How May People Can the World Support? It Depends...

To have as many cars per person as the U.S., China will need 30% more cars than exist worldwide today. Driving them would burn 98 million barrels of oil a day, but the world only produces 85 million barrels.

May 8 , 2012

by Carl Safina

If people are using the world's forests, fishes, soils, freshwater and other resources something like 25% faster than the world can replace them, it means, basically, that the world would already be broke if we weren't taking so heavily from the future.

In his 1848 essay "The Art of Living," John Stuart Mill said: "There is room in the world, no doubt... for a great increase in population... I confess I see very little reason for desiring it."

"If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which... the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope... they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it."

Growing at just one percent annually, a population doubles in just 70 years. During the 20th century, world population quadrupled; it's now approaching 7 billion. By 2050, we'll add to that more than the total human population of 1950.

If everyone gets 800 kilograms of grains annually, like Americans, then the world can carry 2.5 billion people. We passed that number in 1950. The world could support 10 billion people living like Indians. But most Indians want to live more like Americans.

We need wood to build our homes, meaning the forests of Indonesia, Burma, the Russian far-east, and Papua New Guinea will be largely gone by around 2025, and with them their birds, bugs, and Orangutans.

To have as many cars per person as the U.S., China will need 30% more cars than exist worldwide today. Driving them would burn 98 million barrels of oil a day, but the world only produces 85 million barrels.

We need a new, non-burning energy economy, a way of reducing population, and a way of replacing the delusion of infinite growth.

Four billion people live on less than $2 per day. Nearly a billion people get less than 80% of the UN-recommended caloric intake; they are, technically, starving. Undernourished women annually bear 20 million underweight infants, and more than half of Indian newborns would be in intensive care if born in California.

One-quarter of the world's people consume more than three-quarters of the world's goods. That's not fair. But to give everyone an American level of material living, we'd need two and a half Earths. That's not possible.

Because forests, oceans, croplands, and water supplies are all being depleted by the number of people we have now, a grim logic appears irrefutable: As we add people, either everyone will get poorer on average, or the poor will get much poorer. Or the population will be adjusted in the usual way: with shortages, bullets, and bombs.