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Ignoring all political factors, I believe that overpopulation is real. Whilst it is true that the planet has enough physical space for billions more people than exist right now, it does not have the natural resources to support billions more.
Focusing on a singular issue that faces global civilization that highlights what I mean - food.
Current food production is heavily reliant on fossil fuel derived fertilizers. It’s commonly accepted that oil production will peak and eventually decline if it has not done so already. Some argue that it has, some say it is imminent. Nonetheless, eventually oil production will become exponentially more expensive as demand increases and supply shrinks and thus anything that relies on oil derived fuels or products will also become more costly. Global farming is reliant on oil derived fuels such as diesel and petroleum for the tilling, planting, fertilizing, spraying of insecticides and harvesting of crops. Not to mention transportation, processing, packaging and preparation. Natural gas, the most important input for the production of fertilizers is required during the Haber-Bosch process. Natural gas is also a finite fossil fuel subject to the same limitations as oil.
If we then look at the macro landscape we also learn that top soil, the soil that crops are grown in is being eroded by constant farming processes, poor land management and natural processes. It is estimated that at the current rate of erosion there could be no top soil left globally within 60 years. If I remember correctly, topsoil is being eroded approximately ten times faster than it can be replaced.
Now there are arguments to be made that we could reduce wastage, reduce demand and manage land better. Doing these things could buy extra time for a static or shrinking population.
Anyway, the point is that the global population rising means that there is more demand for food. Our ability to produce more food to satisfy the extra demand of a growing population is being reduced due to the factors I’ve mentioned above and these are only a subset of a far greater set of issues we face.
The idea that we can continue to grow the population further and that the planet can support this indefinitely is not reasonable. There are limits to growth in finite systems.
Population growth means that there are more people that both want and need a slice of the pie. The problem is there’s only a limited amount of pie available. We can slice that pie into ever smaller pieces and we can even redistribute the pie that exists more equitably. This will help keep people fed in the short term but not in the long term.
The problem is that the pie is going to shrink and the baker isn’t going to be able to get enough ingredients to make more. Eventually the pie will be gone.
In our analogy eventually there will be no pie to go around and everyone goes home hungry.
This means that we end up with a predicament without a solution that I am aware of.
It is far more likely that globally populations will continue to rise until we overshoot our constrained resources. Once that happens human population levels will drop, whether there is intervention or not.
What do you feel about overpopulation?
I’ll make the devil’s advocate argument: The mid to long-term problem is underpopulation: Pretty much every industrialized country has seen plummeting birthrates as they industrialize and become more urban - some countries like Canada and the US are managing to make a patchwork solution out of immigration, but as the world as a whole industrializes there will eventually be no more ‘immigration solution.’
Essentially the long and the short of it is in a rural setting the kids could help out and the farm, in a smaller city space, at least, isn’t at a premium and kids can still go play outside. In a big city space, and the cost of living in general is at a premium and city infrastructure can be outright hostile toward kids. (If you like at regional birth rates within a country they generally support what I’m asserting. Birth rates in Seoul are something crazy like 0.5 children per woman).
A lot of developed countries have tried to encourage people to have kids but none have really done enough to succeed in reversing the trends, and these have been ongoing - accelerating for decades now. Worse yet the further in you get the worse it gets. (Ex: If birth rates are 1 per woman and half your women have hit menopause then every remaining woman needs to have 2 children just to get into break even territory).
All of this is also not mentioning things like generational knowledge etc. that’s lost by people who don’t have kids - in many cases that could amount to a lot of useful information that’s just never passed on. This also doesn’t touch on the more immediate problem of the younger generations in many countries being overly burdened with caring for a historically unprecedented quantity of elders. And we’re not even getting into the economic effects of basically not having a young population to drive consumption. The whole thing is a mess and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
I only see underpopulation as an issue because of the extreme lack of forethought put into economies in those countries. They originally implemented everything based on infinite growth because it’s the simplest option. Just like in every single industry on the planet, however, infinite growth is completely unsustainable.
The economy needs to be made more cyclical, but it’s going to piss off a few billionaires in the process, which I’m sure we are all okay with. At the same time, implementing universal basic income would assist with this. A falling birth rate, and sustainable immigration combined with UBI and some re-implementation of systems would solve scads of societal issues including housing and many environmental problems.
And generational information has never been easier to pass on than now, we just have to make a few easy adjustments.
I should add that, in all fairness, the last, what 60-80 years have been an exception relative to the entire history of humanity where we were having 6-10-15 kids (higher mortality rates but still). I really think this being a problem has caught society as a whole off-guard.
Also keep in mind that policymaking from the 80s, 90s etc. when it was really becoming apparent this was an issue was still not as, how shall I say, scientific as these days (because an adult of that time in power would have been educated in the 30s-50s). Plus, governments have always been bad for “kick it down the road, it’s a later problem” looks.