this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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Yup. Its just like peak oil. fracking pushed it off a bit but otherwise its still on track. A guy in a post reply put a thing that he would like to see the population at 4bil as 8 is kiiling us and got plenty of flak. My response was lol because we started using oil for fertilizer back in the early 1900's when the population was below 2 billion. For the planet to actually heal we would need to draw down and cap at a billion if we even have the time to draw down at this point. If we had kept up conservation and advancement with human rights and envorionemental improvements and renewables and such and if we recognized and worked toward a drawdown by the end of the last millnium we might have been able to do 2bil but given our headlong ignore and pull out more faster it will take much more and likely be even more severe in another 20 years.
The game theory of international markets and farming means you're at a severe disadvantage if you don't use petroleum fertillizers and pesticides/herbicides. I guess it's possible if there's voter appetite to subsidize farmers to an even more extreme degree with tax revenue to keep them barely scraping by.
The big issue with subsidization is it picks winners. Small family farms usually get less and end up shafted while big mega farms get the lion share of subsidies and outcompete Joe and Jane farmer, who end up bankrupt and the mega farm buys their land... That's my personal gripe with the whole process...
Places like Cuba and Haiti are a natural experiment in what life would look like without industrial agriculture inputs.
Fun fact: Britain has around the same per capita agricultural area as Haiti does, only Britain is using fertilizer and in addition importing 50% of the food sold (almost like importing double the farm area).
Yes which is why we are on this ride of ruin. The expansion no matter what damn the long term. Thats my kids and their kids and their kids if I had any problem.
The 1972 Limits to Growth study famously made many of the same exact points. Their computer model projected different scenarios, and none of them didn't eventually have a crash. They showed that business as usual and lots of population growth would lead to a very abrupt cliff / die-off and they also showed that a much more restrained population growth could continue for hundreds of years in an almost economic steady state.
The backlash from economists was that all the previous claims of a hard civilization limit had been successfully transcended and that models were too complicated to understand and the plan would be downright lousy for the economy. Therefore it wasn't a problem, or if it was we shouldn't do anything about it.
If the LtG was correct and the economists were wrong about innovating our way out of a collapse, I hope we have airbags installed in this thing.
Actually some of them didn't have the crash they were just very unrealistic scenarios however business as usual scenarios were a bit to pessimistic on their resource availability assumptions but reality tracks closer to the higher availability scenarios which , if I recall correctly, actually crash steeper after holding off a bit longer.
In general, it seems like LtG scenarios show that more resources or more technology just push population level higher before hitting a crash. And as you point out, the crash is worse (steeper and more severe) the more resources and technology went on and the bigger the population at the point of collapse.
In a way you could analyze LtG as saying that overpopulation is the central issue and there is no solution set to solve population overshoot.
There is a solution to overshoot if humans voluntarily or semi voluntarily reducing population by sub replacement birth rates and then hoping we coast over the next 200 years without catastrophe until population is back to sustainable level . Africa still hasn't hit demographic transition to sub replacement yet though and may just bang straight into the malthusian limits. It's not entirely out of the question though that we could have enough resources to taper down global population in a controlled manner. We already damaged earth and will keep damaging it over those 200 years though and affluence chasing can nullify the population decline benefits to environmental impact.
The LtG showed that if 1972 population had frozen at that level, there was STILL eventually a crash within a few hundred years.
And they also carefully stated that if you grew population from 1972 to 1990 and then had no further population growth (same idea starting 20 years late), the crash was before 2100. The window for any kind of sustainable population control would have already closed within the next 20 years.
What you're outlining is a scenario where let's say it's roughly approximate to growing population from 1972 to 2022, then DECREASING population growth. Let's say if we could snap our fingers and put today's population of 8.3B to 1990s level of 5.3B, well we can already interpolate from the LtG that this doesn't get us to 2100, they already spelled that out.
You need the following : Population rapidly back to 1990 or 1972 levels, double/unlimited resources, pollution controls, increased agriculture etc. Like basically every variable beyond all the most unrealistic scenarios they modelled.
You're saying "there is a solution" but I think basically a lot of people would technically need to die somehow, given where we are in this story. So just ethically, no, there isn't a solution.
The "voluntarily reduced population" was what they called "perfect birth control". They showed that this led to a crash also. To really halt population growth into a "steady state" you need to place a strict license on reproduction to get zero growth, like an imposed law or whatever.
In the paper LtG 30yr recalibration, the model is validated against historical data and basically they say that the boundary in the original model was running out of resources, but in the revised model it's pollution, but the limits are still in force.