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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".