WARNING: 👉TIRADE👈

For anyone who believes 8 billion people is sustainable on planet Earth.

Here’s why it isn’t.

• We all need food
• Food is non-discretionary consumption- everyone needs it.
• Food needs agriculture.
•50% of habitable land is now used by agriculture.
• A large proportion of that land which is now agriculture used to be carbon sink forests, and used to regulate the climate. No longer.
• The rest of that land used to be grasslands, which also held C in the soil with help of herds of wildlife - no longer.
• And what of the agriculture? 50% of the world’s population is actually totally reliant on fossil fuels for fertilisers to grow the crops to feed them. And almost of all of us need fossil fuels to get the food from farm to us, and for the farming itself.
• And the agriculture itself? Almost all of it is Carbon positive. And worse than that, it liberates CH4 & N2O which are much more potent GHG than CO2, meaning the equivalent CO2 level is close to DOUBLE pre-industrial levels - we’re talking levels in excess of 550 ppm CO2 equiv
• N2O is about 300 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
• CH4 is 21-72 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
• So, can we all go back to a permaculture type system, without fossil fuel inputs? We would all need to live on the land, close to food sources, away from cities & jobs, because its labour intensive. How will that be possible, when much of the land is now urbanised & concreted?
• And desertification is causing migration of people to cities. Where will their food be grown?

“Overpopulation in drylands can also impact the soil of the area. For instance, the pressure of overpopulation can deplete the fertile soil and cause desertification...
”When soil becomes depleted and unusable for farming, mass migration to urban areas increase. Therefore, this results in overpopulating urban areas.”

• So maybe the land can become more productive elsewhere to compensate?
• Worldwide agricultural productivity inc 69% in 50y
• Unfortunately in that same 50 year timeframe world population increased 114%. So why have their not been major famines, despite loss of topsoils & desertification?

Deforestation & loss of wild ecosystems.
• The other thing that’s very important to mention about deforestation is that forests regulate climate & rainfall in many different ways, by altering weather patterns, land surface temperature, and increasing rainfall. https://www.climatechangepost.com/news/2017/2/21/more-carbon-storage-importance-forests-climate-cha/
• So, just to feed current populations of close to 8 billion people requires extensive use of fossil fuels, & loss of climate regulating climate sink forests. This will inevitably worsen climate change & haste decline of land productivity. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190531152047.htm
• I’m not going to even touch on the energy requirements except to say there is not one energy source which is truly renewable & carbon negative. Biomass & biofuels are an abomination in destroying forests that would have been better left as carbon sinks. Nothing is sustainable.
• And of course this thread has not really mentioned the mass extinctions which have already been ‘necessary’ to get the human population to 8b. Don’t the other creatures & ecosystems on this planet have rights to, the right to exist? This is the worst global crime of humanity.
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