Overpopulation and the enviornmental impact of all this

5p9arw38djv2b4 · 12-12-2013 11:20pm

hotbabe1992 wrote: »

Put laws in place for these rubbish dumps and crackdown on prositution,rome wasnt built in a day,it is worth paving out a future for them no matter how hard and how many sacrifices have to be made to achieve this goal.

And how will the families feed themselves? Plus policing any of these crackdowns would be impossible, in Ireland we have far more police per head of population and we can't control prostitution

AngryHippie · 13-12-2013 5:32am

hotbabe1992 wrote: »

Put laws in place for these rubbish dumps and crackdown on prositution,rome wasnt built in a day,it is worth paving out a future for them no matter how hard and how many sacrifices have to be made to achieve this goal.

India?
China ?
The USA ?

There is a book called One World by Peter Singer.
Read it. It should open your mind to some of the challenges that need to be overcome as a species before we can try to build a better future to the planet.
It should be compulsory reading for all. Just to highlight the challenges.

The complete lack of responsibility that comes with our current International governance systems is fairly indicative of how it will go until nationalism finally has had its day, and we can amalgamate and harmonize laws to transgress borders.

Unfortunately the human psyche is very insular and cannot cope without "belonging" to something greater, (teams, clubs, nations, races) and the concept of One World is actually beyond our comfort zone. As such the benefits of globalization are hamstrung and the drawbacks are all ours to wear. It will take generations. Generations we may not have......

Capt'n Midnight · 13-12-2013 11:02am

hotbabe1992 wrote: »

Put laws in place for these rubbish dumps and crackdown on prositution,rome wasnt built in a day,it is worth paving out a future for them no matter how hard and how many sacrifices have to be made to achieve this goal.

I think I see your true colours now.

You are teh benevolent dictator that will take on the white man's burden and force them to do the right thing.

You still haven't understood that you are demand sacrifices from those at the sharp end of the wedge. People on a €1 a day can't really cut back on moped usage, and even if they did it would take whole communities to offset just one SUV.

Faced with the prospect of breaking a environmental law imposed by a foreign government and not properly enforced most people wouldn't make the choice that leaves them hungry.

Target the big consumers first.

Remove the loopholes in off-shoring waste and hazardous work. When you have 15 year old girls dying in a factory because it shaves a couple of cent of the price of the latest Apple kit that has a gross profit of 50% it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the fat should be trimmed off corporate welfare and not on those who may have to break the law to eek out a living.

Generally in China , India and Africa and Brazil the big land grabs are by the rich and powerful. The locals have a vested interest in ruining their locality and if they can afford it won't. Lots of community projects have shown this.

All you need is a level playing field.

hotbabe1992 · 13-12-2013 12:30pm

You still haven't understood that you are demand sacrifices from those at the sharp end of the wedge. People on a €1 a day can't really cut back on moped usage,

Hang on where did i say i was telling them to get off their mopeheads,if anything what i said was that it would be unreasonable for me to tell them to get off their mopeheads while i had (lets just say) 4 cars..

I think I see your true colours now.

You are teh benevolent dictator that will take on the white man's burden and force them to do the right thing.

No nothing to do with me being white or anything like that,why are you making this into a race thing?

I dont think its biting off more than you can chew this could be enforced by local officials and police,if they see children prostituting themselves slap them in school,and have a word with the parents.If it is ascertained that the parents are pimping them well then penalties.

Faced with the prospect of breaking a environmental law imposed by a foreign government and not properly enforced most people wouldn't make the choice that leaves them hungry.

Target the big consumers first.

Remove the loopholes in off-shoring waste and hazardous work. When you have 15 year old girls dying in a factory because it shaves a couple of cent of the price of the latest Apple kit that has a gross profit of 50% it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the fat should be trimmed off corporate welfare and not on those who may have to break the law to eek out a living.

Generally in China , India and Africa and Brazil the big land grabs are by the rich and powerful. The locals have a vested interest in ruining their locality and if they can afford it won't. Lots of community projects have shown this.

All you need is a level playing field.

I get what you are saying about a level playing field,and think rightly like you corporate welfare needs to be targeted.
But why not have a scenario whereby if children are put in school the family gets food for a day,and each day they turn up they get food.

I know its somewhat of a welfare system ,but it could be used to kickstart education and when they are on their own two feet making the country a better place you can naturally take away the food for school intiative.

djpbarry · 13-12-2013 12:51pm

hotbabe1992 wrote: »

I dont think its biting off more than you can chew this could be enforced by local officials and police...

You just don't understand that the countries in question don't have the kind of resources that you're talking about. They don't have the manpower to enforce such things.

maninasia · 13-01-2014 5:13pm

LadyLabyrinth wrote: »

Hans Rosling is one of the eminent demographers in the world ... He is also interesting and presents things very clearly. I've seen him present a few times but take a look at this TEd talk... A lot of his talks revolve around how it's not overpopulation that will be a problem necessarily - it's the level of consumption/ increase in middle class level of consumption. http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html

They are related, and if you can solve one you may still be fecked with the other.

A bit like China, which on the one hand needs to build 100s of new coal power stations, and on the other hand is going mad putting in renewables but it's like a drop in the ocean.

djpbarry · 13-01-2014 5:31pm

maninasia wrote: »

A bit like China, which on the one hand needs to build 100s of new coal power stations, and on the other hand is going mad putting in renewables but it's like a drop in the ocean.

Not really - China's making a pretty dramatic shift away from coal and towards renewables and nuclear.

maninasia · 13-01-2014 5:32pm

Greensleeves wrote: »

I have spent a lot of time in the developing world I can tell you that China, India and much of SE Asia are very crowded places and that the lives of the millions of poor people are miserable beyond belief. It is the world's poorest people that suffer the most from having too many children. And in particular it is poor women who in some cases bear their first child in their teens and have had maybe 10 pregnancies by their mid-twenties.

I don't buy the thesis that as countries get richer/become more educated things will improve all of their own accord.

There has been a boom in Asia in the last decade - China, India, Vietnam, etc. - and as these countries got richer they went from bicycles to two-wheelers (mopeds, motorbikes) to cars. The rich buy Range Rovers, Landcruisers, Hummers, etc. and the rest buy whatever they can get their hands on. In India Ratan Tata helpfully made a cheap car to get the hundreds of millions of poor people on the road. The net result of this is that the roads of Asia are choked with traffic and all the attendant pollution. I don't begrudge these people their cars; why shouldn't they have everything we've got?, but that ditty about 9 million bicycles in Beijing would be more accurate if it said there were 9 million BMWs in Beijing.

The other thing people do as they get richer is travel; they start flying everywhere just like we do. In the last 10 or 15 years there has been huge growth in budget airlines in India, Thailand, China, etc. The Ryanair of Asia (AirAsia) is marvellously cheap and flys all over the region. But obviously planes are very bad on the CO2 emissions front.

And of course, just like us, they shop like lunatics. So they need landfill sites but as anyone that has been to India knows, the country is covered in litter because when there are 1 billion people it's not really possible to have proper waste management.

I don't share the view that mobile phones are a sign of hope that all will be well with the world. More people in the world own mobile phones than have access to sanitation. For the poorest people in the world this lack of sanitation condemns them to a life of misery and illness, and in India means that girls are more likely to quit education when they reach puberty because of the lack of toilets in schools.

We in the west have unsustainable carbon footprints. If by some act of magic the most populous part of the world was to wake up tomorrow morning and find itself with the same standard of living that we have there would be a bit of a problem. We are unwilling to make any meaningful changes to our lives; we'll buy a Prius, we'll continue to fly whenever and wherever we feel like it and we'll stump up for some carbon offsets, we'll toy with being vegetarian but conclude that the nice ethical/free-range/fairly-traded sausages from the nice organic chap at the farmers market are much better for the planet in the long run so really there is no need for us to change at all. And that is only the tiny minority that are even slightly bothered about sustainability and the environment. Most people don't care. And we delude ourselves that all this is fine and that if the whole 7 billion of us were all carrying on in the same fashion that would be fine too.

Well put, I have been based in Asia for many years and have experienced the serious pollution issues first hand, most especially air pollution which has been worsening across most of the region, not improving! This is actually the biggest problem we face in Asia at the moment if not the world, not climate change although that is a serious long-term issue. It gets ignored because air pollution is not a big problem in the US and Europe and yet it kills millions every year in developing regions and seriously blights quality of life.

It's very true, the huge and rapidly growing population puts very serious strains on the environment wherever we look, with animals and plants endangered in every region of the globe from over exploitation of resources for humans. Humans are a virus in some ways as are our associated animals including cows, sheep, cats and dogs. Just as one example, since I've arrived over a decade ago black tuna has almost gone extinct and local fish resources have been decimated, coastal regions are all fished out, the demand for fish has exploded, and squid and deep sea fish are now the go to food for many fishermen and fish farming now provides most fish served on people's plates (and that also has serious problems in terms of water table depletion on inland farms). People are starting to talk about eating jellyfish as they take over ecosystem niches vacated by fish.

The human population will level off eventually but at a number possibly at 10 billion, and with rapidly increasing expectations of lifestyles against resource depletion, the situation may be more precariously balanced than many realise.

There are good reasons to think that the Arab spring movement and regional instabilities are actually related to their exploding youth populations.

How much slack is there in the system? In terms of seriously reducing environmental impacts there are probably three things we can do

- stop having so many kids or have no kids
- stop or decrease eating meat
- ride public transport or bikes more and fly less

These are not that difficult in practice but it seems far too much for most people.

I'd say the problem is a global problem and not 'West' or 'East', it's a human problem. The Chinese have gone mad for automobiles, but only a few decades after the Americans went mad, and Ireland is also heavily dependent on cars. The Chinese are now the biggest CO2 polluters, but Americans are going mad for cheap shale gas and the Canadians are loving their tar sands. The West has cleaned it's air and water up but mainly be moving most of the factories to the East. It's shocking in a very real way to see this pollution which still exists, it didn't disappear, if just moved to a neighbourhood farther away, and is coming back to bite us all one way or another.

There is hope, the message is getting through in Asia Pacific more rapidly now, a realisation that this pollution is a very serious problem, but economic realities constantly push back i.e. oil/coal are cheaper options to keep inflation down and governments in power.

Capt'n Midnight · 13-01-2014 6:45pm

djpbarry wrote: »

Not really - China's making a pretty dramatic shift away from coal and towards renewables and nuclear.

Wind then solar then nuclear in terms of GW being installed.

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/21/china-reaches-50gw-of-connected-grid-wind-capacity-expected-to-top-140gw-2015/

China Reaches 50 GW Of Connected Grid Wind Capacity; Expected To Top 140 GW By 2015

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/11/asia-report-china-ascending-to-solar-pv-pinnacle

And China's not looking back. The National Energy Administration reportedly has increased its 2014 targets for solar PV capacity to 12 GW instead of 10 GW. Of that, up to 8 GW would be from decentralized solar PV. The State Council has said solar capacity should stay at the 10-GW/year pace through 2015, reaching 35 GW cumulatively installed by the end of 2015.

Germany reduced it's CO2 emissions by building more coal plants :eek:

They were replacing older plants with newer more efficient ones so they could get the same electricity from less coal. Those plants were started during the boom and while they still had nuclear. They didn't start any new ones since the recession. Since then it's been mostly renewables.

If you wanted to power the world with solar this is how much land you'd need

less land would be needed if we were more energy efficient (ie insulation) or we used more efficient panels.

Greensleeves · 13-01-2014 9:05pm

Things are not that rosy on the renewable energy front in China.

CNOOC to close new energy unit

Global Times | 2014-1-5

China's third-largest national oil company decided to end one of its renewable energy subsidiaries, according to media reports, as the country's lackluster new energy market continues to struggle with limited demand and high production costs, analysts said Sunday.

China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) plans to dissolve its subsidiary CNOOC New Energy Investment Co, a Beijing-based firm which mainly explores and produces several forms of renewable energy including wind power, coal-based clean energy and biomass energy, the Beijing-based Economic Observer newspaper reported Friday.

The newspaper cited an unnamed source close to the senior management of CNOOC who said that the company's top executives have lost confidence in the new energy company, which has incurred huge financial losses since its establishment in 2007.

Lin told the Global Times Sunday that the financial performances of China's renewable energy companies are highly dependent on the amount of subsidies from the central government.

"It is very costly for companies to develop clean energy businesses. Without the authorities' financial support, the price of electricity produced by renewable energy will be very expensive and consumers will not purchase it," Lin said.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/835915.shtml

maninasia · 14-01-2014 5:04am

djpbarry wrote: »

Not really - China's making a pretty dramatic shift away from coal and towards renewables and nuclear.

It is?

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/nov/20/coal-plants-world-resources-institute

This map- http://www.theguardian.com/environment/picture/2012/nov/20/which-countries-most-coal-power

http://www.wri.org/blog/majority-china%E2%80%99s-proposed-coal-fired-power-plants-located-water-stressed-regions

Even though it has cut back on some coal plants in Beijing China may still add hundreds of new coal power plants.

Nuclear and renewables are small fry compared to coal power generation. Coal power currently provides 750 GW in China with up to 500 GW to be added or not in the future.

Nuclear will be at about 50-60 GW investment at the end of this decade. China has added a huge amount of renewables but the easy hydro stuff has been done , wind could go up to 200 GW but as we all know wind can not act as base load.

And India is going to cause even more headaches than China, with less economic power and more pressure to generate cheap electricity now.

Both China and India have very significant coal resources.

So the situation is complex in China, with both good and bad developments at the same time.

Unfortunately the world is going to see a lot more dirty coal power plants being built, if not in China then in India and other countries.

India is going to be the big problem with over 500 GW of coal plants in planning and likely to be built. I've talked with educated Indians before and they believe that CO2 taxes are trying to 'keep India down', they would rather choke in the coal dust and pollution.

Renewables are a good news story that are hiding a very bad news story in plain sight.

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/12/five-graphs-that-tell-the-future-story-of-coal/

China is now importing roughly as much seaborne coal as the rest of the world combined - and its coal consumption is expected to grow by another 17 per cent over the next five years. Overall, China alone will account for half the expected growth in coal demand to 2018, as this chart shows:

Source: IEA presentation

Even that startling growth is a slight downgrade from previous predictions. The country's government is making efforts to reduce its dependency on coal and use energy more efficiently - for example by introducing new carbon trading systems in seven separate regions.

But the IEA says these efforts are likely to be at least partially offset by the growth of China's middle class, which is demanding more and more power. So while coal demand will grow a bit slower, it's still going up.

The_Captain · 14-01-2014 3:25pm

Jesus, the state of the 'facts' people are banging on about in this thread

djpbarry · 15-01-2014 11:30am

The_Captain wrote: »

Jesus, the state of the 'facts' people are banging on about in this thread

[MOD] So produce some facts of your own then. [/MOD]

Overpopulation and the enviornmental impact of all this

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