"What is the Earth's carrying capacity?" This from the same guy who says desalination is more feasible than people think.
"Weirdly, most analysts believe the Earth is already at its carrying capacity! Look at the graph above: the mode1 is at 8B people!"
"What is the likelihood that we're just at the limit of the Earth? Very low. My immediate reaction to this is: Most analysts simply lack imagination. They see the current world, notice that there are some problems, and conclude that we're hitting our limits."
He goes on to cite The Limits to Growth, the 1972 report that raised the alarm about the Earth's population growth rate, and how it meant humanity would run out of many resources as it grew.
"So far, humans have not run out of a single resource."
He then goes on to look at the Planetary Boundaries report, which I myself posted here last September.
"A team of 28 academics have come up with the Planetary Boundaries, a series of nine processes that threaten to collapse under the weight of humanity's impact. From what I've seen, it's the most serious attempt to quantify what can go wrong. According to the team's latest report in 2023, six of the boundaries have already been transgressed."
He goes through these one by one -- well, presumably, only the first 2 are outside the paywall. Those are CO2 and deforestation. On both he says the situation is less dire than the alarmists would have you believe, and that the Earth's carrying capacity is higher than people think.
