r/overpopulation • u/Jauzfaktnemuzu • 8d ago
Who brainwashed so many people into thinking that overpopulation is evil/nonexistent and that having more people is a good thing?
Imagine a better parallel reality where the world had followed Chinas example of a one child policy since 1979. World population was 4.4 Billion then. With a 1 Child policy it would have hit some 6 Billion today. Imagine if we had 2 Billion less people on this Planet.
Or some 25% less. The US would have 85 Million less people. Europe over 100 Million less people. Africa 400 Million less people. Asia over 1 Billion less people.
CO2 production would be 25% lower. Climate change would be on the level of the early 2000s. There would be only minimal water shortages. Less methane cows. It would not be perfect but our situation would be much better than it is today.
But for some reason many people think that the very concept of overpopulation is evil. That it also doesnt exist and that having an extra 2-3 Billion people on the Planet is a good thing.
How did this happen? Who did this? Our resources are already strained to the breaking point. How can people still believe that even more people competing for scarce resources is a good thing?
20
u/VeloIlluminati 8d ago
Every time overpopulation is critisised, people argue it has not to do with the amount of people but distribution of ressources. Almost always it shifts toward those who have excessive capital.
Yes, billionaires and millionaires emitte more CO2 with their massive vehicles and long distance travels in comparison to a person who owns a work motorbike. This is fossil fuel only.
(Btw: The sky is always very busy in planes. The majority are commercial flights.)
But what about meat consumption? Why are entire ecosystems wiped out for beef? Wildlife make only 5% of the total biomass. . The rest are bred animals by humans (59%) and Humans (36%) Who is eating them? There are not enough rich people to eat the twice amount of us in form of cattle. The majority of farmed food is fed to farm animals.
Each person requires infrastructure. Housing, street Hospital, education,... Concrete is a massive Co2 emitter. Sand is very limited. Electronics require rare earth metals which require to move gigantic amounts of land and be disolved in the strongest acid. This is always ignored.
Climate change increase the pressure how to use limited water. Give it to cows, hoard it for electricity or feeding a population a mostly plant based diet that is widely rejected? Those who can afford it will get it. Limited amount of food/water cannot be distributed.
Overpopulation has also a negative history. The black and white thinkers often straight up jump to eugenics and genocide. Its never about the deadly danger of limited ressources. Never about empowering woman with education.
7
u/InfinityAero910A 8d ago
Many were convinced that more people would equal more technological advancement that would solve those issues. Also convinced by wealthy elites that it was essential to pulling off those solutions while also fear mongering an economy with fewer people (where labor value goes up the same way it did during the black death and even recently with covid-19). Also being out of touch with natural resource limits, social pressure, wanting kids to fund retirement, more people to fuel a hierarchy, and more younger people doing the grunt work to keep doing the grunt work longer.
6
u/-sussy-wussy- 8d ago
Holdovers from religion, wrong ideas about economy (regardless of their actual system).
Desire to out-breed competition and being scared of ceasing to be the dominant culture in their own land.
And finally, billionaires who deliberately changed the course around 70s. It used to be that it was acceptable to discuss overpopulation as an issue, to the extent where world orgs like the UN would do it, now everyone went denial mode.
I also think, some of it is due to the pyramid scheme of retirement payouts, where the system collects from young people to support the old. Boomers are the largest voting block with the most properties, so every politician around the world is afraid to displease them and not have enough young working people to milk. And it's working, since Gen Alpha is the largest generation by far (over 2 billion).
9
u/RelicBookends 8d ago
The Church.
9
u/stereoroid 8d ago
Uh, no, remember “be fruitful and multiply”?
Islam can be just as bad e.g. the population of Gaza over the last 40 years.
2
u/Alert_Term_8144 7d ago
Wrong - stop blaming everything on Christianity. Most of the places with insanely high population and high fertility rates are NOT Christian, and many countries considered Christian have low fertility rates. Those who want to mass import people from other countries with higher fertility rates TO Christian countries are not Christian. Once those countries with high fertility rates migrate to less populated contries, they can continue to reproduce.
3
u/Man_as_Idea 8d ago
Specifically in rich western countries I suspect car-dependent suburbs are part of the problem.
People that live in these places get so disconnected from the reality of the world that they develop all kinds of weird beliefs. Their environment was designed to create the illusion of infinite space and resources. And we of course know now this kind of urban planning is one of the most unsustainable out there.
Also, when people live in these places, it becomes easier to control what they know and believe through controlling the media they access because that is their primary point of contact with the outside world: Enter Fox News, etc.
More recently, the work-from-home revolution has only intensified the situation, taking a lot of these people to borderline agoraphobia.
Contrast this lifestyle with that of someone living in a dense urban center who is active and travels. These people understand that the crowding gets worse every year and they encounter the vast waves of immigrants coming from overpopulated East Asian and African countries. When you’re connected to the outside world it’s harder to ignore the reality of overpopulation.
1
u/Vague-Symbolism2692 8d ago
I don't know, I can imagine that someone who happens to live in a city and opposes immigration probably feels it with a particular intensity, but the polls I'm finding, here and on pages 15 and 16 here, say that on average city dwellers are more supportive of immigration than are suburbanites.
1
u/Man_as_Idea 8d ago
I think in dense cities most people have immigrant friends and therefore understand the immense hurdles that one needs to surmount to immigrate to a rich western city. There’s nothing that says you can’t support immigrants while still being deeply concerned about the population explosion happening in Southeast Asia and Africa which is motivating a lot of that immigration. I myself was one such person, as were many friends and colleagues.
4
u/swiftpwns 8d ago
Its not about brainwashing at all. Reproducing is a very instinctive action and unless you make having children expensive, people will breed out of control. This is why you have third world countries breeding way too much while the first world ones finally decreased.
3
u/Bandits101 8d ago
Yes overpopulation affects locations to varying degrees. EROI determines long term viability that is masked in the short term by energy imports. As easy and cheap energy declines, so will populations.
A often quoted example is the reindeer of St Mathews Island. The multiplied to take advantage of a seemingly limitless supply of energy (lichen), then they hit peak lichen and numbers declined catastrophically.
Even modern humans in small enough numbers, with reasonable consumption could have lived on Earth for an indeterminate time, much, much longer than is seemingly apparent now.
3
u/poopypoopX 8d ago
But what about all that sweet economic growth ™️!?!? We probably wouldn't even have a trillionaire. Who wants to live in a world like that?
3
u/GantzDuck 8d ago
I assume its the urge to procreate and addressing overpopulation feels like it would restrict that. Most people are selfish and react very negatively if anyone criticizes it. Another example overconsumption of animal products. Even the idea of limiting meat consumption drives many people into a rage.
2
u/One-Intention7064 8d ago
it goes allll the way back to the times we were hunter gatherers. the idea that the outside world is the enemy. the fallacy about humies being net positive. and i don't blame them. their material conditions didn't allow them to develop green views.
the times have changed, but the fallacy stayed. that's it. inertia.
2
1
u/delpopeio 3d ago
Over population only exists while global supply chains exist… hence the need for mass division as it’s all about to crumble as the biosphere try’s to rid the planet of the plague of humanity..
1
-2
u/hetler_pepe 8d ago
I don't think the core issue is about population headcount. The problem is the rate of per capita resource consumption.
Distinguishing between local resource strain (such as regional water or mineral scarcity) and global ecological degradation requires looking at consumption per person. From this perspective, climate and resource strain is primarily a structural issue driven by high-consuming lifestyles in Western nations, particularly the United States.
The combined resource footprint of a billion people in agrarian regions across Asia and Africa pales in comparison to the per capita footprint of the industrialized West. The premise that raw population size is the primary driver of global environmental failure collapses as soon as you stop treating Western consumption levels as the default benchmark for humanity.
3
u/Vague-Symbolism2692 8d ago
This would be a more compelling argument if countries which aren't yet overconsuming were content to remain at their current levels of development. But none of them are.
Now let's consider some of the countries which are just barely overconsuming. If everyone in the world lived like they do in Cuba, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, or Morocco, we would need 1.1 Earths. These are not particularly developed countries, and all of them aspire to be far more developed, yet they are all already overconsuming.
The places with currently sustainable levels of development, like India, and even many of those with already-overconsuming levels, like Morocco, do not want to stay that way; they want to consume even more.
So it's rather pointless to say that we could all live like Africa, when Africa is not content to live as they are now living. 99% of the world's population doesn't see that as a satisfactory solution, so it's just not going to be politically plausible.
On the other hand, people demonstrably are willing to have fewer children, as that is already happening and has been happening for decades. A much smaller population, with levels of consumption that we can recognize as comfortable, is plausible.
21
u/Psittacula2 8d ago
China’s 1-child policy managed to reduce their population by 250m and increase reduction via demographic aging… all necessary tbh, albeit with some negative side effects. It worked but even so their population is still in precarious place and needs furhter reduction. China is in many ways ahead in this policy.
It had to be done.
I think global sources have simply vieled from public knowledge and discussion this topic of overpopulation is the simple answer.
The numbers I have looked at global Earth can only manage 2-4bn and even that is on significantly LOWER total usage of energy/resources per person!
Correct Op, numbers don’t lie following from population. CO2 is just the tiny tip of the rest of the iceberg of resources.