue, especially while basically zero effort is being put into reducing carbon emissions globally.

    There was an article somewhere in these threatlds that gave a decent summary:

    The Earth cannot sustain the future human population, or even today's, without a major overhaul of socio-cultural practices for using land, water, energy, biodiversity, and other resources

    What a lot of people (myself included) struggle with is that the amount and significance of change needed to make an actual difference is huge right now, and it requires a concerted global effort to get anywhere close to halting what feels like an inexorable rise in earth's temperatures.

    Until we can change this then humans might as well be described as a virus and looking at forced population control (in this case of transport etc. under covid) and seeing a measurable improvement in our environment feels cathartic and, honestly, easier to obtain than the global overturning of capital.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 children)

    Resorting to calling people ecofascists feels pretty reductive.

    Goes on to describe their definitionally ecofascist beliefs in detail

    Overpopulation is a myth started by nazis and eugenicists. People aren't viruses.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago

    Define ecofascism then, because its easy to just fuck around and shit on an opinion without providing an alternative.

    I'm not saying we need eugenics or a cull., and I'm certainly not blaming the global south for existing in a world that was driven by short sighted rich European capitalists.

    What I am saying is:

    1. Population is a problem provided the status quo doesn't change
    2. The status quo just ain't changing. Not fast enough, anyway.
    3. In light of this the current state of human existence (and the systems which support it) could be reasonably described as a virus. Exponential growth at the cost of a host? Prove me wrong.
    4. Solutions? Fucking sea change and a total shift in the way we occupy the planet. We're not over crowding we're over producing (and over consuming).

    What's eco-fascist about that, and if you don't agree, please let me know.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 hours ago

    Yeah, overpopulation is really easy to handle and doesn't require violence. Give kids a genuine education that they can continue into adulthood, and access to birth control and reproductive healthcare, and bam, population growth is fixed.

    The population problem is intentionally caused by the epstein class, so they can have abundant, desperate, cheap labor.

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  • [–] 47 points 1 day ago (20 children)

    If I could snap my fingers and all the world's billionaires disappear I would, or oil refineries. Not people though. Humans aren't the virus.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    Snap for all the cars to disappear!

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  • [–] 5 points 5 hours ago (1 child)

    No. People would starve to death. Cars are necessary. Not everyone lives in the CBD of the capital city.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    Cars are not inherently necessary. But we built around them and made them necessary. That can change. We control how we build and what assumptions we make.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 child)

    If I could snap my fingers and have people wake up from the capitalist propaganda they've been force-fed their whole lives, I would. Population is not the issue, it's a deflection.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Population is definitely an issue there’s no many problem that wouldn’t be instantly solved by going down to a hundred million people.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    If your only problem is that you want more resources available for yourself, I can see how you'd come to that conclusion, but you're wrong. It wouldn't solve the underlying problems, and in fact it would create a whole set of new ones. Modern civilization depends heavily on economies of scale, and your magic finger snap does nothing to change how resources are produced, distributed, or consumed.

    You're also assuming that every human consumes resources at roughly the same rate. They don't. Not even close. A tiny fraction of humanity consumes vastly more resources than billions of other people. Your finger snap doesn't address that inequality at all. The same people and systems that concentrate resources now would simply have an even larger pool of resources to hoover up afterward. Then what? Snap your fingers again?

    And follow the logic to its conclusion. If reducing humanity to 100 million "solves" problems because fewer people are consuming resources and competing for them, then 1 million should be even better. Five thousand better still. Ultimately, zero humans means zero poverty, zero war, zero homelessness, zero human carbon emissions, and zero human suffering. Problem solved!

    Except obviously it isn't, because eliminating the people who experience a problem is not the same thing as solving the problem for those people.

    We don't have billions of people living in poverty because there simply isn't enough stuff on Earth to go around. We have enormous disparities in who controls resources and who gets to consume them. Fantasizing about eliminating most of humanity while leaving that system completely intact makes you a stooge for the oligarchs.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    But even with these slower rates of growth, our population is already far above the sustainable carrying capacity given by Bradshaw and team's models.

    The gap between their optimum number of 2.5 billion and our current population size of 8.3 billion may help explain the problems with overconsumption our species currently faces.

    Earth's Population Has Surpassed The Planet's Capacity, Study Suggests

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  • [–] 6 points 23 hours ago (1 child)

    Did you actually read what you provided? It's really not the defense of your point that you are making it out to be. Lead author, Corey Bradshaw (Who also co-authored Human Population Reduction is Not a Quick Fix for Environmental Problems), argues that our current consumption system is unsustainable. I couldn't agree more!

    The 2.5 billion figure cited within is not some immutable physical limit on the number of human bodies Earth can contain. The authors explicitly acknowledge that a "sustainable" population depends on things like standard of living, economics, social conditions, and resource consumption. Their ecological-footprint estimate of 2.35 billion specifically assumes today's average material standard of living and current consumption distribution, including the enormous consumption of the wealthiest people.

    You're taking a model of how many people our planet can sustainably support under particular socioeconomic and consumption conditions and treating it as evidence that the people themselves are the fundamental problem. That's not what the evidence shows, though. Not even the evidence you yourself brought to the table, sorry!

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  • [–] -2 points 23 hours ago (1 child)

    It's a number of people that the planet can carry based on reality.

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  • [–] 4 points 22 hours ago* (1 child)

    Reality is malleable. Sure, the current circumstances of how resources are divided and used is reality. The current population is reality. We are both discussing ways in which our reality can be transformed to the benefit of all. Your suggested path involves the death of billions of people, while my suggested path involves some people having slightly less exorbitant lifestyles. Your suggested path is not only extreme, but it wouldn't even work according to the very scholars you are citing. THAT is reality.

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  • [–] -2 points 21 hours ago (1 child)

    Sounds good enjoy your fairy tale take on the world I'll stick with the reality we're living in.

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  • [–] 4 points 21 hours ago (1 child)

    The reality of ignoring all evidence to validate wishing you could kill most people for no reason? And I'm the one living in a fairy tale? Okay.

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  • [–] -3 points 21 hours ago (1 child)

    All evidence points to the fact we have more people on this planet than the planet can sustainably carry.

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  • [–] 6 points 21 hours ago

    All evidence aside from the evidence you supplied that said the opposite? I mean really, ALL evidence? All of it? But you can supply none? But it's ALL the evidence? Right. You are literally just saying things. You could fit every single human being on earth into one metropolitan area. It's our behavior that is unsustainable, not our population. Go lick a boot.

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