The human species has topped 8 billion, with longer lifespans offsetting fewer births, but world population growth continues a long-term trend of slowing down, the US Census Bureau said Thursday.

The bureau estimates that the global population exceeded the threshold on 26 September, though the agency said to take this precise date with a grain of salt.

The United Nations estimated the number was passed 10 months earlier, having declared 22 November 2022, the “Day of 8 Billion”, the Census Bureau pointed out in a statement.

The discrepancy is due to countries counting people differently — or not at all. Many lack systems to record births and deaths. Some of the most populous countries, such as India and Nigeria, haven’t conducted censuses in over a decade, according to the bureau.

While world population growth remains brisk, growing from 6 billion to 8 billion since the turn of the millennium, the rate has slowed since doubling between 1960 and 2000.

  • Damage@feddit.it
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    8 months ago

    Our consumption habits are much more detrimental to earth than how many of us there are (most of us live in poverty).

    The best way to reduce consumption is to not exist.

    • RedditWanderer@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The rules and ethics around who gets to exist or not exist are more complex than fucking not being aggressively destructive with the plentiful resource we have.

      If you put it on a graph of how many people it takes to sustain the society you want versus the impact it has on consumption, you’d see you can’t draw a line that makes sense with our current way of life. Cut too low and you don’t have enough people. Cut too high and you end up with the same problems you think are due to overpopulation. Run the numbers, find your ideal spot and tell us how much of all this is actually number of people.

      Consumption doesn’t scale exponentially or even linearly with population, it does for the most egregious industries that run the world today. The math doesn’t check out, dude. The only variable left is to change the way we consume. We have the economic and technological means to do it, with nothing but greed and cheating keeping us from it, to serve the few.

      This isn’t even about communism or socialism either, we are far far beyond what is necessary in terms of capitalistic gains, like very very far beyond. You’re afraid your way of life would change but it wouldn’t really, as the video you didn’t watch clearly states.

      And if that doesn’t make sense to you, then by all means “be the change you want to see in the world”.

      • Damage@feddit.it
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        8 months ago

        All your essay is unraveled by just taking a plane and looking down. In many biomes, humans have left no room for anything else besides ourselves.

        And if that doesn’t make sense to you, then by all means “be the change you want to see in the world”.

        Yeah, I’m doing just that, by not reproducing.

        • Laticauda@lemmy.ca
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          8 months ago

          I mean, most of the earth’s real estate is taken up by industries for the purpose of consumption, not for housing.