Solar pumps are spreading rapidly among rural communities in many water-starved regions across India, Africa, and elsewhere. These devices can tap underground water all day long at no charge, without government scrutiny.
For now, they can be great news for farmers, with the potential to transform agriculture and improve food security. The pumps can supply water throughout the daylight hours, extending their croplands into deserts, ending their reliance on unpredictable rains, and sometimes replacing existing costly-to-operate diesel or grid-powered pumps.
But this solar-powered hydrological revolution is emptying already-stressed underground water reserves—also known as groundwaters or aquifers. The very success of solar pumps is “threatening the viability of many aquifers already at risk of running dry,” Soumya Balasubramanya, an economist at the World Bank with extensive experience of water policy, warned in January.
An innovation that initially looked capable of reducing fossil-fuel consumption while also helping farmers prosper is rapidly turning into an environmental time bomb.
There's just too many people on this planet.
Yea sure that was said years ago then farming happened. Then it was said again and thr new world was found. Then it was said again and the harber process was found.
Yes we will probably make lab grown meat and we can keep increasing our population.
But look we are farming absoulte marginal, temporary farmland.
But there is too many people. We make up a huge amount of the biomass on this planet there are just too many people and we are fucked because of it.
There doesn't seem to be any solution to it either.
Please look at past trends in fertility, and predictions of reputable, independent sources. The growth rate is already sinking fast (just in case: the rate is sinking, population is still growing). With the current/recent situation, in the short term the growth continues, but slows and mid-term there will be a reduction in population. And already today we do have the means to support this population much more sustainably, we just choose not to (we even produce food to turn it into gasoline o.O ): It would require a massive wealth/standards re-distribution, and re-distribution is socialist and thus bad (/s in case that's necessary). A possible starting point: https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-over-time
About the only solution would be barbarism. A lottery to decide who gets to live and who has to go. And I’m not willing to participate in that. But as things get desperate, there will be those who are.
China's one child policy worked well for China.
But there is no way to get a whole world, one child policy.
No need to, as countries develop, the birth rate already shrinks.