frigidweirdo
Diamond Member
- Mar 7, 2014
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Do you understand how little room we have to play with here?
Water levels: China has a water problem.
China has a water crisis - how can it be solved?
While China encompasses almost 20% of the world’s population, the country contains only 7% of the world’s fresh water.
www.weforum.org
Not enough water for the number of people it has. It's just changed it's one child policy to a three child policy to INCREASE the number of people in the country? Too much pollution, too much water usage, too many people.
The US also has a water problem.
The United States Water Crisis
With increasing temperatures, we need more water.
With each new person we need more water, for that person to drink, for that person to bathe, for the food that person is going to eat.
China, also has the sources of quite a few rivers that flow into India, and Southeast Asia, like the Mekong river, and the Chinese are taking this water.
That's water. Now to food.
We're running out of arable land.
How much land does a person need?
What is (or how can I find) the maximum/average food value of x acres of farmland?
ask.metafilter.com
According to this, to feed one person you need 0.07 hectares. This is a MINIUMUM. The average American uses 0.5 hectares.
The US has about 157 million hectares. So at 0.5 per person the US need 165 million hectares. That's more than it currently has. Just.
The world has 1.4 billion hectares of arable land. We have an estimated 7.8 billion people. So, at 0.5 per person we need 3.9 billion hectares. Which is a hell of a lot less than we actually have. Also discounting for the fact that some places have bad soil, like big parts of Africa.
At 0.25 we'd need 1.9 billion hectares, which is closer to what we actually have.
With countries rising out of poverty, people are going to want to eat at least 0.25.
Now, imagine on the trajectory that we have right now, in 9 years we'll have 8.5 billion people. Not only will we need more land for these people to live on, at 0.25 hectares per person we'll need 2.1 billion hectares.
By 2056 we'll be at 10 billion people. At 0.25 we'll need 2.5 billion hectares. In other words the world average will have to be about 0.13 hectares per person. Your average American will need to cut their diet by four times, or more.
The US is losing arable land, the US has gone from 0.68 hectares per person in 2001 to 0.54 hectares per person in 2021. Losing 20% of arable land in 20 years.
If the US continues to grow, the US will no longer have enough food to supply it's people. It's already getting close. What happens then? They won't be able to buy from other countries. As China gets richer, it'll eat more food, and is becoming more powerful. Europe is full, it needs all the food it can get.
Keep growing people, and you'll run out of water, run out of land for food. And you want to keep growing, keeping telling people to have children even if they don't want a child for petty religious reasons that made sense when the plague would wipe out a third of your population and infant mortality in cities was 70%.
