Resources
Resources
180 comments
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what about food and place to live? seems to me we are stealing too much land from nature.
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This is one of the things that pisses me off about the Star Trek "fans" who point to the Replicator tech (which wasn't introduced until the Next Generation series) as the reason humanity was able to end scarcity. No, it absolutely was not what ended scarcity in the Star Trek universe. What ended scarcity was the absolute end of capitalism. We have now and have had for over a century, the capability to end world hunger and provide housing for every man woman and child on the planet. We don't do it because it would remove the overinflated value of those things as well as the obscene wealth of the rich.
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Even if that wasn't true, do you know how much energy it takes to turn energy into mass (unless I don't understand the tech and it works like a 3D printer or something). If a society has this much (free or at least affordable) energy, even without a replicator there is so much abundance.
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Reading the study I get the following remarks:
Living space, not great. 60m2 for a 4 person family. That's tight. I live alone in a 90m2 house and I could use more space, do they want me to live in a 15m2 house or do they want to force to share living space? Sorry but I won't compromise there. I prefer people having less children that me having to live as ants in a colony.
That is just a personal pick with the DLS minimum requirements chosen.
But still forgetting that. The reasoning is extremely faulty. Most of their argumentation heavy lifting is just relied to Millward-Hopkins (2022) paper establishing that 14.7 GJ per person anually is enough. That paper is just a work of fantasy. For reference, and taking the same paper numbers. Current energy usage (with all the exiting poverty) is 80 GJ/cap. Paleolitic use of energy was 5 GJ. Author is proposing that we could live ok with just triple paleolitic energy. That paper just oversees a lot of what people need to live in a function society to get completely irrational numbers on what energy cap we could assume to produce a good life.
Then on materials used. The paper assumes all the world shifting to vegetarian diet, everyone living on multiresidential buildings, somehow wood as the main building material (I don't know how they even reconcile that with multiresidential buildings...). And half of cars usage shifting to public transport How to achieve this in rural areas it's not mentioned at all).
A big notice needs to be done that both papers what are actually doing is basically taking China economy (greatly praised in the introduction) and assuming that all the world should live like that. And yes, probably the world could have 30 billion inhabitants if we accept to be all like China, who would we export to achieve that economic model if we all have a export based economy? who knows, probably the martians. And even then, while a lot of "ticks" on what a decent level of life quality apparently seems to be ticked, many people in western countries would not consider that quality life, but a very restrictive and deprived life standard.
I'm still on the boat the people having less children is a better approach to great lives without destroying the planet. At some point a cap on world population need to be made, it really add that much that the cap is 30 billion instead of maybe 5 billion? It's certainly not a cap in the number of social iterations a person can have, but numbers give for plenty of friends. And at the end it's not even a cap on "how many children" can people have, as once the cap is reach the number of children will be needed to cap the same to achieve stability. It's just a cap on "when people can still be having lots of kids". Boomer approach to "let's have children now" and expect that my kids won't want to have as many children as I have now.
Also another big pick I have with the article is that it blames the current level of inefficiency to private jets, suvs, and industrial meat. But instead of making the rational approach of taking thise appart from the current economy and calculate what the results will be. Parts from zero building the requirements out of their list. Making the previous complaint about those luxury items out of place completely. On a personal note I would reduce or completely eliminate many of those listed "super luxury" items. But I have the feel (just a feel because neither me not the author have studied this) that the results of global energy and material usage won't drop that much, certainly not at the levels proposed by the authors with their approach.
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Gonna quote the study again:
"It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension."
Firstly- Are you so selfish that you refuse to change anything about your lifestyle in order to provide people with an absolute minimum standard of life - a standard that you have identified as abhorently poor by your standards?
Secondly- Change on your part may not even be required. Tax on production (i.e. corporations) would cover the majority of it, and the rerouting of production from useless things like casinos and yachts would cover the rest.
Finally- additional taxes and such would not even be required for many changes, just spending more efficiently. As an example- Very rural places all over the world have train and bus service. It's a matter of choice that the US doesn't, not a matter of practicality. We spend all of our money on highways instead, which are far more expensive per person per mile. Investing in rail, like Europe and China have done, provides far more use for far more people.
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I said in other comment. I'm not in the US, I'm in europe we have one of the best train networks of the world. Public transport is funded by the government so is cheaper, even completely free in some cases.
People living in rural areas still chose cars while they have the free will to do so.
If as a species we cannot find the way to make that work there's no incentive for us to keep trying. Luckily I'm sure it's possible, that people say it's not just because propaganda (as I said mostly because the voting split rural/urban). We have achieve harder things as a species. Surely we can have people in rural areas still using cars (electric cars for instance) without dooming humankind to extinction.
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The paper assumes all the world shifting to vegetarian diet, everyone living on multiresidential buildings, somehow wood as the main building material (I don't know how they even reconcile that with multiresidential buildings...). And half of cars usage shifting to public transport How to achieve this in rural areas it's not mentioned at all).
Yeah, that's totally unrealistic. We could get rid of 99% of cars and only keep ambulances and fire trucks, and most people would be happier. Also we should get everyone on a vegan diet. Vegetarian is okay, but still enslaves animals. We can do much better.
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What about people not living in cities?
Public transport for low density areas is terrible. So or you are forcing people to live in cities (where public transport can be good) or you are forcing people to endure terrible public transport.
Also forcing dietary changes on people, something as big as preventing people to eat or use animal products...
I just don't think forcing that on people would be clever. I know how I would react if anyone were to impose that way of living to me, and I can only assume that many people would react the same way. Specially if I would have to endure all that only to accommodate a growing population when we could just try to aim for a lower stable number of total human population (a number that will need to be reached regardless at some point. Infinite growth is unfeasible).
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How do you need more than 90m² when living alone?? I live in a 60m² apartment and literally only use like 30-40m² and idk what I'd use the rest for.
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I have a kitchen, a living room and two bedrooms. I do remote work so one of the bedrooms have a double purpose as guess room and office.
I would love to have at least, another room dedicated to storage. And second room so I could have a hobby/office room and a guess room separately.
Also I would love to have a garden.
I spent a lot of time at home, between remote work and hobbies, so I would like to have a more spacious living space. The more time you spent on a place the bigger it probably needs to be.
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Well they need a garage for their car, and since they're driving to work and don't get enough exercise they need a home gym
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could you link us the dls standards and the study itself?
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It's a minimum to bring the impoverished up to. The paper makes no suggestion that the rest are to be brought down to that standard except by changing production practices.
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You mad?
Yes, to support everyone on what our economy outputs today will involve the quality of life decreasing for a lot of people. And the economy will have to change, to build the things that people need but are currently unable to pay for. This is unsurprising.
Probably the living space is more to show this is feasible over it being the expected/desired solution. It would be very counterproductive to tear down good houses, but small apartments work well for "house single unhoused people".
Rural transport is a rounding error compared to the number of private cars that could be converted with minimal fuss in cities.
Why would an export economy be a bad model? They literally have a surplus; all you need to do to fix it is.... Make less?
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I'm not mad. I will just not allow anyone to reduce my living standards because they don't want to use a rubber.
A export model is not bad. I just said that's unreasonable to think that all the world could follow that model. Because then "who would we export to?". It's like liberals thinking that the tax rate in a tax heaven are proof that every country could have those tax haven rates. Good for them, that the model worked, but for some country to export other country needs to import, that's all. Chinese economic growth have been very linked to being the world factory. That's great, but it could not be assumed that all the world could just do the same.
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They’re not mad, they’re just a bad person. Don’t use empathy in argument with someone who has none.
Also, those numbers are like averages. Some places would have high rises to accommodate the sheer numbers of people, working or non-working.
But yeah, I’d tear down my own fucking home right meow if it was for equality on a massive scale.
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I agree that we can support everyone on earth if we change our social, economic, and political systems.
I also think it is good that voluntary population decline is already happening and seems likely to continue in many industrialized nations.
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Imposing such a drastic change in living conditions for the the whole population of this planet is impossible. The rich will not allow it and everybody who isn't worse off than the conditions suggested here will fight it. Most people won't even consider going vegetarian, for fucks sake.
Using this study as proof that there are enough resources to support billions more people is beyond stupid. Humans are not an altruistic species. We already have the money and resources to adequately support everyone already existing, but just flat out refuse to, and always have.
Adding more people to this hellworld because some naive study assumes that at the last second of the eleventh hour before we hit 3c warming and run out of fresh water and arable land, we will evolve into a species capable of physics defing magic and perfect communism... is really, really, REALLY fucking stupid.
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If we had less people companies would dump twice the amount of plastics in the ocean
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Do you think plastic waste ending up in the ocean, is some kind of industry sanctioned punishment for falling birthrate or something? Or were you being sarcastic?
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The design choices of people who make memes out of their political opinions are so random and funny to me sometimes. Like why is one of them a Russian gopnik? Why is the other one a blushing gamer femboy who paints his nails??
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Engagement.
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Yeah but DLS would be a significant downgrade for many people, who already fight the suggestion to only eat meat six days a week tooth and nail.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6013539/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10537420/
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.est.3c03957/suppl_file/es3c03957_si_001.pdf
Things that count as DLS:
- 10 m² of personal living space + 20 m² for every 4 ppl as bathroom / kitchen
- 2100 kcal/day
- 1400 kWh/year, but this already includes public services (education/healthcare)
- 1 washing machine per 20 ppl
- 2.4 kg clothing / year
- wear tops for three days and bottoms for 15 days without washing
- 1 laptop per 4 people with a yearly power consumption of 62 kWh. (bizzarely they talk about an 800 MHz computer and seem to confuse HDD and RAM). If your gaming computer used 400 W you could use it for 150 hr/year.
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- wear tops for three days and bottoms for 15 days without washing
It is for the good of all people that this is not the case for me...
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The same paper addresses this directly. 86% of human beings live below this standard of living today.
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I'm gonna need a lot more than 10 square meters of space if everyone is changing their shirts twice a week. Yuck.
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I am amazed by all the people that, when faced with having to give up some of the first-world luxury they are used to, flip completely in their head. It is the opposite of not-in-my-backyard: Don't take from my backyard, pls.
Yes, I would rather have the current distribution continue, where hundreds of millions are literally starving, where there are people who would kill to live like this, where people are walking through the desert and taking dinghies over oceans for shit like this, just so I can have my amenities.
Absolutely wild. We're so doomed.
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Why are you amazed? Have you lived your whole life under a rock? People have always been like this, it's never been hidden or even remotely pretended otherwise.
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where hundreds of millions are literally starving, [...] just so I can have my amenities.
Note that other people's suffering is not always directly related to our lifestyle.
Explain to me how the sudanese war is caused by our consumption of meat?
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A simpler solution is to simply abolish wealth hoarding, impose sensible consumption limits (so, no cars or commercial plane travel, no meat, no 800 watt gaming rigs), and continue to encourage population decline. Boom, everyone is healthy, the air is clean, and you can keep your house.
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I always wonder what happens if commercial air travel is banned. Cruise ships are obviously worse for the environment than planes, but are there ships that are fast enough to be feasible for people traveling for less than a month while actually being sustainable or are the americas and Australia just going to be effectively isolated from Eurasia and Africa?
It’s worth it if it’s the only way to survive, obviously, but I wonder what the effects would be. I’m a transatlantic immigrant, and I’d be willing to take a three month trip by ship to visit my family once a decade or so, but I can’t imagine most people wanting or being able to do that.
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that's how you start a civil war. lots of people will rebel against oppression
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I'd argue that's a downgrade for most people. I personally exceed all of those bullet points and the idea of coming close to most of them sounds like Hell to me. If it meant 8.5 billion people met those standards, I could make the sacrifice, but it would be awful.
Can you imagine if everyone you met was wearing a 3 days dirty shirt? Do other not sweat? And 2100 kcal per day is not safe or sustainable for almost anyone that exercises regularly.
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ITT: people who didn't even glance at the study.
Quoting from the study:
"It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension...we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world's population, are deprived of DLS."
The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
"Averages are reduced by the relatively lower requirements of infants and children."
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And 2100 kcal per day is not safe or sustainable for almost anyone that exercises regularly.
I’m a woman with a relatively large frame (~65kg/180cm) who used to do 14 hours of hard cardio a week. At that time, my recommendation was 2250, the first time in my life it had exceeded 2k. For smaller women, the recommendation is sometimes much lower. My stepsister is about 45kg and 155cm tall and her calculated daily calorie burn is like 1300. My ex boyfriend’s mom was told not to go over 1200, which I thought was the lower limit for humans generally- things are different when you’re a short, post-menopausal woman.
All that is to say, it’s probably an average of 2100 calories, spread between people who need on average 1400-1800 calories and those who need 2000-2400
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I'm actually in favor of keeping a lifestyle that wastes a lot of resources simply for the point that it guarantees that in times of crises, of unexpected shortages of products, there will still be enough products going around to sustain us.
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1400 kWh/year
that seems awfully low, considering that germany uses 37 000 kWh /year per person. But that already factors in things such as energy needed to produce your soda bottle, so it's not "energy used inside your own house/apartment".
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And kill all the pets I assume.
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Or at least feed the dogs plant based and phase out having cat as pets. IIRC it's 20% of all livestock in the US that's killed just for cats and dogs and about 70% of that 20% is for dogs on top of my head. Dog can live fine if not better on a well formulated plant based dog food. Just look at some of the reviews for Purina HA Vegetarian (it's vegan btw) dog food. A lot of dog owners cured the gastro intestinal and lot of other problems their dogs had with it. I'm not affiliated. There are other well formulated plant based foods like AMI successfully used by many dog owners. Just seen a video on "The Dodo" of a dog who was at the verge of being put down because of weight loss till the veterinary got the idea the dog could have a meat allergy and advised said Purina food. The dog is now healthy and thriving again. That diet change on a global scale would take a huge burden off of the environment.
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The other question is: where are we living? It takes a lot more resources to live in Canada than it does to live in a warm climate to the south. Does that mean we all have to abandon Canada and crowd ourselves into the hot equatorial regions?
Otherwise those numbers seem like a huge downgrade for even working class Canadians. It goes to show you that Canada is a truly rich country and all but the least fortunate here have far more resources than someone living in the poorest countries in the world.
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Define 'decent living standards'.
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The study does, in fact. Or actually, bare minimum living standards:
Quoting from the article:
"It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension."
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I think Maslow's pyramid of needs would be a good starter. But let's be more concrete.
- House (60 m2, +20 m2 per extra person in household), with electrification, and which can withstand severe weather events (heatwaves, blizzards, heavy rain and wind, etc.).
- Clean air and environment without fine dust, microplastics, PFAS, asbestos, etc.
- Clean, potable and heatable water available anytime
- Healthy and clean food free from animal suffering made available for all
- Everyday and affordable clothes available for all
- Bodily integrity: only the person themselves can decide over their own body, with the exception of vaccination (because everyone ought to be vaccinated!)
- Labour rights, such as automatic unionisation, workplace democracy and self-governance, no vertical hierarchy (so no CEO, overreaching holdings, trusts, etc). And ideally, a wageless gift economy system based on needs. If not that, then this: any company lacking one of the above/being too big, may never get bailed out.
- Protection of personal property, with private property becoming communal property instead.
- Encouragement of meeting people at sport, hobbies, reading (helps finding friendship)
- Bicycle and public transit infrastructure being widely available.
- Free and high-quality public education available for all
- Same with healthcare. No artificial limit mandating that there be max x amount of doctors or teachers.
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I'm sure they define that in the study if you read it
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Well would you look at that, it sure does.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493
Recent empirical studies have established the minimum set of specific goods and services that are necessary for people to achieve decent-living standards (DLS), including nutritious food, modern housing, healthcare, education, electricity, clean-cooking stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigeration, heating/cooling, computers, mobile phones, internet, transit, etc. This basket of goods and services has been developed through an extensive literature (e.g., Rao and Min, 2017, Rao et al., 2019) and is summarized in Table 1, following Millward-Hopkins (2022).
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Genocide normalization
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Why can’t we just have fewer people too? Instead of finding ways to support 50 billion people, how about we have good birth control facilities, education, and economies not based on constant never ending growth? The reality is unending growth WILL end whether people like it or not- wouldn’t it be better to do it on our own terms rather than in a global catastrophe?
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The best way to control population growth is to actually give them a high standard of living and education. One of the most consistent trends in a developing nation is it's birth rate slowing down as people become more prosperous
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Why can’t we just have fewer people too?
Won't somebody think of the ECONOMY?
A lot of countries around the world are living a so called "underpopulation crisis" even though the population is still growing frighteningly fast. Population going down is only a problem for capitalism, and it's going to doom us all
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wouldn’t it be better to do it on our own terms rather than in a global catastrophe?
The catastrophy is inevitable, it's just a question of whether any humans will survive.
For example CO2 has a delayed effect of ~40years (if I remember correctly). The effects of global warming are very much obvious now, but the yearly output hasn't at any point dropped to those levels since.
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Why can’t we just have fewer people too? Instead of finding ways to support 50 billion people
line must go up (/s)
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Most of the world is far from replacement levels of population and the global trend is a decrease in fertility. Overall, we are at 2.4 kids per woman, the replacement level being estimated between 2.1 and 2.3 (depending how likely you think it is to die from wars). This data has been (mostly) decreasing since the 60s.
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Does this assume instant, frictionless transportation of goods?
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Transportation of goods is mostly a capitalist issue. You don't need to cover a cucumber with plastic and ship it half way across the world, while selling the local ones to richer countries. The same goes for the vast majority of "goods". Remove all of that greedy, superfluous shit, and you're left with minimal shipping needs.
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Not everyone has equally arable land.
Edit: Beyond that, have you talked to anyone performative driving one of those child-killing tall pickups? We are a people that lost their shit about straws, and the kind of changes being talked about here are just… [waves arms at all of this]
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It's wild that many people on Lemmy dont understand that many things, while completely and absolutely unnecessary, also bring a lot of joy to people.
Cracking a bottle of beaujolais alongside a dish made from Chinese and Korean ingredients while listening to South American vinyl on my Japanese speakers is part of the spice of life.
I get that I could live like a 12th century peasant, only consume things I grow myself and use clothing I can make by hand, but Jesus christ, that's fucking insane.
Living isnt just about living, its about knowing and enjoying other cultures and the world itself. This study sound like they'd have you live in a cave with no ac while only eating flavorless locally sourced paste.
How boring and repulsive.
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And bunch of other sacrifices. One of the points was also about everyone living in a city close by. The study is not applicable to real life, it's utopia scenario. One of the biggest problems isn't even resources, but co2 production.
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Technically, earth's land area is big enough to sustain around 24 billion people. Consider this diagram:
It shows that we're using around 50% of all habitable land for agriculture. Most of the land that we aren't using is either high up in the mountains (where terrain isn't flat and you can't use heavy machinery) or in the tropical regions on Earth close to the equator (south america, central africa, indonesia), or in areas where it's too cold for agriculture (sibiria, canada). so you can't really use more agricultural land than we're already using without cutting down the rainforest.
In the diagram it also says that we're using only 23% of agricultural land for crops which produce 83% of all calories. If we used close to 100% of agricultural land for crops, it would produce approximately 320% of calories currently being produced, so yes, we could feed 3x the population this way.
However, it must be noted that there's significant fluctuation in food production per km², for example due to volcanic eruptions. So it's better to leave a certain buffer to the maximum amount of people you could feed in one year, because food shortages in another year would otherwise lead to bad famines.
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Did you know 90% of Earth’s topsoil is at risk of depletion by 2050? It might throw a wrench into this perfect utopia being planned here.
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Oh, I know!
wE sHoULd KiLl HalF oF ThEm
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The number of people basically advocating for this in the comments is honestly depressing
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I was going to say "No one is saying that", but there are many going down that road.
The preferable approach is degrowth. A lower birthrate leading to a smaller population with no deaths required, just vastly fewer births and lower consumption until human civilization can not only fit with our planetary boundaries, but restore a lot of wildlife and wildlands, then stabilize at a population and consumption that is healthy and comfortable.
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This is already happening, but i don’t think it’s fast enough: with the exceeded life expectancy, we are first seeing an increase and aging of population. Only after the wave of now 50-60 year olds will be dead will we see a stable degrowth. Is that soon enough? Sure it’s preferable to extermination?
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I'm not keen on a society were seniors are the majority of the population, it would be a disaster.
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Most of the 8 billon people are living in the third world and which less resources waste, most recources a wasted by less than 10% of the world population.
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But image if we can provide so much for 8.5 billion, it means we can provid double for 4 billion. There is no reasonable excuse to keep increasing the human population.
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Those 8.5 billion are producing all of that 100%. If you had 4 billion, it would be 45%.
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Production is absolutely not the bottleneck, here. We are producing too much, constantly.
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numbers must go up
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what tf kind of game controller is that? three vertical buttons??
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From what i've heard, with the aging population in developed countries and the birthrate getting lower due to longer life expectancy, population should soon stabilise itself around 10 billions. Seems viable.
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Yeah population growth really follows a sigmoid curve:
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Not when a fraction of it "needs" everything. But that's another problem ofc.
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Is there a workable plan to get to that point or is it a theoretical idea like communism
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workable
No. It would require guillotining all billionaires, dissolution of a shit ton of wasteful industries (AI for example), vast reduction of meat consumption (which also means closing large parts of the meat industry) ...
Basically it requires the rich and powerful to not be rich and not be powerful anymore
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It’s disturbing, how many people eagerly embrace eugenics and anti-natalism as long as they can cite a left-wing cause like ecology as their reason
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How are the two on the same level?
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Gee, I dunno, maybe everyone having 3 or more kids in the long term will lead to overpopulation issues we cannot resolve even with improved technology.
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How did they calculate that? I don't believe it.
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https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/124460/1/Hinckel_how-much-growth-is-required--published.pdf
Hickel serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is legit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Hickel
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Ah hes a degrowther, makes sense. I read through his paper and I really don't think its realistic or thought provoking. It lacks humanity and applies a utilitarian solution. Its the same as saying we have x humans producing co2 lets reduce the number of humans but instead of humans its goods he deems to be unnecessary.
His entire premise is based on what he thinks a person needs to live a good life. But lifes just not that simple and people all around the world NEED different things this type of strict partitioning fails when applied to the entire world. Part of what makes our current system work is that its dynamic, people create goods they want and those who also want those goods buy them.
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Anyone have a good pdf source on this research?
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How detailed is this calculation? Does it take into account where these resources are produced and costs of logistics (nvm difficulty of getting every country on board with this, lets assume we did)?
180 comments
Decent living conditions... meaning what, exactly? 250 square feet with no windows, shared shower and bathroom with 11 other people?
The depressed goth gamer in that cartoon would have to wear the same unwashed clothes for a week between hand washings, and in any case, that's all the clothes they have.
It's sad, but without the tremendous fossil inputs we've been gobbling for over a century, poof, we're back to an agrarian 19th century life style. At best. With the concomitant 1-2 billion world population. And hand made clothes from natural fibers. Bye bye synthetics, bye bye engineered detergents, bye bye dyes, bye bye individual front loading washing machines.
You really can go on the internet and say anything without sources
"You really think someone would do that? Go on the internet... and tell lies?"
Citation?