I don't understand people for population control. There is plenty of resources for everybody, but corrupt people in power are usually the reason why it isn't given to those people.
I think you're underestimating just how many people 7 million is. It's true that there's inequality which leads to wealthy regions like Europe and the Americas using vastly disproportionate resources, but that doesn't change the fact that we've got a massive amount of people. The only reason we're even able to maintain current populations levels this long is because of techniques of the green revolution that are proving to be less sustainable than originally advertised. That's not to say nothing good came out there, but monocultures screw up the soil and there's only so much you can ramp up fertilization before it becomes less feasible, meanwhile the resultant eutrophication is destroying waterways that are already subject to massive overfishing, meanwhile coastline development is destroying forage fish spawning grounds, meaning that even if all oceanic fishing stopped right now, populations still couldn't return to their original levels. I mean, this is just food, to say nothing of the decadence of petroleum products, the loss of biodiversity, and the slow but inexhorable march of global warming. There are enough resources right at this specific instant in time, true, but we can't freeze time right now. Time is proceeding forward, and will continue to do so regardless of the actions of "people in power".
This isn't really correct though, and none of it has to do with population regardless. Lack of sustainability is due to capitalism focusing on tiny short term gains at massive long term expense, and its traditional denial of available-but-untapped resources having value.
So, you're saying that if the world was converted to a planned economy that doesn't have flaws for people to exploit, the earth would have more resources? I mean, I agree that people focus on shortsighted profit, but going "it's capitalism's fault!" is pretty disingenuous.
With proper incentives and techniques like vertical farming, Earth could probably support 50 billion humans or more. It would be incredibly energy intensive, but entirely doable by human civilization. If we globally decided that sustainably supporting as many humans as possible was what we wanted to attain, and put resources towards accordingly, we could support a very much larger population than even the most extreme forecasts for peak human population numbers.
I'd like to see your numbers on that. I'm having a hard time imagining a power source that's both fully sustainable and also able to produce on the scale you suggest.
Capitalism is a winner-take-all system. If you have a product that's slightly more expensive, but which is better in the long run, capitalism will drive it out of business completely. So yeah, it absolutely destroys attempts to do things that aren't shitty for everyone in the long run. If you look at an industrial process creating heavy metal contamination everywhere it's done, you can't simply claim 'this product can not be made sustainably.' There may well be a variation on the process that pollutes nothing but costs another 0.25% of profits, but capitalism has merely 'optimized' it out of the system. This is why capitalism has historically been so incredibly destructive, and until people got fed up enough to implement regulations preventing some of its most obvious and immediate excesses, it polluted vast swaths of land to the point where cleanup efforts continue decades later. Capitalism has not and will never clean up after itself or be an effective steward of the environment, a fact which has been shown time and again. That businesses in a capitalist society aren't sustainable is about as surprising as looking in the mirror and finding your skin is not purple; there's no reason to think they would be.
As for efficiency in food production:
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.fullAt present, the US livestock population consumes more than 7 times as much grain as is consumed directly by the entire American population (11). The amount of grains fed to US livestock is sufficient to feed about 840 million people who follow a plant-based diet (7).
Even just by *reducing* production (of meat), you could feed significantly larger populations. On top of that, there's the increase in yields that's been going on for decades:
https://ourworldindata.org/yields/So there's still plenty of space to support several times the current population into the future even if we assume no increase in cropland and no move towards proposals as extreme as vertical farming. If you see some reason as to why agriculture would suddenly collapse despite an increase in agricultural technologies, automation, and environmental monitoring that isn't merely a side-effect of capitalist incentives to destroy for profit, I'm curious what it is. Of those you mentioned, monocultures can be eliminated by automation technologies capable of handling multiple types of plants/crops, which is plenty possible with today's computer vision tech if the need for it were made clear. Eutrophication is a symptom of fertilizer/chemical excess, which can be monitored and prevented if there's reason to do so. Overfishing, coastline development, again, that's capitalism failing to value an unexploited resource. Global warming is a long term cost ignored for short term profit; again, capitalism. All of these things would be just as big a problem with a smaller population; they would simply take longer. The underlying incentives causing them would still be there.
Edit: And in entirely unrelated news, don't ask Republicans questions, they might attack you.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/24/greg-gianforte-bodyslams-reporter-ben-jacobs-montanaRepublican congressional candidate bodyslams a reporter for the guardian to the ground after he asks about the latest CBO score for the Republican healthcare disaster.
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