Unrelenting growth causes famine and insta-kills 2 billion – their tech evidence can’t solve because of unsustainable fossil fuels and humanity’s global reach means no adaption – transition allows non-apocalyptic birth rate decline

Briefly put, the dilemma is that given uncertainties about future technological innovations, no one can provide a persuasive prediction of human K for the next 100-200 years. Vaclav Smil notes that technological innovation in the form of cheap, industrially produced fertilizer supports roughly 40% of the human population by radically increasing agricultural yields [2]. Nevertheless, industrially produced fertilizer will remain cheap only as long as the fossil fuels used to manufacture it do. Currently, we have no viable alternative to fossil fuels, and as human ,V and per capita human resource use both increase, dwindling fossil fuels will become more expensive. As that process continues, famine will no longer result from an inability to distribute existing global food supplies, as it does today. (Global food production is sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of every human on earth; the roughly one billion people who experience malnourishment today do so because of problems with food distribution [3]). However, in a future without a viable replacement for fossil fuels or some alternative means of sustainable food production, a lack of food will lead to increased death and/or decreased reproductive rates. Smil predicts that human K would then decline roughly 40%, to somewhere in the 3.6-^.2 billion range, with the lower figure assuming that the reduction should be computed from the human A'of six billion, current in 1999 when Smil published his article, and the higher figure assuming that Smil's 40% figure would still hold in reference to today's human A'. Either scenario involves a profound decline in human population, one of the order of two billion people. Without technological advances in the areas of energy and food production and/or a radical shift in per capita resource use, the global human population must eventually fall below current levels. As a species with a global distribution, humans have extremely limited opportunities for emigrating to suitable, unoccupied habitat. At issue is the manner by which our species' population reduction will occur—in particular whether it will result primarily from increased death rates or decreased birth rates. While a population crash resulting from increased death rates might occur in a variety of disaster scenarios, population decline via decreased reproduction need not involve anything remotely apocalyptic, nor would a shift to a primarily plant-based diet. Since such a diet transfers a higher percentage of the energy captured by agriculture directly to humans rather than allowing for it to be lost by maintaining livestock, it could allow both for higher human N and more extensive resource use in other areas of lifestyle. Ultimately, all of today's environmental problems proceed from unprecedentedly high global human Af and per capita resource use. The Western, resource-intensive lifestyle has become a goal for many of the world's billions, with a range of interrelated negative consequences, from large scale production of disposable products to increased use of fossil fuels and consumption of the three protein sources whose production or harvest are the most resource-intensive: meat, dairy, and seafood. While recent trends indicate that per capita energy consumption—which can serve as a proxy for overall resource use—has decreased in many Western nations, that decrease is more than offset by increased consumption in the developing world [4].