Because it's growing at ~2% per year. Which sounds small until you realize that it means that the population doubles about every 40 years. So there will be about 4X as many people when you are old as there were when you were young.
This kind of rapid growth has only been possible in the last 60 years or so with the dawn of modern medicine and the availability of seemingly limitless amounts of hydrocarbons to produce food through cheap energy to plant and harvest and make artificial fertilizers and other chemicals derived from petroleum and natural gas.
What to do about it? The problem is that our modern economy is predicated on "growth", exponential growth...typically around 2% per year (sound familiar?). If you stop the growth, you will find yourself quickly out of a job with no way to provide for yourself. If you don't stop the growth, eventually war and famine will take care of the problem for us.
This kind of rapid growth has only been possible in the last 60 years or so with the dawn of modern medicine and the availability of seemingly limitless amounts of hydrocarbons to produce food through cheap energy to plant and harvest and make artificial fertilizers and other chemicals derived from petroleum and natural gas.
What to do about it? The problem is that our modern economy is predicated on "growth", exponential growth...typically around 2% per year (sound familiar?). If you stop the growth, you will find yourself quickly out of a job with no way to provide for yourself. If you don't stop the growth, eventually war and famine will take care of the problem for us.
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Because humanity has reached an exponentiation growth rate yet our earths resources are ever dwindling. There isnt much we can do to control it without stiff regulation at this point since systematically killing humans isnt ethical in itself. Over population will probably only correct itself in a catastrophic manor.
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sources are limited