this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
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This is going back a bit longer than 15 years but the myth of the Population Bomb was pretty fucking wrong.
It predicted the mass starvation of hundreds of millions of people due yo food production not keeping up with population growth in the 1970s.
That was avoided by "the green revolution" i.e. new ways of producing fertilizers. It just kicked the can down the road and made everything worse honestly.
This was averted by mass production of fertilizer through fossil fuels.
I'm sure that won't come back to bite us in the ass.
Certainly not dangerous to have massive monocultures what could easily be wiped out by disease or heat waves. I'm sure all those people will be able to keep living when we aren't making as much fertilizer with the destruction of our economies.
We are producing about four times as much food as we consume.
Solar panels wind turbines and nuclear energy have proven to solve all of our issues if we actually put effort into implementing them.
Humanity destroying the entire planet would happen even without food scarcity. Every problem we've been presented with has had a solution, but we just didn't implement it.
Well, we haven't reached the peak yet, tho. Afaik global population is going to peak at around 10 billion people somewhere in the 60s. We will see how much land climate change will render unusable for farming until then as well. So a food shortage is still not completely off the table, I think. Well, at least if we continue to use most of the crops to feed livestock, and not us humans directly.
And if not food, but access to enough fresh water willl probably be a huge issue in the future.