Not possible because ceo, investors, bankers, office employees, real estate owners, managers, bureaucrats, politicians, clerks, all entertiment employees, and all their families are more than 2% and they need only one resource to survive - people that do things for them.

Not only are there enough, but the world’s population may have peaked long ago at a much lower number if things had been better distributed.

I would think it would cost more to keep the elite’s boot on the throat of the masses. Makes no sense.

Yes, absolutley without question we can. And it wouldn’t even take that much resources.

The most recent wide scale study that was done was focused entirely on the world’s “needs” being satisfied in addition to basic resources like food and water.

The conclusion: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493

Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments.

Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production should be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries.

With this approach, good lives can be achieved for all without requiring large increases in total global throughput and output.

Yes and no. It really depends on what you mean by “comfortable and happy”.

There are people living in developing areas of the world who still essentially live as peasant farmers or unskilled laborors. They live on less than $2 per day, and scratch by day by day with barely enough to eat. And some of those people are happy. And many of those people live under authoritarian, kleptocratic regimes. If everyone lived like those people and was able to be happy in the same way, then yes, the earth could sustainably support the whole population we have now and more.

On the other hand, we can imagine what would happen if this was the case. Everyone is content and happy living as a subsistance farmer, and everyone has kids at exactly the population replacement rate. Well, at some point someone will notice that they like it when other people like them. Like, they really, really like it. And they notice that other people like them more when they have and do cool things that other people want to do - like travelling to Bali or riding jet skis. So they go jet skiing in Bali so they can show all their friends in Nebraska the photos and have everyone tell them how cool they are. But a funny thing happens - while they are in Bali jet skiing, they meet a bunch of people who go paragliding in France. So now they want to go paragliding in France, since they also want these people to like them.

This is the basic concept of the social heirarchy, and it is pretty much universal across human societies. In societies with extremely rigid heirarchies, you are born into your caste and know it can never change. Some people will find comfort in this (“since I can’t change it, one less thing to worry about”), while others will hate it. But in societies with fluid social heirarchies, most people find themselves motivated to move up or at least maintain their position in the heirarchy. And since even if you don’t care about moving up, when you notice others around you moving up it feels like getting left behind. And how do you signal your position in the heirarchy? Via ostentatious displays of wealth, luxury, and niche social knowledge. Via this mechanism, the total resource consumption of humanity would gradually rise until something stopped it.

It won’t allow everyone to live comfortably and happily. The resources need to be distributed and there are many, many decisions necessary to define how the resources get distributed. If we lived in an ideal world, where everyone shared the same opinion on these decisions, then we’d all already live comfortably and happily now. But we don’t and as much as it sucks, we can’t fix being ourselves.

Yes there is. we’ve had some bad habits that are not sustainable but we generally already know a better approach that is.

We can do it if we wanted to, and we are actually making progress in transitioning to more sustainable approaches. However I’m Not as optimistic about whether we will, or whether we will before our bad practices cause newer and greater challenges

Depends, there are extremely happy people with nothing, and depressed billionaires wanting more than exists.

When we’re talking raw resources that can potentially be turned into things needed to provide for the people, then yes there is easily enough. Today you have a lot of people living on a subsistence level, but also a ton of potential arable land, resources to be mined, production to be refocused that can provide for said people.

However, unless we get rid of capitalism (tired trope but hopefully I can provide substance below), then even in the best case scenario of how capitalism can develop from here on will this idea of “providing for everyone” remain impossible.

The main issue here isn’t “the rich” or them not being taxed (which others blame in the thread), but how capitalist mode of production fundamentally organizes production - goods aren’t produced to satisfy human needs (use value), but strictly for profit (exchange value) as commodities, to be bought and sold.

If you have millions of malnourished lower-class people and a million middle and upper strata demanding more luxuries, the latter’s demand will always be prioritized while the former’s will until things get desperate that production for them finally leads to desired margins and profit rates. Why produce cheap commodities whose main buyers have very limited purchasing power (therefore a low cap on growth) when a business can produce a commodity that turns more profit and whose buyers are more wealthy, leading to more potential growth?

That’s not to mention overproduction, the need of a reserve army of labor which are unemployed people kept on a brink of poverty to compete in the labor market to keep wages down and therefore profit up, and many other funny things. To change this fundamentally, one would have to ditch production for profit and instead replace it with production to satisfy human needs via economic planning - anything short of that is not enough and results in “capitalism coated in X”.

They key to your question is “sustainably”. We can support 8 billion humans without poverty for a time. We can support 10 billion for a shorter time. There is no way to support 8 billion sustainably.

A sustainable civilization uses zero fossil fuels, and recycles 100% of metals and engages in virtually no mining. Our civilization enjoyed a energy metabolism based on fossil fuels with an energy return of 100-1 in early 1900’s. That spawns phenominal growth and automation. The easy oil is gone now, so we’re living on 20-1 EROEI and declining quickly. Renewables give a roughly 3-1 eroei. Think about all the things civilization will have to prioritize to live on a 3-1 metabolism. Monster truck rallies, NASCAR and Jetset NBA teams flying around the country eating beef hamburgers served via drive-thru (sic) to your SUV is gonzo.

A sustainable world leaves 50% of land in a state of nature, untouched by human hands to preserve biodiversity. The number 1 occupation is permaculture gardiner/farmer and we live in ultra low energy passivehouses. Everyone eats local and transport of goods is done only by sail. No more fossil fueled powered combine harvesters.

As our micro and nano plastics crises is showing us, we would have to give up synthetics like polyester for clothing. Whatever population we have would be wearing cotton, wool, hemp and leather or their birthday suit. No more single serving anything.

I could go on, but you get the idea. How many humans can be supported depends on the consumption of resources allowed by society and the equality permitted within that society. There is no exact number as there are a ton of variables.

A mostly equal society living a comfortable but austere lifestyle could probably support 1 billion which is roughly dialing back life to before the industrial revolution. Say 1800’s While the planet is much degraded since then you could argue the number is much lower, but we have a lot more knowledge and skill today about chemistry, medicine, sanitation etc.

At the same time, are we still running MRI’s in modern hospitals? What kind of pharmaceuticals can be run sustainably when your average person is a permaculturist farmer. There will naturally be some specialization. Will we choose doctors or soldiers? Do we have a militaries and political factions? That will consume an enormous amount of our sustainable energy and materials budget, thus fewer lives can be supported withing your sustainability budget.

In my personal opinion, 500 million or less would be optimal.

We currently produce food for about 10 billion people and waste about half of it. What does that tell you?

So, without animal products, the answer is yes. with animal products the answer is no, then we’re way over the sustainability threshold. It is so inefficiënt and costs so much land and resources that the argument that the wealthy are hoarding resources is looking merely like a small problem in comparison.

Besides. Would humanity ever actually be happy and fulfilled when millions of animals have to suffer to get there? I would argue, not actually, not on a deep level. Superficially, perhaps.

Define comfortable and happy?

Because the most uncomfortable and unhappiest people I know… are the richest. They are have millions but are still desperately trying to get more money and feel no matter how large their lifestyle is, it is inadequate compared to someone else who has it ‘better’.

All of human history exists because we solved scarcity.

The past 12,000 years has been trying to convince the hoarding assholes to stop making life shitty for everyone else.

You shouldn’t just be mad, you should feel the injustice of it all in your ancestral bones.

That depends on the definition of comfortably and happy. Everyone probably couldn’t live at the level of an upper middle class American, for example.