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little Z
Trad climber
un cafetal en Naranjo
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Technology has come through
In reference to the video in the original post about how we can all relax and procreate to our heart's content because technology will save us, I love how they hold up modern science-technology as being the savior of all, but then try to blame rising infertility on some nefarious government plot run by the Malthusians. I'd say it's more likey caused by environmental pollutants, the very residues of all those great scientific and technological solutions that were meant to save us.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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The idea that technology will save us is also a part of a modern narrative that lacks analysis of externalities.
By "technologies" we refer to what happened during the 20th century.
And that means the development of the internal combustion engine, which is the root of the "technology saving us" meme... that is, utilizing a ubiquitous energy source, fossil fuel, to make power to do mechanical work.
It wasn't too long that someone figured out why the climate in the late 19th century was so very different than from the ice ages, the concentration of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, and predicted that energy production by fossil fuel would change the climate; 1896.
In the future, the technology that "saves us" will have to shift the external costs somewhere else, fission energy is not the place (at least not with our current technologies) as the external costs are now included in that analysis and make that energy source cost prohibitive.
Renewables are likely to be push the external costs elsewhere, for a while. But as demand for energy increases with the modernization (= access to energy) of the global population, those external costs will start to dominate the picture.
It makes the 3% efficiency of photosynthesis look terrific, as archaic a "technology" as that is, it serves the bulk of the biomass on the planet, sustainably. We are living off the "inefficiency" of that process, the geological processing of organic matter that was once life which built the chemical bonds that we so cluelessly break to be able to type messages to this forum.
We do this at such a prodigious rate that the hundreds of millions of years worth of biological activity represented by the reserves of fossil fuels could be arguably entirely depleted in 200 years by humans.
Welcome to the petri dish.
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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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Consider first world nations have achieved a fertility rate of about two births per couple (replacement). The outlying data for population growth in America consist of subsidized populations and immigrants from agrarian economies. Eventually, they too will become emancipated and their fertility will approach replacement. As for welfare communities, until there is no longer a financial benefit to those who produce children they don't support, those communities will continue to have high fertility. This is the classic example of adverse selection. That term refers to any policy that propagates and increases the very problem it purports to alleviate.
Not sure what all is being driven at here. I took the earlier post as blaming welfare for urban population increase. But it is generally the wealthy nations that have welfare and most wealthy nations are below replacements rate. So blaming population on welfare sounds like something the Heritage Foundation would come up.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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So all this talk of fecundity and economics (not sure of its relevance to pop growth) seems to be avoiding the 800 pound gorilla present: the Hydra headed growth monster. Can Yosemite handle 7 million visitors per year? When will the Democrats stop supporting the IRS fecundity subsidy?
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