Slashdot Mirror
Humans Will Need Two Earths By 2030
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."
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?
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.
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.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.
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
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...
The main problem is with what economists call externalities. 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.
Program Intellivision!
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.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.