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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."
Amen... same thing about other resources. You can find clips of former President Carter claiming oil and natural gas would be gone "in the next decade" while giving speeches in the White House.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
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
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
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...
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.
The US did not reach "peak nuclear" because there's no technical reason preventing increased nuclear output from the US. There's a lot of "cut off one's face" greens who've succeeded in bringing about even more coal burning, but that's not here or there. Nor did we encounter Peak Buggy Whip, the demand simply fell away. We could begin ramping nuclear up any time we wanted, but we'll never produce as much oil as we used to (let alone enough to meet our increased consumption since then) however we try.
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.