Humans Will Need Two Earths By 2030 738
An anonymous reader writes "A recent report warns that humans are overusing the resources of the planet and will need two Earths by the year 2030. The Living Planet Report tells that the demands on natural resources have doubled in the past 50 years and are now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half."
Noo! (Score:3, Funny)
I told you not to take the axiom of choice!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well, we DO have both "Earth 2" and "Bizarro Earth", right?
I read through much of this thread, and am pretty well convinced that we must be living on the cube-shaped alternative...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair, the Banach-Tarski paradox [wikipedia.org] you're referring to uses 3D Euclidean space [wikipedia.org] instead of the curved Minkowski spacetime [wikipedia.org] of General Relativity. I'm certain the Lebesque measure [wikipedia.org] (the key ingredient to Banach-Tarski, along with the Axiom of Choice [wikipedia.org]) can be extended to that spacetime, and I'm pretty sure it can be used to generate the same type of paradox. That might actually have interesting physical consequences for the theory, which, incidentally, would be entirely avoided by quantizing [wikipedia.org] it. Considering how much most mathematicians like the Axiom of Choice, this could be a great (mathematician's) argument against GR and for Quantum.
Objects that can only be specified using the Axiom of Choice involve an infinite number of arbitrary choices. This means they have infinite Kolmogorov complexity (i.e. it's impossible to write a finite computer program that outputs a representation of the object).
That doesn't really square well with my (limited) understanding of physics where infinities are always tucked away behind event horizons and every interesting quantity is strictly bounded.
Of course, throwing out the Axiom of Choice also throws out
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, no, no. Lebesgue integrals aren't *needed* for modern physics, they're just convenient. There are alternatives like the Kurzweil-Henstock integral that can replace Lebesgue with extra properties. All the usual integral
Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
.. and we've run out of ipv4 addresses "in about a year" for the last decade or so..
and people will probably pay about as much heed to this warning as they do to ipv4 exhaustion.
AND just like ipv4 exhaustion, nothing serious is going to be done about this until stuff actually starts falling apart. And by falling apart I don't mean charts and graphs, I mean "The Day After Tomorrow" falling apart. And even then...
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
What Carter was discussing was resources in the USA, at projected increased rates of consumption. Since we passed peak oil in the continental USA in the 70s, this was not inaccurate. I don't think it ever occurred to him that we were collectively such self-absorbed greedy obtuse little wussies that we would let ourselves become dependent on the Arabs, Russians and Mexicans for the life blood of our economic viability and strategic safety (i.e. Oil).
Surprise!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, I could have sworn that the US still has the worlds largest supply of oil shale. Plus oil sand. Plus coal. Plus plenty of offshore oil, and oil in Alaska. I guess "peak oil" to you just means "we have less than we used to"?
To most people, "peak oil" is the point at which production is at a peak. After this point, a country (or the world) is _producing_ less then they used to. Unless the oil shales have reversed the trend in the US, it does seem like that point has been reached.
A relevant graph from wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
lol. Well, yeah, that's true. In that case, the US also reached peak-nuclear a few decades ago. However, if that's your definition, it's just as useless as the one I suggested.
Re:Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm. I'm a little confused by your assumption that everyone has their own personal definition of what "peak oil" means. I'm fairly certain that there is only one accepted meaning for the term, however useful or useless. I mean, I'm all for refining the usage of words and technical terminology - but not to the point of having individual relationships with words.
I don't find myself discussing peak oil very often, but if I wanted a term that meant "the point at which production starts to decline" then I think it would come in pretty useful....
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
And that is what Peak X specifically refers to: An inexorable decline in production & major increase in prices that results as initial easily accessible supplies are depleted.
Re:Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing is, "economically extracted" is subjective term that changes as technology advances and we discover new cheap ways for extracting previously inaccessible oil. This is a process that has been going on for decades and will continue for decades more to come. Particularly since we haven't even yet exhausted all the sources of EASY to access oil yet. Most of the USA's oil is locked up in federal lands that the Eco-morons wo
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The last time oil got so expensive as to spur major interest in oil shales & tars, it was between $100 and $130/bbl and the price o
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's not a good analogy. We can ramp up nuclear any time we choose.
And we can ramp up oil any time we choose. If you're going to ignore the fiscal and political implications of ramping up nuclear plant construction, I can just as easily ignore the fiscal implications of ramping up oil production.
Re:Bull (Score:4, Interesting)
You're still not using the term correctly. As mentioned by others, "peak oil" concerns the point of maximum production (extraction) of oil. That is, when the rate at which we pull oil from the ground begins to decline.
What you're talking about is "oil depletion", i.e. where the physical supply of oil gets low.
These two conditions might be linked by circumstances, but they don't mean the same thing, obviously.
Re:Bull (Score:4, Insightful)
Oil shales and oil sands are a disaster to the environment. Nothing could be more destructive to the environment than the massive strip mining it would take to recover that kind of oil.
Coal is so nasty that all use of coal should be illegal and reason to kill off any nation allowing its use. If you burn coal you will saturate the soil with mercury among other things.
And you fail to take into account such issues as running out of drinking water. Frankly water could get so expensive that the price of food will exceed your ability to purchase it.
There is simply no way to keep going without some deeply radical changes even if they ruin your expectations in life.
Re:Bull (Score:5, Informative)
He's using the standard definition of "peak oil", you know when production rate hits its maximum. Which has exactly nothing to do with how much is in the ground - it's how much is being extracted.
So here's the chart: http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS1&f=A [eia.gov]
It's seems pretty obvious that peak oil for the US was in 1970. Sure we may ramp up production in the future in which case that'll just be a local maxima and not the actual peak. But it has been 40 years so far...
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
What Carter was discussing was resources in the USA
[citation needed]
Those talks on peak oil production for 1970 were based on M. King Hubbert's theory for the US lower 48 states. With respect to the lower 48 states, he was accurate: http://dieoff.org/page1916.gif [dieoff.org]
Funny, I could have sworn that the US still has the worlds largest supply of oil shale. Plus oil sand. Plus coal. Plus plenty of offshore oil, and oil in Alaska. I guess "peak oil" to you just means "we have less than we used to"?
With the US as a net importer and a dwindling supply of domestic oil I'm not sure where you're going with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves [wikipedia.org]
The United States #1 source of oil is Canada. That oil comes from traditional wells that are drying up and more recently oil sands that are expanding production. However, the oil sands are far from a recent discovery. They have been well known since oil became a commodity but were left untouched because it is incredibly expensive to recover.
That fact that companies are paying big bucks to develop oil repositories that are expensive only proves that they're running out of traditional oil... and they're heading into the tail end of the curve.
- If you need to burn half the equivalent energy in natural gas to extract the oil from the sand as you recover in oil energy... ...then something is wrong.
OR
- If you need to drill offshore in water so deep it becomes a risk...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This is somewhat true.
We are out of $30 a barrel oil. Some other countries still have $10 a barrel oil.\
However, oil takes on the price of the most expensive barrel pumped and sold.
The U.S. has a ton of oil that would take about $90 a barrel to get out.
And other alternatives at $90 to $100 a barrel equivalent price.
Still, population is getting too high. Ocean fishing areas are out and out collapsing (not fishable-- doesn't mean lifeless- would recover completely in 20-30 years if fishing was banned in tho
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Partially. I have friends who have an autistic child.
Among the more successful therapies were horse training and changing her diet.
Re:Bull (Score:4, Informative)
It's not about *quantity* of oil it's about *rate*. A lot of naysayers seem to think that shale and tar sands are just like Texas sweet crude, stick a straw in it and out it comes, but it's not. Shale is basically rock. It costs a lot of money and takes a lot of effort to get oil out of this shale, and when you do, you just can't extract it at a very high rate.
If you had infinite oil it wouldn't matter one bit if you could not extract it at a sufficient rate to feed the consumers of this oil.
To contrast the *rate* at which you can extract oil from tar sands and other euphemistically named "unconventional sources", consider this. The entirety of Canada's tar sands, with something like 1.7 trillion barrels of proven reserves, after decades of investment is producing at a rate less than Mexico's Cantarell field did at its peak. Cantarell field is just *0.1%* of the size. 1/1000th of the size.
Extracting from shales and tar sands is also highly polluting and energy intensive. For each barrel of oil energy you invest in, say, Saudi Arabia, you get about 30 barrels of oil back. For Canadian tar sands, one barrel of oil's worth of energy only yields 3 to 6 barrels of production. Shale is likely to be a lot lower if it can even make the break even point at all. If it can't break even there's no point even mining for it.
just like "Day After Tomorrow? (Score:5, Informative)
And by falling apart I don't mean charts and graphs, I mean "The Day After Tomorrow" falling apart.
So, superstorms that freeze the Earth, and CGI wolves?
Re:Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
I rather doubt we will have a "day after tomorrow", things don't happen like that. Instead I see a mechanization of our nature. For example, imagine a sort of nature where things are completely recycled? Sound far fetched? Consider how Switzerland is essentially self-sufficient in copper. Does Switzerland have copper mines? Nope not even close. Copper can be easily recycled and hence Switzerland recycles their own copper. This goes towards rare earths, etc, etc.
While many people believe that we waste, waste, waste, there are many pockets of the world that are now becoming adapt at living with little. Classic example is Israel. Israel can grow crops with water amounts that makes everybody else blush with embarrassment. That is the future...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As we begin to run lower on a given resource it becomes increasingly more viable to recycle it or look for alternatives.
Quite so. Supply and demand will sort everything out perfectly, as a famous 1973 documentary film explained [imdb.com].
Re:Bull (Score:5, Informative)
The main problem is with what economists call externalities. [wikimedia.org] Waste byproducts, pollution, resource depletion, etc. are all negative externalities that aren't immediately reflected in the cost of a good or service. Policy decisions, though, such as pollution regulation, manufacturer takeback requirements, and so on can internalize those costs in the final selling price of a good or service.
This is where regulation meets the marketplace, and how proper regulations and policies can work together with market forces to drive sustainability. But, it does require forces outside the market (such as government regulation) to internalize those costs so that they get accounted for up front.
For example, I actually would be in favor of increased fuel taxes, with the money allocated directly to greenhouse gas abatement programs, whether it's planting tree farms or sequestering carbon by some other means, or converting power plants away from coal.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I agreed with you until you used the word "require". A free-market does not require a strictly-outside force to enforce internalization of externality costs, at least in theory.
Example: An externality of oil-discove
Re:Bull (Score:4, Insightful)
In the absence of the regulation, the pollution is a negative externality that affects the people not interested in the widgets. The widget producer has imposed an external cost on people not interested in widgets. If those people push back (ie. require the widget producer himself to absorb the cost through regulation or other means) so that the cost of cleaning up the pollution is included in the cost of the widget, then that cost is internalized.
Using your example: If you start and end with clean air and clean water, there's no transaction with a cost to externalize to the widget producer. If you achieve that goal by regulating the widget producer, you've merely prevented the widget producer from externalizing a cost. You haven't externalized one of your costs onto him. You didn't have a cost to externalize. "Keeping the air clean" is not a transaction.
Therefore, calling the regulation an external cost to the widget producer in this case is incorrect. An externality is something that doesn't show up in the final price of the good or service. Forcing an externalized cost back into the price internalizes the cost. The force itself isn't not an externality.
A very good point also.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bull (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
While technology might very well "save us" once again, it's a bit audacious to assume that it always will in the future. Civilizations have fallen before, and all of them could probably have argued in a similar way before the end: It has worked fine up until now, so why shouldn't it continue to?
I actually think energy is one of the easier problems to solve -- solar cells will drop in price as demand increases and technology advances, and the sun provides orders of magnitude more power than we have use for at the moment. But if you look at almost any other natural resource, demands are increasing at an exponential rate. Since resources are limited, it is impossible for this to continue for very long. I have no doubt that society will adapt, the question is how disruptive the changes will be. At the moment, it appears that some prominent economies think that even reducing oil consumption is out of the question due to the economical effects it would have.
Re:Bull (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bull (Score:4, Interesting)
What I don't understand is not the future projection, but the PRESENT claim: "Demand is... now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half."
If that statement were true, we'd be starving (needing 1.5 earths to survive).
Clearly the fellow has no idea what he's talking about.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
If that statement were true, we'd be starving (needing 1.5 earths to survive). Clearly the fellow has no idea what he's talking about.
What he means is that we need 1.5 Earths to survive in the long-term.
Think of the Earth like a retirement fund. You can take out more than the interest earned each year, but that means at some point in the future the account will be at zero. In this case, we are doing things like cutting down old-growth forests to make more farmland, overfishing, and doing other things that the Earth cannot replenish or repair on a human time scale. Unfortunately, when the Earth account balance hits zero, losing our home has a much broader meaning than having to move into a nursing home.
Re:Bull (Score:4, Insightful)
OMG ur right - teh author is an idiot who failed first year logic!
Actually, no - he means that demand is outstripping what the Earth can sustainably provide. Ie, humanity grows a fair amount of food, but only at the cost of chopping down huge swathes of forest every year. And in fact, 1 billion+ people are starving or malnourished.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's simple. Take copper for example. Picking a nice easy round number just for demonstration, say we use 1Kg of copper per person per year, and we have 6.75Bln people on the planet. Unfortunately, if we average out all the copper trees to growing 1Kg of copper per tree per year, we see that we only have 4.5Bln copper trees. This is why we're having to roll out fiber optics for broadband instead of copper, because the copper trees are really tired. Why don't we just planet more copper trees? Well we are, bu
wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Technology has not progressed a whole lot this generation and its currently not moving at the exponential rate the population is.
Projections are limited (can't predict the future) and hindsight is easy to be smug about. If everybody was to live the American way, we ran out of earths long ago. If everybody lived the EU way, we'd be 3x over the limit.
You blow this off; thinking somehow new tech will save us-- we'll buy it and then TRASH it and newer tech will save the day... The cycle doesn't go on forever.
It
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The cellar doesn't have a government, thus a true free market solution can arise: the strongest economist slaughters and eats the rest one by one, preferably with good red wine - this is wine cellar, right? It would be barbarous to expect such civilized people to resort to cannibalism without wine.
This proves, once again, that the true nature of humanity can only be realized when the weak are not coddled by the so
Re:Bull (Score:4, Informative)
Israel can grow crops with water amounts that makes everybody else blush with embarrassment.
Have they started using Palestinian blood then?
Israeli propaganda aside, you have to remember that Israel makes a practice of annexing orchards, houses, farms, etc.. and that's hardly a model for self-sufficiency. Not every nation in the world can demand lebensraum.
Israel diverts all of Palestinian Jordan River water and 87% of Palestinian ground water to the state of Israel proper and the illegal Jewish settlers. The remaining 13% of Palestinian ground water is distributed back to 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.
Israel cuts off Palestinian access to water by destroying wells (Between 2000 and mid-2006, Israel destroyed 244 of Gaza's wells and destroyed 6.2 miles of culinary water lines); destroying all Palestinian pumps and ditches accessing the Jordan River; destroying cisterns and irrigation systems; preventing the construction of new water infrastructure; preventing the repair of out-dated infrastructure; preventing Palestinians from drilling new wells; and hindering access through 'security measures' such as roadblocks, closures, checkpoints, and the wall.
The route of Israel's security wall delineates the eastern boundary of high groundwater production from the Western Aquifer. The wall fences those areas of high water production into Israel, closing off Palestinian access to more than 95% of their groundwater resources, over 630 million cubic meters of water per year.
Since 1967, not one permit has been granted for the drilling of new Palestinian controlled wells in the largest and most productive of all the aquifer basins, the Western Aquifer.
Palestinians pay from four to twenty times more for water than Jewish settlers pay, but are restricted to 10 to 60 liters of water per day, less than the 100 liters-per-day minimum standard set by the World Health Organization. Jewish settlers enjoy from 274 to 450 liters of water per day.
Five thousand Jewish settlers living in the Jordan Valley consume the equivalent of 75% of the water used by the entire West Bank population of over 2.5 million Palestinians.
Crops grown in the fertile Jordan Valley of the West Bank, are grown in Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory.
http://bdsmovement.net/?q=node/519 [bdsmovement.net]
The Israeli military shoots unarmed farmers
http://palsolidarity.org/2010/06/12759/ [palsolidarity.org]
30% of Gaza's arable farmland, and some of it's most fertile, lies within the 'buffer zone'.
Farmers attempting to cultivate land in the 'buffer zone' are routinely met with barrages of live ammunition and occasional artillery shells.
Since 2007 Israel has also banned Gazan farmers from selling their crops abroad, where they might compete with Israeli produce
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11414.shtml [electronicintifada.net]
They are also facing further restrictions on the types and amounts of products they can grow.
Palestinians must obtain permits from Israel to grow crops. Permits are granted based on whether Palestinian crops compete with Israeli agricultural production.
http://icahdusa.org/download/10 [icahdusa.org]
Re:Demographics will tell the tale (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, I live in Cairo, Egypt at the moment. It's a city of 20M people and growing bigger every day. This is the future for most of the world, where most of the growth is happening.
And if these cultures don't straighten out their act, they'll also be the places where most of the population die-off occurs. Further, population growth doesn't equal economic growth. Most of the places with negative population growth still have positive economic growth.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Nuclear power is proliferating, but even that will not compensate for increases in conventional pollution of cars and electrical generation"
And the fact that it's not renewable. Sure there's plenty uranium left, but the concentrations at which you will find it in rock is dropping considerably, because we go for the easiest to get stuff first.
"They will continue to lose their competitiveness to the US, South America, China"
Perhaps. The other option is that because we look after our people better, we don't n
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
With Ipv4, NAT gave us a reprieve, which is why we have managed up until now.
With the Earth, don't expect any such workaround.
That said, what TFA refers to isn't doomsday by 2030, but that in 2030, we will be using renewable resources twice as fast as they can be renewed. Which means that we are going to run out of lotsastuff one day, but exactly when is hard to estimate.
(And perhaps even foolish to estimate -- any estimate is going to be scrutinized by the reactionary right, who will search for any error,
Re:Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
With the Earth, don't expect any such workaround.
Yes we can, and are actively working towards them even as I type this.
The workarounds include higher efficiency devices (e.g. iPad/Mac Mini/laptop instead of a massive gaming desktop), lowered consumption (when gasoline hits $5/gal in the US, odds are excellent that we'll all be driving less), and a different way of providing the goods (locally-sourced and produced foods instead of container-ship shipped, etc).
Long-term, this also includes starting colonies off-Earth, or at least having commercial space mining and production (which in turn expands the resource pool for a lot of things, from energy to minerals, to living space when we start looking centuries ahead). We're doing space tourism now (well, not-quite-LEO), and with commercial space industry warming up, it is not impossible (or even improbable) to consider viable commercial space entities making regular trips up and back by 2030. Consider that the first airplane flight happened in 1903, and we had commercial passenger flight by 1930.
This has nothing to do with "left" or "right", and using such designations will only muddy the water (and degenerate the debate). Please refrain from doing so.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The workarounds include higher efficiency devices (e.g. iPad/Mac Mini/laptop instead of a massive gaming desktop)
The iPad is a mobile device - the user is on the move.
The mobile gadget or mini HTPC doesn't replace the more capable full size laptop or desktop. It is your second or third, fourth, fifth or sixth purchase of an Internet enabled appliance - which include all your e-book readers, smartphones, video game consoles, HDTVs and so on.
The infrastructure needed to suppport all this is not trivial.
The g
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Second law of thermodynamics; Learn it, Live it, Love it.
When you drop an egg on the ground, the raw materials that constituted the egg are not destroyed, but the egg is no longer useful. It would require a considerable amount of energy to reconstruct the egg into a useful condition. This is called ENTROPY.
Nature stores and makes use of energy in various forms, including fossil fuels, but also in the form of minerals etc-- Using these resources improperly destroys the resource faster than it is produced.
EG, it takes nature X years to produce a large tree; Cutting it down takes only a few minutes. Once the tree is used, you don't magically get a new tree from the resources after they have been processed. Those resources have to be broken down (requires energy), recirculated in the environment (requires energy), and reconstituted as a new tree by another seedling (requires lots of energy and time.)
In the meantime, humans are greedily hunting for energy sources to exploit. the exploitation of these energy sources causes another problem; The earth can only eliminate thermal waste (biproduct of entropy) at a maximum theoretical rate- (the rate it can radiate that heat into space as IR radiation)
Right now, "Global Warming" is a 2 factor beast-- the consumption of energy resources produces a biproduct that is energy intensive to recycle by mother nature, which also has the added effect of reducing the rate at which the earth expels waste heat into space. This has the net effect of causing the earth to heat up.
Now, if we couple this with some of the proposed solutions to the energy crisis (Space based solar power, Fusion energy, etc--) we end up creating NEW problems:
Space based power: We increase the amount of energy reaching the planet, and consequently increase the baseline thermal energy production of the planet. This will cause global warming faster than you can imagine. The earth's current temperature (sans global warming effects) is the result of an equilibrium of energy in VS energy out. Fucking with that causes the equilibrium to shift, so dont do it.
Having opinions before you actually look at numbers cause errors. Don't do it.
According to the first website I found on the topic [einsteinyear.org] the amount of energy humans is used is 1/6000th of the amount that the earth gets from the sun.
With any normal increase of the temperature of a black body, the amount of radiation will also increase (by the fourth power of the absolute temperature; the Stefan-Boltzmann law). The average temperature of the earth is somewhere in the 13C to 15C range (according to another quick se
Re:Bull (Score:5, Informative)
Right now, "Global Warming" is a 2 factor beast-- the consumption of energy resources produces a biproduct that is energy intensive to recycle by mother nature, which also has the added effect of reducing the rate at which the earth expels waste heat into space. This has the net effect of causing the earth to heat up.
That's BS - the second "byproduct heat" is negligible. Computations on the back of a napkin:
Result: the heat created by the humans is at most 0.04% of what the Earth dissipates into space naturally.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of my post wasn't that the technological workarounds that have held off ipv4 exhaustion directly translate into resource depletion.
Although it really does apply. As a resource becomes more scarce (water, gas, ipv4 address space) there becomes more incentive to find workarounds.
In other words.. recycling might become the NAT of earths resources. But no one is even going to think about it until we actually start running out of something (even if you've got a pile of evidence saying we _will_ run out
Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The myths are true, we're just really good at pushing back problems until we absolutely can't no more, at which point things screw up epically.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Is space on the earth infinite? No. And an individual human's need for space is much greater than zero. Given those two fact there is a limit, just on living space, for how many humans the earth can support. Now, what that limit is exactly isn't known for sure, it's a moving target because technology keeps pushing it higher and higher but there definitely is a limit. Same with water, and food production. You can squeeze more and more efficiency out of the system but eventually you're going to hit a limit, e
Re:Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Packing everyone into 8x10 cells, isn't an acceptable solution to me. Any solution that doesn't allow for wide open space of undeveloped land, wilderness, forests, jungles, deserts, is suboptimal. We could cram everyone into skyscrapers that cover the entire earth in one giant planet wide city, but what kind of life would that be? Quality of life and quality of our living space are important things to consider. Humans were not meant to be packed like sardines into crowded cities with no where to escape to. The health effects both known and unknown would be profound.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Packing everyone into 8x10 cells, isn't an acceptable solution to me. Any solution that doesn't allow for wide open space of undeveloped land, wilderness, forests, jungles, deserts, is suboptimal.
Plug everyone into some kind of Second Life (or Matrix or 13th Floor or whatever) and you could do both.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They're not refuted - we're adapting, finding ways to both postpone the inevitable, and spread the impact out over time.
You mentioned "peak oil". We are coping by various means, including (but not limited to):
- Processing oil from wells that earlier weren't considered economically viable, but now are with the oil price increase. This directly flattens out the peak.
- Replacing oil-based power plants with other sources.
- Reducing the amount of oil used per engine. Back in the 70s, 12 MPG was pretty much st
Another low point (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the purpose of this post? What does it even mean? What is the purpose of posting a link to a nebulous summary of a highly suggestive report on an extremely politically charged subject on a site that bills itself "News for Nerds"?
Re:Another low point (Score:5, Insightful)
Sensationalism. Trolling. Flamebait.
Welcome to the machine.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly. The post is crap.
Too bad about all that crying wolf (Score:2)
Peak Oil not Oil Running Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Quick, someone say "we're using the resources at a larger rate than the earth can provide" ! before the cornucopians come out of their caves to declare infinite growth through infinite resources.
The bottle maybe big but the spout is killing us.
Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
This was soured from a WWF report. The same WWF that has been making dire predictions form day 1, and even managed to get their non-peer-reviewed policy papers (it isn't even science) into the IPCC reports. Wherein, recently, the IPCC has has to issue retractions for it not being up to scientific scrutiny.
In short, nothing to see here, move along. It's just WWF campaigning for more money.
It may happen one day... (Score:4, Informative)
But I still remember in the 70s how oil was going to run out by 1990; we seem to have had only twenty years' supply of oil left for as long as I remember. Similarly, half the world was going to have starved by 2000, but instead we've seen population continue to increase.
The hair-shirt left have cried disaster so many times that it's impossible to take them seriously anymore.
Re:It may happen one day... (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, the radical (on either side of a debate) always have a knack for exaggeration. This shouldn't deter us from taking at least some measures towards better efficiency and at the same time expanding resources available.
Re:It may happen one day... (Score:5, Informative)
You are probably referring to Hubbert's Peak [wikipedia.org]. His prediction was for peak production in the US, and was mostly on target (which is admirable for a prediction 50 year ahead). The curve has been adapted to several regions, with correct predictions. The peak global production, using Hubbert's curve, is predicted for 2005, and it seems to have indeed ocurred [doe.gov].
Mind you, peak production isn't the same as "running out". There's still a lot of oil out there. It's just that now it's clear we must find an alternative, and we have a couple of decades left.
Regulation of births is needed. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Regulation of births is needed. (Score:4, Insightful)
Regulate them by increasing affluence. Worked for Europe and the US (and various other first-world regions of the world...)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But increasing affluence means more use of resources.
Re: (Score:3)
WTF? How did this neo-Nazi crap get modded "insightful"? Dismissing eugenics not on moral grounds, but on the grounds that we won't get it right, and instead favoring war and plague to weed out the "unfit"? I can only hope this is a troll and the mod's finger slipped...
Why?! (Score:5, Funny)
Why, slashdot, do you insist on posting article after article wrote by Al Gore and the global conspirators of Climate Gate. Clearly if just drill in the Arctic it will solve ALL of our environmental woes.
Link to the actual report... (Score:3, Informative)
Consider the source (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, the Zoological Society of London [zsl.org] and the World Wildlife Fund [wwf.org] are a bunch of hardcore animal-loving animal enablers giving aid and comfort to our animal enemies. It's like, whose side are they on anyway?
Shameless self promotion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shameless self promotion (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The overpopulation myth [simplyshrug.com]. Bottom line - we could provide for every single person living on this planet with just the resources inside the US. Never mind the rest of the world. We're a LONG way from overpopulation... We have a distribution - not resource - problem to solve.
If people were boxes that needed to be stored in a warehouse, then the math would be solid. But that's simply not the case. Furthermore, even if such a state is possible and sustainable, that in no way means that it's desirable. I don't want to live in Texas with the population density throughout the entire state as dense as NYC. That sounds horrific.
Another thing that is completely neglected is future population growth. The reason people like you think that overpopulation is a myth is because you're only t
Re:Shameless self promotion (Score:4, Interesting)
We don't have a distribution or a resource problem, we have a starvation problem.
Distribution results in starvation. There is plenty of food in the world, it just is not distributed properly.
When I've gone on humanitarian aid trips to Haiti, Sudan, Mozambique, Bangladesh, and a half-dozen other shitholes around the world, the issue hasn't been one of getting supplies and food IN to the country, and getting it there in sufficient quantities. The issue has been making sure it goes to those who need it, rather than those who desire it.
For most of the starving world, food is a weapon used by the local thug/"political leader" to wield against the people and enforce their will. Most of the time, the ONLY reason food and medicine was properly dispensed and rationed and CONSUMED was because of those firearms carried by the soldiers around us.
You want to know how to solve the starvation problem? Use an assault rifle in the hands of a trained soldier and kill the scum who choose to enforce starvation for their own sociopathic, twisted pleasure or gain. A bullet to the head of a few dozen scum would quickly change the way most of those thugs operate and at least food supplies would get through.
Yes, that's not politically correct, and I guess many would call it uncivilized. But most of those thugs and cretins care not for Western reasoning or compassion. They get the food, drink, money and women as they want, without repercussion.
Why should the want to give up power and control - to make the West feel happy? Heck no! They WANT pictures of starving orphans, of emaciated women on the TV because they know - they KNOW - that we in West will spend billions of dollars to send food and drugs and equipment to "solve the problem". And they can sit back and take it for their own pleasure and use and power.
You either write the people off - ignore the suffering - or you simply execute the bastards in charge. There is no other solution.
It's not starvation - there is plenty of food. It's distribution. From thugs stealing food shipments to countries erecting insane barriers to the import/export of food. Distribution - not production - is the problem.
look up (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, of course. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course. Human civilizations are about 3000 years old, but industrial civilization is only 200 years old. Only in the past 100 years has large-scale resource extraction, large enough to make a big dent in potential supply, been feasible. The really rich ores, like veins of copper with over 1% metal, are long gone. Over the next century, lots of stuff is going to run out. Oil production peaked in 2005. [doe.gov] There hasn't been a major new energy source in the last half century; just improvements on previous ones.
The "free market will solve all problems" crowd was insisting that peak oil would never happen. But it did. The price of oil has tripled without an increase in supply.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course. Human civilizations are about 3000 years old, but industrial civilization is only 200 years old. Only in the past 100 years has large-scale resource extraction, large enough to make a big dent in potential supply, been feasible. The really rich ores, like veins of copper with over 1% metal, are long gone. Over the next century, lots of stuff is going to run out. Oil production peaked in 2005. There hasn't been a major new energy source in the last half century; just improvements on previous ones.
So what? Recycling alone handles virtually all of that hypothetical supply problem. And no new energy source in the last half century? Let me break it to you, there hasn't been a new energy source in the past 4.6 or so billion years yet we have yet to need another source of energy.
The "free market will solve all problems" crowd was insisting that peak oil would never happen. But it did. The price of oil has tripled without an increase in supply.
The first sentence isn't true. Peak oil is quite consistent with free market theory. And the "tripling" in price of oil is the price signal that will encourage people to seek alternatives to oil.
heh... (Score:2)
freudian slip there, lefty? Think you meant to say "birth control"....
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
still refuse to discuss population control.
Not true. There are a few that advocate genocide.
Re:And the religions of the world.... (Score:5, Insightful)
still refuse to discuss population control.
And so do the non religious, unfortunately. Worse, they seem intent on subsidizing the fecundity of the stupid at the expense of the responsible.
Re:And the religions of the world.... (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, "growth" has become something of a religion itself. In public discourse and political debate, no one ever talks about stability; the need to "grow the economy" is taken as a "given", a commandment from on high. If a company's sales are merely stable from one quarter or year to the next, they are considered unsuccessful (or would be if the economy as a whole weren't currently shrinking). If a country's or state's or city's population isn't increasing, that's considered a sign of problems. There will come a day when that trend stops, whether it's in 2030 or probably much later. The only question is whether we'll bring population growth to a "controlled landing" or to a crash.
Re:And the religions of the world.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Affluence = population control. Note how Europe and the US are experiencing all of their population growth now due to immigration? It doesn't require mandatory birth control measures (or enforced abortion laws, etc) to keep the population down.
All you really have to do is provide the masses with a better form of retirement plan than: 'have a shitload of kids so that at least some will live long enough to care for you when you get old'.
Re:Then what? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's actually easy to do nowadays - a new car no longer means a 2mpg V-8 weighing in at 2 tons of steel. If you look at Japan, you see a population that makes do with a whole hell of a lot less than the typical wealthy family in, say, Eastern Europe. The trick is to bring up the affluence by generating a demand for efficient goods.
Re:And the religions of the world.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Did it ever occur to you that most major religions discourage birth control (and especially abortion) because it blocks the production of life - something they esteem to hold in the highest regard? Mind you, I'm only discussing the concept, not the practitioners.
Re: (Score:2)
One child per couple one would lower the population over a few generations to more sustainable number.
Perhaps you should ask the Chinese how wonderful 'population control' has been? First Mao demands more kids to fight the EVIL AMERICANS, and their population explodes. Then they decide that actually they don't have the ability to feed that many people so they'd better stop and demand that Chinese couples only have one child. Now they have a rapidly aging population with about 50,000,000 more men than women.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
an an entire generation that has no aunts, or uncles, no siblings, and a tradition of the children taking care of the parents in old age.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
you do realize that sometimes adapting and surviving might include the fall of modern society and a return to agrarian, low power, mechanization through brute force life of the 17th century, right? are you able to survive like that? I be 99% of the western culture is not and will die.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The most likely of scenarios, certainly.
OR...and I'm just throwing this out there...OR we exploit sustainable power technology we have already developed, but at this time is too expensive when viewed against fossil fuels.
But hey, I dig that we all like doom and gloom around here, so don't let my logic and rational discourse dissuade you from that.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, I'm not in to the whole "chicken little" thing. You want to run around panicking about the sky falling, knock yourself out.
Me? I prefer common sense and intelligence.
Re:Too bad for the "organic food" folks... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are painting with an excessively broad brush here.
You don't need mystical mumbo jumbo to not want pesticides all over your fruits and vegetables.
You don't need mystical mumbo jumbo to not want your chicken and cows raised in factory farming conditions, fed hormones, antibiotics, and the cheapest foodstuff imaginable to fatten them up as quickly as possible.
Why do you need mystical mumbo jumbo to be aware of the major nutritional differences between wild-caught fish and farmed fish, that are principally due to their different feeding habits.
So yeah, some of the stuff labeled "organic" that's basically identical to conventional stuff may be a rip-off, but there is plenty for a purely scientific, rational-minded person to critique in our industrial food system and plenty of reasons to avoid certain food produced by them.
Re:Too bad for the "organic food" folks... (Score:5, Informative)
At present rate we have what ... 100 years of potash in the ground? At some point we will have to sustain the production with only atmospheric nitrogen.
Just because the same kind of revolutions need to keep happening doesn't mean they will ... all our revolutions up till now have dependent on non renewable resources, if we don't have a sustainable revolution in energy production in the near future (and I don't think liquid sodium reactors qualify) we will be fucked. Because all the other potential revolutions will almost certainly depend on that, it's not going to come from mining non renewable resources any more.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They are sustainable. They could
Stop being disingenuous and condecending (Score:3, Insightful)
Give me a break. the issue that the "organic food" folk are concerning about is farm animals being pumped full of antibiotics because they're crammed into confined places in which their walking on, breathing in, and ingesting fecal matter and the remain
Re:Sigh, These TreeHuggers must need more $$ (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh oh, another "non-profit" group must need money to supplement their jet's and expensive dinners.
That is a stupid argument. Imagine you see someone disemabarking from a private jet, wearing a suit that costs more than the salaries of you and I combined, just so that they can attend an expensive dinner in another city. Which is more likely?
Which side of this argument has the most financial interest in arguing either for or against limiting our use of Earth's resources? Let's face it, you don't get super rich by becoming a climate scientist.
It reminds me of when the three CEOs [go.com] of the car industry all took private planes to lobby Washington for a taxpayer handout. But no, I am sure that you are right that it is the tree-huggers who are the ones trying to greedily screw us all for money.
Re:Sigh, These TreeHuggers must need more $$ (Score:4, Informative)
You don't deal with many non-profits do you? Even middle-management at many non-profits earn a very healthy income, easily on par with anything the corporate world offers.
Let's see, the CEO of the WWF (the authors of the report) earns a whopping $465,427 [charitynavigator.org]. Now have a look at this list of CEO compensation by industry type [aflcio.org]. Can you see any under $1,000,000? How many over $10,000,000? They are certainly not on par with the WWF salaries.
That said, some of those executives you describe are directly responsible for the existence of non-profits. The money has to come from somewhere.
No, not the ones we are talking about. Do you really think that the mining industries are funding the climate advocate groups? No, I don't think so. Sure they have their own industry groups and think-tanks, but none of those could be called "tree huggers".