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I never got around to properly responding to this. So I'll do so now.
Count Lucanor wrote:First of all, there's no "human population problem". There may be problems with growing human populations, but that's another issue.
It's in another topic, yes. As stated before, there is an average environmental footprint per person problem. The distribution underlying that average is currently very uneven.
Secondly, it may be argued that this myth is not exclusively fed by racism, and I would agree with that. It looks like Paul Ehrlich's book was inspired by some level of racism of which perhaps he was not well aware of, but that only tells about him. But it is indeed a typical prejudice from Western policy advisers against the poor countries.
I don't care about Paul Ehrlich's book. I care about trying to identify problems and proposing potential solutions. I don't care who implements those solutions.
It is interesting to note how natural you find that some part of the world will bring the other up to their standards, implying where decisions are to be made.
I don't care where decisions are made. Obviously I think they should be made by whoever is in a position to make them. (Do you disagree? Do you think they should be made by people who aren't able to make them?). I don't care who they are or where they live.
Secondly, the "standards of affluence" of the developed world are inherent to its standard of exploitation of resources and people, so why would the rest of the world should follow the bad example?
Are you saying that most people in the world would rather be poor than to grow affluent by "exploitation of resources and people"? On what evidence do you see this fundamental difference between the peoples of the world?
About renewable, I totally agree, but the biggest burden there lies on the developed world, not the less affluent.
As I've indicated, I'm not interested in blame games. As I've said, I don't care where decisions are made. They should be made by whoever is in a position to make them. I don't care who they are or where they live.
Vegetarianism? Agriculture production rates have already increased in the last decades. Anyway, as I have stated before, some non-vegetarian food production like cattle farms may be inefficient, but overall, there are plenty of other sources that are not vegetarian and seem to work well. I would say a good balance within an omnivorous diet should be OK.
I'm not fundamentally opposed to an omnivorous diet. We seem to simply disagree about the optimal balance.
That's another myth of libertarian economists, either allow high inequality or get flat equal poverty.
"Either allow high inequality or get flat equal poverty" was not what I said, was it? I didn't present that binary choice did I? In point 2, to which you were replying there, I simply said that one way to reduce the average environmental footprint per person would be for all the world to be poor. I didn't say that this is a desirable option. I didn't say it was the only option. I explicitly said that I didn't favour it later in the post. Do you disagree with me that if all the world was poor the average environmental footprint would be lower? Note: this is not a question about values, or about what you or I might want to be so. It's a factual question. I think you need to separate question of fact from question of what we may or may not want to happen.
The trouble is that you don't read what's written at face value. You see it through the prism of the various prejudices that you assume people to have.
Without the need of Western countries imposing population control on others, the data indicates that population growth will stabilize by itself:
At what point did I advocate Western countries imposing population control on others?
