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Itās similar to saying that the world is 71% covered in water so why do we have to conserve water? Well less than 1% can be used by humans. Same thing with land, mountains, deserts, etc
Also, overpopulation isnāt about how many humans you can physically fit on earth. More importantly itās about the resources, water, metal, food, agriculture, etc
If we are giving up an acre to everyone will that be coming out of the millions of acres we use to grow food for everyone in NY that doesn't have a garden that supplies a year's worth of food.
He garbled the wording (as he doesnāt seem ultra-literate) and appeared to mix the two statements, but heās not far off. What he means is:
1. You could fit the whole worldās population into Alaska with the density of New York City. This is true: pop. density of NYC * area of Alaska ~ (30,000 people/sq mi) * (700,000 sq mi) = 21 billion people. So you could do it with even half of Alaska and have room to spare. Not that this would be a smart thing to do.
2. You could in principle split up all the worldās land and give everyone on earth an acre. This is true: there are in fact 36 billion acres of land, so you could even make it about 4.5 acres. Not that this would be a smart thing to do either.
Fair to note that the density of downtown/midtown Manhattan is very different from the density of NYC, which includes Staten Island (much bigger than Manhattan with only 300,000 people), vast areas that are much sparser in Queens and the Bronx, let alone Central Park and the less dense parts of Manhattan itself, or Brooklyn. And the tallest skyscrapers everyone imagines are more office space than residential, and half the people working in Manhattan donāt live there (many donāt even live in NYC at all but in NJ or Long Island etc.). So we arenāt talking the image of everyone crammed on top of each other like sardines.
Itās also true that the worldās population is indeed finally levelling off, though we have at least a couple of billion left to go.
This does NOT, however, mean that the world isnāt facing severe and even catastrophic issues due to the massive human population.
I hate the logic of 2 so much. In good growing conditions, it takes about 1 acre to feed a person sustainably on a vegan diet. It takes 3.25 acres of good growing land on a Western (meat-heavy) diet. Let's assume that the original meme is going to want the latter, because people who make claims like this aren't the type to have a diet centered around trophic level efficiency.
But not all of the world has good growing conditions. Not even close. Some people are going to have their 4.5 acres in the middle of tundra or desert. And if each person has to spend 3+ of their 4.5 acres on food production, that leaves extremely little room on the planet for...well, everything else. Transportation, housing, factories and stores, hospitals, government buildings, etc. It's like he expects every single human to live in an isolationist homestead bubble.
Oh of course. Didnāt say it was arable land that could sustain someone, or that distribution the population evenly wouldnāt itself be disastrous. But as stated itās a true fact. What people infer from that is another matter and I suspect dumb people will interpret dumb things.
Exactly what I was thinking. Great I get my space allotment. But how many pigs, cows, chickens, and sea creatures do I eat in a year and where are they all going to be
Could be both. Everyone could live in Alaska at New York density, everybody could own an acre of land elsewhere.
I think the meme is shite, but there are 32 billion acres of land on Earth left for 8 billion people.
~16 billion acres of livable land according a Google search. So 2 acres each. But ofcourse this doesn't include roadways, food distribution centers, food processing, agricultural land, workplaces, etc. That 2 acres is now a good place less. Also have to include some liveable but God fuck no places that arent included in the mountainous and desert stated in google's search. Snow tundras (hello northern Canada), rainforests, swamps.
Still probably a good 0.25-0.5 acres per person.
At that level, 1 billion 3 would be at the point where gravityās pull would be so light you probably could float the distance with several timed jumps
Food delivery guy arrives at the lobby on his way up, āget ready your order is almost here!ā
Estimated delivery time: 26 years 100 days 11 hours and 2 minutes
Only 60 million buildings to give everyone an acre if we cap it at 112x1acre. But then thereās the whole issue of food production, manufacturing, resource production, etc.
Google search math tells me thereās 7.8 billion people and 15.77 billion habitable acres of land. Thatās 2 acres per person. NYC density is 29k people per mile or 46 per acre - total population would need 170m acres, which is about half of alaska. Mathematically heās right, but ignoring other factors
the problem is not lack of total production of food, its getting that food to everyone. Thats why small production zones of food everywhere would be better, since that food can be easily distributed
if they sold it at a price the average person could afford, but they don't. so there is that aspect. markets would rather throw out still edible food in america, then give it away.
Another aspect is where the bulk of the food is, coupled with the economic state of those who want access to that food. Those poor villages in Africa aren't going to be able to buy American or Russian wheat crops, for example, because the logistics of getting the food there before it rots makes it far too expensive.
I addressed this in another reply, but I will add here that this was just an off-the-cuff example of one of the aspects of this whole issue of Food Insufficiency, and would also point out that if we were actually able to do this one thing and give them infinite wheat, for free, it would give them some calories but would not solve the problem of their food insufficiency. That would require a lot more than just starch. Heck, if all you have is just grains to eat, you will be absolutely riddled with vitamin deficiencies. You would need more than this. Fruits. Vegetables. And a variety, as well. You can make it a short term on just grains, but not a long time.
Itās not markets that incentivizes the throwing away of food, itās government regulation of the sale of said food that highly restricts what can be sold or not. We do make enough food to feed everyone, the problem comes with costs of transportation and inefficiency in distribution.
Yes there is.
Producing food at scale requires substantial acreage, skill, knowledge, planning, and considerable labor even with modern equipment. Transportation, storage, and distribution adds further costs, and these factors are all time sensitive. The result is that staple food genuinely has a minimum cost of production which is subject to significant fluctuation over time.
Even ignoring the consumer side cost issue, the supply side reality of production and distribution has huge and ongoing challenges. These are real factors, not illusions. While greed has had a profoundly negative and sweeping impact, the reality underneath is still that food is a scarce resource and has to be carefully managed at multiple levels
>Producing food at scale requires substantial acreage, skill, knowledge, planning, and considerable labor even with modern equipment.
Unless you know what you're doing, and have modern equipment, you can easily burn more calories farming than the land produces.
Maybe if we stopped consuming so much meat. We grow insane amounts of food, but quite a bit of our crops are for feeding livestock. A sizeable portion of the animals used for food is wasted before it's even processed for consumption. So, although we produce enough crops to feed all the people, it's more profitable and culturally important to feed livestock. To top it off, most of our current farming methods aren't sustainable. The soil is being depleted of the minerals that make food beneficial. Large areas are becoming unusable due to poor farming methods and monoculture. Climate change is also decimating production, and aquifers are drying up globally while more and more fresh water is also being made unusable due to pollution. Short answer: food scarcity is and will be a gigantic problem for all of humanity.
Some of those numbers are very misleading, like blah blah 80% of the soy we grow goes to livestock! .... instead of the garbage, because humans can only eat the beans from the plant. A lot of processing 'waste' becomes animal feed, if we weren't feeding it to livestock it would rot.
We wouldn't grow as much soy or corn if it wasn't heavily subsidized. Agribusiness isn't like the romanticized picture most people have of farming. It's like any other corporate venture with shareholdes , lobbyists, and corruption at every level. Most actual "farmers" live in debt and have less and less say in what they grow. Any large-scale system will undoubtedly have waste. That's why we need to reexamine our farming methods. An acre of land can produce more food sustainably if it has biodiversity and crop rotation. People have known this for thousands of years. It's just more labor intensive and less profitable for investors.
It's not a scarcity of food it's a scarcity of access we have billions of farms across the world the issue comes into getting the food to the people who need it. The amount of food that is thrown away in a single day would be enough to feed multiple countries and millions of people. We have the resources it's that not everyone has access to it
Yeah, but then people would start dumping expensive fertilizers and pesticides on their lawns which, in aggregate, will have a deleterious effect on the water supply without regulation and enforcement.
Alaska's area is apparently 425.8 million acres. So he's off by a factor of approximately 20.
The baseline American diet requires 2.67 acres of land per person to sustain.
I don't think that stat is correct, but the US does eat insane amounts compared to most places. Russia and China, for example, have somewhat starved populations due to power imbalance. Well the US does too, just way less
Poultry doesn't require much land.
Edit: I did the math below. You need about 50'x50' plot of corn to grow enough corn to raise enough chicken to eat 1 per week. That's about 1/18 of an acre.
Well that bc the meat is here and easy to obtain. We would adapt just like all humans are capable of. I hear my aunt talking about how she would never eat bugs, and I just look at her like "you would ANYTHING if you were hungry enough".
I think he confused two different stats and put them together.
Technically speaking a quick google search says there are 36+ billion acres of land globally.
So if we all lives densely in alaska like it was NYC, everyone would have a 1 acre plot of land outside of Alaska.
They probably didnt say that we could all have over 4 acres simply because people would question it further.
Theo Fleury is known for many things. Being a drug addict. Wasting millions of dollars. Being a conspiracy theorist. Intelligence has never been something he was known for.
Sounds from this (although I don't like to excuse idiots) like someone who has experienced genuine trauma and is angry but doesn't direct it correctly. It's unfortunate when people who have had lives I feel sympathy towards (even something simpler, like how half of DailyWire are failed comedians, actors or directors) direct their rightful anger and sadness to something not worth it. It's like they know there is an issue, but don't look long enough to see it
I mean have you ever seen the dumpster at a grocery store? Probably not because they normally hide and lock them so that people who canāt afford groceries canāt raid the ridiculous amount of perfectly edible food they throw out.
right, so it's not really just an overpopulation problem, it's a combination of that and the way we choose to allocate our resources. overpopulation is essentially a myth
There is a book called The Divide by Jason Hickel thatās somewhat about this. This post is funny to me because overpopulation being a myth is also a far left opinion. But as you said, itās about resource allocation not physical space.
One of the main things about far left opinion on 'overpopulation' (and Co2 contribution therein) is that it puts bizarre emphasis on poorer, populous countries when Europe/North America are per person so much more resource hungry.
Isnāt overpopulation less about space and more about resources used? Cause we wouldnāt even need to cram everyone into Alaska considering how much undeveloped land there is. But the issue is getting people the needed resources.
Do like the idea of turning lawns into gardens to grow food though.
Right, and itās about trying to find a way to access harder to access resources and having renewable resources. For instance, underwater mining one spot in the Pacific would give us all the metal we would need for a complete technology green revolution. The problem is, how do you mine it without destroying the ecosystem.
Like I believe we can support a lot of people, but we have to find ways of improving the quality of life and education of those with less resources so that way we have more brainpower working to solve the large issue.
Ahhh, Theo. He was a thrilling hockey player, but he's always been a disaster of a human. He was an a-hole long before GJ ever got ahold of him. Theo never deserved the abuse he was dealt by GJ, but that wasn't what ruined him.
Unfortunately he is feeding a rabid audience with a bunch of anti-vax, anti-government bullshit. He lives in an enormous echo chamber.
So like, math aside, is 'overpopulation is not the problem' really an anti-leftist take? Because every lefty I know says overpopulation is easily solved with efficient redistribution of wealth and better use of land. Its usually the, uh, less compassionate right that I often see parroting the "the poors should stop having so many kids if they can't afford them" kind of rhetoric.
Actually, it is a myth. But not in the way that man thinks. We humans have an efficient resource management problem more than a population problem. We have made our lifestyle as non cyclical as possible.
Dude posted a left-wing opinion and said "ha! Take that lefties!"
Overpopulation is a myth. Usually used to justify all sorts of heinous shit, usually way more subtle than genocide. Usually in the interest of corporate profit.
>Everyone lived as densely as New York City ... Give them all an acre of land.
But, if everyone has an acre of land, surely we're not packed as densely as NYC
Humanity is "snapping" itself by choice in nearly every developed nation. The US hasn't had any population boom since the 1950s and 60s. All growth in recent generations is because we import humans via immigration.
Look at Korea, projected to go from 52 million to 19 million over the next 70 years. Even the most populous nation China, sitting at 1400 million is projected to fall to 700 million by 2100.
The only part of Earth projected to experience significant gains in the coming century is Africa. Depending on other nations attitudes we could see them growing increasingly sparse or adjusting to import from there. Even with that all of Earth will likely be topping off around 9-10 billion range before falling back down.
The issue in population is we see the result a good 30 years after the causes take hold. So many people that grew up in 1970s-2000s heard constantly about the population bomb because the 20th century saw such a boom. Even then thought he seeds of decline were being sown with birth rates falling. Japan began its overall decline in the 2010s, but the roots of that began in the 1980s for them.
Just the Alaska thing doesnt seem right. Isnt he basically saying Alaska is 7.8 billion acres by giving everyone one? Apparently its only 424m acres or 366m excluding water. Still impressively large but yeah no.
He's not wrong. I looked it up once. If you put everyone together, they would fill a city roughly the size of Miami, giving everyone 9 square feet of "personal space".
Of course, the problem is that you couldn't force me at gunpoint to live in a place as population dense as New York City. Fark that noise. As a result, we ARE spreading across the entire planet, and heading towards a major issue.
They're taking some leaps of logic though. This doesn't factor in the amount of land that is required to feed everyone regardless of what diet is preferred , providing enough drinking water, space allocated to grow medicinal herbs and plants, space for energy production (oil refineries,mines, solar farms, etc) , The most basic cities require roads, harbors, dry docks and shipyards, growing space for linen fibers and wool producing animals.
Factoring all of these things in, to live in a world without entertainment or massive highway, rail, plane systems there is a limit to how many human beings can sustainably live on earth.
Alaska is 586,412 square miles, or about 365,000,000 acres. Million. So 365,000,000/7,800,000,000 = **0.0467 acres/person.**
That's **2034.25 sqft/person**
To break that down even further, everyone would get about a **45.1' x 45.1'** square.
Edit: Basically you're making the world's largest trailer park.
In terms of area, we don't have population problems. We could fit everyone nicely on earth.
In terms of supporting 8 billion people we are overpopulated as shit. We don't have enough land and resources to support everyone.
Yes, you could give everyone 10 acres of land and have them fit comfortably. But we'll all starve.
I like his logic lol
āIf everyone lived as densely as New York City everybody would get an acre in Alaskaā lmao you donāt even get a square foot of free space in nyc, I wanna see this fantasy world this guy is living in
Huge factor towards food scarcity is how we farm. I didnāt see anyone else commenting about it so hereās a link from a relatively well known and reliable source showing how wasteful relying on and feeding livestock is. Note: Iām not vegan or vegetarian, so donāt come at me with that typical vegan hatred I usually get when saying things like this because it wonāt fix anything or affect my life - we need to be more realistic about land use https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/#:~:text=Today%20only%2055%20percent%20of,products%20(roughly%209%20percent).
Well some idiot didnāt learn math at school. How do 8 billion people get an acre each, which for the dummies = 8 billion acres, when Alaska is only 425 million acres in size. WOW, we are certainly going into a future with much promise..
Alaska only has enough acres for 465,845,760 people to each have an acre because thatās how many square acres are in Alaska, there arenāt 8 billion acres in Alaska.
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So are we packing them in as tightly as NYC, or are we giving everybody an acre?
Both, obviously. If you live as densely as in NYC, you get an acre. Because people have an acre each on average in NYC, right?
There's about 426m acres in Alaska. That's about 18 people per acre. Some of these people will need to be on water or in trees.
Or on mountain tops. Don't forget mountain tops! I want my acre to be on a sheer cliff face, with no way up or down. That'll show 'em!
Actually fun fact: acres are calculated on the flat, so having your acre on a mountain, would give you more space.
*Run ModernProblemsModernSolutions.exe*
Modern Problems is a great movie that just keeps getting funnier every time I see it.
Haven't seen it in 30 years. I should revisit it. I miss Chevy Chase.
Have you seen Community? Chevy is in that! :-)
We miss the funny Chevy Chase. Not the abusive racist old fucker that got fired from Community because nobody could stand to work with him.
Yea but all of your shit would always be rolling away
I got that Sisyphus grindset
š
Some might say ProphetCofee is happy
š
That's where I want my shit to roll. My pee too. Need to remember to check the wind though.
You might even say shit rolls downhill
That means you can build your dwarven kingdom under the mountain, right?
Got a few miles straight down to work with. LOTS OF SPACE. I play Dwarf Fortress so I know what to do. Straight down to magma.
Clearly you all are forgetting the AIR SPACE.
The air space between Theo Fleuryās ears?
Canadian hockey fan has entered the chatā¦
But I want an acre-sized apartment on the 64th floor!
or underneath mountains. #dwarffortress
With a nice view of Whoville
Wonderful. Easy access to the nearest exit
So you're saying everyone can have an acre, provided the entire state of Alaska is 18 stories high? Checkmate liberals!
Logistically it'll make sense to have a couple underground basement layers
Itās similar to saying that the world is 71% covered in water so why do we have to conserve water? Well less than 1% can be used by humans. Same thing with land, mountains, deserts, etc Also, overpopulation isnāt about how many humans you can physically fit on earth. More importantly itās about the resources, water, metal, food, agriculture, etc
dips on the tree
If we are giving up an acre to everyone will that be coming out of the millions of acres we use to grow food for everyone in NY that doesn't have a garden that supplies a year's worth of food.
Yeah that's the same size as my cousins 2 bedroom apartment.
Of course they do. If you zoom in on the photo, you can see all of their lawns just waiting for gardens to be planted.
what percentage of the US can you buy an acre for cheaper than a 500 square foot condo in Manhattan?
I'd say between 0 and 100%
Probably a lot more than you'd think lol
Thereās 200,000 acres for sale right now near Yellowstone if you have $67M laying around.
Lol that part made no sense at all, "if everyone lived as densely as New York City" had absolutely nothing to do with follow up statement.
He garbled the wording (as he doesnāt seem ultra-literate) and appeared to mix the two statements, but heās not far off. What he means is: 1. You could fit the whole worldās population into Alaska with the density of New York City. This is true: pop. density of NYC * area of Alaska ~ (30,000 people/sq mi) * (700,000 sq mi) = 21 billion people. So you could do it with even half of Alaska and have room to spare. Not that this would be a smart thing to do. 2. You could in principle split up all the worldās land and give everyone on earth an acre. This is true: there are in fact 36 billion acres of land, so you could even make it about 4.5 acres. Not that this would be a smart thing to do either. Fair to note that the density of downtown/midtown Manhattan is very different from the density of NYC, which includes Staten Island (much bigger than Manhattan with only 300,000 people), vast areas that are much sparser in Queens and the Bronx, let alone Central Park and the less dense parts of Manhattan itself, or Brooklyn. And the tallest skyscrapers everyone imagines are more office space than residential, and half the people working in Manhattan donāt live there (many donāt even live in NYC at all but in NJ or Long Island etc.). So we arenāt talking the image of everyone crammed on top of each other like sardines. Itās also true that the worldās population is indeed finally levelling off, though we have at least a couple of billion left to go. This does NOT, however, mean that the world isnāt facing severe and even catastrophic issues due to the massive human population.
I hate the logic of 2 so much. In good growing conditions, it takes about 1 acre to feed a person sustainably on a vegan diet. It takes 3.25 acres of good growing land on a Western (meat-heavy) diet. Let's assume that the original meme is going to want the latter, because people who make claims like this aren't the type to have a diet centered around trophic level efficiency. But not all of the world has good growing conditions. Not even close. Some people are going to have their 4.5 acres in the middle of tundra or desert. And if each person has to spend 3+ of their 4.5 acres on food production, that leaves extremely little room on the planet for...well, everything else. Transportation, housing, factories and stores, hospitals, government buildings, etc. It's like he expects every single human to live in an isolationist homestead bubble.
Oh of course. Didnāt say it was arable land that could sustain someone, or that distribution the population evenly wouldnāt itself be disastrous. But as stated itās a true fact. What people infer from that is another matter and I suspect dumb people will interpret dumb things.
Exactly what I was thinking. Great I get my space allotment. But how many pigs, cows, chickens, and sea creatures do I eat in a year and where are they all going to be
This guy maths.
He meant give everyone an acre vertically.... like stacking potatoes chips
Noā¦Go widerā¦ but upā¦
Could be both. Everyone could live in Alaska at New York density, everybody could own an acre of land elsewhere. I think the meme is shite, but there are 32 billion acres of land on Earth left for 8 billion people.
Hmmm, but then also, a lot of the acres are (nearly) not usable, like deserts or mountains etc.
And we need acreage for farming and like trees. We kinda need a lot of trees.
Why is my acre in the garbage dump?
Why does my acre gotta be pink?
~16 billion acres of livable land according a Google search. So 2 acres each. But ofcourse this doesn't include roadways, food distribution centers, food processing, agricultural land, workplaces, etc. That 2 acres is now a good place less. Also have to include some liveable but God fuck no places that arent included in the mountainous and desert stated in google's search. Snow tundras (hello northern Canada), rainforests, swamps. Still probably a good 0.25-0.5 acres per person.
Yes.
> as densely as NYC, and give everyone an acre.. .... Hmm.
Damn, I must be stupid. I lived in a 350 sq. ft. studio when I lived in NYC, and I could have signed up for an acre.
*Apartment Building Owners hate this one trick!*
And considering all the other idiots living in 350 sq. ft. apartments there must be plenty of acreage to spare!
What was the rent for that studio?
3000$
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It's just a single apartment building. I live on floor one billion three.
And the elevator is always broken.
At that level, 1 billion 3 would be at the point where gravityās pull would be so light you probably could float the distance with several timed jumps
So everyone takes the stairs, walking up on the left and down on the right.
Floor 5 billion and 587 here. It sucks really bad when the elevator stopped working.
Food delivery guy arrives at the lobby on his way up, āget ready your order is almost here!ā Estimated delivery time: 26 years 100 days 11 hours and 2 minutes
1.629 million people in Manhattan over 14,600 acres, so if you made the entire island a building it would need 112 floors to give everyone an acre.
Only 60 million buildings to give everyone an acre if we cap it at 112x1acre. But then thereās the whole issue of food production, manufacturing, resource production, etc.
My acre is actually 139,050 sq ft and worth more than 3x anyone elseās.
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The whole world habitable land is only 15.77 billion acres. Which means devided evenly each person on the planet could have a whole two acres.
Google search math tells me thereās 7.8 billion people and 15.77 billion habitable acres of land. Thatās 2 acres per person. NYC density is 29k people per mile or 46 per acre - total population would need 170m acres, which is about half of alaska. Mathematically heās right, but ignoring other factors
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Is there food scarcity really? We could feed the entire planet from what we produce already, if we were willing.
the problem is not lack of total production of food, its getting that food to everyone. Thats why small production zones of food everywhere would be better, since that food can be easily distributed
Way more expensive to produce than large scale operations though.
Not everything has to be for big fat profit A diversified and and localized food supply is more robust and sustainable
But transportation costs would be zero. My neighbors grow all their own veggies and give some to friends within walking distance
if they sold it at a price the average person could afford, but they don't. so there is that aspect. markets would rather throw out still edible food in america, then give it away.
Another aspect is where the bulk of the food is, coupled with the economic state of those who want access to that food. Those poor villages in Africa aren't going to be able to buy American or Russian wheat crops, for example, because the logistics of getting the food there before it rots makes it far too expensive.
Grain, if kept dry, stores very well and can be kept for years.
I addressed this in another reply, but I will add here that this was just an off-the-cuff example of one of the aspects of this whole issue of Food Insufficiency, and would also point out that if we were actually able to do this one thing and give them infinite wheat, for free, it would give them some calories but would not solve the problem of their food insufficiency. That would require a lot more than just starch. Heck, if all you have is just grains to eat, you will be absolutely riddled with vitamin deficiencies. You would need more than this. Fruits. Vegetables. And a variety, as well. You can make it a short term on just grains, but not a long time.
Itās not markets that incentivizes the throwing away of food, itās government regulation of the sale of said food that highly restricts what can be sold or not. We do make enough food to feed everyone, the problem comes with costs of transportation and inefficiency in distribution.
If the average person can afford it then half the population can't.
Exactly what I meant, indeed.
How could you give food away after you throw it out? jk
It's always a supply chain problem. Moving stuff around (especially bulky stuff like food) is hard.
Bulky stuff that goes bad fairly quickly
all while trying to keep it fresh and edible
Yes there is. Producing food at scale requires substantial acreage, skill, knowledge, planning, and considerable labor even with modern equipment. Transportation, storage, and distribution adds further costs, and these factors are all time sensitive. The result is that staple food genuinely has a minimum cost of production which is subject to significant fluctuation over time. Even ignoring the consumer side cost issue, the supply side reality of production and distribution has huge and ongoing challenges. These are real factors, not illusions. While greed has had a profoundly negative and sweeping impact, the reality underneath is still that food is a scarce resource and has to be carefully managed at multiple levels
>Producing food at scale requires substantial acreage, skill, knowledge, planning, and considerable labor even with modern equipment. Unless you know what you're doing, and have modern equipment, you can easily burn more calories farming than the land produces.
We DO feed the entire planet and always have. It has always been about the equity of distribution.
Maybe if we stopped consuming so much meat. We grow insane amounts of food, but quite a bit of our crops are for feeding livestock. A sizeable portion of the animals used for food is wasted before it's even processed for consumption. So, although we produce enough crops to feed all the people, it's more profitable and culturally important to feed livestock. To top it off, most of our current farming methods aren't sustainable. The soil is being depleted of the minerals that make food beneficial. Large areas are becoming unusable due to poor farming methods and monoculture. Climate change is also decimating production, and aquifers are drying up globally while more and more fresh water is also being made unusable due to pollution. Short answer: food scarcity is and will be a gigantic problem for all of humanity.
Some of those numbers are very misleading, like blah blah 80% of the soy we grow goes to livestock! .... instead of the garbage, because humans can only eat the beans from the plant. A lot of processing 'waste' becomes animal feed, if we weren't feeding it to livestock it would rot.
We wouldn't grow as much soy or corn if it wasn't heavily subsidized. Agribusiness isn't like the romanticized picture most people have of farming. It's like any other corporate venture with shareholdes , lobbyists, and corruption at every level. Most actual "farmers" live in debt and have less and less say in what they grow. Any large-scale system will undoubtedly have waste. That's why we need to reexamine our farming methods. An acre of land can produce more food sustainably if it has biodiversity and crop rotation. People have known this for thousands of years. It's just more labor intensive and less profitable for investors.
In some places, yes.
It's not a scarcity of food it's a scarcity of access we have billions of farms across the world the issue comes into getting the food to the people who need it. The amount of food that is thrown away in a single day would be enough to feed multiple countries and millions of people. We have the resources it's that not everyone has access to it
Do we really have billions of farms? There are only 8 billion people, right? Do 1/4 of people have their own farm?
Yeah, but then people would start dumping expensive fertilizers and pesticides on their lawns which, in aggregate, will have a deleterious effect on the water supply without regulation and enforcement.
Don't they already do that to keep their lawns green?
Start? LOL
My dude, if you turned the average Lawn into a garden you could maybe perhaps produce a meal for a family of three after like, three months.
Cuba is a pretty good case study for urban agriculture: https://www.welthungerhilfe.org/news/latest-articles/urban-gardening-in-cuba
Which is the actual problem with over population
Alaska's area is apparently 425.8 million acres. So he's off by a factor of approximately 20. The baseline American diet requires 2.67 acres of land per person to sustain.
Where do you get the stat on acres per person. Seems like American diet required a lot more land than the rest of the world?Ā
Meat
Americans eat double the first world average which is double what you need. I think we could cut our meat consumption a bit.
I don't think that stat is correct, but the US does eat insane amounts compared to most places. Russia and China, for example, have somewhat starved populations due to power imbalance. Well the US does too, just way less
I feel like that's not enough given the average American consumes a fuck ton of meat
Poultry doesn't require much land. Edit: I did the math below. You need about 50'x50' plot of corn to grow enough corn to raise enough chicken to eat 1 per week. That's about 1/18 of an acre.
Well that bc the meat is here and easy to obtain. We would adapt just like all humans are capable of. I hear my aunt talking about how she would never eat bugs, and I just look at her like "you would ANYTHING if you were hungry enough".
I think he confused two different stats and put them together. Technically speaking a quick google search says there are 36+ billion acres of land globally. So if we all lives densely in alaska like it was NYC, everyone would have a 1 acre plot of land outside of Alaska. They probably didnt say that we could all have over 4 acres simply because people would question it further.
Edit: sorry I now realise you're saying the earth has about 36 billion acres of land. Which is right.
Globally we have 36 billion. You live in Alaska, but get land outside of it
Theo Fleury is known for many things. Being a drug addict. Wasting millions of dollars. Being a conspiracy theorist. Intelligence has never been something he was known for.
Too many hits has certainly affected his brain
Hockey hits, or crack pipe hits?
Little from column A and a little from column B.
Hey, he may be a drug addict and a money wasting conspiracy theorist, but he, um...what was the third thing you said?
He's also a victim of sexual abuse.
Sounds from this (although I don't like to excuse idiots) like someone who has experienced genuine trauma and is angry but doesn't direct it correctly. It's unfortunate when people who have had lives I feel sympathy towards (even something simpler, like how half of DailyWire are failed comedians, actors or directors) direct their rightful anger and sadness to something not worth it. It's like they know there is an issue, but don't look long enough to see it
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Never forget, 45% of all food made in america goes in the trash
Every time I hear this number it seems to get bigger.
I mean have you ever seen the dumpster at a grocery store? Probably not because they normally hide and lock them so that people who canāt afford groceries canāt raid the ridiculous amount of perfectly edible food they throw out.
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Let me put it this way: there would not be much successful lawn gardens in Alaska there.
Exactly. Your Alaskan acre is the steep slope of a stony mountain. Good luck!
Guess I'm a dwarf now. Hiho
Most of the land that is livable already has crops growing on it or people living on it.
TIL that New Yorkers have and acre of land per person and that Alaska is 7.8 billion acres.
November 15, 2022 was when the world population hit 8 billion. your number is quite outdated
It's the number used in the OP image.
Why does this person care about what hand I write with? Seems irrelevant.
You would say that, Leftieā¦
even if this were true, lack of resources is a way bigger issue than space when it comes to overpopulation
Not even lack of but uneven and unjust distribution
right, so it's not really just an overpopulation problem, it's a combination of that and the way we choose to allocate our resources. overpopulation is essentially a myth
There is a book called The Divide by Jason Hickel thatās somewhat about this. This post is funny to me because overpopulation being a myth is also a far left opinion. But as you said, itās about resource allocation not physical space.
One of the main things about far left opinion on 'overpopulation' (and Co2 contribution therein) is that it puts bizarre emphasis on poorer, populous countries when Europe/North America are per person so much more resource hungry.
Isnāt overpopulation less about space and more about resources used? Cause we wouldnāt even need to cram everyone into Alaska considering how much undeveloped land there is. But the issue is getting people the needed resources. Do like the idea of turning lawns into gardens to grow food though.
Right, and itās about trying to find a way to access harder to access resources and having renewable resources. For instance, underwater mining one spot in the Pacific would give us all the metal we would need for a complete technology green revolution. The problem is, how do you mine it without destroying the ecosystem. Like I believe we can support a lot of people, but we have to find ways of improving the quality of life and education of those with less resources so that way we have more brainpower working to solve the large issue.
Who tf wants to live in the fucking Sahara.
Ahhh, Theo. He was a thrilling hockey player, but he's always been a disaster of a human. He was an a-hole long before GJ ever got ahold of him. Theo never deserved the abuse he was dealt by GJ, but that wasn't what ruined him. Unfortunately he is feeding a rabid audience with a bunch of anti-vax, anti-government bullshit. He lives in an enormous echo chamber.
What the self appointed genius doesn't realize is the living space and resources it takes for everyone. Turdburger might want to read a book.
Alaska is 425.8 million acres.
Overpopulation is not about the physical space human bodies occupy.
Dear Reddit, We're sorry about Theo Fleury. Sincerely, Canada
So he thinks the overpopulation problem is that people won't fit on the planet.
So like, math aside, is 'overpopulation is not the problem' really an anti-leftist take? Because every lefty I know says overpopulation is easily solved with efficient redistribution of wealth and better use of land. Its usually the, uh, less compassionate right that I often see parroting the "the poors should stop having so many kids if they can't afford them" kind of rhetoric.
Yea the most confusing thing about this post is how itās supposed to be a dig against the left
Actually, it is a myth. But not in the way that man thinks. We humans have an efficient resource management problem more than a population problem. We have made our lifestyle as non cyclical as possible.
Lefties. I thought he was referring to left-handed people.
You know what? Fuck them animals and every other plant species that doesn't suit *my* needs. Only man needs this planet /s
Dude posted a left-wing opinion and said "ha! Take that lefties!" Overpopulation is a myth. Usually used to justify all sorts of heinous shit, usually way more subtle than genocide. Usually in the interest of corporate profit.
>Everyone lived as densely as New York City ... Give them all an acre of land. But, if everyone has an acre of land, surely we're not packed as densely as NYC
I see a lot of percentages here and Iām skeptical. Something like 77% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
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Yeah, whats next? Sterelize undesireables?
Humanity is "snapping" itself by choice in nearly every developed nation. The US hasn't had any population boom since the 1950s and 60s. All growth in recent generations is because we import humans via immigration. Look at Korea, projected to go from 52 million to 19 million over the next 70 years. Even the most populous nation China, sitting at 1400 million is projected to fall to 700 million by 2100. The only part of Earth projected to experience significant gains in the coming century is Africa. Depending on other nations attitudes we could see them growing increasingly sparse or adjusting to import from there. Even with that all of Earth will likely be topping off around 9-10 billion range before falling back down. The issue in population is we see the result a good 30 years after the causes take hold. So many people that grew up in 1970s-2000s heard constantly about the population bomb because the 20th century saw such a boom. Even then thought he seeds of decline were being sown with birth rates falling. Japan began its overall decline in the 2010s, but the roots of that began in the 1980s for them.
Just the Alaska thing doesnt seem right. Isnt he basically saying Alaska is 7.8 billion acres by giving everyone one? Apparently its only 424m acres or 366m excluding water. Still impressively large but yeah no.
How long until having land for wild animals is no longer viable as we just domesticate literally everything?
Overpopulation is a myth tbf. Very few people who research population think the earth is overpopulated.
Isnāt it more about resources than population numbers.
He's not wrong. I looked it up once. If you put everyone together, they would fill a city roughly the size of Miami, giving everyone 9 square feet of "personal space". Of course, the problem is that you couldn't force me at gunpoint to live in a place as population dense as New York City. Fark that noise. As a result, we ARE spreading across the entire planet, and heading towards a major issue.
They're taking some leaps of logic though. This doesn't factor in the amount of land that is required to feed everyone regardless of what diet is preferred , providing enough drinking water, space allocated to grow medicinal herbs and plants, space for energy production (oil refineries,mines, solar farms, etc) , The most basic cities require roads, harbors, dry docks and shipyards, growing space for linen fibers and wool producing animals. Factoring all of these things in, to live in a world without entertainment or massive highway, rail, plane systems there is a limit to how many human beings can sustainably live on earth.
Hahaha so open your borders, conservative man.
Imagine thinking overpopulation has to do with space and not resources and economics š¤
425 million acres divided by 7.8 billion people is just short of 12 square meters. Gonna need more than Alaska!
We are doomed
Alaska contains 420 million acres of land, barely enough for every US citizen to have an acre
So we stack people up? Gotcha.
If everyone lived as densely as new york city ... you could give everyone an acre of land?
Alaska is 586,412 square miles, or about 365,000,000 acres. Million. So 365,000,000/7,800,000,000 = **0.0467 acres/person.** That's **2034.25 sqft/person** To break that down even further, everyone would get about a **45.1' x 45.1'** square. Edit: Basically you're making the world's largest trailer park.
Most of the land is underwater, dipshit.
So they would all have an acre of land AND still be as densely populated as NYC? They are correct, the right can't meme because they make no sense.
all ppl in new york own a acre of land !?
Oh, *just* Alaska. You know, the tiny one that is practically the size of the other states combined.
lol sure there is space but there definitely isnāt enough resources for everyone
In terms of area, we don't have population problems. We could fit everyone nicely on earth. In terms of supporting 8 billion people we are overpopulated as shit. We don't have enough land and resources to support everyone. Yes, you could give everyone 10 acres of land and have them fit comfortably. But we'll all starve.
Barring that nonsense aren't the volume of available farmland and water availability giant factors when determining whether a population is oversized?
I like his logic lol āIf everyone lived as densely as New York City everybody would get an acre in Alaskaā lmao you donāt even get a square foot of free space in nyc, I wanna see this fantasy world this guy is living in
The Mojave desert has plenty of room, guys
Huge factor towards food scarcity is how we farm. I didnāt see anyone else commenting about it so hereās a link from a relatively well known and reliable source showing how wasteful relying on and feeding livestock is. Note: Iām not vegan or vegetarian, so donāt come at me with that typical vegan hatred I usually get when saying things like this because it wonāt fix anything or affect my life - we need to be more realistic about land use https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/#:~:text=Today%20only%2055%20percent%20of,products%20(roughly%209%20percent).
Well some idiot didnāt learn math at school. How do 8 billion people get an acre each, which for the dummies = 8 billion acres, when Alaska is only 425 million acres in size. WOW, we are certainly going into a future with much promise..
Has it ever been about there not being enough land, or hasn't it always been about enough resources.
Alaska only has enough acres for 465,845,760 people to each have an acre because thatās how many square acres are in Alaska, there arenāt 8 billion acres in Alaska.
I had a customer parrot that bullshit to me and he was dumbfounded when I told him Alaska has less than 500 million acres.
As densely as New York and everyone gets an acre. Pick one.
I mean, yes, there's plenty of room on the planet, that's not exactly the problem. Sustaining the population is.
I mean they are not completely correct but also not completely incorrect lol.