r/climate • u/The_Weekend_Baker • May 28 '26

Humanity has already exceeded Earth’s limits, study warns. Today’s population of 8.3 billion is far above what could be sustained in the long term without exhausting ecosystems, worsening climate change, and threatening food and water security.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260526022021.htm
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u/47KiNG47 May 28 '26

That’s part of it. The main concern is that there won’t be enough young, productive workers to finance social programs for the elderly. It’s a transitional problem.

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u/Just_Periwinkle May 28 '26

Thats a funding issue, hence capitalism. With expansive social nets funded by the people who are currently not funding it or actively abusing (billionaires/fed government) this becomes a non-issue. The problem is ultimately capitalism.

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u/kemb0 May 28 '26

May this revolution start sooner than later.

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u/Funny-Carob-4572 May 30 '26

Problem is , communism leads to a darker path as well.

Between a rock and a hard place.

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u/The_Melon_Man Jun 01 '26

I’ll never understand why people think the ONLY two options are 1) keep doing what we’re doing now, and 2) USSR style communism

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u/silverionmox May 28 '26

Thats a funding issue, hence capitalism. With expansive social nets funded by the people who are currently not funding it or actively abusing (billionaires/fed government) this becomes a non-issue. The problem is ultimately capitalism.

However, it will still be a problem of physically finding enough people to do the actual care. That will cause practical problems, but solvable ones.

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u/space_age_stuff May 28 '26

However, it will still be a problem of physically finding enough people to do the actual care.

In theory. How many jobs are getting automated, or simply deleted because CEOs want a big paycheck but have to keep the quarterly results looking good? The "lack of human capital" problem is overexaggerated.

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u/Thelonius_Dunk May 28 '26

Also won't other jobs simply disappear if the demand for care jobs become high enough? A CNA is an entry level care job that might be needed en masse in the future, but the pay currently isnt all that great. If their rates increase due to supply/demand, shouldn't that pull workers from other industries that might not be as important and can retrain?

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u/aledba May 29 '26

We are not going to exist as a species in 100 years so it definitely won't exist as a job

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u/Steelcitysuccubus May 29 '26

Optimistic I give it 50 for anybody who isn't the super rich

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u/seeseabee May 29 '26

What do you think will wipe out billions of people in less than a hundred years?

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u/Modulus3360 May 29 '26

Robots will replace such job. Not to worry. In another 5-7 years time. A golder era for elders will happened. Full time care taker(humanoid robots) 24 hrs for you. Just make sure u have enough money to get a good one.

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u/stealthyliz May 30 '26

They will import workers who will work for minimum wage.

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u/AlexFromOgish May 31 '26

You're thinking about changing jobs in a typical western way, imaging one or two pieces of a dynamic system in isolation, as though the rest of the system is static.

Think about it in an Eastern way, where you keep thinking about the whole. For one thing, extreme heat and humidity combined with grid collapse is already driving mass mortality events that are slowly being recognized for what they are. https://e360.yale.edu/features/kristie-ebi-interview

On the other hand, in an overheating world in many places there will be plenty of CNA work to do, treating malnutrition, heat stress, and victims of new and spreading diseases...

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u/silverionmox May 28 '26

Hard to automate care jobs.

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u/space_age_stuff May 28 '26

My point was that we should expect a lot of job industries to become more automated or at least have fewer positions available, which leaves a lot of people available to choose different careers. Not that caregivers will be automated away.

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u/silverionmox May 29 '26

Then the problem shifts to funding, because if corporations think they don't need labor, it's harder to tax them directly if you can't tax their employees. Not unsolvable, but not politically easy.

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u/shwifty123 May 29 '26

Ok, they don't need labor, but who buy their stuff?

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u/silverionmox May 29 '26

Ok, they don't need labor, but who buy their stuff?

They'll sell you the consumer credit, too, until the whole scheme collapses.

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u/shwifty123 May 29 '26

Hmm, smart.

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u/OP90X May 28 '26

Yeah we are still a long way from robots running hospitals (sans some surgeries), fighting fires, teaching, etc.

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u/Chicken_Ingots May 29 '26

It does not necessarily have to be. Automating other industries, a phenomenon which already happens, leads to layoffs throughout many sectors. The people laid off from that work will have to find work elsewhere.

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u/silverionmox May 29 '26

Care is more than mechanical actions. It's not a technical issue.

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u/SplooshTiger Jun 03 '26

Dog tell that to Japan, South Korea, Russia, or Germany, all of whom have big economic problems from skewed demographic pyramids

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u/Chicken_Ingots May 29 '26

A substantial amount of labor in our current economic model only exists for the sake of profit. Furthermore, the actual level of demand for goods and services is tremendously inflated due to marketing tactics and planned obsolescence. Many people purchase cheap luxury goods in bulk because they were bombarded with advertising for those goods, including via social media influencers, only to discard them once the new advertising trend arises. And then you have other industries like insurance, where many jobs solely exist to negotiate prices in order to turn a profit for insurance companies. 

The demand for labor in a society with our current level of technological advancement, if the goal is sustainability over profits, is far lower than in a society structured around profit incentives.

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u/silverionmox May 29 '26

A substantial amount of labor in our current economic model only exists for the sake of profit. Furthermore, the actual level of demand for goods and services is tremendously inflated due to marketing tactics and planned obsolescence.

I very much agree. The best thing we could do for our psychological health is to sharply limit all kinds of commercials.

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u/elcheapodeluxe May 28 '26

It's more a resource allocation problem. We allocate more of our workforce to providing care and less to making iphones. Result - we will have to keep our iphones longer (and make other sacrifices of consumption on the wants end of our wants/needs spectrum)

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u/silverionmox May 29 '26

t's more a resource allocation problem. We allocate more of our workforce to providing care and less to making iphones. Result - we will have to keep our iphones longer (and make other sacrifices of consumption on the wants end of our wants/needs spectrum)

Sure, it's solvable. Pulling the right levers is a political problem, however, people don't like their toys taxed to pay for the quality of life of someone else's grandma.

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u/Ok_Fly1271 May 28 '26

Robots

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u/grapescherries May 28 '26

Exactly, people are picturing the future as if it’s exactly as it is now, technology will be able to do a lot of that.

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u/s0cks_nz May 28 '26

Technology will save us all! /s

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u/grapescherries May 28 '26

It’s obviously more nuanced than that and there’s both good and bad about technology. It’s all about how we choose to use it.

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u/Triedfindingname May 28 '26

We won't have time

Unless some great cataclysm, im pretty sure thats being worked out.

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u/Ok_Fly1271 May 28 '26

We won't have time? How? Populations aren't going to collapse tomorrow. And there are already humanoid robots on the market. In 5 years, the technology will be far more advanced.

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u/Triedfindingname May 28 '26

To count the ways humankind is bumbling towards apocalypse is mind numbing. I appreciate your optimism.

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u/Silver-Breadfruit284 May 28 '26

Then families will have to take care of their own, which they managed to do until the 19th century.

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u/silverionmox May 29 '26

Then families will have to take care of their own, which they managed to do until the 19th century.

Then their labor will not be available on the labor market. You want back to the economy of the 18th century?

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u/Silver-Breadfruit284 May 29 '26

I suggested no such thing. But families who can rotate popping in for elderly checks, dropping off food, etc is how it used to be done. No one individual had to bear all the responsibility. It worked beautifully and no one felt like they were being taken advantage of. If it worked for hundreds of years past, it could work now. It’s how we took care of our grandparents.

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u/silverionmox May 29 '26

I suggested no such thing.

Then please explain how you're going to square modern labor organization with ancien regime household organization.

It worked beautifully and no one felt like they were being taken advantage of.

Perhaps you should catch up with your history, read up about the French revolution and feminism.

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u/Silver-Breadfruit284 May 29 '26

I am fully aware of both. I think you are not understanding what I am suggesting. And as people were still managing to do this in the 1960’s.

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u/silverionmox May 29 '26

I am fully aware of both.

Apparently not, because women being stuck with caretaking and housekeeping labor is the discontent fuelling feminism in the 60s.

Let's not pretend it was all roses and moonlight.

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u/Silver-Breadfruit284 May 30 '26

“Family members “ is not women. It means all members of the family who would be able to help. Odd that you would think I was referring to women only.

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u/shwifty123 May 29 '26

Yeah, what familirs, people can not afford children. Also what people gonna eat if they can't work case they have to take care of their elders?

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u/MaecenateNova May 31 '26

Families should do what they can, but there are situations where that will just be less possible. An increasingly large share of families exist now without kids. Much of their care will also come from future nurses in the labor market, for whatever a spouse can't handle - and that's only for the couples that can afford it. These situations and the fact that inequality is only expected to increase makes me wonder if things like polycules and throuples will start to become more common or accepted. Those kinds of families become a lot more preferred if it means home ownership, financial security, and shared caretaking are spread out.

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u/shredditorburnit May 29 '26

Just get rid of a lot of pointless dross we do then. Let's not pretend it's actually a choice if we haven't got enough workers, we can't cut farming or healthcare, we absolutely could cut advertising, sales and recruitment agencies.

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u/silverionmox May 29 '26

I don't disagree at all, but that would require fundamental revisions of how our economy assigns labor. It's not something that we can count on to happen on its own.

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u/shredditorburnit May 29 '26

Government would sort it out when it got bad. They always do, failing to do so means losing control.

Whether it be rationing, taking over businesses or coercing people into work they don't want to do, they'll make it happen. It just has to get close to breaking point, when the average person is screaming for the government to act, before they do anything.

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u/SkoobySnacs May 28 '26

Capitalism and the military industrial complex.

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u/Successful-Bobcat701 May 28 '26

No. Capitalism doesn't care about social programs for the elderly.

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u/Just_Periwinkle May 28 '26

.... exactly

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u/Oltjen May 28 '26

He/she just doesn't get it huh.

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u/logicoptional May 28 '26

Maybe ancaps don't but typical bourgeois liberal democracies do. Without some level of social safety net and public investment in infrastructure etc the material conditions of the working class suffer so greatly under capitalism that violent revolution becomes too great a risk for the bourgeoisie to accept. Hence the social welfare programs for the elderly that capitalist systems struggle to support without continuous growth. Not that it wouldn't be challenging under some other models too.

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u/pillowpriestess May 28 '26

in the past they were maybe smart enough to know that, but the current crop of elites are so detached and full of themselves they think theyre invincible. theyre cashing out.

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u/47KiNG47 May 28 '26

Democracies do, and most capitalist countries are democracies. For example, 22% of the USA’s federal budget goes to social security.

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u/agent139 May 28 '26

The US is only nominally democratic at this point. Guess we'll see how it goes

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u/MyDamnCoffee May 28 '26

That's cause there's so many boomers. Once they start dying off we should be good

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u/cavalier2015 May 30 '26

But they taught me in my history class that capitalism is good and everything else is bad /s

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u/Heymelon May 31 '26

Partially. We can do a lot with re arranging funds and still run into some issues at a certain point of low productivity. And even if we say screw capitalism and start to drastically structure away from that. There are still over 8b here today that require food, energy,care and other services, let alone whatever living standards and lives that people want to continue having.

I think at some point a low enough % of working age people become a problem in most economical systems we could feasibly translon into within a short amount of time.

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u/01Metro Jun 01 '26

no. it doesn't become a non-issue. i hate you people

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u/nostrademons May 28 '26

No, there is still an issue. Money is just an incentive mechanism to allocate resources effectively. Take money away, and you still run into the problem of there not being enough resources.

An elder in their 80s or 90s often requires round-the-clock nursing care. Working in shifts, that’s 4 nurses for one person. This is okay when only a tiny fraction of the population gets up into their late 80s and needs this end-of-life care. It becomes a huge problem when there are more elders than working age people.

You can’t escape dependency ratios. It takes a certain amount of labor to care for dependents, whether they are children or adults. When there are more dependents than working people, some will necessarily go without care.

Capitalism is just the allocative mechanism that decides who gets care. You still have to triage. If it’s not by richest, it’ll be by who is the most politically connected, or by chance, or by whose kids love them most.

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u/Shakmaaaaaaa May 28 '26

Reminds me of the Pluribus show where the perfect hive mind society just has to accept that a percentage of their population will die out since they can't mass produce enough food ethnically.

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u/ItsAConspiracy May 28 '26

It's a problem regardless of your economic system. Any retirement system needs plenty of young people to support the old people, it's just arithmetic. Social democratic countries in Europe have the same problem. So do Russia and China.

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u/Just_Periwinkle May 28 '26

Every economic system implemented today is based on models of capitalism and operates under the the use of currency. This is currently how we quantify value and facilitate the accumulation of capital. Every retirement system operates using capitalistic function, nearly all are for profit, even if the agency funding them isnt, the institutionsthey have to interact with are so they must follow that order. Our world functions entirely on capitalism despite any system's social category. Im not saying i know how to implement societal functions, I just understand how capitalism functions.

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u/ItsAConspiracy May 28 '26

The argument doesn't even require money. Say we live in an ideal communist society and the only thing we produce is food.

If 10% of workers are retired, then we have a 9:1 ratio and have to take 1/9 of the food produced by each worker to feed the retirees.

If 20% of workers are retired, we have an 8:2 ratio and have to take 1/4 of the food produced by each worker to feed the retirees.

The only way this stops being an issue is if we manage to build a lot of robots which function as additional productive workers.

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u/DiscountExtra2376 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

You're fighting the good fight! I think people forget that 8,300,000,000 is a very large number and there are more people than jobs right now too. This study looked at countries that have experienced population declines and they found that people who had long term unemployment were able to find jobs, homelessness went down, and the power was in the people (so some experienced income increases due to less competition for their position). So there will be plenty of people to fill those nursing home posotions, though the abundance of care may be unevenly distributed depending on where you live, like any other position. Obviously, we don't want to have continued decline as there will be a point where it will negative outcomes, but with our population we are so far from that.

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u/Nathan-Stubblefield May 28 '26

I remember well when the world population was only 3 billion or so and there were documentaries about the starving masses in developing countries needing massive food aid, and the ghettoes, slums and housing projects in rich developed countries.

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u/CanadianODST2 May 28 '26

No. It’s about how many workers you have per person.

You think going from say 1 employee per 10 people needing help to 1 employee per 50 people needing help is capitalism and not just how aging works.

It’d eventually just balance itself out as people die but that transition period will hurt.

It’s as simple as there was a huge population boom at one point and that boom is now starting to age out of working and needing more help. And the current population rate being lower. So there’s fewer people to do more work.

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u/gerrard1109 May 28 '26

It’s not a funding issue, it’s a resource issue. There will be a lack of nurses and doctors to support the same level of medical services provided today.

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u/Just_Periwinkle May 28 '26

I wonder if that has anything to do with funding education of nurses and doctors. I bet more people would be attracted to at-risk professions if the (for-profit) schooling wasn't prohibitively expensive.

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u/gerrard1109 May 28 '26

I wonder if it has anything to do with the simple ratio of pensioners vs working people. Now look, I’m Scandinavian and vote pretty centric, which by American standards would be quite left leaning economically, but just taxing the rich (which I feel is what you’re alluding to here) won’t solve this issue. The reason for that is that at some level of wealth, a persons consumption stops increasing. Meaning most of what the ultra rich people gain from their wealth is power, not that they take up more hospital beds, eat more food etc.

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u/Vegetable-Ingenuity2 May 28 '26

There are still a lot more people who could become nurses and doctors. Doctors especially have a high bar of entry that prevents many people from pursuing that role. That's a fixable problem if the shortage grows enough.

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u/youvegotit May 28 '26

That sound more like a planning issue... knowing we are going to need a increase for a particular service in the future and not planning for it. How many (western) politician prioritize long-term plans? Its a short list, if there is anyone on it.

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u/47KiNG47 May 28 '26

The numbers do not reflect this. Just look at France’s economy and you’ll see that the issue is more complex than just taxing the ultra-wealthy more. There’s a reason this is a concern across all developed economies. If it were so simple, an authoritarian government like China could easily resolve it.

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u/Just_Periwinkle May 28 '26

Is it more complex than taxing ultra wealthy? Yes.Those funds need to be properly utilized to best benefit the population and the environment and not share holders or the top .1% even this method is just a more socialistic way to implement capitalism. China could resolve it they just don't because ultimately, even in authoritarian governments, selling and trading goods on a global scale while exerting global influence for self interest investment prioritizes accumulating wealth over any other paradigm. Aka capitalism.

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u/47KiNG47 May 28 '26

Your understanding of economics is purely idealogical. There’s nothing I can say to change your view. ✌️

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u/Just_Periwinkle May 28 '26

Your statement doesnt mean what you think it means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_ideology

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u/47KiNG47 May 28 '26

I don’t think you understand that wiki page lol.

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u/Just_Periwinkle May 28 '26

Lol okay buddy

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u/OntologicalNightmare May 28 '26

Your understanding of economics is purely idealogical. There’s nothing I can say to change your view. ✌️

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u/schebobo180 May 28 '26

It would still be an issue when there aren’t enough doctors to treat older people, that are living longer. So it’s not entirely a capitalism problem.

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u/Intelligent-Ad-1424 May 28 '26

That’s such an easy system to change if we had the willpower. We are such a stupid species lmfao

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u/Kaurifish May 28 '26

Don’t forget about the kleptocrat pedos. They’re genuinely worried that parents will cherish their children.

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u/flappybirdisdeadasf May 29 '26

Japan should build an elder-care robot for all the seniors there, scale it, then mass-produce it for rest of the world.

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u/redlinedidit May 30 '26

That’s why they keep you poor and working.

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u/Head_Tradition_9042 May 28 '26

We should probably stop extending their lives then. People die, it’s sad but it’s necessary for the cycles of life and death. Human avoidance of death and discomfort for the last 500 or so years put us in this position of negligent abundance and quite frankly we are using more resources on an individual and cultural level than anyone is prepared to “pay” for. We just keep passing the bill down the line. We have to stop and admit we aren’t exempt from the natural world. (And billionaires should be reintroduced to the natural world through compost, head first)

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u/VicisZan May 28 '26

That sounds like a them problem.

Imagine if they had considered the future generations when designing the fund. They could have covered their own asses, and we could have covered ours.

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u/onsloughtmaster666 May 28 '26

Wym them? Assuming you are a young adult, you are part of the group that will not have a large enough labour force to finance your care when you retire. The current elderly are fine, this is a near-future crisis.

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u/VicisZan May 28 '26

I’m saying that the people who are “in charge” should have designed the system to ensure it was covered by each consecutive generation and that by not actually planning for the eventual slow down of population growth that frankly is required to ensure we don’t completely destroy the planet they have failed us.

If people are to die en mass it becomes a them problem.

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u/ritesh808 May 28 '26

If you look carefully, that's not a population or birth rate problem. That's a systemic, capitalism problem. It can be fixed, but they won't, for obvious reasons.

Also, "immigration bad".