Reply #5: Good stuff, just one observation [View All]

"Fortunately, expert consensus tells us we can address population humanely by solving the social problems that fuel it."

How do you solve the social problems that fuel it?

"Neither justifies hiding the truth because total resource use is the product of population size and per capita consumption."

By increasing per capita consumption, if it is to be done humanely.

I think that's the trap we're in. We can't stop, but we can't keep going. We have 6.5 billion+ people today. We haven't started doing anything yet, so that number will go up before it goes down. Billions of those billions are not connected to the global economic system, and if they are connected at any point, that means an increase in consumption. An increase in consumption will help with the population, but we still have the problem of an aging population that nobody has had to deal with fully yet, in Europe, Japan, and even here in the US. How do you keep paying for the increased living standards? Mass immigration to the developed world? What happens to the countries that you're taking people away from? They need people in order to pump energy into their system and increase their standards of living. How do you keep paying for everything in the developed world if there are more people retired than working?

We can't stop, and we can't keep going.