(09-13-2020 04:24 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(09-13-2020 02:35 PM)colohank Wrote:  

(09-13-2020 01:00 PM)DFW HOYA Wrote:  

(09-13-2020 12:15 PM)chess Wrote:  The census is taking place right now. Illinois is losing population.

Florida now has more people than New York. The Empire State has gone from 45 electoral votes in 1950 to a projected 28 after 2020. North Carolina will overtake Ohio in the 2030 census.

A candidate in 2024 that wins four states (CA, AZ, TX, FL) will have half the electoral votes needed to secure the White House.

Anyone who celebrates population growth for any reason has his head up his bung. There are already too many of us competing for dwindling resources, polluting air and water, and getting in each other's way. The year I was born, the population of the US was 140 million. Now it's 330 million. Do you think things will be better when it's 500 million? 700 million? One billion or more?

Welcome to Bangladesh.

Good Lord, that's ignorant. Every single documented population increase in history has been followed by increases in consumption per capita. Even Bangladesh (although admittedly their experience hasn't been as good as most). Have you read anything about what life was like for the average Indian/Bangladeshi 100 years ago? I have Bangladeshi graduate students, and they say their country is better now than it ever has been.

Do you know what the average global population hovered around for almost 5 millenia? ~3.5 billion. That changed around 1880. Do you know why? Petroleum. The biggest use for petroleum is fertilizer. The Earth naturally could sustain about 3.5 billion until around 1880. With petroleum based fertilizer you see how many the earth is sustaining now is over 8 billion and quickly heading to 9 and I haven't checked it in a year so....

So with advances in modern science and the use of electricity and advances in medicine we have raised the average life expectancy rather significantly as compared to 1880.

All of that is good, unless we pass peak oil, which many have predicted is just ahead. Now whether that is in 10 years or 100 makes little difference. We eventually are going to have to make synthetic fuels for about everything we currently use gasoline, Diesel, and kerosene. That means fertilizer will be on a triage list along with other petroleum products and probably under national defense.

The current population has drastically overfished the seas and that doesn't even account for the added pollution, much of which is plastic in nature, dumped into the sea creating multiple large floating islands of plastic which slowly sinks, sublimates, and releases pcps on the ocean's floor. These have a nasty habit of altering the sex of minute marine life which forms the basis for the oceans food chain. And of course that is destroying a significant % of the that base as those organisms don't reproduce as they should. That means that in the food chain the fish we eat have less and less to eat. Since the oceans provide 70% of the protein consumed by humans that doesn't bode well for us long term. When the ocean collapses as a food source the planet will have it's own way of returning to ~3.5 billion if it doesn't overcompensate initially through disease, war, and famine. We are only about 150 years removed from a wide range of nasty disease processes all of which were related to deficiencies in vitamins and trace elements.

This industrial wonder you believe drives commerce does, but it takes 100 years to bring soil back to a high level of fertility after it has been paved over. Deforestation continues to be a problem to the ecological balance and that is directly related to human activity. And mind you I'm not a Green Party advocate, but far from it. And just because those whackos have some bizarre pseudo religion out of the environment doesn't mean that man is not destroying his eco system because he sure as hell is.

If you spent anytime at sea you would see this. We think that chickens which never touch the ground and hydroponics is going to save us. They won't. The chickens make us more antibiotic resistant and hydronics is hopeful spatially but probably isn't going to be widely enough practiced before the crunch hits.

In 2000 when the Pentagon released its plan for the 21st century their primary concern for infrastructure was the defense of potable water supplies. Let that sink in. People taking all kinds of pills pissing into the sewage system where the waste water is reclaimed are putting more harmful pollutants into the recycled water than we can filter out. So unless you have a well (for which most states will not issue a new permit) you are going to be dependent upon city water (which means the power grid) or you are going to be one of the few fortunate ones who bought land with an old well on it which you may maintain. Other than that sport it's going to be Dasani for you.

The super wealthy are more than aware of all of this and there are more than a few of them that would like to see the global population managed back to 3.5 billion (it's natural and sustainable level).

So Colonel Hank is far from an idiot, and may be better informed than you are regarding this matter.

I'm not a radical, not a crazed environmentalist, but my wife did seafood research, my daughter is documenting climate change in Alaska photographically, and I spent a great deal of time sport fishing the ocean and getting to know commercial fishermen. The changes from the 60's to the 90's in fish populations and size were staggering. Now there are whole species you can't fish, though third world countries do, and even the wild salmon populations are dropping.

Pollution of the oceans by man is at the core of the natural decline in numbers, and over fishing has only exacerbated what is becoming rapidly a global problem. So unless you want to entertain Swift's "A Modest Proposal" I would recommend you spend less time checking out the consumer index and more time paying attention to nature.