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.
collapse
Placeholder for time being, moving from lemm.ee
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.
- Standard run (business as usual) population crash around 2050.
- Doubled resources population crash around 2050.
- Unlimited resources population crash around 2050.
- Unlimited resources and pollution control population sharp decline 2075.
- Unlimited resources, pollution control and increased agriculture population crash around 2050.
- Unlimited resources, pollution control, increased agriculture and perfect birth control population crash around 2090.
- Stabilized earth (no population growth, no economic growth) crash after centuries. [* if you start in 1972. By 1990 it's too late.]
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.
Ecofascism is still fascism
You seem to think in terms of intent and choices. Try physics and degrees of freedom, which have only results and consequences. It's a description, not prescription.
You seem to think that it's possible to use language to communicate objective truths. This is why Malthusian analysis is fascistic despite having several accurate premises.
I don't understand what you're saying, then.
I am saying one cannot speak seriously about how technological advances will drive immiseration by overpopulation while being a completely integrated part of the most technological and most genocidal civilization on the planet. There is no way for it to be an objective sober analysis of systems because it is inherently a narrative that will be used by that system to continue its centuries-long genocidal program.
It would be like saying that measuring the volume of skulls and correlating it with intelligence is just sober objective biological analysis in the middle of the transatlantic slave trade. Which is among the things we were doing and saying in the sciences during that time.
This can essentially only be responsibly analyzed and communicated by and with the global subaltern as part of their program of resistance and liberation. It can never be a part of the administration and maintenance of empire because it will always lead to the same fascistic outcome regardless of intent.
First we must end the greatest source of human suffering in the world - genocidal white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, responsible for a nearly million deaths of deprivation per year through trade policy alone, and the constant instigator of the overwhelming majority of kinetic conflict - and THEN we can talk about how the liberated people can choose to assess and adapt to carrying ecosystem capacity limits.
If you had to rewrite that as would you be able to?
Claim: The main thesis or assertion you want the audience to accept. It answers the question: "What is the point I am trying to prove?".
Evidence / Grounds / Data: The foundation of hard facts, statistics, or primary source material that supports the claim. It answers the question: "What factual information do I have to go on?".
Warrant / Reasoning: The logical bridge or unspoken assumption that explains how and why the evidence directly leads to the claim. It answers the question: "How does this data connect to and prove my thesis?".
I found it easy enough to read
Claim: it is impossible for this article, and many like it, to be objective. Instead, it is fundamentally supportive of an ecofascistic program even if it doesn't explicitly say it is and even if it attempts to deny.
Evidence/Grounds: The article is titled "Malthus was right" and then in the article attempts to say Malthus was just doing objective systems analysis. The history of Malthusianism is ecofascistic. Malthus was an economist and demographer in Britain in a time when economics and demography were being used to justify brutal genocidal colonialism all over the world by Western Europe and their settler colonists on every populated continent on the planet. It wasn't possible for anything Malthus said or did to be objective, even if he applied super-human rigor because he knew that the crown would use any such analysis to justify fascistic genocidal policies on the global oppressed.
The same is true today. The author claims to be Sarah Connor, of the Terminator movie franchise, and provide no evidence for her real identity. We are left to assume she is a native English speaker living in the Western European sphere (like America but could easily be Canadian, Australian, or British), and therefore part of a society that is fundamentally organized around structural racism, a global class divide, patriarchy, global genocidal wealth accumulation, monocultural hegemony, expansionist Christianity, and the oppression of indigenous populations around the world.
Warrant: No possible systems analysis done at a blog level, or indeed even at the academic level, could possibly resist the application of its conclusions for fascistic purposes in this context. This claim is not new, it has been levied against Malthus for decades. We don't need to rehash it. The overarching social context determines not just what gets studied but how it gets studied and how those studies are interpreted and applied. It has been this way since the university system emerged in Europe. Not a single attempt at objectivity has escaped the university without somehow fueling the mass murdering globe spanning Eurocentric patriarchy. It never has and it never will until that hegemonic system is dismantled, and it will only be dismantled through the struggle of the subaltern against both the systems that it comprises and the reaction such a struggle will inevitably trigger.
Until then, attempts at redeeming Malthus and analysis of overpopulation mechanics are inextricable from the oppression that such logic will necessarily participate in.
Your argument is a masterclass in Critical Theory , but from a formal logic perspective, it relies heavily on attacking the origin and context of ideas rather than the ideas themselves. Here is a systematic breakdown of the logical fallacies and factual errors in the text.
1. The Genetic Fallacy & Anachronism
Quote: "It wasn’t possible for anything Malthus said or did to be objective... because he knew that the crown would use any such analysis to justify fascistic genocidal policies..."
- Refutation: This is a Genetic Fallacy, which occurs when someone judges an idea based on its history or origin rather than its current merit. Even if Malthus had personal biases, those biases do not automatically invalidate the mathematical concept of resource scarcity (arithmetic vs. exponential growth).
- Factual Error: It is an anachronism to claim Malthus "knew" his work would justify "fascistic" policies. Fascism as a political ideology did not exist until the 20th century, over 100 years after Malthus’s death.
2. Ad Hominem (Circumstantial)
Quote: "We are left to assume she is a native English speaker living in the Western European sphere... and therefore part of a society that is fundamentally organized around structural racism... and the oppression of indigenous populations..."
- Refutation: This is a classic Ad Hominem (Circumstantial) fallacy. Instead of addressing the article’s data or logic, the argument attacks the author’s presumed identity and location. It assumes that an individual’s geographic location or language makes their work "fundamentally" incapable of objectivity, which is a logical leap that ignores the specific content of their writing.
3. Guilt by Association
Quote: "The history of Malthusianism is ecofascistic... attempts at redeeming Malthus and analysis of overpopulation mechanics are inextricable from the oppression..."
- Refutation: This is Guilt by Association. It asserts that because bad actors have historically misused Malthusian concepts to justify cruelty, any modern use of those concepts—even purely scientific or ecological ones—is "inextricable" from that cruelty. By this logic, the study of genetics is "inextricable" from eugenics, and the study of physics is "inextricable" from nuclear war.
4. Hasty Generalization / Sweeping Generalization
Quote: "Not a single attempt at objectivity has escaped the university without somehow fueling the mass murdering globe spanning Eurocentric patriarchy."
- Refutation: This is a Hasty Generalization. It makes an absolute, all-encompassing claim about every single piece of objective research produced by the university system over centuries. It ignores countless advancements in medicine, human rights, environmental protection, and technology that have saved lives or challenged the "patriarchy" within that same system.
5. False Dilemma (Bifurcation)
Quote: "It never has and it never will until that hegemonic system is dismantled, and it will only be dismantled through the struggle of the subaltern..."
- Refutation: This presents a False Dilemma. It suggests there are only two possibilities: either the entire global hegemonic system is dismantled, or no objective analysis is possible. This excludes a vast "middle ground" where incremental progress, objective scientific discovery, and internal reform can and do occur within existing systems.
6. Begging the Question (Circular Reasoning)
Quote: "The overarching social context determines not just what gets studied but how it gets studied and how those studies are interpreted and applied."
- Refutation: This is Circular Reasoning. The argument assumes its conclusion (that the system is fundamentally oppressive) to prove that anything produced within the system (the study) must also be oppressive. If you start with the premise that objectivity is impossible, you will always conclude that a specific article isn't objective, regardless of its data.
7. Category Error
Quote: "analysis of overpopulation mechanics are inextricable from the oppression that such logic will necessarily participate in."
- Refutation: This is a Category Error. It conflates a descriptive observation (the study of carrying capacity and population dynamics) with a prescriptive policy (genocide or oppression). A scientist observing that a petri dish has a maximum capacity for bacteria is not "participating in oppression"; they are describing a physical limit. The logic of a "limit" is distinct from the ethics of how humans respond to that limit.
Your a.i. slop is pretty weak sauce
Strong sauce compared to your broken argumentation.
Brb. Ascending to Nirvana and detaching from my mortal coil so I can have an opinion about society
It's easier to imagine the end of reality than it is to imagine the end of patriarchy. This is a problem of imagination, not of reality.
Opinion that formed from within capitalist white supremacy detected.
Rejecting.
Only opinions formed outside of capitalist white supremacy are candidates for consideration
Aww someone's feefees got hurt
Fucking whoosh lmao
No, I got it. I just assumed you were serious
The popular understanding of Malthus was that he was calling for a population crash / overshoot.
I think he was saying a more nuanced thing. What he said was that any material improvements that raise the standard of living will be responded to with human population growth and that the growth always increases population until humans are living in miserable conditions again.
He was claiming that technology cannot solve this issue, human behavior sabotages the technical advances. Every technological step that could lead towards a human utopia will be overwhelmed by population and progress was sort of paradoxically impossible.
This is very similar to Jevons who said that resource efficiency causes it to be cheaper to use that resource so humans will use more, not less, as efficiency advances, so technology steps backwards, not forward.
I think it's funny that we're no different than rabbits with abundant food and a lack of predators. The irony is human society gets this emergent property from billions of people working together like a super organism, kind of like ant hives, yet we're still so dumb as an aggregate and as individuals.