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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."
I told you not to take the axiom of choice!
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
.. 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...
Haven't "scientists" been saying stuff like this since about the mid-1800s? "Peak Oil", "Population Overcrowding", "Global Warming"... all modern-day myths that never seem to die no matter how much they're refuted.
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?
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"?
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.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
This has F-U-D written all over it. Yes, we might need 2.75 Earths worth of *some* minerals or resources, such as tungsten or cork trees, in 20 years, but we certainly do not need 2.75 Earths worth of other, vaster resources, such as breathable air or silicon. To say that we'd need two Earths in order to quench our ravenous thirst for light bulb filaments is overkill, and certainly does more to make me discount these studies than think poorly of how humanity manages the resources we have.
still refuse to discuss population control.
Not true. There are a few that advocate genocide.
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.
So when are we going to start regulating birth rates? I know this is seen as racist by many, since the minorities are the main ones reproducing at an alarming rate, with obvious octomom exceptions, but it is about the future of our planet and the survival of our race at this point. Race isn't even a factor.
The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
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.
Fortunately, things are being dramatically better managed than even just 30 years ago. For instance, the birth rate of most densely populated countries has flattened to almost zero; agriculture is far more efficient than before; trees are being reforested in earnest. As things get gradually get worse, people will gradually put more emphasis on sustainability, and an equilibrium will eventually be reached somewhere between the Utopian and Doomsday extremes. Might not be quite as rosy as it is, comparatively, today, but it will be manageable.
is here. Contains lots of nice, big, hard to interpret charts and stuff.
Sig this!
Somehow I doubt that the groups who created this report are impartial and it is well known that if one goes looking for a specific conclusion, one will find the conclusion whether the conclusion is correct or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The overpopulation myth. 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.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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/
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.
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'.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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?
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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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 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.
Meanwhile, the "organic food" folks insist that food must be grown using only slightly modified classical techniques, for a variety of reasons from vitamin density (overstated relative to studies, at best), to mystical mumbo jumbo like vibrations and auras. The other argument is that a given technique is sustainable for a given circumstance, or allows for smaller farms - but none of them are sustainable across the populations modern farming techniques functionally do now.
They are sustainable. They could easily feed the planet. And they are based in real science (artificial hormones are still present in the meat when cooked, even if there isn't proof that they affect humans). You are arguing that increasing pesticide use is good for people. That's not true. Reduced pesticides, reduced hormones, and reduced water usage will improve the food and the areas where the food is grown/raised. The USA could supply just as much meat as it does now if all the cattle were banned from hormones, required a disease to be given antibiotics (rather than using them as preventative medicine), and were no longer fed grains they aren't built to eat. The issue is that it would be more expensive. And there's real science that supports the idea that our current regular practices are unhealthy (or higher risk) for the cattle and the humans consuming them. No mumbo jumbo required.
Learn to love Alaska
OK, I've read all the posts and apparently I'm the only one (today) who reads this article, goes outside and looks up at the starry sky... Ignoring the article's source and Doomsday message, there may come a day ( in the distant future ) when resources become (excessively) difficult to obtain. Then it will be a good day to notice that this is but one smallish planet in a much larger solar system.
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.
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.
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.
Never mind that we constantly continue to find new resources, never mind that our technology continues to change and improve, nah its DOOM the freaking SKY is FALLING, mass extinction, whitey guilt, global colding, lack of DIVERSITY, we need one more planet. I agree with that last part - we need one more planet, because the amounts of STUPID, self righteous, pseudo intellectual, whiny douchebags who believe in wealth redistribution and entitlement has reached the limit. We need a second planet to export the STUPID.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
that "the fall of modern society and a return to agrarian, low power" lifestyles couldn't make you happier.
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"According to the Living Planet Report, human demands on natural resources have doubled in under 50 years and are now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half"
Then how are we getting the resources? If I can provide 2 apples and the customer takes three where does the third one come from?
"The report said that wildlife in tropical countries is also under huge pressure, with populations of species falling by 60 per cent in three decades, the'Daily Mail reported."
60 percent? O' RLY? I don't think even the National Enquirer would buy that.
"And the report, from the WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network, said that British people are still consuming far more than the Earth can cope with."
Then how is the Earth coping?
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
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.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
"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 need so many of them to remain competative. I mean you have to look at why our population's dropping: educated females are prefering to have careers rather than just spit out children. This means we can achieve a higher % of our population that's available for work.
"Just for a laugh, I suppose you would claim that Iraq was not a resource war?"
In 1914 when we (Britain) first went in, it was certainly about resources. The most recent time, saying it was about resources is a little harder to justify. We already had their resources, we made sure it was the only thing Sadam could trade with the rest of the world. We weren't profiting from those resources as much as if they were owned by private American companies, sure, but that's about money. There is also of course the major threat of Sadam switching his O4F account from US dollars to Euros, citing "I will not use the currency of my enemy". This was the biggest threat of all, as if other OPEC nations followed suit and switched to other currencies, the USD would be in big trouble. Currently, America has a monopoly on producing the currency required to buy oil, and this helps them run up massive debts. An example needed to be set, because if people around the world all started flushing their dollars in order to buy whatever other currency they needed for oil... the federal government couldn't last a week. So again, this is more about money than oil, although it's easier to see the involvement of oil and just yell "it's about oil", I don't think it really serves the truth well.
All that and of course, Israel really wanted the war, and we all know how massive their lobby powers are in the states (but I'll say no more on that subject cuz we all know how sensitive Americans are on the subject)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
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.
Its how you decide to measure things that impacts the results so much. You may not realize we are overpopulated already but a billion people in severe poverty around the world notice it (but may not understand why and just would like to be you... but there are only so many slots available at the top end... yeah yeah, we have enough to feed everybody but its a COST and distribution problem - give them all jobs... doing what? all the livable jobs are filled...)
Peak OIL: already hit it - if you think it amounts to output then you are grabbing the wrong stat. We can produce oil from shale at higher rates of output than ever before... if we wanted. The problem is that CHEAP to produce OIL has peaked and will never be any cheaper (barring the foolish trading games or government subsidies which only can go so far.)
Peak Copper - coming in a decade or two. Copper will still be around but it'll cost more-- recycling it costs more.
The system is designed around continual growth and there IS A LIMIT technology or not.
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Ya know, I hear this all the time, yet I have never heard of any sort of viable actual real alternative for the people living in these areas. They need jobs, any sort of income. Old growth is that, old, needs to be harvested, but oh noes, can't use any exotic old growth jungle hardwoods because....people with jobs in the developed nations say so. Can't have more farmland because...no idea, people need to eat, it has to be grown. Ya, maybe it isn't the best land, but *it is the land they have*, it is what they have to use. They have no other choices. They burn their woods down because they aren't allowed to sell the timber in the first place! Of course they would rather sell it, but it is "embargoed" and such like. They have to do something, so the woods there, the old growth forests, "accidentally" burns down instead of being harvested and used to build good furniture and lumber for homes, etc. So then they grow cattle and corn and soybeans for cattle, because they need "exports", usually to pay off rich as snot western bankers/IMF folks
Catch 22 squared.
This is what I hear as an option for hundreds of millions of very poor people, they will all exist on "eco tourism", because they shouldn't be allowed to do anything else, like logging, farming, mining, etc. "eco tourism" is supposed to support hundreds of millions of the poorest people on the planet. Everything else is bad for the environment, and is unsustainable, so they should just suck it up and sit under the dripping trees all day for a living.
They pull this crap in the western US every sumer, can't log, can't build roads, but it is OK to let all that resource burn up in massive millions of acres of forest fires instead. Same people cause that, misguided eco nazis who don't really understand nature and economics, they just can't see how much harm THEY cause by insisting on looney tunes policies guaranteed to keep poor people poor, and guaranteed to WASTE resources.
How quaint. Wait, how do those eco tourists get there to go visit the pristine old ready to croak trees? Oh ya, fly there in smog spewing jets...how double quaint. Then they go home and sit in air conditioned offices and luxury homes and urban apartments and pontificate about how all those poor people need to "stop destroying their environment". They can't even see that where they live and how they live is about as un-natural as it gets and about as energy intensive and resource exploiting as it gets, yet they dis and dump on the poorest for trying to make an honest living *somehow*.
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.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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 remains of other dead animals. This has nothing to do with "vibrations", "auras", or any such bull that you pulled out of your ass, and the fact that you have to lie about the viewpoint that you oppose speaks volumes.
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. Now have a look at this list of CEO compensation by industry type. 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".