You are covering the material side of things, not taking into account the thermodynamics. What are the energetic costs of those measures? You are also not taking into account the economic costs - can we afford that transition. Not to speak of the climate impact of transitioning from an oil based system to a system based on coal-derived liquid fuels with an EROI and therefor emissions worse by a factor of 3-5. A look at the real world quite clearly shows that your "trivial" solutions are not implemented for a variety of quite nontrivial problems.
Stop burning strawmen about man-hate, which you completely pull out of your ass, as again, you have nothing to back you up. What would those replacements be, giving a comparable EROI to light sweet? How are fossil aquifers not depleted to fuel our agriculture? How are the fisheries not collapsing? What's the replacement for those? Classic cornucopianism, but you know that, else you would argue and not resort to name-calling.
They also have a living standard that depends on depleting finite resources. We are good at that. Where will that prosperity go when the oil with a decent EROI is gone, the fossil aquifers depleted, the soils leached out, the fisheries destroyed? We are working on each of those. I am not saying that our standard of living is unsustainable - it might be, but not by the means we are employing now, and I don't see any viable alternatives coming up.
Yep. Keeping up exponential growth in a finite world is just an engineering problem. Also, in short, a discussion strategy that boils down to stating a bunch of contrafactual claims and concludes with calling your discussion partner psychotic, is no discussion strategy at all, but a sign that you have no argument at all. Next.
Of course, genocide is the only way of population control know to man. That's how the highly developed countries are doing it internally, right? Whenever I read bullshit like this - and it invariably pops up in every discussion regarding population control - I get the feeling that the respective poster works from a perspective of "Well, given the opportunity, I'd absolutely, positively love me a decent genocide, if I only could get away with it" and then ascribes his warped perspective to others.
Well, yeah, sure - that the population as such is not a problem at the moment is a bit trivial. As you say, the problem is that industry and economy are currently not geared to provide for this population in a sustainable way - and for many problems, we don't have a clue how to fix them. As for phosphate - a lot is washed into the oceans, creating dead zones, getting diluted and vanishing in the sediment in concentrations that are not economically recoverable. Entropy is out to get us...
I completely agree that at the moment, we are facing mostly distribution problems - definitely when it comes to food, not so certain when it comes to oil. In the case of oil, it seems that production can't keep up with demand. My concern, however, is that this status quo is only held up by the consumption of finite resources, some of which have already peaked, some of which are about to peak. This obviously means that the status quo is not sustainable and has to be changed. The question is, can it be? That actually is a bundle of question with different answers for every single resource - is the resource in question replaceable with something equivalent, how expensive is the transition, is the supply with other resources tied into this one, does the EROI change by the transition? The main problem here is oil - easily replaceable for electricity, probably even affordable to do so, not so easily replaceable as transportation fuel, which will require massive infrastructure investments and quite some technological advancement. That's where the problems lie.
You assume that there is anything to go forward to, anything that gives the same EROI that cheap oil used to give us when we built the whole system. You also assume that the transition comes with no significant cost - what percentage of the world population will be able to afford it at all? Those who can't will be back where we started. Maybe not all of us.
Well, in non-human biological systems, populations rarely crash because fertility goes down, but rather because mortality skyrockets. And that's what is going to get us - what part of the world population can actually afford to transition away from a completely oil-addicted system?
Who is "we"? The winners of the Great Resource Grab of the last century? What percentage of the world population is "taking joyrides for fun"? What percentage is throwing away more food than they eat? Seen the oil prices lately? They are gonna stay there - and go up further. Production has been on a plateau for years and that is not because demand has gone down - as shown by the price trend. You are aware of the declining availability of fresh water in large areas of the world? You are aware that fisheries are collapsing all over the place?
The whole "green revolution" is fueled by these things. We didn't need to do it back then, but now that our population exploded because we chose to do so, we are pretty much trapped in it. I see at least a quite unpleasant transition period coming while we try to extricate ourselves from this trap.
We are way past sustainable resource usage due to our population already. Of course we breed when resources are rare. We have been doing it for decades.
And every single thing you listed is fueled by oil. Seen the prices for that lately? Seen the effect of that on the economy, on food prices? And they ain't gonna go down. Oil has peaked, production is on an undulating plateau for a couple of years now, with the major producers being in decline. Oil fueled our decoupling from natural population cycles, with the cheap oil being depleted, we'll be back where we started pretty damn soon.
And land will not give you any sufficient food, as we are already deep in overshoot regarding a sustainable food production - to keep up our production rates, we deplete fossil aquifers, we burn 9 kJ of our declining fossil fuel reserves for 1 kJ of food produced and we deplete our soils, leading to an increasing need for limited resources (cv. phosphate depot depletion) to keep the soil chemistry going. To top it off, fisheries are in massive decline, with many local collapses already having happened. Fun times ahead.
Don't forget about the wonderful quality of life in the 19th century, the enormous freedom to live in perpetual debt in company towns, the freedom to get a lead pipe applied to your knees should you dare to actually strike as a worker, the freedom dem niggers and womenfolk enjoyed while being kept in their respective places, the freedom of 60 hour work weeks in conditions that cut decades from your life expectancy, the freedom to have your children work to make ends meet. Great times, man, great times. I can see why you in particular would want to go back there.
And in a few decades, you will sit in your basement, err, sorry command center, your grandson on your knees, telling him stories of the heroic times when you waged your One-Man-Crusade against the evil space nutters in every thread on slashdot, single-handedly eradicating this scourge from the world. Wait, no, you won't, because you won't have a grandson, being a bitter, single-minded, trolling moron that not even a 5 dollar whore would let come close to her.
I freely admit that I have been outnerded on this one. But hey, I am a protein structure guy that left academia for quite some time in the end - been a while since I went over the theory of cannabis. The town's Munich, Germany. The pigs are unpleasant around here these days.
Yeah, opportunity cost. For the money spent on NASA in the last couple of decades, we could have prolonged another useless war for a couple of weeks. Think of the children of the military-industrial complex!
Seriously, if you want to slash spending, start with the real parasites, and not with science.
If the system was broken and impeding innovation even back to the invention of cotton gin, how in hell did we actually get to the amount of innovation that did happen? In the case of Eli Whitney - which I am not familiar with in detail - well, yes, if you get the patent, you will have to spend time on defending it. If that takes over your life - well, then your law firm sucks. In the case of the telephone - of course one gets the patent. The one filing the earliest, in a sane system that doesn't open the can of worms of "first to invent". I completely agree that there are lots of points that could be improved, I see it every day at work, but I can't get from your post what you do actually think is wrong at the moment.
Ah well, don't mind it. The "everything in the news is biased bullshit" is just another one of those faux-cynic memes spouted around here daily. It's working along the same lines as the "all politicians are equal"-meme. Doesn't help dealing with reality, but it won't go away either. Like the smell of piss in a derelict subway station.
Slashdot Mirror
You are covering the material side of things, not taking into account the thermodynamics. What are the energetic costs of those measures? You are also not taking into account the economic costs - can we afford that transition. Not to speak of the climate impact of transitioning from an oil based system to a system based on coal-derived liquid fuels with an EROI and therefor emissions worse by a factor of 3-5. A look at the real world quite clearly shows that your "trivial" solutions are not implemented for a variety of quite nontrivial problems.
I'll stick with extra-virgin olive oil in that case, though....
Stop burning strawmen about man-hate, which you completely pull out of your ass, as again, you have nothing to back you up. What would those replacements be, giving a comparable EROI to light sweet? How are fossil aquifers not depleted to fuel our agriculture? How are the fisheries not collapsing? What's the replacement for those? Classic cornucopianism, but you know that, else you would argue and not resort to name-calling.
Brains, intelligence and the ability to keep up with current news, obviously.
They also have a living standard that depends on depleting finite resources. We are good at that. Where will that prosperity go when the oil with a decent EROI is gone, the fossil aquifers depleted, the soils leached out, the fisheries destroyed? We are working on each of those. I am not saying that our standard of living is unsustainable - it might be, but not by the means we are employing now, and I don't see any viable alternatives coming up.
Yep. Keeping up exponential growth in a finite world is just an engineering problem. Also, in short, a discussion strategy that boils down to stating a bunch of contrafactual claims and concludes with calling your discussion partner psychotic, is no discussion strategy at all, but a sign that you have no argument at all. Next.
Of course, genocide is the only way of population control know to man. That's how the highly developed countries are doing it internally, right? Whenever I read bullshit like this - and it invariably pops up in every discussion regarding population control - I get the feeling that the respective poster works from a perspective of "Well, given the opportunity, I'd absolutely, positively love me a decent genocide, if I only could get away with it" and then ascribes his warped perspective to others.
To reiterate a point that needs reiterating - we spend on average 9 J worth of oil on 1 J worth of food produced. That is where it really gets ugly.
Well, yeah, sure - that the population as such is not a problem at the moment is a bit trivial. As you say, the problem is that industry and economy are currently not geared to provide for this population in a sustainable way - and for many problems, we don't have a clue how to fix them. As for phosphate - a lot is washed into the oceans, creating dead zones, getting diluted and vanishing in the sediment in concentrations that are not economically recoverable. Entropy is out to get us...
I completely agree that at the moment, we are facing mostly distribution problems - definitely when it comes to food, not so certain when it comes to oil. In the case of oil, it seems that production can't keep up with demand. My concern, however, is that this status quo is only held up by the consumption of finite resources, some of which have already peaked, some of which are about to peak. This obviously means that the status quo is not sustainable and has to be changed. The question is, can it be? That actually is a bundle of question with different answers for every single resource - is the resource in question replaceable with something equivalent, how expensive is the transition, is the supply with other resources tied into this one, does the EROI change by the transition? The main problem here is oil - easily replaceable for electricity, probably even affordable to do so, not so easily replaceable as transportation fuel, which will require massive infrastructure investments and quite some technological advancement. That's where the problems lie.
You assume that there is anything to go forward to, anything that gives the same EROI that cheap oil used to give us when we built the whole system. You also assume that the transition comes with no significant cost - what percentage of the world population will be able to afford it at all? Those who can't will be back where we started. Maybe not all of us.
Well, in non-human biological systems, populations rarely crash because fertility goes down, but rather because mortality skyrockets. And that's what is going to get us - what part of the world population can actually afford to transition away from a completely oil-addicted system?
Who is "we"? The winners of the Great Resource Grab of the last century? What percentage of the world population is "taking joyrides for fun"? What percentage is throwing away more food than they eat? Seen the oil prices lately? They are gonna stay there - and go up further. Production has been on a plateau for years and that is not because demand has gone down - as shown by the price trend. You are aware of the declining availability of fresh water in large areas of the world? You are aware that fisheries are collapsing all over the place?
The whole "green revolution" is fueled by these things. We didn't need to do it back then, but now that our population exploded because we chose to do so, we are pretty much trapped in it. I see at least a quite unpleasant transition period coming while we try to extricate ourselves from this trap.
We are way past sustainable resource usage due to our population already. Of course we breed when resources are rare. We have been doing it for decades.
And every single thing you listed is fueled by oil. Seen the prices for that lately? Seen the effect of that on the economy, on food prices? And they ain't gonna go down. Oil has peaked, production is on an undulating plateau for a couple of years now, with the major producers being in decline. Oil fueled our decoupling from natural population cycles, with the cheap oil being depleted, we'll be back where we started pretty damn soon.
And land will not give you any sufficient food, as we are already deep in overshoot regarding a sustainable food production - to keep up our production rates, we deplete fossil aquifers, we burn 9 kJ of our declining fossil fuel reserves for 1 kJ of food produced and we deplete our soils, leading to an increasing need for limited resources (cv. phosphate depot depletion) to keep the soil chemistry going. To top it off, fisheries are in massive decline, with many local collapses already having happened. Fun times ahead.
Don't forget about the wonderful quality of life in the 19th century, the enormous freedom to live in perpetual debt in company towns, the freedom to get a lead pipe applied to your knees should you dare to actually strike as a worker, the freedom dem niggers and womenfolk enjoyed while being kept in their respective places, the freedom of 60 hour work weeks in conditions that cut decades from your life expectancy, the freedom to have your children work to make ends meet. Great times, man, great times. I can see why you in particular would want to go back there.
And in a few decades, you will sit in your basement, err, sorry command center, your grandson on your knees, telling him stories of the heroic times when you waged your One-Man-Crusade against the evil space nutters in every thread on slashdot, single-handedly eradicating this scourge from the world. Wait, no, you won't, because you won't have a grandson, being a bitter, single-minded, trolling moron that not even a 5 dollar whore would let come close to her.
Game over, Troll.
Much to learn YounglingBot has, much to learn.
I freely admit that I have been outnerded on this one. But hey, I am a protein structure guy that left academia for quite some time in the end - been a while since I went over the theory of cannabis. The town's Munich, Germany. The pigs are unpleasant around here these days.
Yeah, opportunity cost. For the money spent on NASA in the last couple of decades, we could have prolonged another useless war for a couple of weeks. Think of the children of the military-industrial complex!
Seriously, if you want to slash spending, start with the real parasites, and not with science.
Sweet Cthulhu, I will find you. Stop baiting the poor semantic nazis. They can't help themselves.
If the system was broken and impeding innovation even back to the invention of cotton gin, how in hell did we actually get to the amount of innovation that did happen? In the case of Eli Whitney - which I am not familiar with in detail - well, yes, if you get the patent, you will have to spend time on defending it. If that takes over your life - well, then your law firm sucks. In the case of the telephone - of course one gets the patent. The one filing the earliest, in a sane system that doesn't open the can of worms of "first to invent". I completely agree that there are lots of points that could be improved, I see it every day at work, but I can't get from your post what you do actually think is wrong at the moment.
Ah well, don't mind it. The "everything in the news is biased bullshit" is just another one of those faux-cynic memes spouted around here daily. It's working along the same lines as the "all politicians are equal"-meme. Doesn't help dealing with reality, but it won't go away either. Like the smell of piss in a derelict subway station.