What is Earth's true 'carrying capacity', in human terms?

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

When the deer on Vancouver Island got to dangerously high levels, Conservationists re introduced a wolf pack back into the ecology. The deer stopped eating themselves out of house and home and returned to a level of population that their island home could support. Maybe Planet Earth is over run with people, and you have to be cruel to be kind and somehow start to 'thin the Human herd'?

In some African nations, women are regularly attacked and killed by crocodiles. But people accept this as inevitable in the same way that Western people accept road traffic accidents as just an inevitable fact of life.
Neither predators nor accidents have a significant affect on population levels.

In spite of famines, plagues and other natural disasters, human populations continue to steadily rise.
The real brake on human population levels is contraception, most widely practised in the (underpopulated) West.
The UN estimate once that Earth could support 12 billion people; Conservatives in the past have tried to prioritise jobs, income and education towards white men men and regard even white women as somehow 'more expendable' or 'surplus to requirements' - so what is Earth's true carrying capacity, and how do we arrange to meet it?

Comments

Re: Actually, that has more to do with energy inputs than real carrying capacity.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

I'm not making the argument that we need 'more people' for the same reason - until we have a solid supply of energy to replace the one we currently depend on. Production of which peaked in 2005 if you exclude tarsand, 2008 if you include it.

Without a solid energy base, more population for its own self is a self defeating anti-strategy and will inevitably result in an avoidable die off.

Re: Actually, that has more to do with energy inputs than real carrying capacity.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

True but thorughout human history energy production has increased in response to population growth. Pre-industrial societies expanded/migrated opening up new frontiers and lands for development. This is how a bunch of african apes conqured the decidedly un-africa-like portions of the world.

Now we have technology.

We've barely begun to harness the raw energy resources of our own planet much-less the rest of the solar system.