Overpopulation and overconsumption are the roots of the climate crisis, peak oil, mass extinctions, habitat loss, and all of the other ecological and resource crises of our time. They are also the root cause of neofeudalism.
The Limits to Growth, published in 1972, described quantitative methods for determining the impacts of exponential economic growth on finite resources. The authors did not intend to make specific predictions, but one conclusion was clear: continued increase in population and consumption levels would produce ecological overshoot that would necessarily lead to collapse over the course of the 21st century.
Mainstream economists howled, but subsquent updates have only reinforced the original conclusion, and the data on climate change have given us indications of the shape of things to come.
If you were on a ship and a fellow passenger, perhaps a physicist or mechanical engineer, pointed out an iceberg and showed you calculations demonstrating that the ship could not possibly turn in time to avoid it, what would you do? If you were a big strong guy, and you knew that the ship had enough lifeboats for about 2/3 of the passengers, what would you do for yourself and your family...?
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