I guess you never heard about the "trust busting era" or the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act
Steel, rail, sugar, water transport, oil, meat packing, tobacco, agricultural equipment, telegraph, telephone,
and various other industries were all monopolized and eventually broken up under the Sherman & Clayton Antitrust acts
Of course I have. You have simply bought into the hype that those things were necessary checks on bad activities, rather than simply power brokers raiding the wealth of successful producers that actually did have competition, and the idea that any of that "breaking up of trusts" actually benefited consumers (you will be hard-press to find ANY evidence of that). Indeed, using Standard Oil as the most recognizable example, note that their market share was actually significantly declining before the antitrust case was brought against them.
You have competitive behavior at the beginning, but once someone establishes a dominant position, they slowly crush their competition
How? Where? "Crushing" the competition is what players attempt to do in any competitive situation. It doesn't mean it's successful, and it doesn't mean that other players can't succeed. Indeed, the larger a firm becomes, the slower it responds and the more inefficient it becomes, leaving itself vulnerable to smaller more nimble firms.
erect false barriers to entry
That can't be done in a free market, it can only be done by introducing government intervention.
and use their monopoly in one industry to allow them to unfairly compete in others
Again, there is something wrong with your premise - you're describing a monopoly that is difficult to impossible to create in a free market, and claiming they can act "unfairly" which can only happen through violence or threat of violence, which typically is government-sponsored or sanctioned.
My starting assumptions are no different than yours -- greed and profit motive drive the producers in the system.
It's the "system" you're describing that's different.
History and evidence teach us that once a company is successful in one area, they continually try to branch out into others, preferrably into areas with strong potential and weak competition.
Sure, and they should. Any area with "strong potential" and "weak competition" defines a market where the consumers are poorly served. It's an important feature of free markets that firms are able to step in and fill consumer needs that are not being met, and that's a good thing.
Capitalism very quickly fails to do what it is meant to do -- promote competition where the best product has the most customers.
Again, check your premises. The ultimate purpose of a free market is to serve consumers efficiently. If any given market is dominated by the "best product" having the most consumers, then that's successful. The only reason any competitor is even necessary is when the best product is not what consumers want, or a valid substitute can be introduced at a lower price.
Again, I don't know what you're describing, unless it's some hybrid of fascism or central planning where capital is directed by government policy instead of the free market. And that's what "strictly regulated" systems actually do - they distort the market and hamper the checks on greed that free markets have. They don't serve consumers well at all, because they focus on producers instead, which can never be as efficient since producers, without clear signals from the market, will inevitably over-produce or under-produce.
You've conflated rational, clearly-defined regulation with economic intervention into markets. It's nothing like the free thing. You act as if I was using things like anti-pollution and access to public lands as interference in the free market - I did not. Which makes your entire post nothing but a straw man.
Try taking off your own ideologue glasses before making yourself look like such a fool, like you have just done.
Your words represent ideology and theory, not observable reality. For a long time, the winners were those that could create the strongest monopoly.
Unsupportable Bullcrap. There is no "observable reality" that fits your moronic historical revisionism that free markets were creating monopolies. Just the opposite is true.
Remember the old joke? "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."
Remember what the phone company was? It was a government-granted monopoly.
Unfettered Capitalism does not necessarily lead to competition.
Yes, it does. Government intervention, however, always creates crony capitalism.
My point was that to have a perfect free market it IS necessary for ALL consumer to be educated about ALL products.
Well that's bullcrap. First because nothing involving people is every "perfect", but the entire idea that complete knowledge of everything is required is only a failing of planned economies - it's not necessary in free market economies because millions of decisions are made that in aggregate are correct.
Not to mention it's that "least resources" part where Capitalism really fails. The Capitalist way is to produce as much as you can, and damn the environment, and damn your employees. If you can cut costs by filling the river with shit, then you should do it. If you can cut costs by paying your workers less, or cutting their health benefits, then you should do it.
Right. Which is one of the few beneficial ways that government should intervene - to ensure that those things don't happen, or that the spoilers are the ones that pay the costs.
If there is a way to "game the system", it's not a free market. It's a frog with his legs cut off, that you can point to and scream "FROGS CAN'T JUMP" ("CAPITALISM FAILED")
Greed is simply part of the human condition - not good or bad. That's a misnomer.
Greed greats monopolies
Well people can try to create monopolies, but a free market will keep that in check unless government steps in and grants privileges.
abuses market and political power
Not sure what you mean by "market power", or if there is really such a thing as "abusing" it, but abuses of political power are an issue - nearly all government intervention in the market create distortions, and business colluding with government for privileges is a major issue without easy solutions.
squeezes employees without choice
employees can't quit or find another job? Why? Labor should be a free market, too.
hires less capable but more obedient employees
That will either provide an opening for competitors or lead to more costly production, or both. Kind of self-defeating, so not sure why even a greedy person would want to kill their goose, so to speak.
These hinder our economy and lead away from a truly capitalist system as market rules change to accommodate the most powerful actors.
Any "market rules" would necessarily be set by government intervention.
In free markets, the consumer sets the rules and decides on the winners and losers. Or, an overly burdensome set of government interventions, or failure to protect the market from the use of force (guns, organized crime, etc.)
You didn't finish that last sentence. Let me help.
The winners are the ones that can satisfy the needs of consumers expending the least resources to do so and thereby attain a monopoly, at which point satisfying the needs of consumers is irrelevant. And once you've reached that point, you have the power to change the rules at-will to maintain that monopoly position indefinitely.
There are really too many market mechanisms that prevent that from happening - it's virtually impossible in most markets, especially considering the inefficiencies and slower reaction times of large institutions. There have been very few real-world examples. Standard Oil comes to mind, but actually Standard Oil's dominance had already begun to wane (due to competition) before the antitrust case was filed against it.
Most monopolies throughout history were either created or supported by governments. So, again, it's the intervention that causes the problems, not the market itself. Patents, Copyrights (virtually non-expiring), and even explicit monopoly grants like utilities and mail service, are all government-sponsored.
That's not to say that there should never be regulation or that all interventions are necessarily harmful, but the idea that a company can simply take over a market, push out all competition, and continue to exist without serving consumer needs is simply a red-herring argument. It's not one of the problems with free markets.
It's not necessary for ALL consumers to be educated about ALL products - it's the mass of consumers as a whole that drives the market, not each one. Information gets disseminated and consumers make value judgements for themselves, and, yes, many make the wrong decisions, but the entire body of consumers is usually right.
The alternative is to expect some person or small group to make all the decisions instead. That's what's impossible, because millions of consumers (as a group) will always make better decisions than a single person, or even a small group, even if they are all Harvard-educated geniuses with Phds in economics.
Yea, that's total bullcrap. If you only have $10, you're a fool to spend it all on consumer goods - you damn well better invest it something and it damn well better pay off.
I saw this dynamic back in the 1980's following the Dead around. The heads would try all kinds of things to make enough money to get to the next show, and you lost some on the way because they failed (that's a feature of free markets - there are failures). But when you're down to the last bit of your money, you HAVE to invest it in something... Sell beer or bottled water if you have to, but don't buy food and drugs with it because you won't have gas money to get to the next place.
You keep looking at it as if there's this finite "pie" and everybody is competing to take the most of it they can. That's not true at all. Free markets CREATE wealth by motivating innovation and efficiencies.
A lot of people that complain about capitalism are complaining about the parts that aren't actually free markets... political favoritism and state-granted monopolies.
Yes, exactly. The market interventionism is so rampant these days, there is virtually nothing recognizable as a "free market".
Marx's model also implies that labor has no value.
Sort of. It actually does have value, it's just not rewarded for the value it adds. Instead, only need is rewarded. Ability, on the other hand, is at best, exploited, or even punished. So you have a system where people compete to be the neediest (and thus allocated the most resources), and to be the least able (and thus asked to contribute the least).
It's amazing how so many people cling to the delusion that it is possible to implement theoretical communism. It's just not possible.
I disagree - I think it's not just possible but quite plausible. The flaw is that it's unworkable once the population living under the system grows to more than about 200 people. More than that, then, yes, it's unworkable, because it becomes necessary to have specialists for enforcing the rules, and then... tyranny takes hold.
In the same way that capitalism has been tried and failed because you can't remove greed from the human condition.
No, that's totally wrong. Capitalism (free markets in their most-free form) actually recognizes and utilizes greed to promote the system. It's greed and profit motive that drives and motivates the producers in the system. The winners are the ones that can satisfy the needs of consumers expending the least resources to do so.
Capitalism, on the other hand, has been tried. It is not working, and never have (I know it's great for growth and accumulation of wealth - it just sucks at liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness).
Bogus claim. If you're going to define Communism is purist theoretical terms and claim it's a system that's never been implemented, then you have to acknowledge that that pure capitalism, as in totally free market, has never really been tried, either.
Even in the nearest implementations of capitalist systems, here have always been government and institutional interventions into the markets in forms like tariffs, product-specific taxes, regional trade restrictions, etc., etc. The last 40 years have seen an ever-increasing amount of interventionist policies, and these have accelerated in the last 10-15 years.
Claiming that this system is evidence of a "failure" of "free markets" is like cutting the legs off of a frog and then claiming "See, look! Frogs can't jump!"
That's pretty short-sighted, isn't it? What about the next one?
For production and wealth, any time that a company goes to use cheap labor at local rates to obtain or build a product that they then sell at first-world prices for orders-of-magnitude profit is exploitation
Because you say so? Doesn't sound like anyone being "exploited" has a gun to their head. They can choose not to participate. But if they are getting "local rates" (in fact in most cases they get much better than that), then why wouldn't they? Besides, as I mentioned, many of the companies that move operations to low-rate labor areas would find it much less profitable if not for the tax considerations, protection, and unfair trade agreements that they buy from their congresscritters.
As for illegal immigration...
Yep, illegal immigrants are the new slave labor. That's what I consider real exploitation, and the fact that the "wink and nudge" comes from the institution that's supposed to exist to protect the rights of people makes it unconscionably criminal.
I don't believe that the Obama Administration wants to happily grant an amnesty to everyone undocumented in the US who have committed no other real crimes.
Then you need to dig a little deeper. This is probably a good place to start.
Either way, ceasing to prosecute deportations on these people and instead focusing on criminals that actually generate real victims is probably a better approach anyway.
Hubbard's estimates regarding the US reserves were pretty much spot on in the 60s.
Which is entirely irrelevant. All Hubbard did was extrapolate from the oil "discoveries" peak to the production peak. Pretty simple. And since there is oil easier to extract elsewhere than the reserves in the US (including the many discoveries since the 1960's), and oil is sold on a global market and ALL oil companies (that are not state-owned) are global, many of the US reserves remain untapped. In fact, I don't think there are ANY US-based oil companies anymore, are there?
Oh please, not abiogenic oil. You have "replenishment" due to slow migration within the reservoir. The most prominent cases are with fields separated by faults, where the fault temporarily isolated part of the reservoir. The oil geologists were all over this - by now the abiogenic guys only have the ones that actually do the field work rolling on the floor laughing when they still bring up their bullcrap.
Way to not even read the link and create a straw man. Nothing anywhere about "abiogenic oil". The point is that not enough is known about how much oil exists and where it might be. Until a credible theory explaining the phenomenon can be developed and tested, the estimates of global reserves will always fall short.
"What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?"
It means war.
The system is out of equilibrium. There will be a correction.
Actually, war isn't a very efficient way of reducing population. Now, totalitarian governments, yea, they are really good at killing off their people. Just imagine how efficient a GLOBAL totalitarian government could be.
It's not a "pie". Innovation means more for less, to whit: with farm equipment and proper crop rotation and land stewardship, you can feed 10 times as many people from the same amount of land, AND with less labor.
While there are lots of people that gain wealth by exploiting the poor (the culture in India is an ideal example), it's a fallacy to claim that wealth is always generated that way, or even that it's a significant factor. What has changed that lately, in the global economy, is large and powerful governments using their power to protect large, multinational corporations through "intellectual property" laws, trade barriers or trade barrier restrictions, and other techniques. That's cheaper for the corporations that know how to navigate the political system, because they can exploit cheap labor instead of innovating their processes instead.
A French author named Jean Raspail wrote a novel called, "Camp of the Saints", about a large scale invasion of the third world into the first world. I think some of his premises were flawed, in that many in the first world cooperated far, far too easily with the invaders compared to what would actually happen
I don't think you've been paying attention. It was one political party's cooperation in Norway that led to Breivik's killing rampage, and while one crazy person's extremism is not indicative, the groups he associated with, frightened by the massive influx of third-world immigration, certainly is. The US has between 10 and 15 million illegal (undocumented) immigrants, with an administration working desperately to keep them all in-country. So I don't think Raspail's premises were flawed, at all.
Congratulations on your new global-citizen-indoctrination job. I'm sure you'll do well, but you first need to understand that the "eco-project" that you're expected to present is NOT supposed to teach science or critical thinking or anything along those lines - instead, it should emphasize the importance of the students' sacrifices for the common good, reliance on appointed "experts" for the amount of sacrifice required, and their total submission to the global leaders for guidance in every aspect of their lives. Think of it as your contribution to "positive societal transformation".
Still, it all goes back to what TYPE of energy to subsidize and tax - the less-polluting solar or the more-polluting oil. I believe the answer is obvious.
Well my take is that it should be none. But I can see a justification for subsidizing implementations of solar (but as this story illustrates, it's simply a waste to subsidize panel producers).
But solar vs. oil is not really a valid comparison, as solar is almost exclusively used for in-place electrical generation, and oil (product) is used almost exclusively for transportation.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you never heard about the "trust busting era" or the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act Steel, rail, sugar, water transport, oil, meat packing, tobacco, agricultural equipment, telegraph, telephone, and various other industries were all monopolized and eventually broken up under the Sherman & Clayton Antitrust acts
Of course I have. You have simply bought into the hype that those things were necessary checks on bad activities, rather than simply power brokers raiding the wealth of successful producers that actually did have competition, and the idea that any of that "breaking up of trusts" actually benefited consumers (you will be hard-press to find ANY evidence of that). Indeed, using Standard Oil as the most recognizable example, note that their market share was actually significantly declining before the antitrust case was brought against them.
What are you describing?
You have competitive behavior at the beginning, but once someone establishes a dominant position, they slowly crush their competition
How? Where? "Crushing" the competition is what players attempt to do in any competitive situation. It doesn't mean it's successful, and it doesn't mean that other players can't succeed. Indeed, the larger a firm becomes, the slower it responds and the more inefficient it becomes, leaving itself vulnerable to smaller more nimble firms.
erect false barriers to entry
That can't be done in a free market, it can only be done by introducing government intervention.
and use their monopoly in one industry to allow them to unfairly compete in others
Again, there is something wrong with your premise - you're describing a monopoly that is difficult to impossible to create in a free market, and claiming they can act "unfairly" which can only happen through violence or threat of violence, which typically is government-sponsored or sanctioned.
My starting assumptions are no different than yours -- greed and profit motive drive the producers in the system.
It's the "system" you're describing that's different.
History and evidence teach us that once a company is successful in one area, they continually try to branch out into others, preferrably into areas with strong potential and weak competition.
Sure, and they should. Any area with "strong potential" and "weak competition" defines a market where the consumers are poorly served. It's an important feature of free markets that firms are able to step in and fill consumer needs that are not being met, and that's a good thing.
Capitalism very quickly fails to do what it is meant to do -- promote competition where the best product has the most customers.
Again, check your premises. The ultimate purpose of a free market is to serve consumers efficiently. If any given market is dominated by the "best product" having the most consumers, then that's successful. The only reason any competitor is even necessary is when the best product is not what consumers want, or a valid substitute can be introduced at a lower price.
Again, I don't know what you're describing, unless it's some hybrid of fascism or central planning where capital is directed by government policy instead of the free market. And that's what "strictly regulated" systems actually do - they distort the market and hamper the checks on greed that free markets have. They don't serve consumers well at all, because they focus on producers instead, which can never be as efficient since producers, without clear signals from the market, will inevitably over-produce or under-produce.
You've conflated rational, clearly-defined regulation with economic intervention into markets. It's nothing like the free thing. You act as if I was using things like anti-pollution and access to public lands as interference in the free market - I did not. Which makes your entire post nothing but a straw man.
Try taking off your own ideologue glasses before making yourself look like such a fool, like you have just done.
Your words represent ideology and theory, not observable reality. For a long time, the winners were those that could create the strongest monopoly.
Unsupportable Bullcrap. There is no "observable reality" that fits your moronic historical revisionism that free markets were creating monopolies. Just the opposite is true.
Remember the old joke? "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."
Remember what the phone company was? It was a government-granted monopoly.
Unfettered Capitalism does not necessarily lead to competition.
Yes, it does. Government intervention, however, always creates crony capitalism.
My point was that to have a perfect free market it IS necessary for ALL consumer to be educated about ALL products.
Well that's bullcrap. First because nothing involving people is every "perfect", but the entire idea that complete knowledge of everything is required is only a failing of planned economies - it's not necessary in free market economies because millions of decisions are made that in aggregate are correct.
Not to mention it's that "least resources" part where Capitalism really fails. The Capitalist way is to produce as much as you can, and damn the environment, and damn your employees. If you can cut costs by filling the river with shit, then you should do it. If you can cut costs by paying your workers less, or cutting their health benefits, then you should do it.
Right. Which is one of the few beneficial ways that government should intervene - to ensure that those things don't happen, or that the spoilers are the ones that pay the costs.
If there is a way to "game the system", it's not a free market. It's a frog with his legs cut off, that you can point to and scream "FROGS CAN'T JUMP" ("CAPITALISM FAILED")
Greed is a bad thing, always.
Greed is simply part of the human condition - not good or bad. That's a misnomer.
Greed greats monopolies
Well people can try to create monopolies, but a free market will keep that in check unless government steps in and grants privileges.
abuses market and political power
Not sure what you mean by "market power", or if there is really such a thing as "abusing" it, but abuses of political power are an issue - nearly all government intervention in the market create distortions, and business colluding with government for privileges is a major issue without easy solutions.
squeezes employees without choice
employees can't quit or find another job? Why? Labor should be a free market, too.
hires less capable but more obedient employees
That will either provide an opening for competitors or lead to more costly production, or both. Kind of self-defeating, so not sure why even a greedy person would want to kill their goose, so to speak.
These hinder our economy and lead away from a truly capitalist system as market rules change to accommodate the most powerful actors.
Any "market rules" would necessarily be set by government intervention.
In free markets, the consumer sets the rules and decides on the winners and losers. Or, an overly burdensome set of government interventions, or failure to protect the market from the use of force (guns, organized crime, etc.)
You didn't finish that last sentence. Let me help. The winners are the ones that can satisfy the needs of consumers expending the least resources to do so and thereby attain a monopoly, at which point satisfying the needs of consumers is irrelevant. And once you've reached that point, you have the power to change the rules at-will to maintain that monopoly position indefinitely.
There are really too many market mechanisms that prevent that from happening - it's virtually impossible in most markets, especially considering the inefficiencies and slower reaction times of large institutions. There have been very few real-world examples. Standard Oil comes to mind, but actually Standard Oil's dominance had already begun to wane (due to competition) before the antitrust case was filed against it.
Most monopolies throughout history were either created or supported by governments. So, again, it's the intervention that causes the problems, not the market itself. Patents, Copyrights (virtually non-expiring), and even explicit monopoly grants like utilities and mail service, are all government-sponsored.
That's not to say that there should never be regulation or that all interventions are necessarily harmful, but the idea that a company can simply take over a market, push out all competition, and continue to exist without serving consumer needs is simply a red-herring argument. It's not one of the problems with free markets.
It's not necessary for ALL consumers to be educated about ALL products - it's the mass of consumers as a whole that drives the market, not each one. Information gets disseminated and consumers make value judgements for themselves, and, yes, many make the wrong decisions, but the entire body of consumers is usually right.
The alternative is to expect some person or small group to make all the decisions instead. That's what's impossible, because millions of consumers (as a group) will always make better decisions than a single person, or even a small group, even if they are all Harvard-educated geniuses with Phds in economics.
Yea, that's total bullcrap. If you only have $10, you're a fool to spend it all on consumer goods - you damn well better invest it something and it damn well better pay off.
I saw this dynamic back in the 1980's following the Dead around. The heads would try all kinds of things to make enough money to get to the next show, and you lost some on the way because they failed (that's a feature of free markets - there are failures). But when you're down to the last bit of your money, you HAVE to invest it in something... Sell beer or bottled water if you have to, but don't buy food and drugs with it because you won't have gas money to get to the next place.
You keep looking at it as if there's this finite "pie" and everybody is competing to take the most of it they can. That's not true at all. Free markets CREATE wealth by motivating innovation and efficiencies.
A lot of people that complain about capitalism are complaining about the parts that aren't actually free markets... political favoritism and state-granted monopolies.
Yes, exactly. The market interventionism is so rampant these days, there is virtually nothing recognizable as a "free market".
Marx's model also implies that labor has no value.
Sort of. It actually does have value, it's just not rewarded for the value it adds. Instead, only need is rewarded. Ability, on the other hand, is at best, exploited, or even punished. So you have a system where people compete to be the neediest (and thus allocated the most resources), and to be the least able (and thus asked to contribute the least).
It's amazing how so many people cling to the delusion that it is possible to implement theoretical communism. It's just not possible.
I disagree - I think it's not just possible but quite plausible. The flaw is that it's unworkable once the population living under the system grows to more than about 200 people. More than that, then, yes, it's unworkable, because it becomes necessary to have specialists for enforcing the rules, and then... tyranny takes hold.
In the same way that capitalism has been tried and failed because you can't remove greed from the human condition.
No, that's totally wrong. Capitalism (free markets in their most-free form) actually recognizes and utilizes greed to promote the system. It's greed and profit motive that drives and motivates the producers in the system. The winners are the ones that can satisfy the needs of consumers expending the least resources to do so.
Capitalism, on the other hand, has been tried. It is not working, and never have (I know it's great for growth and accumulation of wealth - it just sucks at liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness).
Bogus claim. If you're going to define Communism is purist theoretical terms and claim it's a system that's never been implemented, then you have to acknowledge that that pure capitalism, as in totally free market, has never really been tried, either.
Even in the nearest implementations of capitalist systems, here have always been government and institutional interventions into the markets in forms like tariffs, product-specific taxes, regional trade restrictions, etc., etc. The last 40 years have seen an ever-increasing amount of interventionist policies, and these have accelerated in the last 10-15 years.
Claiming that this system is evidence of a "failure" of "free markets" is like cutting the legs off of a frog and then claiming "See, look! Frogs can't jump!"
He had a point, alright. On top of his head!
At any given moment it is a pie though
That's pretty short-sighted, isn't it? What about the next one?
For production and wealth, any time that a company goes to use cheap labor at local rates to obtain or build a product that they then sell at first-world prices for orders-of-magnitude profit is exploitation
Because you say so? Doesn't sound like anyone being "exploited" has a gun to their head. They can choose not to participate. But if they are getting "local rates" (in fact in most cases they get much better than that), then why wouldn't they? Besides, as I mentioned, many of the companies that move operations to low-rate labor areas would find it much less profitable if not for the tax considerations, protection, and unfair trade agreements that they buy from their congresscritters.
As for illegal immigration...
Yep, illegal immigrants are the new slave labor. That's what I consider real exploitation, and the fact that the "wink and nudge" comes from the institution that's supposed to exist to protect the rights of people makes it unconscionably criminal.
I don't believe that the Obama Administration wants to happily grant an amnesty to everyone undocumented in the US who have committed no other real crimes.
Then you need to dig a little deeper. This is probably a good place to start.
Either way, ceasing to prosecute deportations on these people and instead focusing on criminals that actually generate real victims is probably a better approach anyway.
Agreed. Too bad that's not happening either.
Hubbard's estimates regarding the US reserves were pretty much spot on in the 60s.
Which is entirely irrelevant. All Hubbard did was extrapolate from the oil "discoveries" peak to the production peak. Pretty simple. And since there is oil easier to extract elsewhere than the reserves in the US (including the many discoveries since the 1960's), and oil is sold on a global market and ALL oil companies (that are not state-owned) are global, many of the US reserves remain untapped. In fact, I don't think there are ANY US-based oil companies anymore, are there?
Oh please, not abiogenic oil. You have "replenishment" due to slow migration within the reservoir. The most prominent cases are with fields separated by faults, where the fault temporarily isolated part of the reservoir. The oil geologists were all over this - by now the abiogenic guys only have the ones that actually do the field work rolling on the floor laughing when they still bring up their bullcrap.
Way to not even read the link and create a straw man. Nothing anywhere about "abiogenic oil". The point is that not enough is known about how much oil exists and where it might be. Until a credible theory explaining the phenomenon can be developed and tested, the estimates of global reserves will always fall short.
And, for some miraculous reason, coincidental with the stabilization of world population, oil will replenish,
That has already started.
"What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?"
It means war. The system is out of equilibrium. There will be a correction.
Actually, war isn't a very efficient way of reducing population. Now, totalitarian governments, yea, they are really good at killing off their people. Just imagine how efficient a GLOBAL totalitarian government could be.
It's not a "pie". Innovation means more for less, to whit: with farm equipment and proper crop rotation and land stewardship, you can feed 10 times as many people from the same amount of land, AND with less labor.
While there are lots of people that gain wealth by exploiting the poor (the culture in India is an ideal example), it's a fallacy to claim that wealth is always generated that way, or even that it's a significant factor. What has changed that lately, in the global economy, is large and powerful governments using their power to protect large, multinational corporations through "intellectual property" laws, trade barriers or trade barrier restrictions, and other techniques. That's cheaper for the corporations that know how to navigate the political system, because they can exploit cheap labor instead of innovating their processes instead.
A French author named Jean Raspail wrote a novel called, "Camp of the Saints", about a large scale invasion of the third world into the first world. I think some of his premises were flawed, in that many in the first world cooperated far, far too easily with the invaders compared to what would actually happen
I don't think you've been paying attention. It was one political party's cooperation in Norway that led to Breivik's killing rampage, and while one crazy person's extremism is not indicative, the groups he associated with, frightened by the massive influx of third-world immigration, certainly is. The US has between 10 and 15 million illegal (undocumented) immigrants, with an administration working desperately to keep them all in-country. So I don't think Raspail's premises were flawed, at all.
Congratulations on your new global-citizen-indoctrination job. I'm sure you'll do well, but you first need to understand that the "eco-project" that you're expected to present is NOT supposed to teach science or critical thinking or anything along those lines - instead, it should emphasize the importance of the students' sacrifices for the common good, reliance on appointed "experts" for the amount of sacrifice required, and their total submission to the global leaders for guidance in every aspect of their lives. Think of it as your contribution to "positive societal transformation".
You can find some really good reference material right here, and be sure to check out this stuff. Good Luck!!
Still, it all goes back to what TYPE of energy to subsidize and tax - the less-polluting solar or the more-polluting oil. I believe the answer is obvious.
Well my take is that it should be none. But I can see a justification for subsidizing implementations of solar (but as this story illustrates, it's simply a waste to subsidize panel producers).
But solar vs. oil is not really a valid comparison, as solar is almost exclusively used for in-place electrical generation, and oil (product) is used almost exclusively for transportation.