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Have We Reached Maximum Sustainable Population Size?
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.'"
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.
don't eat meat. That alone alleviates the largest part of the problems mentioned, as 1) much less crop will be needed to feed the same population and 2) CO2 emissions from animal farming will disappear. These are actually the reasons this anonymous coward turned vegetarian.
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.
The title of this summary is "Have We Reached Maximum Sustainable Population Size." That is the question to which he is answering "No," and his is the correct answer.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
we need to let go of. Most of the so called economic growth of the last few hundred years has been entirely based on digging things out of the ground and consuming them. Nothing grew, we just reduced the value of our asset base in favour of revenue to spend. Yes we could find other assets to strip that would keep us 'growing' a while longer but really, can we keep pretending?
Korma: Good
Examples? Chernobyl. Fukushima Daiichi. 'nuff said.
Those are minor examples. Use banning of DDT if you want an example of human stupidity costing thousands of lives.
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.
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 food costs have almost doubled since 2003 or so. Competition for jobs is so fierce that companies are now offering to pay less than they did before. Vacation days are nothing compared to what other western countries get. Healthcare is a coin-toss on whether anything I get gets covered. The real cost of basic utilities is high. etc.
Most of those issues have to do with how expensive it is to extract resources for the earth and how expensive it is to buy those resources because market demands raise their cost.
30 years from now, you'll be living in some 300 sq ft box, working full time, and eating gruel and still refusing to believe that population affects lifestyle.
Sadly, its probably too late to do anything. Imagine getting a one child per couple policy in the US with our puritanical roots and "family" above all else policies and culture. Compare China to India. Both were just as poor not too long ago, but one has a wildly expanding population while the other put in a one child per couple policy. Guess which one will be tomorrow's world leader?
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.
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*.
e.g. will we start letting the excess die in a gutter? 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. I don't know of a third answer (that doesn't boil down to one or the other in practical terms).
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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.
Maybe that's because the relevant number here is not population density, but rather population growth rate?
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.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
As does global warming alarmism, nuclear meltdown alarmism, alarmism over the horrors of oil pipelines across the pristine Alaskan wilderness, nuclear/bio/neurotoxic terrorism alarmism, economic alarmism, alarmism concerning the inevitable collapse of Christian Society should same-sex persons be permitted to marry, taxation alarmism, economic depression alarmism, and recently, alarmism concerning the rapture and following apocalypse and still more alarmism about how a coronal mass ejection that is apparently inevitable in 2013 will bring about the collapse of civilization as we know it.
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?)
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
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.
>>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.
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
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs