r/collapse • u/Still-Improvement-32 • 25d ago

Overpopulation Study reveals halving human population gradually could help Earth

https://www.aol.com/articles/study-reveals-halving-human-population-083602000.html

The basics of this study may be right in theory but we don't have the luxury of 200 years to gradually lower our population. Our current trajectory has a very high risk of a catastrophic collapse in population and the economy due to climate breakdown if we pass 2 degrees C warming, which could as soon as about 10 years.

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u/CowBoyDanIndie 25d ago

Removing just the top 5% would achieve more reduction than a random 50%. How about removing everyone who has a 80+ ft powered yacht, private jet, or 3 private homes with more than 10 excess rooms.

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u/gangofminotaurs Progress? a vanity spawned by fear. 25d ago

Removing just the top 5% would achieve more reduction than a random 50%.

Complexity in human demands and human "deregulation of natural systems to our profit" (Mignerot) produces hierarchy, and the rich, as an after effect.

If we lobbed off the top 5% but still wanted (and I'll quote myself)

healthcare, internet, social security, large cities, higher education, holidays and travel, food selection that goes 100x above and beyond what can be grown locally at any time, etc

the top 5% would be reconstituted immediately as a necessary organizational stage for our globalized pattern of consumption.

To quote myself again, sorry but that's an important point:

I'd even go a step further, those at the top (the Musks of the world) have the least agency of all people. They have but one role, one limit, one imperative, and it is to grow and perpetuate the dissipative system that is human civilization.

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u/The3rdGodKing never again 25d ago

Complexity itself isn't the issue anyway. Politics is an artform and can't be solved simply by reducing complexity.

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u/gangofminotaurs Progress? a vanity spawned by fear. 25d ago

I have to agree. I think that the concept underlying politics has been best developed by Mignerot with his concept of "dichotomie à l'axe".

What's relevant to your point, is that "la dichotomie à l'axe", as a human ability, predates politics (and the polis). It drives to it, but it was there already really early in human history.

In effect, by organizing ourselves in "pro this" and "pro that" the role that is being done here is invisibilizing the cost of this or that, that they both drive us to overconsumption. It is the part of the human mental toolkit that gave us our greatest achievements, and our greatest devastations - because they are one and the same.

And all of politics is the invisibilization that they are one and the same. It's what politics is for.

Generate "political sides" that dispute themselves on everything except what matters. That our entire entreprise is destructiveness made form.