A pessimistic vision of India’s looming environmental and economic collapse

https://thewire.in/217773/india-systematic-destruction/

by Santosh83 • 8 years ago

310 170 8 years ago

elipsey• 8 years ago

"Exploitation and inequality is innate to the industrial-capitalist system; a fact well-known at least since the time of Marx." Citation needed?

roenxi• 8 years ago

If 'exploitation' is in the ethically neutral sense of taking something with latent potential and bringing it to bear then this isn't particularly controversial.

Capitalism has a happy partnership with inequality. People who exploit resource effectively get given more resources; that is the heart of the system. Works really well. Builds societies that are the envy of the world. Even people who squander resources can expect to come out ahead (they get a small share of a bigger pie).

int_19h• 8 years ago

I mean, Marx would be the citation, but it's important to remember that exploitation in this context is a neutral term, not a judgment. It just means that people who own means of production (i.e. capitalists) can extract economic rent from people who don't (i.e. workers, who need access to those means of production to generate wealth). That shouldn't be controversial - the problem with Marx wasn't that he pointed this out, but rather his statement that it is a fundamental problem, and remedies offered for it.

f_allwein3• 8 years ago

"Economic growth is a central assumption to political and economic systems… But strong growth is not normal, being a recent phenomenon over the last two centuries… It was based upon the profligate use of mispriced natural resources such as oil, water and soil. It relied on allowing unsustainable degradation of the environment. The human race refuses to accept that it is not possible to have infinite growth and improvement in living standards in a finite world."

Exactly this - it seems that while we are aware of it as individuals, we act as of it were not so as societies.

stale20024• 8 years ago

Yeah and the Malthusians have been predicting the downfall of civilization due to "non-infinite growth" for the last couple centuries as well. And they keep being proven wrong.

Just because growth isn't "infinite" says nothing about how far away we are from reaching the limits of the planet.

Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. So we've got a ways to go.

The facts show, that by every metric of quality of life, life is better than it has ever been in the history of the world.

throwaway34DF23• 8 years ago

The counter to the reflex argument "it's worked thus far" is the parable of the turkey. Or the guy who jumped out a 100th floor window (and passing the 2nd floor said "so far so good").

https://blog.commonwealth.com/independent-market-observer/th...

Looking at the past only works if the future is like the past. It's a lazy argument, but sure, statistically you are right most of the time.

This in turn is a case of survivorship bias and a result of how you count: Everybody who is wrong is weeded out immediately. If you sample many times you are more likely to find that it all works just fine because those who survive are counted many times, failures only count one time. The more often you count the more your argument will look favorably for the side of the "anti-alarmists".

llukas• 8 years ago

You always measure distance taken with speed?

Quality of life is nothing without way to sustain it long term.

nils-m-holm• 8 years ago

Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people.

There's enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed. -- Gandhi

The facts show, that by every metric of quality of life, life is better than it has ever been in the history of the world.

Also, the gap between rich an poor has never been bigger.

stupidcar• 8 years ago

Original Mathusianism should be distinguished from neo-Malthusianism, in that the latter does at least have some evidential basis in that it is based on measurement of resource levels and their rate of use, not just some political philosopher's wooly notion of overpopulation.

The problem, as I see it, is that even if you are optimistic about the theoretical capacity of the planet to sustain human life, its practical capacity is limited by how efficiently we use the resources to hand, and the current system does not properly incentivise efficient use. More often, it's the complete opposite, because the price of resources like water and soil does not reflect their true scarcity.

It's like having a large store of firewood. Enough, in theory, to heat your home through several years of harsh winters. Then you burn the whole stockpile in a great bonfire on the first cold Autumn night. That night, by every metric, you'll be warmer and cosier than you ever have been before, but you'll still have doomed yourself.

pakitan• 8 years ago

Just because growth isn't "infinite" says nothing about how far away we are from reaching the limits of the planet.

And just because Malthusians have been wrong for centuries, doesn't mean they won't turn out to be right in the next 50 years. At some point something will snap. Yeah, we have it pretty good right now. At least those of us in the west. I'm not sure if those people in India who have to endure 51 Celsius heats, don't have access to fresh water and live in areas where it's hard to breathe are in a better positions than their ancestors.

A trillion people on Earth may be possible if there was a God designing the planet from scratch with the specific aim to put a trillion people on it. But moving gradually to such a number, from where we are now, I'd say is absolutely impossible. Countries like India and China that are already bursting at the seams, seem to be proving that.

fiblye2• 8 years ago

Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people.

Honestly, you can think whatever you want. But what people want to think and what's actually true often don't line up, and they certainly don't here.

Wikipedia says that the total land mass of Earth is about 150,000,000 km^2. Do you really think a global population density of 6666 people/square kilometer on every single piece of land on earth is in any way sustainable? That's a population density that exceeds Tokyo. Japan's population is heavily dependent on food imports to sustain itself. When the whole world is denser than Tokyo, where is the food going to come from?

ben_w• 8 years ago

Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. So we've got a ways to go.

A bold claim given we’re already way over the ecosystem limits regarding CO2 production, biodiversity loss, atmospheric nitrogen depletion; and close to the limits for ocean acidification, land use converted to cropland, & water consumption; and until we invent sustainable replacements for currently non-renewable oil drilling and phosphorus mining, it’s probably a better idea to say “fund research into fixing this” than “it’s all good”.

akvadrako3• 8 years ago

not possible to have infinite growth and improvement in living standards in a finite world

But our world might be infinite, and there is certainly at least 20 orders of magnitude more available resources than our current usage, so this isn't a practical consideration.

skosch• 8 years ago

Unfortunately, the opposite is true for basic resources such as clean water and air: look up "Earth overshoot day" [1]

[1] https://phys.org/news/2017-08-earth-resource-spent-august.ht...

f_allwein3• 8 years ago

Really? Do you have any evidence for this claim? Genuinely interested, as it's the first time I hear this.

goatlover2• 8 years ago

What do you mean the world might be infinite? The Earth isn't. Do you mean the sun, asteroids and other planets in the solar system will provide all the resources and energy we could ever need? Because even that's not infinite on a Kardashev increasing energy scale.

But the real concern is the biosphere, which most certainly is finite and the 7.4 billion humans are very much dependant on it. Maybe we terraform Mars someday, but I doubt that will do much for life on Earth.

redwood2• 8 years ago

Did you mean "20 times" instead of "orders of magnitude"?

icebraining2• 8 years ago

The unstated (and unsupported) assumption is that economic growth requires growth in the use of resources.

f_allwein3• 8 years ago

well, even if it didn't, the increasing wealth leads to increased use of resources, as people will spend it on things, long distance flights etc.

minikites• 8 years ago

It only takes a shortage of one core resource (e.g. water) for a whole economy to crumble.

b1daly• 8 years ago

The concept of whether a belief in indefinite growth as a possible tragectory for human societies is “normal” offers little to people considering the issues.

You don’t have to look that far back in history to find examples of societal “norms” that are downright sociopathic. For all the problems of the developing world, life is much less cheap now, than any other time, anywhere

The US bombed civilian populations with napalm in the Vietnam War.

If anything, the forces of greed and self interest that lie behind the problems described in the article are timeless. The problem is that the human species has been so successful, and developed new technology, that there are new problems to go along.

Fundamentally, the most severe problems facing human populations have their roots in politics and culture, not resource constraints.

As I was thinking about what motivates the super rich to keep going with obtaining wealth far beyond their needs, I had a bit of an epiphany.

All people suffer from being vulnerable, by our nature, and assured of our own guaranteed destruction. To the extent that wealth creation and accumulation provide real, if marginal, improvements to our security, it’s not surprising that someone super rich would continue whole heartedly in one of the activities that actually does the increase security.

But since even the super rich are only a little bit more existentially secure than the rest of us, to stop with the process of wealth accumulation would deprive them of one of the few activities they have relied on to increase their sense of security. It would lead to a greater experience of their subjective personal powerlessness.

I also think, based on my own idle speculation, anecdotally, that more pronounced sociopathic behavioral traits are distributed among the population, across class.

Such traits provide an advantage to power seeking individuals, with talent, ambition, and cultural resources at their disposal. Hence, positions of power have an over representation of heartless, ruthless, greedy people in their ranks.

Such people, lacking in empathy and charity, once they reach positions of power, can distort the behavior of the institutions they control, leading to the kind depredations described in the original article.

The only hope against such people is that the mass of non-sociopathic individuals can weave supporting and countervailing structures.

If the societal institutions are strong enough, the talents of such driven people, with the “killer instinct” can be mitigated, and in some cases channeled into productive activities.

We see such sociopathic behavior from Trunp, big time. My fear right now is that in his wake, he is tearing at this social fabric, as an end in itself.

The people associated with him, the powerful republicans who populate Washington, are being”turned” by Trump, and are re-introducing and amplifying a “take no prisoners, scorched earth” approach to US politics.

Sean Spicer does not strike me, or probably anyone, as someone who would instinctively go on national TV, and spout obvious lies, in service of maintaining a corrupt politician. But that’s what he did.

I’m he’s asked himself many times, “what was I thinking?”

triplesec2• 8 years ago

I don't understand any donwvotes on parent, because these dynamics are pretty well known and observed.

arnie0012• 8 years ago

As an Indian living in the United States, I hope the development choices made in India skip some of the unsustainable choices made by other countries. Car ownership should be discouraged to a higher degree than what it is today, and we should focus a lot more on efficient carpooling solutions. Things like bikeshare, etc however may never be a realistic solution in most urban cities.

One other thing is most places in Mumbai for example don't have strict zoning practices. I do think that this has some unintentional benefits like lower travel time for commuting by colocating housing and offices.

hkmurakami• 8 years ago

As an "American" who's visited India as a tourist once, I have some questions to educate myself.

1) India is a very large and very diverse country. How is the culture of acceptance towards carpooling and resource sharing, especially when it will gain an ascendant middle class like we're seeing in China?

2) Vehicles have always had a status communication role. Is there something we can tap into that can impede this desire?

arnie0012• 8 years ago

1) I think most of the resource sharing is driven out of cost necessities. There are many places where people share a single autorickshaw to the same destination. This is sometimes because there is a shortage of taxi/autorickshaws/bus availability at peak hours. I tried Uber pool a couple of times in Mumbai and almost always travelled alone. Not sure what's the reason.

2) The status still exists. However it can be practical to not own a car as roads are extremely congested in big cities (in some places temporarily worsened by public transportation infrastructure projects)

ZeroGravitas• 8 years ago

Not specific to India but one theory behind luxury tax type approaches is that the social signalling still remains, but everything is shifted down a bit.

So if car pollution, parking, congestion is priced appropriately then some people will still have bigger, less efficient vehicles to show off but the baseline will be lower and therefore society as a whole is better off.

livus• 8 years ago

1. Car pooling has become very acceptable. I live in NCR and every time I've taken an Uber Pool or Ola Share the car has been packed to capacity. This is especially popular among solo office travellers.

2. This has, sort of, lost its charm with the younger generation especially if they are earning well or used to own a car. Public transit has become faster (on the order of twice as fast during peak time) compared to driving. 2 wheelers are more popular than 4 wheels for cost and practical reasons.

nordsieck• 8 years ago

2) Vehicles have always had a status communication role. Is there something we can tap into that can impede this desire?

I really doubt it. People are always looking around for honest signals about each other, and a vehicle is the most expensive possession other people will see in a casual social setting by at least an order of magnitude. Whether you're at school, work, a bar, hiking, etc, people will see you get into your car.

Karupan2• 8 years ago

As a Indian, convincing people not to buy cars is going to be very hard, if not impossible. Cars represent social status, and they are a big step forward in comfort when traveling. Even if the public transport system improves drastically, the comfort and privacy that one gets in a car is unrivaled (remember that public transport, be it trains or buses, is always overcrowded).

The general attitude among middle class, when discussing how unsustainable cars are, is - why do I, as a first time car owner, have to think about pollution and traffic when all first-world countries have enjoyed it for decades? I don't necessarily agree with that stance, although I understand it.

OscarCunningham5• 8 years ago

Impose a tax on fuel that is enough to pay to repair the environmental damage. Then it doesn't really matter if the tax disuades car ownership or not. If it doesn't then you have the money.

Alreadyobsolete• 8 years ago

I can't help but think that these problems won't be solved until there's an obvious, short term incentive for our lawmakers to actually tackle these problems in any tangible way.

The public outcry has been constant for decades. The information and alarmism has existed for just as long. There's no shortage of reasons why we shouldn't tackle these issues. Those in the power to enact significant change to environmental and economic models aren't incentivized to. How do we shift perception to incentivize sustainable growth, rather than growth in isolation. How do we incentivize politicians to feel rewarded for methodical long term changes rather than short term successes at the cost of finite resources?

chii• 8 years ago

Run a patreon style system where sustained long term benefits are rewarded with sustained long term income/rewards to the politicians?

SturgeonsLaw• 8 years ago

Interesting approach. I'd like to also see a transparent system where campaign funds are kept in escrow until specific goals are achieved, those goals set by the donors

thaumasiotes• 8 years ago

How do we incentivize politicians to feel rewarded for methodical long term changes rather than short term successes

Make sure they stay in office for a long time.

Al-Khwarizmi• 8 years ago

The public outcry that you mention is not even close to large enough.

Sure, everyone is for reducing pollution and against climate change in the abstract, but then in my country coal miners rally (successfully) to avoid their mines getting shut down, drivers complain when car lanes or parking space are replaced with bike lanes or sidewalk, half of the population buys diesel cars to save a few bucks, many go to live in suburbs and plan their life around the car, and people give close to zero weight to environmental proposals in elections.

There are countries with more environmental consciousness than mine (I'm from Spain and sadly it's very far from being a model country in this...), but anyway, public outcry is worthless if it is hypocritical and near the bottom of people's list of priorities.

By the way, the answer to your question is that elections provide a great way of incentivizing long-term thinking in politicians: just don't vote those that don't exhibit it. It's the voters' fault if we don't take that into account and instead vote based on stuff like "unemployment has gone down 2% in the last 4 years" (probably more due to global trends and long-term decisions of previous administrations than to whatever the current one recently did...)

ignoramous2• 8 years ago

The thing that worries me the most is lack of fresh water. I belong to the Indian state of Gujarat mentioned in the article, and the pessimism isn't exaggerated at all. Soil erosion and fresh water coupled with rising temperatures is a real and present danger seeimingly ignored in favour of populist and industrialist projects such as GIFT (that keeps on winning elections for the incumbent). There's no reversing desertification that plaques my home state. It is heartbreaking, to say the least. It's taking us towards a Mad Max Fury Road esque world, and how.

Uttar Pradesh, the quintessential Indian state that 200* million people call home, along with another 200 million in the Hindi-Urdu heartland, has always had abundance of natural resources but its utter mismanagement has led to an unprecedented ecological crisis that no one in the political setup seems to be bothered about; and that may be since they continue to grapple with challenges of heavy population, unemployment, casteism, and near absence of law and order in every fabric of the society. Most of its major cities are on the verge of collapse, whilst the elites along with the politicians have cornered an enormous amount of wealth for themselves at the expense of the environment and the people; unlike in 2000s China, where the distribution of wealth seemed more fair, in comparison.

I think, India and Pakistan (I was astonished at the very similarity of what's happening to India's biggest states like Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana, and Punjab; and Pakistan's Punjab and Sindh) and most other tropical countries favouring unabated development at the cost of the environment are going to end up in a very sorry state that's going to get worse along an exponential curve for entities with larger than sustainable populations.

I don't understand at all the increasing rents, property prices amidst the impending crisis. Given that, especially, only a handful hoard most of the wealth and could afford buying or renting at today's rates.

India is being held hostage in a prison of corruption by greed, will promptly be taken to the altar of doom by ignorance, where civil unrest will have a final swing of the sword culling the Virus, as Agent Smith would put it.

*edit

danmaz743• 8 years ago

Making big sacrifices now to avert a disaster that is "only" forecast, but not yet tangible/certain in the mind of most people, is incredibly difficult everywhere, not just in India. To cite an example from Italy, everybody who had a basic understanding of economics knew that we had unsustainable rate of growth of public debt and pensions promises, but there always somebody promising that they had a magic bullet solution (or that there is no problem at all), and most voters in the end prefer to believe in those. This is true even now that the consequences of those policies have struck hard with years of economic stagnation and a worsening general situation.

hiram112• 8 years ago

Seems like Italy is a basket case. I sometimes look at Who's Hiring in the EU, yet I've never once seen a startup in Italy.

Wages seem to be awful there compared to the US and northern Europe, but it also appears that home prices are still really high.

Finally, from the few Italians I've spoken with - I've only been there once long ago - nobody is getting married and people live with their parents until their mid 30s, at least.

A lot of the educated Italians hit the road for jobs in Germany and elsewhere, meanwhile you're importing a lot of low skilled migrants from Africa.

Why are things so bad there?

visarga• 8 years ago

Romania is beholden to a post-communist party since 1989 using the same tactic - promise pension raises. Old people mostly vote with them, sacrificing the future of the country. They make a mess, then step down for a term to let the opposition fix it, then come back with more promises. And the old people love them because "What has the opposition ever done for us?" and "They are all corrupt, anyway, no matter the party".

But now even the leader of this party has a huge corruption case against him, so he tries to change the laws to save his ass, by making corruption legal. In the last 12 months he changed 3 prime ministers (all from his party, absurd as it seems) because even they were afraid to do the illegalities he demands. He's a joke and we can't get rid of him. Why can't he directly take the PM seat? Because he has already been condemned for corruption in a past case, so he's barred. He can still lead by proxy, though.

Sometimes I think old people shouldn't be allowed to vote because they got little time left and don't care much for the rest of us (the future they won't get to see), so they'll gladly sell our futures for a modicum raise in their pensions. If you vote, you should be held to the reality of what you voted on. It's unfair to vote and die soon (same thing happened in UK where old people voted out and young people are left with the consequences).

thisisit• 8 years ago

That is the case with most countries including India. It is difficult to have conversations about public debt, fiscal responsibilities without getting mired in some emotional debate.

twelve40• 8 years ago

home to 400 million people

That's a pretty intense number even for India

deepfriedbits• 8 years ago

Wikipedia says 200M (which is still an insane number). Typo in the parent comment?

srean2• 8 years ago

The thing that worries me the most is lack of fresh water. I belong to the Indian state of Gujarat mentioned in the article, and the pessimism isn't exaggerated at all.

but surely Ram mandir will fix all that. The real problem is cow slaughter, and inter-religious marriages, oh and Padmavat[i]

hux_• 8 years ago

Do you have better issues on which to win the largest amount of votes? People have no concept of how many different competing agendas exist in a country as large. Whatever issue you pick a large majority of the country is bothered about something else. Which is why things devolve to the lowest common denominator.

fellellor• 8 years ago

What will this argument achieve? It's not like the other side is asking people to be more responsible either. If you have Ram mandir on one side, then the other side were the guys in charge who led all the selloff and debt holidays for corporations in the first place. And don't get me started on the third side with their BS free electricity promises.

As long as you keep taking sides, you eventually become a part of the problem because every side is fucked up to the core.

sbmthakur• 8 years ago

You forgot routine murders of RSS workers in Kerala.

kamaal2• 8 years ago

>India is being held hostage in a prison of corruption by greed

While this is true. The true problem really is the population scale is just too much. At that point everything breaks.

We really are a society of extreme scarcity. There could be enough for everyone, but there are just too many people. People do the obvious and optimize to no end for personal profit. At one point in time people thought the government is corrupt, or that government jobs automatically come with corruption. At that point in time around late 80's there was a sentiment private jobs and enterprises would come along and solve all this. Something like the exact opposite happened. Almost every company I've worked I have seen politics and corruption to no end for foreign travel opportunities, pay rises, equity and promotions. This automatically creates a situation where merit can never win. You can start all the start ups you want but if you can't solve this problem its just attempting to build a pyramid on quick sand.

>I don't understand at all the increasing rents, property prices amidst the impending crisis.

Why don't you understand this?

Settling in cities is the only hope for a decent job currently. Farming jobs are long gone and are not profitable for a long time. Most farms lands are owned by a few families and the remaining people just slave around on that. For those people the only escape is to start a small shop or get some education and get a job in the city. So those people will keep coming to cities. And we can only develop a few cities as we don't have enough tax collection to build and develop all over. This concentrates people into a few cities.

Now you have a high demand and low supply situation. There fore high rents and property prices.

Ideally if you had good transit then you could expand to outskirts and increase supply. But some 1000 people come to a city like Bangalore everyday, and there isn't enough tax money to build that sort of infrastructure.

>Given that, especially, only a handful hoard most of the wealth and could afford buying or renting at today's rates.

If you start early, save and invest well, you could establish unbeatable lead over your colleagues. In a society like India where things are so scarce this is even more so true.

kiliantics• 8 years ago

We really are a society of extreme scarcity.

That scarcity is completely artificial though. Wealth and income inequality make this obvious and they are the problem. A different social organisation could allow for everyone to have enough and probably make society less wasteful too.

fyfy18• 8 years ago

But some 1000 people come to a city like Bangalore everyday

That’s really a lot of people if think about it. That’s 365,000 people a year. If a new city was built for all those people, in France it would be the 5th largest city.

warmcat• 8 years ago

"Most farms lands are owned by a few families and the remaining people just slave around on that".

I wonder how you came to this conclusion. In fact, farming in India is very fragmented. Lot of farmers or people in rural areas own very small parcels of land and work on them. Yes, there are people or families which own large pieces of agricultural land, but not in the numbers that you seem to imply.

Also, lack of manpower for working on farms is a very real problem in India. Farming jobs still exist at a big scale in India because we don't have mechanization like western countries(Again because of fragmentation of farms). People are not willing to "slave around" in farms anymore because they get subsidies from government i.e. food at very low cost for people below BPL. And it is very easy to get a BPL card if you live in rural area. This comes from someone(me) who has worked and been around farms and is still involved in farming though not directly on a day to day basis.

bufferoverflow2• 8 years ago

Gujarat is almost surrounded by the ocean, it's an endless supply of water. You can build very low tech and very cheap systems to evaporate and condensate fresh water. Black container with salt water, a few reflective panels to concentrate the sun, tube to guide the steam/vapor into another container with the fresh water. It can be VERY cheap.

There are probably more efficient membrane-based solutions, but probably more expensive.

sametmax5• 8 years ago

You won't provide water for a billion souls this way.

sametmax5• 8 years ago

You can only survive a few days without water. And when you don't drink, your capacity for thinking peacefully disapear quickly.

So you have more than a billion of people that will soon need to drink on a packed polluted land. And the country has already huge social tensions, a gigantic gap between the legion of the poor and the small group of the rich, plus the nuclear weapon.

China took the himalaya for this very reason years ago. Fresh water is more important than the dalai lama.

But for india, the 3rd world war could very much start here. I wish i was joking, but i have political analysts around me that take this possibility very seriously.

fermienrico• 8 years ago

> China took the himalaya for this very reason years ago. Fresh water is more important than the dalai lama.

Tibet is a cold desert or tundra. Please don't spin this around. China has an abundant land elsewhere outside of Tibet which provides plenty of rainfall. China's intentions and justification for their relationship with Tibet is largely political and strategic.

dmoy• 8 years ago

Huh so, Tibet does generate a lot of water relative to its size (>620 km^3 per year). By comparison China only generates 3-4x as much water total. However, the vast majority of Tibet's water drains to India not China (like >85% or something).

So at first glance I don't see it. Is the concern that China is somehow going to massively redirect water flows somehow and take water away from India?

danmaz743• 8 years ago

Interestingly, most of the article thesis isn't specific about India being destructed, it's about the World being destructed (over exploitation of natural resources + pollution).

But the element that I find strangely missing is the one about population growth. I'm pretty sure that GDP per capita can grow, if not indefinitely, for a very very long time - if the population isn't too big. India will soon be the most populous country in the World and still growing strongly enough; I would be curious to know if this is seen as a big problem in India, or not...

baxtr4• 8 years ago

I totally agree, I also noticed that this element was missing. A think, a crucial first step would be to stop population growth. This is very intrusive in people’s lives and hard to control as measure, but more than necessary. The footprint of a human being needs to be sustained by its local environment. Global effects are not helping, but in the end this problem requires a local solution.

jpatokal3• 8 years ago

The world's population growth is screeching to a halt almost universally, even without China-style coercion. This includes India, where the total fertility rate has fallen from >6 in the 1950s to around 2.4 today, and the steady decline is set to continue.

shripadk2• 8 years ago

No population control is no longer a necessity. Hans Rosling explains it really well in this video: https://vimeo.com/79878808

lozenge3• 8 years ago

The population growth isn't a problem "yet" but it is a problem when those people want to develop (ie increase energy consumption). Hans Rosling explains it well: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing...

singularity2001• 8 years ago

will energy consumption be less of an economic problem thanks to the break even of solar and coal?

spicymaki• 8 years ago

That was a great video! Thank you!

tapanjk• 8 years ago

strangely missing is the one about population growth

This.

There was a time when population explosion was recognised as something to deal with. For the last decade or so, somehow this conversation has simply vanished (from the school books, from political discourse, from the news media). It is as if we, the citizens, have collectively given up on this issue and want to pretend that the issue does not exist.

If I were to pick one single thing to start with, in order to reverse the current trend of environmental degradation, it would be population control. Unless this is addressed soon, it will be the root cause for the breakdown of the equilibrium of the environment and the social structure.

peoplewindow7• 8 years ago

Well is that observation specific to India, or do you mean in the west?

In the west it's disappeared because the projections were all wrong. The population in rich countries does not replace itself. Without large levels of immigration the population would start to decline. This is partly why the EU is trying to force mass migration on the member states - it's for several (stated) reasons, but one of them is a belief that otherwise the population will decline and the economy will shrink.

VLM• 8 years ago

The population issue has become racially charged and therefore off limits to talk about in polite society.

forinti• 8 years ago

I live in South America, where we have plenty of space. Bangladesh is half the size of my state, but has 14 times its population. And 18% of Bangladesh floods during the monsoon. China has more people than India, but because it is so much larger, its density is similar to a European country's (Italy is denser than China).

India and Bangladesh make me very afraid for the future.

lispm• 8 years ago

China's population is unevenly distributed. There is a large concentration in eastern coastal regions. There are provinces with larger population than Italy and MUCH higher population density.

The whole of Europe, similar in area to China, has 1/2 the population density of China.

sanmon3186• 8 years ago

India has more arable land (though less productive) than China.

jstewartmobile• 8 years ago

Always nice to see mention of Kumarappa in an article. His viewpoint deserves more consideration than it gets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._Kumarappa

virtualwhys2• 8 years ago

Not being able to drink the water is bad enough, but not being able to breathe takes it up another level.

It's such a sad state of affairs that in many parts of the world we can't even breathe the air. I'm in Thailand up in Chiang Mai where the "burning season"[1] has just begun. The mountains in the distance, normally plainly visible, are gone, hidden behind a blanket of smoke/smog. And the locals tell me, "hah, this is nothing, wait until March [when the air quality goes from merely unhealthy, to hazardous]".

Berkeley Earth[2] reveals the state of the air in this side of the world. Am thinking of heading to northern India but it seems there's no safe haven short of climbing Mount Everest. Maybe at other times of year the air quality is much better; for the locals I hope so.

[1] In Asia apparently every spring the farmers burn the previous season's rice fields in order to enrich the soil for the next crop.

[2] http://berkeleyearth.org/air-quality-real-time-map/?z=4&x=10...

metalon• 8 years ago

You could consider going to Laos, the air is definitely better here

virtualwhys2• 8 years ago

Thanks, think I'll probably head somewhere in southern Thailand until my visa expires.

smnplk• 8 years ago

I hope that one day, government corruption will be a solved problem. []-[]-[]-[]

jpatokal3• 8 years ago

I find neo-Malthusian arguments like this need to be taken with a serious grain of salt. Much of the article would have applied word for word for China a decade or two ago, and that country continues to struggle with environmental problems as gargantuan as India's -- but it's now also equally clear that they have turned a corner and are not just taking the issue seriously, but starting to make an impact.

largote• 8 years ago

One of the biggest flaws of democracies is that they strongly incentivize policy makers to follow short-term gains over long-term goals.

peoplewindow7• 8 years ago

Because dictatorships are so famous for their 100 year horizons?

The USSR planned its world in 5-year spans. That's about the same length of time between elections in most democracies. Lots of people like to say things like "one of the biggest flaws of democracies" but I've yet to see such a statement that actually doesn't also apply to other systems of government.

lsd5you• 8 years ago

Except china had the one child policy which clearly had long term goals in mind. Singapore also implemented eugenics policies and still has them to some degree.

Realistically population one of the few things you can take a long term view on, since so geo politics and technology are so unpredictable. With population planning much of the effects are only to come a generation later so mostly only a long term concern. It is also completely radioactive as far as modern democracies are concerned.

lozenge3• 8 years ago

The article on China linked to is also excellent: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31478-china-s-communist-c...

sidcool• 8 years ago

That's an Interstellar like scenario. Things literally are very bad in India. Ecological disaster has already started. But the same is true for most countries.

parthmehta23• 8 years ago

Article discusses only one side of the debate, and media just publishes it without proper research. It should also mention the efforts taken to overcome the issues of environment, economy or infrastructure.

deathtrader666• 8 years ago

So what are the efforts taken to overcome these issues?

known2• 8 years ago

1% in India cannot own 73% Wealth unless they're running Pyramid schemes.

Govt should impose 30% #InheritanceTax and use those funds for free healthcare/education/pensions.

vs2• 8 years ago

100

known2• 8 years ago

I think Govt should focus on Solar based Lift irrigation projects https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/gujarat-model-of-hate-i...

thallukrish• 8 years ago

It shines new light on the mindset that promises bullet trains and ‘smart cities’ while neglecting public health and malnutrition; the pursuit of heartless policies calculated to keep agriculture economically unviable, driving the rural poor "wholesale into the cities to serve as cheap fodder for India’s ‘economic miracle’; and the permanent destruction of million-year-old mountains, forests and rivers to create a ‘nine-day’ industrial wonder."

I cannot agree with this more.

blunte• 8 years ago

You could change "India" to "United States" in this article and still be pretty accurate.

hedora• 8 years ago

Are short-term sea rise forecasts really up to 11 feet? Won’t that wipe out a big chunk of Silicon Valley?

ancientworldnow2• 8 years ago

If you ignore the IPCC reports of 1.5m because it was based on inomplete data and consequently intentionally ignored several positive feedback liops, the most recent studies suggest 3m-4m by 2075-2100 are very possible and even likely. This obviously totally floods places like miami, osaka, all three airports in NYC, Bangladesh is gone, many of the coastal Chinese cities, parts of vancouver, etc. I haven't looked in detail at Silicon Valley but the western coast tends to fare better because there is a rapid rise from the coast (many cliffs as well though they are extra vulnerable to increased erosion and you will see many collapses) and because of how the rise won't be even (due to gravity and other variables), places like the east coast will see a much greater percentage of that water focus there.

lamby• 8 years ago

I was recently in Delhi for a few days.. the pollution really is truly awful. Indeed, I even had an layover on the way back (where I didn't even leave the airport) and I almost needed to wash my clothes after walking from the terminal to the plane doors. :/

ohiovr• 8 years ago

I read the other day that chicken farmers are working on a solution to this problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16281316

olivermarks• 8 years ago

It took 200,000 years for our human population to reach 1 billion—and only 200 years to reach 7 billion...

6 minute American Museum of Natural History animation

https://youtu.be/PUwmA3Q0_OE

The fundamental problem is over population IMO

A pessimistic vision of India’s looming environmental and economic collapse

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