|
You have to consider though how many of our current 7 billion people: - don't use toilet paper
- don't drink milk
- don't travel more than a few miles from their birthplace etc etc, and that will be shifting quite quickly, I believe. It took centuries for industrialisation to get e.g. Europe past such reference points of wealth, after two hundred thousand years of most of humanity living roughly without significant improvements in wealth. But it only took a few decades for e.g. China to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty and towards some form of middle-class. You can debate some of the details for sure, my overal point is that we're not just going to add a few billion people to this planet, more importantly, we're going to add a few billion middle-class people to this planet. It's not the billions who live off of subsistence farming, who's impact on the environment is not all that much more substantial than any other animal grazing in a field, that is the big environmental issue. It's the fact that those people become more like us, drive cars, run refrigerators, eat energy-inefficient meats, have a shower in the morning and evening, live in large homes that must be cooled and warmed, eat more than necessary etc. If you look at some figures that state we consume 10x more energy (making up a number here) than a subsistence farmer... it's more the economic shift from poor to rich we may need to worry about from an environmental, than raw additions to our global population. (disclaimer: not implying I have anything against poor people getting richer, purely looking at it from an environmental perspective. Also, there's opportunities in a richer planet to build environmentally sustainable infrastructure, too, but on aggregate it'll bring some big issues to the table, far bigger than adding 1.6 billion poor people to our population, I think.) |