A person calling him or herself “Thorkel” left a comment over at Wired magazine’s recent item on water shortages:
Your article on the planet’s dwindling supplies of freshwater (“Peak Water,” issue 16.05) shies away from the obvious: There’s not a hope in hell of avoiding dangerous water shortages until demand is reduced. And there’s not a hope in hell of reducing demand sufficiently until the human population is significantly reduced. We can either start taking measures to curtail our own breeding, or we can die in thirst and hunger and in the wars over what little is left.
How “significantly” we should reduce the human population, or by what means, is not explained. Apart from “curtailing our own breeding” (by forced sterlisation, compulsory abortions on the Chinese model, perhaps?) is not explained either. Neither is this writer, I expect, aware of how previous predictions of disastrous shortages of water and food been shown to be utter nonsense.
More than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. That seawater is not drinkable but then the problem is therefore one of using resources to convert that water into drinkable form. But to suggest that the Earth has a water shortage problem is a nonsense; what it has is currently an under-investment in the systems that might be needed to convert seawater into liquids fit for human use.
The always readable Leon Louw, who spoke at last year’s Libertarian Alliance conference on the issues raised here, is good on this topic.
I don’t understand this chap. He wants to reduce the population so the remaining people will all have enough fresh water. Presumably if one group decides that another group will be part of the reduction, there will be a war anyway. So to avoid war, he must be advocating voluntary euthanasia or some other mad scheme. Why do these people not start with themselves?
A client said to me that ‘greenies love trees because they take in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen and therefore they are good’.
Well, people like this take in oxygen and give out carbon dioxide and therefore…
Well, the anti-humanism of Greenies is apparent, if not criticised much (since it’s a ruling class/cultural hegemonic/take your pick value). Some time back I bookmarked this Telegraph page for the comments section, just in case an occasion arose when I wanted to highlight the views of ordinary Greens, for the comments section. Check out the flurry of early comments demanding population control and admiring good ol’ sensible China etc.
We’re not short of freshwater. There’s no need for desalination plant, which is just as well really as it’d be hopeleslly uneconomic.
As to low flush toilets being- eh- crap, (the linked article by Leon Leow) having been a building services engineer I can confirm that those in the maintenance trade are all too aware of the problems. Modern office buildings have low flush toilets and block regularly. What’s actually an even bigger problem is urinals, the flushes of which are now set to be so hopelessly inadequate as to be worthless.
But meh, these are just manifestations of a quasi-religious insanity which as I’ve said before IMV probably heralds the collapse of our civilisation. We’ll just gradually cripple ourselves to the stage where nothing works, from the economy to toilets to our food supply to medicine. Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad, or whatever the quote is. Just as a trivial example, we now have councils told not to collect festering rubbish, regardless of the public health consequences, while mandating the number of holes in a salt shaker due to a society-wide terror of sodium chloride on imaginary health grounds. By degrees our productive capacity is being redirected towards unproductivity, as useless as building giant statues of ancestors. This is a civilisation-wide insanity, and civilisations don’t recover from them.
It is surely true that there are a great many misguided people in the world, some stupidly misguided, and some of those in positions of authority and power.
But have you noticed, things keep getting better, and nearly all the time, if not actually every second.
Why is this?
Perhaps it’s because there is an even greater number of guided people in the world: that is guided by their own (selfish) desires. And with a sufficiency of energy (that is diligence and Megajoules both) to get on with it.
It’s a shame that the misguided people do waste so much resource, but every robust system has some intrinsic inefficiency.
Best regards
No, I haven’t noticed that at all.
I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong or anti-libertarian with the statement ‘the world would be a better place if there were less people in it.’
It reflects a reality that supply chains lag behind demand (so sustained population growth in undeveloped countries leads to famines, in developed countries leads to overcrowded public transport, roads, electricity network breakdowns, etc) – and that it’s ‘nice’ to have space to oneself – and that the world has finite resources even with the best supply chains.
Yes, we can go and mine asteroids etc but, if famine hits the developed world, do you think our fearless leaders will have seen that coming and be prepared to make the investments, or do you think they’ll just use the time-tested ‘vote for me and you get to eat’ strategy?
The fact that it’s impossible to ‘manage’ the population growth in a free society doesn’t mean you can’t float the viewpoint. The inevitable discussions of eugenics are the problem, not the concept.
Listening as I have been over the years since the Green movement really found its legs I’ve noticed a tendency in people – who’d be described as liberals by most – to lean towards the notion that we humans are not natural any more and have somehow become a type of virus. That junkies should be sterilised and maybe it’s time to consider issuing breeding licenses.
Many of these people are friends of mine and when I mention that I do not buy into the CO2/Recycling mania, and that like it as not we humans and all of our actions will always be “Natural” they smile, nod their heads and call me a right wing fascist.
Ya’ gotta laugh.
It always strikes me how unimaginative eco-doomsayers are.
In the 80s, I bet they were the people who were saying “I can’t think of a single reason I would ever have use for a home computer—a total waste of money!”
Do you think this planet will be able to continue to accommodate the human race regardless of how many of us there are? Assuming the present population is x can we accommodate 2x for instance? 4x? 8x? 16x? If you don’t accept that such a point exists then there can be no discussion obviously, but there must surely be some physical limit to the number of people who can be fed, watered and housed with the resources available.
Whatever multiple of x we think applies when do we start thinking about not reaching it? What do we need to do to avoid reaching it?
I’ve always thought that people who advocate forcible population reduction should step up and volunteer.
Problem solved.
Worrying about population is just so 1970s. The demographic trends since then have changed so utterly that all the cutting edge activists have moved onto other things, mostly global warming. Meanwhile, the number of people rich enough to live a basically decent lifestyle has been getting larger faster than the population has been increasing, and the living conditions of humanity as a whole have therefore been getting dramatically better.
Demographics is extremely hard to predict. Population may become an issue again if we succeed in dramatically increasing the human lifespan (which is likely, I think). Even if we do, however, “This will have consequences that it will require great ingenuity to deal with” is not an acceptable reason for condemning people to death. We should encourage and embrace ingenuity, not retreat from it.
If they’d all just be patient it is going to happen anyway. UN demographic predictions have for decades predicted global population reasonably well and part of the prediction is the turn over. Every coutnry goes through an S curve transition from High birthrate/high deathrate to low birthrate/low deathrate. The change in birthrate lags so population shoots up. This happened in Europe (especially the UK) first, then America… and as infant mortality and healthcare spread it went through the rest of the world also.
Population increase at present is coasting upwards like a second stage with the engine shut down. There will be a turnover and a very significant fall in global population after the middle of the century.
Add to that the opening of space to settlement by that time (very small numbers at first, but accelerating into the next century) and you will be facing a rapidly declining population on this planet.
She will get her wish. She just has to be patient.
ian,
You keep making the same mistake Malthusians do; why don’t you rephrase your question like this:
Do you think there is a limit to human ingenuity?
If you do, then resources will run out eventually; if you don’t, then your multipliers are irrelevant.
It is not how many resources you have; but what you do with them!
Logically, the answer to Ian’s question is no, but that is not really the situation we are likely to face, anyway. Even without the sort of coercive methods that the person who wrote to Wired magazine might favour, population growth tends to slow as people get more prosperous, as Dale Amon points out. The problem may be too few people, not too many.
If it really was the case that mankind had reached the finite level of resources, we would be facing far more drastic rises in certain resources than we do now, and have no obvious solution to that. But we are not remotely close to this. One does not have to buy all of the optimists’ views (like J.L. Simon) to believe that there is plenty more room left in the inn.
Dale, I can’t help but feel that those graphs are a little like the metrics that let you show how advanced etc a country is by the proportions of manufacturing, services, etc industry – as in they work for the majority of cases but they don’t work for China, because they basically say ‘all countries advance and as they advance they leave their manufacturing base behind them’ – which ignores the possibility of an advanced country based on manufacturing.
Also, the modern states rely on a pyramidal population model to maintain their social security and healthcare networks. Those in power in those states can choose either to try and rework the system to the ‘detriment’ of their electorate or to try and shovel more into the bottom. Giving money to people to have kids, despite middle class angst, is very popular among the sort of people that would have kids regardless of whether they could afford them or not, and they make up the majority of the population.
Also, from a libertarian perspective, following ‘your right to swing your fist ends at the face of another’ what’s precisely wrong with ‘you can’t have kids because you lack the ability or finances not to cause them harm through deprivation?’
Surely the simplest way to curb population growth in developing nations (because, lets face it, that’s where the problem is) is to develope them, and fast.
The population of most Western European countries is fairly steady, and in some cases declining, due to the quality of life enjoyed by their citizens. The more likely your children are to live, the less children you need to have.
Given time this will sort itself out. I’m not saying that it will be pleasant or easy, but that the human population of Earth will level out. Its just going to get mighty interesting before it does.
Ian B: I pity you, its such a shame that you’ve had your optimism crushed so resoundingly. There are good things happening in the world everyday, in the interactions between individuals and the fields of science and technology. There is so much to be optimistic about.
I wonder whether “Thorkel” is ahead of the current fashion, or behind it. Most population doomsayers seem to prefer the threat that we will run out of people. If the population trend of the last two hours is extended for 50 years, Europe will have a negative population or something like that. To combat this I have seen and heard proposals ranging from bribes for breeding, through to taxes on childlessness. No doubt someone will propose forcible impregnation of women reluctant to “do their duty”.
Certainly the current birth rate is below the replacement level, but who can say with any confidence that the next generation won’t suddenly decide they want big families? If they don’t, there will be no water shortage and no need for forcible population reduction. If they do we won’t run out of people. Whatever happens, we will ingeneously adapt to the changed population, unless the politicians get there first (OK; very big caveat!).
Of course, they couldn’t be motivated more by the desire to boss people around than by any rational cause. Could they?
Ian B wrote:
Well, from the perspective I was writing from, I must disagree. This is the general perspective of the human race on the planet, as is perhaps appropriate for an article centred somewhat around the human race [not] running out of fresh water and other essentials.
My two key indicators are life expectancy and GDP per capita.
A nice graph of life expectancy can be found here on Wikipedia. The bad bit is sub-Saharan Africa; I believe almost entirely down to Aids. The rest is clearly good.
World GDP per capita (at purchasing power parity, PPP) is given also by Wikipedia. From 1950 to 2003 (their latest figures), the average growth has been 2.1% per annum. Over the last 10 years (again to 2003), it has been 5.1% per annum.
Whilst I would agree with Ian B that there is serious cause for concern for the UK (given the decade of profligate mismanagement under the Blair/Brown government), I hope the punishment visited upon us will be less than that of the 1970s (which followed the period of similar profligacy and incompetence of the preceding period of Labour government). I survived relatively well then (sixth form to a mortgage), though the 3-day week, rotting rubbish in the streets and high inflation were all a pain; they taught me the economic consequences of too much socialism. Sadly, too many other voters clearly have either shorter memories, different priorities, or were so unwise as to be born after we paid for this excellent example of how not to do it.
However, even these extended periods of mismanagement, and their negative outcome which necessarily follows (and not totally during the period managed by the guilty government), are not sufficient to reverse the ongoing global, and average local, improvements in the human condition. As far as I can see, only major wars succeed in that.
As to why I posted my earlier and enthusiastically positive comment, it’s because we are winning against misgovernment (through socialism or otherwise), even if it is more slowly than possible and much more slowly than some deem tolerable. As we are winning, I judge we should plough on firmly, rather than wringing out hands, wailing ‘all is lost’, etc.
Concerning water, the annual precipitation is a much more important quantity than the total volume of the oceans. If we divert some of it for our purposes (I understand that it is around 4% in the UK), this changes slightly where and how it flows. Some land, animals and vegetation may lose out, but we can keep this disadvantage fairly modest.
Concerning energy, solar radiation of the planet per head of population is around 26MW (megawatts). Current total energy use per head of population is around 2kW, which is less than 8 thousandths of one percent of the solar radiation. Although we do not seriously tap into current solar radiation (because it is not cost-effective compared to the competition), there is so much of it that (should it become necessary) there is plenty around for human ingenuity to work with.
Concerning land, there is a bit under one square mile each. Even though a fair bit is unlikely to be practical for agriculture, should it be required, we can make significant improvements in productivity; this is mostly by the application of water and the application or removal of energy. And then there is the sea (twice the area per head) to be managed more, and more efficiently.
We are not going to run out of water, energy or land any time soon, though how hard we have to work and the relative costs of things may well change. As others have commented above, there is no impending doom (though I think we ought to do more about the risk of large asteroid impact).
Best regards
The fertility rate in most Western nations is below two (two babies per women), but the “progressives” are still banging on about reducing the number of children.
“We are not being exterminated fast enough, genocide now!”
Even in the United States (less “progressive” than most of the West) the government gives vast sums of the money of the taxpayers to groups like “Planned Parenthood” with their death-to-humanity ideology.
The fertility rate in most Western nations is below two (two babies per women), but the “progressives” are still banging on about reducing the number of children.
“We are not being exterminated fast enough, genocide now!”
Even in the United States (less “progressive” than most of the West) the government gives vast sums of the money of the taxpayers to groups like “Planned Parenthood” with their death-to-humanity ideology.
Frederick Davies
You are effectively arguing that an infinite number of people can live on this planet, because human ingenuity will make it happen. That seems unlikely to me.
Johnathan
We may not have reached the limit yet, but for certain key elements we are pretty close. The analogy that works for me is the lily pond. If the area covered by lilies doubles each day, there may appear to be plenty of time to cut them back when only a tiny proportion is covered. But by the time it gets to 25% you only have two days.
Even accepting that human ingenuity can postpone many problems and create new opportunities we are always in a race between the downward pressure caused by resource consumption and the opportunities offered by ingenuity. The problem is that ingenuity needs a certain level of spare capacity in society – which is why subsistence economies have such a hard time getting beyond that level. Even for basis materials like copper and zinc we are using them at an incredibly fast rate.
It isn’t about hatred of humanity – that is silly hyperbole. It is about giving some thought to the future we are creating as we blithely spend our capital. If we are so ingenious then perhaps we should be applying that ingenuity to avoid – or at least minimise – the ‘interesting’ times ahead.
Chapter 10 of The Ultimate Resource covered this one. And of course Lomborg gave more detail.
That was all several greeny scares ago – he’s waaay behind the times. I’m constantly amazed by their ability to keep pumping these out, and for nobody apparently to be able to remember any of the previous ones. Truly, it is as if some Orwellian censor, in erasing them from mainstream history, had also wiped them from people’s minds.
According to my quick scan of Wiki, over 100,000 km3 of precipitation falls on land each year. By my, (very rough), calculation that’s about 13 million litres each per year. Of course, some areas don’t get much and some get lots and lots. There would seem to be three aproaches to this problem: 1) Use human ingenuity to get water from places where there’s plenty to places where there’s a shortage; 2) Move people from areas of shortage to areas of plenty; 3) Kill lots of people. For me, which of those answers you choose tells me an awful lot about you.
This whole myth that the earth is crowded, (infested), with people need to be stamped on. Of the roughly 150 million km2 of land area on earth, about 2% is urban, 26% is rural and the rest is forest, woodland and wilderness. We have plenty of room to live, and plenty of resources to use and the ingenuity to make life better for all of us, and our children and granchildren.
“But what about Nature!”
Well, we are part of nature and nature is change. We are both an agent of change and subject to change and whatever way we develop, nature will survive. There are some who argue that we are nature’s best hope for survival so far. I don’t go quite that far myself as it seems to appoach the anthropomorphic fallacy in much the same way that belief in Gaia does, but there is an element of truth in it.
Whatever, nature will survive with or without us.
Pedants Corner:
I do…it should be ‘fewer’.
Let him put his money were his mouth his via calling for an end to all aid to countries with massive population explosions. No force involved there, but no way in h*** would a left winger ever call for that.
Maybe this Thorkel fool ought to take a drive on down to Missouri, if he thinks there’s a shortage of water.
My earlier comment of July 1, 2008 05:16 PM has finally made it out of Smite Control.
Best regards
Living as I do on the shores of one of the Great Lakes in one of the world’s most heavily endowed with fresh water nations here’s my chicken little anecdote of the day.
When I moved here ten years ago the lake level had fallen and there were cries of anguish and heavy duty doomsday scenarios about the coming desertification. And then the rains came and came and came and today there is woe is us talk about horrendously lhigh lake levels.
And the moral of the story is – Don’t jump to conclusions when brain is running on empty.
Before anyone else gets there, I’d like to apologise for my careless error at July 1, 2008 05:16 PM. This was down to too much reliance on memory, and not enough checking.
The land area per head of population on the planet is just under 1/100 of a square mile (around 29,000 square yards – which I had remembered correctly).
Thanks to Kevin B’s comment at July 1, 2008 08:18 PM, I have realised my mistake.
This land area each is somewhat over 2 hectares (and somewhat over five and a half acres): more than adequate living space and, on adequate quality land, enough to feed oneself many times over.
Best regards
“Do you think this planet will be able to continue to accommodate the human race regardless of how many of us there are?”
Your premise is false.
This planet doesn’t accommodate any of us — never has. We support ourselves by the fruits of our labor. Double the number of people and you double both our needs and our productivity. In fact, it turns out, you more than double our productivity, since people build off each other’s ideas and innovations. More people = More prosperity.
ian,
The mathematical part of my brain throws a “Does not compute” when you mention infinite; I would merely leave it at incalculably large. Essentially, a number so large that the above-mentioned asteroid impact is a far more urgent proposition, and it will remain so for a few centuries.
“You are effectively arguing that an infinite number of people can live on this planet, because human ingenuity will make it happen. That seems unlikely to me.”
The argument is dealt with at great length in Julian Simon’s classic book – linked to above. A lot of people find it unlikely, and yet this is well-known and nowadays very basic economics.
The reason all such Malthusian predictions fail is that they all make the same basic assumptions: that our future resources are fixed and that we will always continue to do things just as we do them now. But we never do. Technology moves on, and what was once difficult becomes incredibly easy. The historic trend has been that our resources have increased, far faster in fact than our population. (Which is why quality of life and life expectancy have expanded so much.) The resources never have to last forever, they only have to last just long enough that we invent something even better. We hop from stepping stone to stepping stone; it doesn’t matter that any one stone is finite, because there are plenty more stones.
Half a century ago, the boom in telecommunications meant people (‘experts’) were predicting we would inevitably run out of copper before we could connect everybody. And then somebody invented fibre optics, made out of sand, and not only can we connect everybody, but we can do it at a fraction of the price and with thousands of times more capacity than copper ever could. So what should you have said to someone who says we must conserve copper, before we run out? That yes, copper is technically a finite resource, but that in economic terms it is effectively infinite – in the sense of being ‘without end’ – because all such resources are eventually replaced or the problem they solve disappears long before they’re used up.
Julian Simon wrote his classic in 1981 comprehensively debunking the entire ‘limits to growth’ fallacy (and Lomborg’s follow up did so even more comprehensively) – and yet still we see the same tired old arguments trotted out. No offence intended – it’s not your fault. The media have been pushing this agenda so forcefully on everyone for so long, it’s little wonder most people believe in it, and have never heard of the counter arguments. But really, this subject should be required reading in school as an exercise in critical thinking. It tells you a lot about our education system that it isn’t.
“Overpopulation” will be solved when people are constrained only to have children that they are willing and able to care for by their own legitimately-acquired means.
Overpopulation is entirely caused by incompetent people who can’t even work out their own lives trying to salve the pain of existence by shagging like mad and shitting out babies. They do this no doubt with an expectation of welfare, free education, enforced paid maternity leave, and whatnot, to be paid for by “society.”
n005, the flaw in your argument there is that the people “shitting out babies” (my, what a delightful turn of phrase for the miracle of birth) that get the Malthusians so upset are in poor countries with negligible or non-existent welfare, education, enforced paid maternity leave and whatnot. The indigenous populations of western countries, despite those incentives, are stable or falling. Just about the only even moderately fecund sector of the western population are the despised underclass, and even they aren’t breeding enough to expand the population.
Nice try, though. It’ll play well at the Daily Mail.
Judging by earlier panics about this issue, written, remember, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the race was emphatically won by the optimists. As other commenters have pointed out regarding population growth and so on, it is a “race” one can watch with confidence.
I’d like to imagine that we could all calmly discuss these matters, but when I see someone write that what the world needs is a severe curtailment, and massive cut, to the size of the human population, I am not prepared to suppose that such a person is motivated by some sort of abstract, academic worldview.
I think it is perfectly legitimate to wonder about the motives of such neo-Malthusians. If you go through the literature of the Deep Greens, the McKibbens and the rest of them, some quite clearly regard humanity as a sort of plague. This is the unmistakable background noise that seems to accompany a lot of their writings. I think it is right to point this out, and wonder about whether the population worries could and should be regarded as essentially malign.
As PA points out, Julian L. Simon crushed much of these people’s arguments years ago.
Well, good for them.
Just makes me wonder who’s really doing all the wailing about “overpopulation.”
Johnathan
Your linking of a quote from me and a comment on ‘Thorkel’ is misleading to say the least.
Pa Annoyed said:
That is, more or less, the point I’m trying to make.
We differ only in that I don’t believe that just because we have managed so far to find the next stone, that this will necessarily always be the case.
Western progressives, who have always been fascinated by the idea of eugenic population “planning” as part of their perfect scientific society, which is largely inspired by a terrible fear that the scum of the earth (be they the local underclass or faraway darkies), breeding like vermin, will overwhelm them. It’s all a manifestation of class interest and power seeking.
No, the error is yours. In my original piece, I attacked the motives of some of the people who bleat about “over-population”; you described my stance as “silly hyperbole”, so I responded. I rejected your criticism.
I am sure your motives for concern about population pressures are honorable ones, or at least I jolly well hope they are.
I’m not especially concerned about population pressures, at least globally and so far as I’m aware I’ve never claimed to be so concerned – which is why I think your linking of my comment with ‘Thorkel’ is misleading. It is commonplace here for motives and opinions I don’t hold to be ascribed to me, but up to now I don’t think that has included you.
There are obvious issues for particular regions and countries, but I expect that these will reduce as and when these areas begin to develop economically and politically.
There are also real problems of water and food supply – we may produce enough globally, but it isn’t getting to the people who need it. There are also any number of places where water supplies up-stream are being held back to the detriment of people further downriver. Many of these are also in politically unstable areas. ‘Water wars’ are not an impossibility, even without climate change.
Ian, now you are being a blockhead. One more time: You described my original attack on the population doomsters as “silly hyperbole”; I had to refer to that point of Thorkel’s in order to defend myself from your charge. It was the tone of Thorkel’s comment that makes me believe that a lot of dark Greens are malevolent creeps.
I also find it rather odd that you are now claiming not to be all that bothered by population, since in an earlier comment on this thread, you spoke of the fact that at some point, population growth would impose intolerable pressures on resources.
I made it quite clear that I don’t think you personally have some sort of anti-population psychosis, as seems to be the case with some of the darkest Greens. Kindly withdraw the implication that I am somehow smearing you by association. I am not, so let’s leave it and move on, please.
I did not describe your attack as ‘silly hyberbole’. That phrase quite clearly attached to your description of the motives driving the people making the argument for population control.
As for what I said about population and resources, I will repeat it a second time.
and…
…but please no more. You clearly believe that what you say you mean is actually what you said and I as clearly disagree. No amount of argument from me to the contrary is going to change your mind.
Let’s remind ourselves of the sentence that I took exception to:
You need to be a bit clearer in your coments, Ian. I took what you wrote to be a reference to my own description of these people, rather than their own arguments.
zzzzz
I give up…
Give up what?
/Sigh/
It is one thing to say – as you did – that suggestions of a global water shortage are not founded in fact.
It is a separate thing to say – as you did – that those suggestions are made because the people making them have – in your words – a “hatred of people”
Hence –
I can’t make it any simpler.