Earth Overshoot: How Sustainable Is Population Growth?

For decades people have been predicting overpopulation would wipe out energy resources if not the entire planet. Every year the population bomb and peak oil crowd have been proven wrong. But how long can the status quo of generating growth by population explosion last?

Every year the population bomb and peak oil crowd have been proven wrong. But how long can the status quo of generating growth by population explosion last?

The second half of the 20th century saw the biggest increase in the world’s population in human history. Our population surged because of:


The global death rate has dropped almost continuously since the start of the industrial revolution – personal hygiene, improved methods of sanitation and the development of antibiotics all played a major role.
Green Revolution

The term Green Revolution refers to a series of research, development, and technology transfers that happened between the 1940s and the late 1970s.

The initiatives involved:


Tractors with gasoline powered internal combustion engines (versus steam) became the norm in the 1920s after Henry Ford developed his Fordson in 1917 – the first mass-produced tractor. This new technology was available only to relatively affluent farmers and it was not until the 1940s tractor use became widespread.

Electric motors and irrigation pumps made farming and ranching more efficient. Major innovations in animal husbandry – modern milking parlors, grain elevators, and confined animal feeding operations – were all made possible by electricity.

Advances in fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and antibiotics all led to better weed, insect and disease control.

There were major advances in plant and animal breeding – crop hybridization, artificial insemination of livestock, growth hormones and genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Further down the food chain came innovations in food processing and distribution.

All these new technologies increased global agriculture production with the full effects starting to be felt in the 1960s.

Cereal production more than doubled in developing nations – yields of rice, maize, and wheat increased steadily. Between 1950 and 1984 world grain production increased by over 250% – and the world added a couple billion more people to the dinner table.

The modernization and industrialization of our global agricultural industry led to the single greatest explosion in food production in history. The agricultural reforms and resulting production increases fostered by the Green Revolution are responsible for avoiding widespread famine in developing countries and for feeding billions more people since.

The Green Revolution helped kick start the greatest explosion in human population in our history – it took only 40 years (starting in 1950) for the population to double from 2.5 billion to five billion people.

We goosed agra machine’s growth and saved a billion people who birthed billions more.

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Malthusian pessimism


Malthusian pessimism has long been criticized by doubters believing technological advancements in:


would keep crop production ahead of the population growth curve. Malthus’s prediction hasn’t come true because, so far, rising agricultural yields have always outpaced population growth.

Norman Borlang, Father of the Green Revolution, is on record as saying if we did everything right the Earth has a human carrying capacity of 10 billion people.

Ester Boserup, an agricultural economist says don’t worry, that population growth is the driver of land productivity – our planet’s human carrying capacity is based on the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than environmental limits.

Ester’s downgrading of environmental limits to second place doesn’t give me much comfort moving forward. It seems a little shortsighted.

Population

In 1950 the world’s population stood at 2.52 billion people. Today there are over 7.5 billion of us living on Earth.

Current World Population: 7,500,072,439

According to United Nations predictions humans could number 9.7 billion people by 2050, and over 11 billion by 2100.

The earth might be big enough for one billion people, four billion maybe even eight or nine or even the 10 billion as Borlang believed. But the time is quickly coming when our sheer numbers will demand more than the earth can possibly supply.

Some say that number has already been surpassed.

Ecological Overshoot

For most of human history, there is no doubt we were consuming resources at a rate far lower than what the planet was able to regenerate.

Unfortunately, we have crossed a critical threshold. The demand we are now placing on our planet’s resources appears to have begun to outpace the rate at which nature can replenish them.

The gap between human demand and supply is known as ecological overshoot. To better understand the concept think of your bank account – you have $5000.00 paying monthly interest. Month after month you take the interest plus $100. That $100 is your financial, or for our purposes, your ecological overshoot and its withdrawal are obviously unsustainable.

Humans are currently withdrawing more natural resources than our Earth bank is able to provide on a sustainable basis. How much more? At today’s rate of withdrawal, we need just over another half earth. We’re on track to require the resources of two planets by 2050.

If today, everyone on earth were to start consuming the same amount of natural resources as the average Australian we’d need 5.4 planets, an ecological overshoot of 4.4 planets.

Earth Overshoot Day

According to the Global Footprint Network (GFN) August 8th was Earth Overshoot Day 2016 – the day when humanity exhausts our ecological budget, the day when our consumption exceeded the environment’s renewal capacity for the entire year.

The rest of the year we’re in ecological overshoot and we currently use the renewable resources of 1.6 Earths.

The GFN predicts that by 2030, Earth Overshoot Day will be in June – meaning it will take two entire Earths to sustain our species’ consumption.

Loss of species

Every two years, Global Footprint Network, WWF, and the Zoological Society of London publish the Living Planet Report. The Living Planet Report 2016 (October) is an eye opener:


The Earth has gone through five major extinction events – from the Ordovician-Silurian (350 million years ago) to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (65 million years ago), in each event 70-90% of all species died.

The Anthropocene, or the age of the humans, is considered by scientists to be a 6th extinction event. That’s real bad news long before even 50% extinction – loss of species means loss of pollinators – which is a real problem since so many varieties, and so much of our food crops rely on insects (ie. bees) to pollinate.

The revolution wasn’t really green

The modern agricultural complex spawned by the Green Revolution may have allowed us to grow more food, but dependence on this high-cost industrial input type of system extracts an extreme toll:


I said earlier we currently use the renewable resources of 1.6 planets and that by 2030 we’ll use the renewable resources of two planets. We do that by agricultural inputs – the massive use of fertilizers, diesel, insecticides, pesticides, fresh water for irrigation etc.

Has anyone thought about the further effects on our environment of ramping up fertilizer, pesticide, insecticide and herbicide applications even further?

How about increasing use of pollution emitting fossil fuels and fresh water for irrigation to enable big agra to feed 2.2 billion more of us?

Have you thought about the effects of the existing billions of people (who don’t live even close to a western lifestyle) all wanting to live, or at least consume, like an American or Australian does? What happens when urbanization increases all the newly minted urbanites living standards and all those new consumers start to climb the protein ladder alongside the future 2.2 billion coming to the table?

It’s obvious the world needs a new farm – one the size of South Africa.

Unfortunately, the UN also says that by 2030 an area twice the size of South Africa will become unproductive due to desertification, land degradation, and drought.

Desertification

Desertification is a phenomenon that ranks among the greatest environmental challenges of our time. Unfortunately, most people haven’t heard of it or simply don’t understand it. Desertification doesn’t refer to the advance of deserts which can and do expand naturally.

Desertification is a different process where land in arid or semi-dry areas becomes degraded – the soil loses its productivity and the cover vegetation disappears or is degraded to the point where wind and water erosion can carry away the topsoil leaving behind a highly infertile mix of dust and sand.

Desertification and land degradation is a global issue with desertification already affecting one quarter of the total land surface of the globe today

Today the pace of arable land degradation is estimated at 30 to 35 times the historical rate. Desertification is degrading more than 12m hectares of arable land every year – the equivalent of losing the total arable area of France every 18 months.

The issue of desertification is not new, it has constantly played a significant role in human history, even contributing to the collapse of the world’s earliest known empire, the Akkadians of Mesopotamia.

Climate change can accelerate and intensify the degradation process.

Climate Change

When Norman Borlang made his estimate of our planet’s human carrying capacity Climate Change was not the huge driver behind his modeling as it would have to be today.

According to science the world is going to continue to get warmer, polar ice caps will melt, so will the Greenland ice sheet and most glaciers. More sunlight will be absorbed by the Earth’s oceans, causing increased evaporation. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and amplifies twofold the effects of other greenhouse gasses. With Earth’s ice gone there will be significantly less sunlight reflected back into space, vast expanses of Arctic tundra will thaw releasing unbelievable amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent than CO2.

The polar jet stream has already been altered, wide swinging north-south deviations (meanders) have become the norm – deviating far from its normal path and meandering north into Canada, the jet stream brings warm air while dipping far south over Europe, the polar jet stream brings record cold and snow.

Ocean currents will be altered further impacting our climate and sea levels will rise – coastlines will be flooded forcing mass migrations inland. Freshwater aquifers will suffer from saltwater intrusion, once habitable zones will become uninhabitable.

Because of increased average global temperatures, the tropical rain belt will have widened considerably and the subtropical dry zones will have pushed pole-ward, crawling deep into regions such as the American Southwest and southern Australia, which will be increasingly susceptible to prolonged and intense droughts.

A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that climate change will amplify extreme heat, heavy precipitation, and the highest wind speeds of tropical storms. Extreme weather events are going to happen with increasing frequency, the climate for the area you live in is, if it hasn’t started already, going to change. We are all watching and experiencing these events and changes in real time because changes that use to take tens and tens of thousands of years are now happening in decades.

Conclusion

We humans have been changing the world around us for tens of thousands of years. It’s pretty much what we do, we shape and we change the existing environment through design and then indifference to the results of our actions. One of the most basic, fundamental problems (other than the rapid depletion of our fresh water resources) we’ve created for ourselves is the impact of human activities on the land we need to cultivate for our very survival.

Our exploding population, our accelerating demand for the world’s treasures (it’s natural resources) our ‘who cares’ attitude towards pollution and habitat destruction are all increasing what were once tolerable pressures towards, and sometimes already beyond, the breaking point in ecosystems all over the world.

this entire thread is cancer and you should be gassed
sage for blog post

Niggers are the biggest threat to the world and when this blow up then it will make bill gate even richer.

Gates Foundation-funded birth control microchip implants

We need to stop exporting grain from the USA and Russia to the rest of the fucking world. If we did that, they would all starve, and we'd have our shitskin problems solved in a year.

And stop funding the shitskins as well.

The earth cannot survive the population explosion of the swarthy hordes. It can survive cataclysmic earthquakes, the detonation of nuclear bombs, and the burning of fossil fuels, but it cannot survive muds.

The reality of the situation is simple: either we kill them all ourselves, we cut off all support and let mass starvation die-offs happen, or we abandon the planet.

Abandoning the planet is not yet possible. Killing them all is not practical. The only solution we have left is to wall them off and let them die.

Whatever the estimations of how much population the planet can sustain, I do not believe them accurate. These estimates are made primarily by Postliberals and Neocons who have no conception or understanding about the perpetuating cycles of life.

Crops must be rotated and fields allowed to rest to avoid soil depletion. Trawlers must be outlawed, and fishing quotas be heavily regulated, to give the oceans time to restore their stocks. Fertilizers, growth hormones, and other various unnatural means of augmenting the production of food must be abandoned, as they have a deleterious effect on the safety and sanity of the population, as well as the health of the environment. Even the less optimistic numbers still make basic assumptions about the sustainability of humanity that are, quite frankly, incorrect, and skewed for the larger sizes.

Forests must be preserved to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. Rainforests must be kept pristine to secure any yet-undiscovered remedies and discoveries that they hold for us. The ecosystem of the seas must be balanced and regulated to ensure that the fish are as plentiful and healthy fifty years from now as they are today and tomorrow.

I would go so far as to estimate that 1 billion is the ideal. To go further than this is to create downward spirals of economic, cultural, and environmental disaster that feed off of one another and merge into a gathering storm that will mark the end of an age.

The world is already catastrophically overpopulated. And even the attempts of the Globalists to rectify this problem by engaging in macro-level wealth redistribution away from white Christian Europeans and converting all money into a digital format will not be enough to halt what is to come.

Africa, India, and China must be purged of 99% of their current population, and all nonwhites in the west forcibly relocated to those areas, if our planet is to have anything resembling a future.

It's not. Civilized nations don't have an overgrowth problem but they are being flooded by those that are. Indefinite growth just isn't possible. If you want stable nations, you need to stop mass immigration. Nearly every problem can be solved by keeping white nations white.

thanks to china this is actually going to happen, the question in the 70s was do we industrialize the third world or actually manage the world order so that there isn't a resource crisis. communists chimped out due to inequality and now we might be fucked.

Australia how the hell do you need more Earths than us? You don't even use 50% of your fucking continent.

by that graph, there will be a food crisis around 2030.

will we have to lower the quality of food in our countries so we can make more and feed the niggers too.. or will we leave the niggers eat each other while we watch live on tv the african hunger games while eating organic popcorn

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There is no reason for the population of the planet to be over 1 billion. We don't need to kill anyone, just prevent people from breeding and let them die of natural causes.

If we are only going to let a small number of people breed they should be the best, brightest and healthiest. Basically whites and Asians.

This should be obvious to anyone with a brain. The questions is how to we implement it globally?

user, there are over 1 billion Asians alone.

Population growth is sustainable as shit, we could multiply the European population of the planet by hundreds of times and it would work out great. All we have to do is get rid of every brand of subhuman wasting resources and space.

Asians are part of the problem, and need to be deported back to their home nations and then embargoed until they either go extinct or sort their shit.

They can just make every crime a executable punishment and practice the eugenical ways.

Dem niggers should stop reproducing youtu.be/7-j9upoKubY

Or we could stop supporting their shithole nations with our Trotskiest-inspired Free Trade deals, and watch the problem solve itself in a single generation as they catastrophically and hilariously implode.

chinese

Yes, and user made the wrong assumption that "Asians" are high IQ.

You should stop shilling your yt in every thread

Maybe we need to invest in the birth controlled food for the niggers so they get free food and get sterile from eating that.

Majority of modern population growth is in Africa and ME becouse of no contraception and women being in their place.
Excluding ME, Africa's growth is basically becouse Western nations are funneling gibs into those countries, so they can import food and increase their population.
IF modern trade stopped due to war and grain ships and donations would stop coming into Africa, you'd see one of the biggest famines/wars in the world.
Population of Africa is rougly 500 000 000 million above their sustainable population limit.
Their native farming organization is shit due to no investment from home governments.
Their native farming technology is shit due to no investment from governments and the private sector since gibs make it uncompetitive.
And their general climate/soil is extra shit and would need investments and tech levels of fucking Japan to provide enough food for the current population.
Pic related, alfisols are best for industrial production. Notice how Zimbabwe is a motherload. Evrything else is shit tier in Africa due to heat and humidity.

My guess is that these nogs were and are bred to be exported to Europe and USA since WW2 at the latest.


The kikes are basically guilt tripping you for them selling your resources to China.
Getting money from trade and climate regulations. The Jews cries in pain as he strikes you.

Australia can easily become Earth battery and power the whole population for long time.

If we nuke China, India and Africa, maybe Mexico, all overpopulation problems would be solved.

Nuke are not environmental friendly user.

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The bitter truth is we must do some purging. The environment, both its flora and fauna, are going to suffer tremendously at the hands of non-whites.

but niggers, jews and chinks aren't humans, retardkun

It doesnt work that way or Earth would have become Venus billions of years ago. More water vapor equals more clouds and more clouds equals considerably more energy reflected back in space. This causes a cooling effect and an oscillating equilibirum. The earths polar ice sheets reflect very little sunlight back into space because they recieve very little light infall otherwise they would melt. Anthropogenic climate change is simply bad science used as a pretext to introduce new ways for private corporations and NGOs to harvest taxes and fees from the population in the industrialized nations.

Everything is harder when you're upside down, you're fighting gravity to stay alive. That takes oil, emu oil, and those birds gotta eat.

In terms of power this is absolute bullshit. Ot's not that we're running out of fuel, but refusing to use certain types of fuel. Also, the Brits are working on getting a Fusion reactor running by 2030. For things such as plants and fish, you can do things such as hydroponics, aquaponics, and aeroponics systems in areas that are otherwise unusable for food production. There are actually many, many ways to deal with food production as long as you handle it correctly, it just takes a bit more effort since you can't run a tractor through a hydroponics system.

We could hijack the anti-gluten movement and use it as propaganda to stop "racist" grain shipments to africa and asia. This will help starve the shitskins.

Without reading your post dump and just going off your title, population growth is incredibly sustainable. For whites.

Population growth is a problem right now because it's mostly subhumans that utterly fail to use the resources available to them. That, or they do it in the most inefficient and destructive way possible. I mean fuck me, I bet if we totally cleansed Africa we could use the majority of the continent as a massive agri-continent. Then we set up all sorts of solar panels, wind turbines, water boilers, etc in the deserts and shit. Pretty good medium term solution right there.

and despite the "green revolution", it's destroying our soil fertility and our own health

Don't we only have like 60 years of topsoil left? That shit takes centuries to form.

Uncle ted was dead wrong on a lot of those claims, science has progressed it's understanding of what humans need. What we lack is a scientific community that will allow real helpful knowledge to disseminate at the expense of (((entrenched industry))). And while I agree about the computer use being overmuch, it's tirivially easy to set things up in a way that does less harm by two orders of magnitude. Once again, (((EI))) prevents. What ted did not focus on enough was race. As long as whites live in mixed nations, lower races will continue to take our advancements and use them to chimp with.

This is actually relevant. Grain is poison. I dont know they will let us stsrve africa, but let them get back tk themselves, outlaw colonialism etc, and they will fall back to what africa produces in the way if meat as their carrying capacity.

The answer is to oven all nonwhites clearly.

killl

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Those 3 billion Africans that will be popped out in the next 75 years will live in destitution. There is no point in having them around. They will end up destroying the wildlife and cause tens of thousands of species to die off.

Desertification is niggers having an actual effect visible from space.

Take a look at the Desertification in Australia compared to Africa.

There is literally nothing there except uranium, red sand and emus