Have We Reached Maximum Sustainable Population Size? 1070
Hugh Pickens writes "Pulitzer prize winning writer Thomas Friedman writes that in few years we may be looking back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? 'We're currently caught in two loops,' writes Friedman. 'One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability.' According to the Global Footprint Network we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth's resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. 'Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,' says Paul Gilding. 'We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid.'"
Answer: (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
Re:Answer: (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes! It's right there in the summary.. We need a new economic model... Resources are more than abundant.. Mismanagement and desire for control is the problem..
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Consumption per person is more relevant (Score:3)
A better question is "have we reached the maximum sustainable resource consumption/conversion rate per person times population".
A US citizen is responsible for 10 to 20 times more resource and energy consumption than a Chinese or Indian citizen, for example.
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> all they have to do is produce them
Or import them, like the United States does. From places like China and India, for example.
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Citation needed.
Yeah, but have we reached the max we'll tolerate (Score:4, Interesting)
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"The question isn't, can we feed these people? It's: Will we? We don't need these people. There's no jobs for them. Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no."
So please tell me: Has starvation historically been most prevalent in socialist or market economies?
Re:Answer: (Score:4, Insightful)
We need to recognise that people like Mother Theresa and the Pope are the cause of more suffering in the world, through encouraging people to breed offspring who can't be fed properly, than either Uncle Joe or Uncle Mao.
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I, for one, am partial to energy accounting. Given that we can recycle much or most of the components in today's products, the only resource we consume irreversibly is power. By measuring an item's price in terms of power needed to produce a set quantity, we can have true, effective competition, unskewed by 'creative accounting', bailouts, and other practices. Then, by dividing a country's productive capacity among its population, we can prevent overspending by any one institution or individual: end of debt
Re:Answer: (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words "from each according to his ability, to each according to their need."
I think the Communists tried a version of this...after the murdered a few hundred million so the books balanced better.
Re:Answer: (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone that claims 'we are running out of resources' - without specifying 'as we currently use them' - is a complete failure.
Almost nobody at all wants to use more resources.
They want certain things, and don't care how they're provided.
For example - lighting.
If you take current lighting levels in homes, and compute it out, you end up with the figure that you'd need 15 tons of candles a year to light the average home as well as it now is.
Consider how much it would cost in 1700 to have the countries leading musicians play one 'track' each as background music at a dinner.
Heating/cooling of houses in the best and average homes worldwide is another huge component of energy use that could be improved without anyone caring.
Technology can help enormously with energy use.
It's plausible that as LED lighting hits, it's going to reduce energy use of even the best current technology by a factor of 2ish.
Aerogel insulation for homes is not intrinsically expensive, and yet could improve dramatically over the normal today, as are many energy saving technologies - air exchange ventilation.
Cars are energy hogs. But even there, it's possible to improve the performance and reduce energy usage - see the various projects in progress to let cars automatically form closely spaced 'road trains' - which will reduce drag.
in short - go and look at a breakdown of resource usage by task, and compare the best plausible or cutting-edge now tech in 20 years, as it could be implemented.
There are _huge_ savings to be made.
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That is simple, stop trying to save the starving people of other nations that can't possibly hope to sustain their CURRENT populations, and they will either survive as their population goes down, or they will die off and we won't be worried about people starving in those nations. If a nation has nothing to trade for the help it needs, then why TRY to sustain the people there? Obviously, responding to things like earthquakes and volcanoes is an area where help makes sense, but for too long, we have
Re:Answer: (Score:4, Insightful)
I would strongly suggest visiting africa. They have plenty of resources to trade (gold, platinum, etc, etc), but the people are exploited by 1st world governments.
I work for an international mining company. In one evening (whilst visiting a mine in Zambia) I personally drank the equivalent in beer of almost 1 year worth of wages for a local laborer, who does just as much physical labor as a typical miner in a first world country, who is taking home anywhere between $80k and $150k per year for his efforts.
That is criminal - but it is also reality for the local people living there. The disparity in wages between different countries for what is essentially the same work can not continue indefinitely.
Possibly... (Score:4, Interesting)
What is the mechanism that will rectify this? Zambian miners forming a union and demanding jobs at the Glory Hole in Alaska?
It's a bit of a wild idea and would have huge ramifications, but applying a COLA pegged labor adjustment tarrif on all imports could. If it take 10 man hours for a pound of sellable material, and the COLA in Zimbabwe was ~$10 US ($0.005/hr) compared to similar labor costs of $60,000 (~$30/hr) in the US, then the tarrif would be just shy of $300 per pound.
It would be a huge equalizing for as it would give international vendors a choice: Sell cheap, but pay a huge tarrif, or pay your employees comprable rates to the US labor force, and get no tarrif. The impact though, is that prices for cheap stuff in the US would skyrocket, and that international vendors would look at automating as much of their labor as possible.
I'm not sure if it would be a good idea, as it would have some huge ramifications, but I think it would be an interesting idea to have some economist debate over.
-Rick
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We can drop a pallet of goods anywhere on the planet within 24 hours...
Yes but feeding starving people leads to..... even more starving people. No I'm not saying don't feed them, but as civilisations become more advanced their population growth appears to taper off naturally and actually begins in some cases to decline. Perhaps we need to help advance these other civilisations.
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most of the supposed "crisis" incidents recently were deliberately engineered so that one political group or another could scream
Or just about every famine or disaster in Africa and the Middle East in the past 50 years, where food is carted off by either the government or the rebels to feed their armies and starve the civilians they are opposed to.
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I could agree with you completely if there was a "near-total socialism" anywhere near being on the table. Frankly, what we have the choice of (in the U.S., at least) is laissez-faire robber baron capitalism from Republicans, and right-of-center corporatist "moderation" from the Democrats.
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Umm, maybe instead of taking away funding for birth control, we could encourage third world countries to reduce birth rates, even if it means, gasp, GIVING free rubbers and or birth control to people. But the catholics and SoBapt's worship making more babies, so we can't do that. So we can do something to help, but in true political perversity, we do the opposite and exacerbate the problem.
Re:Answer: (Score:5, Insightful)
Reiterate: No.
1% of the population controls, demands, consumes and excessively wastes better than 85% of the available resources on Earth.
I assure you, they do not do so through a system that rewards their excessive virtue or merit.
The planet could sustain many times it's current population with a better equity in distribution. This doesn't mean lowering the status on middle-classes in the developed world, but toppling the capstone of this pyramid.
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1% of the population controls, demands, consumes and excessively wastes better than 85% of the available resources on Earth
Politicians make up a lot less than 1% of the population. If they stopped artificially controlling food and energy the prices would plummet.
Re:Answer: (Score:4, Informative)
Why is that jackass' garbled, moronic gibberish showing up on Slashdot?
So we can post THIS!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_(unit) [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Also, the prices are rising not because of TF's "warming" and "scarcity" but because of US currency devaluation (QE2) and commodity speculations - where Goldman parks billions after real estate failures.
But this cheerleader for the trans-national elite can't exactly blast the billionaire-boys-club that he's paid to carry water for, can he?
NYT and WaPo - like Pravda and Izvestia in the 70's. On to glorious victory in Afghanistan!
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No (Score:5, Insightful)
In 1971, Paul Ehrlich predicted a maximum sustainable world population of 1.2 billion people. By 1994 Ehrlich raised his estimate to 2 billion saying, "the present population of 5.5 billion [..] has clearly exceeded the capacity of Earth to sustain it." Two decades later we're closing in on 7 billion souls the overwhelming majority of which are not expected to starve to death or otherwise suffer a Malthusian catastrophe.
Overpopulation alarmism has become trite and hackneyed.
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But my personal favorite is Fremlin's 1964 observation that the heat dissipation limit requires us to keep the Earth's human population under 10^18 souls.
http://probaway.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/what-will-be-the-earths-maximum-population/ [wordpress.com]
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, the problem with that attitude is that just because a bunch of people cried wolf before you doesn't make you wrong.
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Of course, the problem with that attitude is that just because a bunch of people cried wolf before you doesn't make you wrong.
Tell that to Harold Camping.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
We shouldn't listen OR not listen to anyone based on the history of other people's failed claims. We should judge claims based on their merit/evidence.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Overpopulation alarmism has become trite and hackneyed.
Yeah, but it sells papers.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
Why, without alarmism the daily news would be so boring that we might even get some work done and end global poverty, cure HIV, wake up and smack our foreheads with our hands and say "What was I thinking" regarding religion (a.k.a. "mythology that governs people's lives"), invent thermonuclear fusion engines the size of outboard motors that run for a decade on a thimbleful of fuel that is not mined from the moon, and establish world peace.
This is in and of itself an alarming prospect!
rgb
(P. S. -- in addition to selling papers, all this alarmism allows politicians to remain in power -- d'ya think?)
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So infinite humans, no problem? Your incredibly naive if you think human life is sustainable at any comfortable levels past a certain amount of people.
Here's an example. Ehrlich's time was the 60s and 70s. Back then an American could work ONE JOB and OWN A HOME AND AFFORD TWO CARS AND A FAMILY.
Fast forward to today and myself and everyone I know is a working couple who can barely afford the things people in the 60s and 70s middle class people had. We've cut back on driving because gas is so expensive. Our f
Re:No (Score:4, Informative)
Gas was completely unregulated back then. I for one don't miss the smog and the lead.
Food is still relatively inexpensive if you actually make your own. No one in the 60/70's bought large quantites of pre-made food and ate out for 3 meals a day of fast food.
None of the things that people consider necessities now existed back then, and what did was insanely expensive.
2-4 cars per family - absolutley fuck no!
Tv's bigger than 24" no, color TV no, cheap Tv's - no
Home computers - no.
Home entertainment systems - no
Video game consoles - no
Internet or cable tv - no
Digital phones, cheap long distance (video/global calls unavailable) - no
Cell phones - hell no
Designer/label clothes - yes did everyone wear them - no
Cheap airfare - no
Houses bigger than 2000sq ft - rarely
Cheap electronics - hell no - stereos/record players/tvs were very expensive
Digital photography - no - just very expensive film based
Modern medical treatments - no - you lived (or not) with most ailements that are trivial to treat now
Advanced education nearly universally available - no
What most people take for granted today as a mediocre lifestyle is beyond what even the wealthy had access to in the 60's and 70's
If you want to live that dream lifestyle just strip all the things above from you and your family and you'll find today's pay quite easy to get by on
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with your argument, is that all of the advanced unnecessary accessories are now comparatively cheap, whereas the basic necessities of life are increasing in cost dramatically.
A standard size house block of land 50km away from the nearest cbd here costs approximately $300k-400k AUD (about $330k-440k USD) _without_ even a house on it.
You are looking at closer to a million dollars simply for a typical house.
Food is still relatively inexpensive if you actually make your own. No one in the 60/70's bought large quantites of pre-made food and ate out for 3 meals a day of fast food.
The costs of the land to grow your own food costs far more than the produce you would create. If you mean going to the shopping centre and getting ingredients, fast food can work out cheaper.. that is how expensive normal food is these days. It only makes sense to go normal food shopping if you have 3+ people and buy in bulk to create big meals.
What most people take for granted today as a mediocre lifestyle is beyond what even the wealthy had access to in the 60's and 70's
Depends on what you want from life, financial independence, owning your own home, not having food bills eat most of your income? Something many now cannot achieve which was easily doable back then.
Basically, all the luxuries are now cheap, and all the basic necessities of life are now expensive, nice work there.
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Okay, on some things like energy, you can argue that the problem is US overconsumption and ill distribution. But on things like food?
Here's an analysis of the global grain market:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/10/world-food-prices-climbing?INTCMP=SRCH [guardian.co.uk]
The short version is that large proportions of the world are already being fed by grain grown through overpumping finite aquifers. When those run out, that section of food production will disappear. Add to t
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
As P. J. O'Rourke once pointed out that (at the time of writing), Freemont, CA has the same population density as Bangladesh, yet NGO's aren't sending swarms of people there to try and convince the residents to stop having families.
Fretting about overpopulation is just the politically correct way to be racist. Far too many of you; not enough of me.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
As P. J. O'Rourke once pointed out that (at the time of writing), Freemont, CA has the same population density as Bangladesh, yet NGO's aren't sending swarms of people there to try and convince the residents to stop having families.
Maybe that's because the relevant number here is not population density, but rather population growth rate?
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As P. J. O'Rourke once pointed out that (at the time of writing), Freemont, CA has the same population density as Bangladesh, yet NGO's aren't sending swarms of people there to try and convince the residents to stop having families.
That's stupid. You are comparing a city to a country. The population density of Dhaka is about 60,000 people per square mile. The population density of Fremont is about 2700 people per square mile. You are arguing that an area of more than 20 times the population density of some random American town is not overpopulated because people could just wander out into the surrounding countryside and evenly distribute themselves and might be able to get the rural population density to barely match some random A
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Think of it this way....
Imagine a test tube filled with sugar and water. It represents all the resources and space on earth. Or just think of the earth, it works either way.
Now place one bacteria in the test tube. For the sake of the though experiment we will say that the bacteria doubles every minute and at 60 minutes the test tube will be full of bacteria and all space and resources are exhausted. Here's the question.... at how many minutes is the tube 1/2 full? Wait... wait... if you thought 30 minutes you're not smart enough to be involved in any type of conversation relating to math. The answer is 59. 1/2 full at 59 minutes. So how many bacteria look around a 1/16 full and realize that they are well and truly fucked? Not you obviously. Even if we invent a quantum earth duplicator and make 3 more earths, at 61 the second earth is exhausted and at 62 all four are. Your basic math illiteracy is the real reason you think that we are all ok.
The depth of your wrongness is staggering. Math is not racist.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=video&cd=1&ved=0CDYQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DF-QA2rkpBSY&ei=IC3wTb3oO4GisAO239yuDg&usg=AFQjCNHmFV-da9Oy6becHtac7KffjWsTsQ&sig2=hocy8suakk6IR0w5233hFg [google.com]
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
>>Imagine a test tube filled with sugar and water. It represents all the resources and space on earth. Or just think of the earth, it works either way.
>>Now place one bacteria in the test tube.
Now replace the bacteria with farmo-bacteria that actively cultivate new food sources. Your analogy begins to fail.
Now replace the farmo-bacteria with birth-control-farmo-bacteria that can limit their population growth. Your analogy then totally fails.
>>The depth of your wrongness is staggering.
The fact that you support Malthus's error even after he was proven wrong over hundreds of years is even more staggering. Malthus was an idiot, you're a fucking moron.
Food prices have not been growing "as the result of global warming" as TFA says. They've been growing due to idiot policies try are using our food supply for fuel - corn ethanol being the biggest culprit. Which even China has banned as being detrimental to human health and happiness. China.
Well, I guess indirectly it is AGW causing the problem, but as the result of shortsighted fucktards like yourself that can't think anything through all the way. The Law of Unintended Consequences always tends to bite hippie policies in the ass, but since their "sustainable" lifestyle is mainly subsidized by their parents, they don't ever feel the pain.
Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, you are correct. We should continue on our present course without considering the consequences. We will never run out of anything.
I personally think that unless some steps are taken to bring world population growth to zero fairly quickly that there are going to be some truly horrible wars in fifty to one hundred years. First world countries will be very reluctant to give up all their modern amenities, and developing countries will be unwilling to curb their population growth to keep competition for resources to a minimum. At some point, there are going to be some very serious shortages, and the wars that result will not be conducted around the traditional goal of military conquest for resources, but rather the goal of making the world population much smaller in a very short time. I certainlly hope that doesn't happen, but there are enough despotic people in power around the world that I think it might.
The fact is that there are not infinite resources. If there are too many people using those resources, you will run out. The problem is that when this happens, it will basically be like an inflection point on a graph, where change will happen very quickly.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally think that unless some steps are taken to bring world population growth to zero fairly quickly that there are going to be some truly horrible wars in fifty to one hundred years.
You mean sort of like the truly horrible wars of the twentieth century, the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century, the... (iterate back to where human ancestors were mostly peaceable primates with 24 chromosomes instead of 23).
Why do you think that world population growth has anything to do with having truly horrible wars? We've done just fine killing one another when the world's population was far smaller, and if anything we are continuing some forty of the most peaceful years the world has ever known combined with the highest population the world has ever known.
Besides, there is only one "fundamental" scarcity -- energy. Bite the bullet, build massive solar energy facilities worldwide and/or invent sustainable thermonuclear fusion generators, make energy cheap and plentiful "forever", and we can address all the other scarcities. The catch will be to manage this before we kill one another off not because of scarcity or overpopulation per se, but because of human lust for political power, wealth, reproductive success, and control.
Not that I really disagree. If, for example, the Holocene cranks to its inevitable end starting tomorrow, the solar minimum that appears to be starting turns out to be a grand minimum, a couple of big volcano blow to give the next ice age a healthy head start, and we have a "Year without a summer" such as the one that occurred last in 1816, it would very likely kill a billion or more people. Midsummer frost in the world's breadbaskets would bring about starvation on a truly unprecedented scale, and the very northerly our southerly countries that have been temperate and prosperous during the Holocene would be the ones begging from or warring with their equatorial neighbors as the glaciers once again begin their slow descent across Siberia, Canada, China, and northern Europe.
The advent of thermonuclear fusion could have a very similar effect as it completely breaks the economies of all of the oil and coal producing countries and companies overnight.
See? We don't really have to wait! We could have a truly horrible war right now!
rgb
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
If we turned 5% of the Sahara desert into solar collector, we could turn the other 95% into one enormous farm and effectively terraform it so that it wasn't desert any more. The Sahara is quite large, has a year-round growing season and lots of sun -- as a farm supplied with unlimited water it could probable feed the entire world all by itself. Ditto the Australian Outback, ditto the US southwest, ditto much of central and western India (away from the major rivers, where farming is tied to the monsoon). Energy is water, energy is food, energy is recycling of garbage, energy is production, energy is transportation. Drop the cost of power to $0.01 per KW-hour, worldwide, define it at this price (effectively fixing a global currency not subject to manipulation) and stand back and watch the world explode (in a good way).
rgb
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
So how much of that population is fed by oil?
The "Green Revolution" was a fossil fuel revolution. Take away the fossil fuel and you're back to the 1-2 billion baseline.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
As a consequence of the green revolution and education and a very energetic population, fossil fuel consumption in India has steadily risen along with the gross domestic product as it has moved towards being a modern society, but oil had almost nothing to do with the revolution per se and has nothing at all to do with the "1-2 billion baseline". At least as far as I know (and I probably know a lot more than most people, having lived in India and watched the green revolution happen). If you have evidence to the contrary, feel free to enlighten me -- with references.
rgb
Re:No (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Over population is definitely something that we need to be concerned with. But in practice that problem tends to take care of itself when the population gets adequate, food, education and support in old age. Few people genuinely want to have more than 3 kids, the number is small enough that if a few people choose to have more it's probably not even worth worrying about.
The bigger issue is in parts of the world where parents have to depend upon their children to care for them in old age. Parents have no way of knowing how many children will survive to adulthood and as such tend to have a lot more children in order to make sure that they're cared for. These kids then tend to make a similar choice and over time the population just keeps on growing.
But, rather than disasters, the bigger thing we need to be concerned with is how much of the planet's surface we're dedicating to agriculture and living space. We definitely could grow the population quite a bit and still be able to sustain ourselves, it's just the cost would be extraordinary and we'd have to give up our wild spaces.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
These are all still just technical challenges. I'll throw some game changing technologies out there.
Plentiful nuclear power. When we finally get good and making reactors and have lplenty of energy available we can solve most of these problems.
With nanotube filters you can filter any type of water to make pure water much more efficiently than RO filters today. With enough power you could filter sea water and pipe it as far as you need it. We already do it on a smaller scale with oil products.
With enough power you can grow plants indoors or underground. LED lights can be fine tuned to the wavelengths that plants crave. Also indoors you can control the weather and temperature so you can get multiple crops. You may be able to automate the entire process. This removes pressure for land to be used for agriculture.
If you have a small enough high power source and light enough building materials you can get flying cars. This will eliminate roads returning those to nature.
So advances in technology can cure almost any problem.
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Not at all. I make no claims about individual resources or specific lifestyles. The claims I do make are these:
1. Given today's technology, the planet can sustain more people in comfort than it currently does. Given tomorrow's technology it's likely to be able to sustain more.
2. Barring an Armageddon that collapses civilization, there is sufficient backpressure as population increases for it to settle into a steady state that matches what the planet can sustain without any artificial stimulus on our part.
3.
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We keep saying this... (Score:5, Informative)
The Earth wasn't supposed to be able to support half the current global population.
Then Norman Borlaug came along, and turns out we could support more. Who knows this time around?
Re:We keep saying this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Spin, perhaps, but even that's debatable.
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You could fit the entire world population into the state of Texas with a population density roughly the same as NYC. The world is not in danger of overpopulation anytime soon.
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1. Looking at the vegan site, the land required to grow food for vegans would be ~650 m^2, not 300m^2. This means that actually all the farmland in the US would not be able to feed everyone in the world, even if everyone went vegan. If there's some meat consumption, to UK levels, then you need over three times the farmland in the US, at maximum efficiency, to feed everyone. Is it plausible that everyone becomes vegans? I'd say not.
Then if you look at the breakdow
Re:We keep saying this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. One only has to look at the devastation of the American Midwest, unable to produce any crops after decades of mechanized farming...
Wait, no. The Midwest produces more crops today then it ever did. Something's wrong here...
Re:We keep saying this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wait, no. The Midwest produces more crops today then it ever did. Something's wrong here...
The land used in corporate farming is now an inert substrate which is being used to grow crops hydroponically using fertilizers and pesticides derived from oil.
Also, get back to me about what the midwest produces later in the season.
Re:We keep saying this... (Score:4, Informative)
So then, if there's no value left in Midwest soil, why does it continue to be intensively farmed when labor and land would be so much cheaper elsewhere?
It's flat and very little labor is used because the whole process is now mechanized, and the labor is down to little more than drivers and other equipment operators. Corporate interests have purchased sufficient legislation on a variety of fronts to make it only affordable to engage in that mode of farming on a vast scale with as little overhead as possible. In theory it could be done with poop but we'd have to have a massive poop-redistribution architecture. Meanwhile, in many cases applying even treated manure is actually illegal now. In fact, the zones between farms that slow down wind, trap dust, and harbor beneficial insects are being eradicated at an alarming rate in the name of elimination of pathogens, so the situation is actually worse than I have made it out to be; the last living things in acres of sterile soil are being bulldozed.
It's a little early... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just like one hot summer doesn't prove it and one cold winter doesn't disprove it (even ignoring the false notion that global climate change != getting warmer everywhere all the time) we'd need to see evidence of increased storm activity for multiple years in close succession before we could draw any conclusions. In general i'm a "believer" in global climate change, but i'm not in favor of using incorrect data to try and prop up the idea.
It's not hard to prove that the Earth's temperature is increasing. M
If we all live like Thomas Friedman, sure (Score:5, Interesting)
He has a 9.6 million dollar, 11,400 square foot home.
Oh and his wife used to own a company developing mall properties, those high square foot, poorly insulated buildings surrounded by heat absorbing asphalt.
Re:If we all live like Thomas Friedman, sure (Score:4, Funny)
He has a 9.6 million dollar, 11,400 square foot home.
Well, that's proof enough for me that he must be wrong, and the carrying capacity of the earth must indeed be infinite.
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I live in 1300 square feet in a condo, Friedman lives in 11,400 square feet in a multiple building estate
This would be the same if my doctor told me never to smoke while chain smoking 8 packs a day and blowing it my face.
If Thomas Friedman wants to talk about sustainability, thats great, then he should practice what he preaches. He doesn't, and he and his wife made money off one of the worst drivers of urban sprawl, large lot shopping centers.
Re:If we all live like Thomas Friedman, sure (Score:4, Insightful)
If Thomas Friedman wants to talk about sustainability, thats great, then he should practice what he preaches. He doesn't, and he and his wife made money off one of the worst drivers of urban sprawl, large lot shopping centers.
Seriously? Your doctor can't warn you about the dangerous and addictive habit of smoking unless he has excellent will power himself?
Sorry, but dismissing an argument with the wave of your hand, because you don't personally like the messenger really is bullshit [wikipedia.org].
I'm not defending his lifestyle --I'd be first to agree that he's being a hypocrite and such excess is deplorable when most people are struggling just to survive, but that's a criticism of the MAN, not his arguments.
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Tu quoque (pronounced /tukwokwi/ [1]), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a kind of logical fallacy. It is a Latin term for "you, too" or "you, also". A tu quoque argument attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting his failure to act consistently in accordance with that position; it attempts to show that a criticism or objection applies equally to the person making it. This dismisses someone's viewpoint on an issue on the argument that the person is inconsistent in that very thing.[2] It is considered an ad hominem argument, since it focuses on the party itself, rather than its positions.[3]
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If the situation is as dire as he makes it out to be, then why is his behavoir inconsistent with his conclusions? The only conclusion is that he doesn't really believe what he says so why should I waste my time trying to verify his premises.
No, that's NOT the only conclusion. You only think that because you aren't listening to counter-arguments. If Friedman believes his own argument and is a resource hog, that makes the man a hypocrite and selfish, but that doesn't mean his argument is invalid.
It's really just tragedy of the commons, where every individual knows that their actions, if taken by everybody, will lead to a bad outcome, yet they act in their own self-interest anyways. A common example is overfishing.
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Of course we're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Monetary inflation... (Score:3, Insightful)
is the cause of the higher prices.
How long can we cheat Malthus? (Score:3)
This gets me wondering how long we can cheat Malthus, until we have a big population die-off?
When it happens, it will be a chain reaction. Famine, disease, and wars tend to go hand in hand, and if a population of an otherwise stable country starts starving essentially in toto, they will be doing desperate means to find a food source, even if it means overrunning a neighbor.
Until 2075, apparently (Score:4, Interesting)
The UN estimates of world population now indicate an increase until around 2075 (9.2 billion), and then a decrease after that.
Birth rates in all developed nations are falling fast, many are under replacement rate already. The US population would be lower than the replacement rate right now if it weren't for immigration.
The problem with Malthus is not the math, it's the model. Anyone can pick assumptions and make a model, and from there make predictions. Mathus erred in assuming that things would not change. An exponential curve is indistinguishable from a bell curve at the long tail beginning, so the evidence seemed to support his prediction.
What's changing is the demographics. Once raised out of poverty, people naturally start having fewer children. There are a variety of proposed reasons for this, and the evidence is very strong.
The prediction now is that once everyone is reasonably above the poverty line (mostly Africa, with some contribution from SE Asia) population growth will reverse.
Interestingly enough, in 75 years time there may be the reverse problem - population *shrinkage*.
Collapse? (Score:5, Interesting)
We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter.
I wish I could be as sure. Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed does a nice job of documenting societies that, when faced with the same choice, picked collapse. Granted, they didn't have Jared Diamond's book to read beforehand, but neither did they have our capacity for self-immolation.
Re:Collapse? (Score:4, Interesting)
lots of nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
. 'One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability.'
- well that's plenty of nonsense.
Prices today are pushed up by artificial demand, created by the inflated currencies of the world. US Fed is printing like a maniac, buying up its own debt and is giving the US dollars to all the banks (and likely central banks) around the world, so that they would also buy US debt - this is an attempt to trick the bond market into believing there is an actual demand for US bonds, but all of this is designed to prolong the day of reckoning - when the US bonds are no longer bought and US dollar plunges ahead of all currencies and US is in hyper inflation, because Fed will likely buy out all the debt and default that way, rather than let the market restructure US debt and rebuild the economy.
The prices for food and energy around the world are going up as US is creating inflation around the world, but for now US is still shielding itself from the ultimate catastrophe - currency crisis, but who knows how much longer it can do this? Of-course the oil production will continue declining, as OPEC cannot actually bring more and more production on line, even though it pretends to say that it can, but it can't.
Cartels do not work, because the members have only incentives to cheat. They agree on quotas, and then they produce as much as they can, since they see high prices (even though in reality, the oil and gas are lowest price ever in history if counted in gold.)
As to the population size - the only problem with population size today, is that the governments of the world are distorting the free market and not letting the businesses provide everything the growing populations need in real competitive market. There are a small number of largest companies, that work with government to make sure they keep their monopolies, but of-course monopolies have about as much incentive to maximize their efficiency and compete on price/quality, as any government, which means zilch.
Do not lose the sight of what is really going on: globally the world's central banks are engaged in destruction of currencies in order to maintain the US currency high relative to their own, since there is likely political and personal profit in it for them. This is causing the massive inflation and then prices rise around the world, only so that they stay relatively stable in USA. Do not be fooled by the so called economists, that the government calls 'main stream' and who work for the governments - they are no different than the shamans and witch doctors of yesteryear, who also worked for their kings.
As to the global warming, etc. - how about getting government hands off the energy policy of the world, allowing the businesses to compete on best ways to provide energy, be it nuclear or whatever it is? And how about getting rid of the subsidies to the auto-industries via government sponsored infrastructure, which create the energy policy that we are observing around the world today, complete with wars and pollution?
I am sure this opinion will be highly popular on this site.
Good night.
Re:lots of nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
That's completely BS.
In the USA in the 19th century, with a gold standard, there were a tremendous number of unjust banking shenanigans which resulted in the confiscation of assets from the productive sector into the banking owners.
There was always fractional reserve, and private banks had their own control over the money supply. LIke it or not, the Federal Reserve system was an improvement.
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you are wrong.
The easy way to display that Federal reserve provided a much worse economic climate, than private banks before it did, even though some of them did do fractional reserve even with gold (sure, why not, fractional gold reserve is the same thing), is that in 19 century the value of US dollar rose by a factor of 2, but since 1913 the value of dollar fell by over 99%, and I left a comment here [slashdot.org] with numbers in it, displaying just how much purchasing power USD lost since 2003 alone.
But not only did
Re:lots of nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Who gives a flying fuck what the purchasing power of [arbitrary currency unit] is? What matters is how much a typical person can buy with a day's wage. That is a hell of a lot higher today than it was in the 19th century.
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History has plainly shown that companies and individuals are selfish pricks who will without a second thought let thousands die for their own profit and convenience.
- if anything, history shows that governments are selfish prick, who will without a second thought let millions die for their own desire of power.
I mean Chernobyl was not a private operation, did you know that?
As to RTGs not being disposed of safely - that's what I am trying to explain. If businesses were not stopped from working on nuclear power, they could have the full cycle worked out, just like we do not throw away our car batteries or oil from cars under the bridge, this does not have to be a problem
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I mean Chernobyl was not a private operation, did you know that?
And Fukushima was. So was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Texas City Refinery explosion. Exxon Valdez oil spill. Three Mile Island accident. Bhopal disaster. Seveso disaster. Minamata disaster. Cuyahoga River fire. Your point?
You can quite seriously write pages and pages and pages on all the ways companies cut corners to save money. Then lied about it or covered it up. They generally only stopped once the government put it's fist down.
If businesses were not stopped from working on nuclear power, they could have the full cycle worked out, just like we do not throw away our car batteries or oil from cars under the bridge, this does not have to be a problem either.
We don't do those things because the g
Scary Headlines Unsustainable, Says NYT Reader (Score:3)
When you get past the big, scary headlines to the inside of the Times article, you see statements like this:
"We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.” (Emphasis added)
Wait, we're gonna have to come up some new technologies to lessen our environmental footprint?! Help!
As Robert A. Heinlein said (Score:5, Informative)
"Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in."
Economic growth is the myth (Score:3, Interesting)
Friedman is an idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
I was forced to read "The Earth is Round" as part of my MBA. When it comes to amazing him, the bar is set pretty low. He could probably write a column on how the sun rises in the east
"Empire of Debt" has a delicious and well-deserved excoriation of Friedman. If it wasn't such a great book in and of itself, it would be worth reading just for that.
Essential reading on Friedman (Score:3)
I think any post referencing Thomas Friedman requires a link to Matt Taibbi's classic article [nypress.com]:
Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses....
According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from eating with lions to devouring with them.
Again? (Score:4, Interesting)
Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich, peak oil, etc, etc. Now Friedman.
A succession of people saying all will be disaster unless you immediately do X that, by the way they consider wise to do for other reasons.
In the reign of Emperor Augustus, historian Livey claimed that if Rome did not return to its founding values (which didn't really exist during its founding by a pretty savage lot) it would surely fall.
He was right. 500 years later for the western part of the empire, and 1000 for the eastern part.
One day such doomsayers will be right. But thus far they have been wrong so many times.
Has anyone noticed how similar this is to the preacher that was saying the world would end on May 22nd?
Like him, when the world fails to end, they say they didn't account for something and set a new date. Now in October, I think?
Similarly, it's now not 1975 or 1980 when it falls apart and we all starve. It's 20xx and we've really got it right this time. We think...
Yeah. Uh huh.
(Note I don't think wasting resources, unending population increase or not conserving energy is wise. I'm highly in favor of efficiency increases. But the claim the gas tank is empty hasn't agreed with what actually happened.)
And what if those claims of how cheap and plentiful solar/renewables are really work?
The same shining lights of this game, Ehrlich, Lovins etc. have stated that a truly cheap clean, plentiful energy source/sources would be a disaster for the world. Mankind would use it to further destroy nature and thus should be limited in energy availability.
Non-problem (Score:3)
First world countries all have below zero population growth rates, or would if it wasn't for immigration. In a rich country, children cost more to raise, and increased women's rights mean that women don't get used as baby factories to increase the status of men.
This is a non-issue for just about anyone who would actually be reading this.
Directed to the countries who do have the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
I noticed that this website is in English, German, Spanish, French, and Italian--meaning it is mostly directed to the west. The fact that it doesn't even have Mandarin or Cantonese despite China's 1.3 Billion tells you that he is more interested in extracting money from guilt-laden westerners than solving any problems. French! Less than 2% of the earth speak French as their native language. Heck, more people speak Bengali or Telugu or even Marathi than the entire population of France!
Most of the western countries are stable or have declining populations. The United States is an exception, however much of that is due to immigration. Yet you have India with 1.2 Billion and growing, Indonesia with 237 million and growing, Nigeria with 158 million and growing, Bangladesh with 150 million and growing---and the site is dedicated to telling Westerners why it is all their fault. Solving the real problem, 3rd world population growth, isn't going to get done by telling Westerners to reduce their "footprint".
It;s meaningless to ask if we have reached max pop (Score:5, Interesting)
It's meaningless to ask if we have reached maximum sustainable population size unless you also specify what standard of living you are talking about. I can recall reading about 20 years ago that we had already passed the point where it was possible to give everyone on Earth the same standard of living as the average American.
But standard of living really is a proxy for resource consumption and not a very good one because as technology advances it can produce more from less. Eventually you reach a wall though. Pick a resource utilization number and multiply by population. Is it greater than the available resources? If yes then we have passed the sustainable population. OTOH divide available resources by population and you have the allowed resource utilization to maintain that population.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you treat resources as finite.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you try to factor in the effects of growing technological capabilities.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you try to factor in the effects of human nature.
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Norman Borlaug beat him to death with his dwarf wheat.
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Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi
Can you give some examples that affected more than 0.001% of the population?
Because while those were sensational and revealing, they're not nearly on the scale we're talking about here. They indicate that someone was stupid, but not necessarily that we are all stupid.
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A guy fell off the Empire State Building. As he passed the 30th floor, he said to himself, "I'm okay so far!"
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Then we fart our way towards a methane-based disaster...
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Yep, for every 100 gallons of ethanol based fuel I use to farm my corn field, they produce 90 gallons of ethanol fuel with the amount of corn I provide for that spent 100 gallons. Although with subsidies, I am living fine. The idea is to make us less fossil fuel dependent.
http://zfacts.com/p/63.html [zfacts.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
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