Our planet can produce food for 10 billion people. However this is not possible, if we keep the current waste of food under capitalism. As long as we continue to waste half of our food before it even reaches the supermarkets, doing intensive agriculture, deforestation, etc… There is just no planet that can sustain so much abuse.
Okay, that makes sense, but what about the energy it takes to perform those prerequisites the study mentions? Like sure, we need redistributed agriculture and more efficient water-nutrient conservation efforts. Where does the energy for that come from?
I’m not trying to be bad faith it just makes intuitive sense to me that there is a limit to the world population/that we’re close to it.
Nuclear power for starters. Look at the rate at which USSR was building nuclear power plants. Many of them are still operational (i.e. Zaporozhina in Ukraine). Energy usage under capitalism is also inefficient, as is the infrastructure upkeep - one of the worries about nuclear are various incidents, but those can be (and are) prevented by timely upkeep and maintenance.
After that, it is entirely possible for fusion to start being viable.
It was definitely one of the final nails in the coffin, in terms of public opinion at least. There was already a lot of anti-nuclear campaigning and sentiment leading up to that point in time (the sixties-seventies environmental movement was all against it
But of course the anti-nuclear lobby (ie. oil companies) leveraged the existing anti-communist cultural context to make nuclear seem even more undesirable than it already was after Chernobyl. So much for “atoms for peace” and electricity “too cheap to meter.”
The population will continue to increase, and there isn’t much you can do about it. 10 billion seems to be the new consensus. After that the population will stabilize and will probably start to shrink. So you may as well think of ways to improve our energy efficiency.
There are a lot of places where we are wasting energy needlessly. Transport chains, cars, cities which are built in car-centric ways, overproduction, packaging. If we can fix all of these, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of energy to spare.
Yeah I obviously don’t support the typical solutions to this like letting mass death occur or whatever but it just seems like a dangerous situation. Planets have carrying capacities, straight up. Whether or not we’ve reached it is what I’m concerned about
I’m not sure about any of this still. Do you have any resources for me to look through?
Our planet can produce food for 10 billion people. However this is not possible, if we keep the current waste of food under capitalism. As long as we continue to waste half of our food before it even reaches the supermarkets, doing intensive agriculture, deforestation, etc… There is just no planet that can sustain so much abuse.
Okay, that makes sense, but what about the energy it takes to perform those prerequisites the study mentions? Like sure, we need redistributed agriculture and more efficient water-nutrient conservation efforts. Where does the energy for that come from?
I’m not trying to be bad faith it just makes intuitive sense to me that there is a limit to the world population/that we’re close to it.
Nuclear power for starters. Look at the rate at which USSR was building nuclear power plants. Many of them are still operational (i.e. Zaporozhina in Ukraine). Energy usage under capitalism is also inefficient, as is the infrastructure upkeep - one of the worries about nuclear are various incidents, but those can be (and are) prevented by timely upkeep and maintenance.
After that, it is entirely possible for fusion to start being viable.
It’s unfortunate but I feel like the whole Chernobyl incident really scared people away from nuclear energy.
It was definitely one of the final nails in the coffin, in terms of public opinion at least. There was already a lot of anti-nuclear campaigning and sentiment leading up to that point in time (the sixties-seventies environmental movement was all against it But of course the anti-nuclear lobby (ie. oil companies) leveraged the existing anti-communist cultural context to make nuclear seem even more undesirable than it already was after Chernobyl. So much for “atoms for peace” and electricity “too cheap to meter.”
The population will continue to increase, and there isn’t much you can do about it. 10 billion seems to be the new consensus. After that the population will stabilize and will probably start to shrink. So you may as well think of ways to improve our energy efficiency.
There are a lot of places where we are wasting energy needlessly. Transport chains, cars, cities which are built in car-centric ways, overproduction, packaging. If we can fix all of these, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of energy to spare.
Yeah I obviously don’t support the typical solutions to this like letting mass death occur or whatever but it just seems like a dangerous situation. Planets have carrying capacities, straight up. Whether or not we’ve reached it is what I’m concerned about
I’m not sure about any of this still. Do you have any resources for me to look through?