The Real Population Problem (2013)
physics.ucsd.edu
physics.ucsd.edu
People have been talking about a supposed Population Bomb for literally hundreds of years. And each time, they have been wrong.
Obviously, there exists some theoretical carrying capacity maximum on planet Earth, but perhaps that maximum is closer to 1 trillion people than 7 billion. That would be plenty of time for humans to figure that space travel thing out. Especially since it is predicted that pop size will peak within the next 40 years.
Because all growth since Malthus' time has been due to the use of stored Carbon energy. Malthus' observations had been largely true until then.
Maybe we'll figure out some way to replace our stored carbons inputs in a way that lets us keep the same energy surplus.
But, that's the short answer for why things may be different: the past 200 years have been a historical aberration. The fact that an effect takes a while to work itself out doesn't mean that that effect is nonexistent.
We already have: unfortunately, massive and pervasive scientific illiteracy, often abetted by the same people complaining about population growth and carbon-based energy, has prevented us from making full use of nuclear power. If you'd like to fix the energy problem as quickly as possible, without waiting for breakthroughs in solar or battery storage or fusion, it's Greenpeace you need to talk to.
That said, it's good to diversify energy sources (so long as they're non-polluting), and I can see some potential benefits for thorium-based reactors.
The main reason we haven't moved away from fossil fuels more quickly isn't due to blocking nuclear, it's due to short-term profit-led thinking.
EDIT: "The MIT report estimated that over 200 zettajoules (ZJ) would be extractable, with the potential to increase this to over 2,000 ZJ with technology improvements – sufficient to provide all the world's present energy needs for several millennia."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy
Plenty of time to develop renewables and nuclear fusion, no?
I think that trend has had its run - we're not brute-forcing every industrial process any more, getting clever about energy use is all the rage now.
Nuclear is non-polluting too. It's probably the greenest form of energy available to us per kWh if you count everything up. Diversification is a good idea though.
> The main reason we haven't moved away from fossil fuels more quickly isn't due to blocking nuclear, it's due to short-term profit-led thinking.
There are two aspects here - one is that we haven't moved away from fossil fuels due to "short-term profit-led thinking", or as it is formally known (if you count profits in dollars), the market economy. But the second aspect is that as we slowly move towards other sources, we're moving away from nuclear - and that happens because of FUD and politics (which is also "short-term profit-led thinking").
"we're moving away from nuclear - and that happens because of FUD and politics (which is also "short-term profit-led thinking")."
... I don't agree with that. I'd even go as far to say the opposite is true, one of the biggest issues with nuclear fission is the long life of nuclear waste, it's only when you have a long term view that it becomes a problem.
Again, there are ways around this. From what I understand it's possible to reuse nuclear waste (are the power plants that do this known as breeder reactors?).
Another big issue with nuclear fission is the other, more destructive use for it. Building reactors all around the world could aid the development of nuclear weapons. Again, that sort of insight isn't exclusively based on a short term view. Again, there could be ways around that. Am I right in thinking that thorium is harder to use in the process of producing plutonium?
At most you could say about short term thinking is that the cost and lead times for producing new nuclear reactors seems fairly high, which would put off some investors.
The proliferation argument is a good one, and it limits available solutions. Some thorium-based designs are indeed more difficult to hijack for production of nuclear weapons.
Tom Murphy (author of the top-level article here) has done an analysis of global geothermal potential. It comes up far short of present or forecast energy demands:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/01/warm-and-fuzzy-o...
Note that even tapping geothermal only for thermal uses still falls far short:
The average American household used 80 thousand cubic feet of natural gas in 2001 (apologies for old data and Imperial units). The gas is predominantly used for heating of one form or another: house, water, and food. 80,000 cf translates to about 800 Therms of energy per year, or 2700 W of continuous thermal power. Using our number from before that the mantle generates 7×10−12 W/kg, the average American home would need a rock mass of 4×1014kg, or a cubic volume 5 km on a side at a crustal density of 3.3 times that of water.
You might also want to check the IPCC's SRREN renewables energy report which has more deets on a large slew of renewable energy options.
"Still, if we don’t care about sustainable use of geothermal, we can just keep drilling new holes to deplete one region after the other. In this sense, we could evaluate the thermal endowment in the upper 5 km of crust under land. The average temperature in this layer is about 60°C above the surface value, so that each cubic meter (3300 kg) contains 180 MJ of thermal energy. Summed over 1.4×1014 m², we get about 1026 J. This is 250,000 years of our global appetite. A quarter-million years might seem close enough to indefinite that we’re willing to call it sustainable. Truly it is a substantial endowment. It’s the practical considerations that hold us off from rushing into this resource."
There are some practical issues to overcome before geothermal could take a bigger share of the energy mix, but they're being worked on. Whilst I don't believe we should ever rely on one energy source, not even when we have nuclear fusion, I still think that geothermal has enough potential benefits to make it unwise to rule out whilst we still need to move away from polluting sources of energy.
Here's one idea for improving the practicalities of geothermal:
"Bhargava’s other hobby is tackling the world’s dependence on polluting fossil fuels with geothermal energy. His twist? Use a grapheme cord, which is stronger than steel and an impressive conductor of heat, in lieu of the usual steam-and-chemicals to gather and distribute underground heat. By his estimate, geothermal energy like this could replace 85 percent of fossil fuels."
http://energyefficiencymarkets.com/quick-energy-efficiency-n...
The project's been plagued by multiple setbacks, for which some of the most candid accounts come from the company's own investor filings with the Australian government, though the upshot is:
* The whole durned thing done blowed up. There was a steam explosion which, putting things mildly, proved a substantial setback. Fortunately no one was killed.
* Power output of the pilot project has been scaled back tremendously. Again it's been a few years since I looked at this, but actual achieved output was 1/50th initial estimates.
* Costs were tremendously higher than initially anticipated. For achieved output, $30,000/kW, vs. about $4,000 kW for solar (less today).
* Schedule overruns, even accounting for accidents, were on the order of years.
Ah, turned up my earlier article, you can see that here:
https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wpa90/how_not_to_...
Solar energy is on the other hand for all practical puposes inexhaustable. The equivalent of ALL fossil fuels hits Earth every few days. It won't run out in foreseable future and if it will, we are done for anyway.
I was just pointing out that there is a cogent rationale for why this time could be different. Perhaps we could replace fossil fuels, but we haven't, yet. And until we do we're still in the same 200+ year energy cycle that started around Malthus' time.
The poster I was replying to seemed to think there was literally no reason that Malthus might be right. He's not certainly right, but he's not certainly wrong yet either.
And given we have great fission engineering, improving solar and wind power generation, and most of the world could easily improve land productivity, we aren't even close to a population cap.
In practice though it's not that easy. Good luck convincing people on how wasteful and pollutant beef production is, or solving the issue of affordable housing for the masses near city centers.
I'd be interested in seeing a city-state attempt to design a modern planned-city architecture incorporating local food production. Maybe even something akin to Paolo Soleri's 'Archology' ; https://www.google.com/search?q=paolo+soleri&biw=1303&bih=78...
In a world with a real pressing population problem, coupled with good alternatives(meatless meat that's good as the real thing, healthier ,cheaper, marketed well) it seems doable.
>> local food production.
In the grand scale of things, i'm not sure that's a huge problem. food miles are just 10% of food emissions, and we have some other ways to get rid of that(clean transport, greenhouses spread around cities) that seem more practical.
But if you're interested, there's some interesting research on large-scale vertical agriculture[pdf]:
http://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/down...
But to build it would be expensive - 200 million euro, and as far as i can remember , it wasn't price competitive.
We could fit even more people if we're willing to self-factory-farm ourselves, but I think people won't be happy living like mass-produced poultry.
So, if not happy, at least willing. Or Montana and the Gobi desert would be hella more expensive.
> "That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence, That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and, That the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice."
His postulate hasn't proven true for the entire global population, it has very often proven true for smaller populations.
Fossil fuels are to the world, as the Potato was to mid 19th century Ireland.
I'm looking at you Organization of Potato Exporting Countries.
Let's say we then invent a new technology that doubles the carrying capacity of Earth; that buys us about 70 years. Now we figure out how to terraform mars to hold about as many people as earth: another 70 years.
So assuming a 2 trillion maximum capacity of earth and a steady 1% growth rate, we have 640 years to figure out how to colonize the moons of the outer planets...
If population sizes do peak in the next 40 years we are a lot better off, but are still stuck with the question of how to grow the economy at an exponential rate indefinitely, or come up with a different macroeconomic plan.
World population isn't growing exponentially, so it can't continue to do so; growth rate (% of current population added per year) peaked in the mid 1960s, and has declined since, exponential growth would have a constant growth rate.
> A 1% growth rate would put us at 1 trillion in about 500 years.
Current growth rate is a little above 1%, but its dropping.
That's just false. If the average number of children per person is falling toward replacement fast enough, population growth is not exponential while still being positive (potentially indefinitely).
No, its not. There are all kinds of growth curves that are not exponential. Exponential growth is has a constant multiple over a fixed time frame. (so, a constant doubling interval.)
Positive growth and exponential growth have nothing to do with each other; exponential growth can be positive or negative, and positive (or negative) growth can be non-exponential.
> but that doesn't change the mathematical reality.
The mathematical reality is that the population isn't growing exponentially, and that positive growth doesn't imply exponential growth.
To me this is obviously false, so we will need to grow sub-exponentially (i.e. per-capita growth rate must go down) at some point. In the context of the article we are discussing, arresting growth rate is part of preventing the Malthusian apocalypse.
Obviously besides the green revolution, the other big change since Malthus has been safe reliable contraceptives, so the tools are there to arrest population growth, but most people are uncomfortable with any coercive use of these, so if the U curve of population growth (that TFA discusses) ends up being real (a lot of countries on the right side of the curve are culturally very different from countries in the middle of the curve, so it could be coincidental), cheaper energy could accelerate us towards a situation where we need to consider coercive means of reducing growth rate.
So true, no population pattern is sustainable indefinitely on Earth. (Or, for that matter, in the Universe.) So in the end, considering infinite timeline sustainability is pointless.
So yeah, Malthus was "wrong" because we've found some ways to temporarily extend the growth curve. But, unless you believe that we'll keep lucking into high-impact solutions, we still have a problem, because his basic reasoning was sound and "limits to growth" are pretty much laws of physics.
But briefly:
1. Vast amounts of coal, oil, and gas. We're using in one year the legacy of about 5 million years of accumulation of fossil fuels. We've managed to burn through much of the total initial endowment of these fuels, and there isn't more where they came from.
2. Improvements in very fundamental health and sanitation practices created a vast boom in population. Far more of this came from simple measures such as fresh water supplies, sewerage systems, and municipal waste collection than all modern medicine since 1920, including antibiotics, organ transplants, and vaccines. Understanding of germ theory, antisceptic controls in hospitals, and quarantines succeeded in taming the epidemics and plagues of the 19th century.
3. Chemical fertilisers, most especially the highly energy-intensive Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixation process. Take away the energy and this grinds to a halt -- it fueled the growth of Europe in the early 20th century.
4. Other chemical and mineral wealth. From iron to platinum, minerals on Earth are present only in limited quantities, and the abundance on Earth as a whole is markedly different from prevalence in the crust. There's a long and growing list of critically short minerals, including such elements as copper, silver, phosphorus, tin, lithium, and more. These are crucial in electronics, fertilizers (especially phosphorus), and other industrial processes.
5. One-time gains from the Green Revolution. By providing plants' needs for fertiliser and pest control artificially, we've managed to divert more of their energy into food production. Take away those inputs, and ag productivity falls. We're also reliant on a vast transport, storage, refrigeration, and processing system -- food requires 10x the energy inputs as it delivers in calories in the US, 5x in most of Europe.
Short of it: Malthus didn't anticipate the total wealth of energy in fossil fuels, or the possible applications of that one-time windfall in further boosting Earth's population. His basic premise was, however, correct. His constants were wrong. Thats' all.
That space travel thing is kinda complicated. And the distances are really far. And last I heard, Amazon's delivery time on other Earths was. Oh crap. They're out of stock.
But enjoy your wishful thinking.
1. Only a small part is used for food production and none of it directly. All our food comes from photosynthesis, that is, solar energy.
2. That only made people live longer, it didn't make them have more children. It does the opposite actually. (and BTW, sanitation is ancient, mediavel Europe was an abberation. Bronze age cities alredy had water supply, sewage systems and such.)
3. It's energy intensive, but not that intensive, it could be replaced with solar energy or natural bacteria and losses could be minimized by recycling waste. Nitrogen is a building block of cells, it's not a source of energy for them. The fixation process takes a lot of energy because nitrogen molecules in the air are hard to break.
4. Minerals, unlike fuels, aren't used up. They can be recycled forever, you only need to recover the losses.
5. Fertilizers aren't made from fossil fuels, there is no reaosn why we should stop using them. Transport storage and processing is done that way because it's more convenient or the final product is preferable. ("fresh" vs. dried or salted food)
1. If you're referring to Smil, you're simply incorrect. As for pseudonymously publised works, there's a long tradition of that, as well as of anonymous publishing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_published_unde...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anonymously_publishe...
1. On food production: the natural rate of agriculture peaked arguably in the 19th or early 20th century. Again, what's boosted food output has largely been a transfer of plant-derived photosynthetic energy from other purposes (disease resistance, physical structure), to producing more actual foodstuffs: grain, germ, and starch. Most especially in the case of the major staple crops: wheat, maize, rice, and potatoes. Avialable arable land, topsoil, suitable climatic regions, freshwater, and fertilisers are all limiting factors. On which you might also care to refer to Leibig's Law of the Minimum. As to the topic of my coment, virtually all manufacturing, transport, and processign activities require one or more of coal, oil, or gas. Absent these, no steel, little aluminium (hydroelectric can substitute), cement, and many other materials, again, Smil addresses this in depth), no overland trucks, far more difficult overland rail, ocean cargo is restricted to sail or sail-power hybrids, and no air travel.
2. Demographic plots of population say otherwise.
3. The point isn't that nitrogen is an energy source, but that it's a fundamentally required and limiting nutrient, and that breaking those chemical bonds are precisely what requires so much energy. The initial question asked was "what changed", and that's what I've answered. Malthus didn't forsee either the chemical energy bounty of fossil fuels, or the possible addition of artificial fertilisers. Haber-Bosch reflects the combination of these factors. You'd have to both continue the 2nd, and substitute for the 1st factor.
4. Cost of mineral extraction rises precisely as a reciprocal of their concentration. Concentrations of mined ores has fallen tremendously. The problem with the "more energy makes recycling possible" argument is that many or most of those energy systems are themselves dependent on scarce mineral resources for their production, transformation to useful forms, and especially, storage.
As ecologists note (Howard Odum at depth), humans, and life generally, exploit entropic gradients. These include not only energy gradients as in fossil fuels, but gradients of ore concentrations and even natural systems producing useful exploitable circumstances.
5. You're arguing a point I didn't make. It's not that fertilisers are made from fossil fuels (though in fact many are). It's that even those fertilisers which aren't critically limited by dependency of fossil-fuel based synthesis are themselves in crucially short supplies. Most notably phosphorus, though on a longer scale, even reasonably abundant potash becomes constrained (1-5 centuries).
Again: life exploits entropic gradients. Humans have overcome contraints of previous gradients (a near 100% renewables regime, based on agriculture, small wind and water kinetic inputs, and small-scale extractive mining), by bootstrapping a vast enterprise of energy and minerals extraction. It's produced a one-time boon for the species.
Even highly abundant mineral resources such as iron and oxygen are available to us through previous biological activity on the planet. Look up "banded iron formations" and "the great oxygenation event" for background. Humans have plowed through a billion years of iron accumulation in a couple of centuries. While not fully exhausted, future generations will have massively less rich ores to mine. If they're starting from a technological deficit on top of that, the process of re-bootstrapping civilisation will likely prove challenging.
Technologies can both lead to newly avialable gradients such as coal, oil, and gas, which were less attractive earlier in that they weren't universally distributed -- easier to walk into the local woods to extract fuel than haul coal thousands, or even tens, of miles. An entire infrastructure of railways, paved highways, pipelines, shipping systems, and high-pressure or low-temperature containment were required to make these fuels vialble, a process which took much of a century to fully develop.
Renewables are the energy of the future, of that I've no doubt. The question is the scale and technological scope of their utilisation. Nuclear power is the curveball, though conventional once-through uranium and plutonium designs are sufficient only for about 7-8 more decades at present levels of use. Increase the provision of electricity from them and that falls to about 6 years. Seawater extraction of uranium at 2ppm is unproven and would require vast marine structures (the marine environment is a bitch to engineer for). Breeder systems offer a longer horizon, but with massive systemic risks.
Neither, of themselves, address liquid fuels, coking fuel (14% of coal consumption), or other affordances of hydrocarbons, though there are some possible options (Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis, possibly recapturing carbon from seawater among the more interesting possibilities). Even these would raise the energy cost of liquid hydrocarbons by a factor of about 80.
2. You're either made it up yourself or you're looking at made up grahps. Fertility rates dropped massively in almost all developing countries, most aren't having enough children to keep their populations stable. Most developing countries follow with some delay.
3. Nitrogen isn't a source of energy and neither it's a major energy cost for plants. Most plants don't even gather their own nitrogen, that's why they need nitrogen fertilizer. Plants that do don't need nitrogen fertilizer, because they can get as much as they need. There is absolutely no problem making fertilizer without fossil fuels. And nitrogen isn't used up, so only the losses have to be covered.
4. That's not what I said. Once a mineral is mined, it doesn't disappear until it's lost. Iron stays iron, copper stays copper, no matter how you use them. I said nothing about energy, recycling presumably needs less energy than mining most minerals anew.
5. a) No fertilizer is made from fossil fuels. 5. b) It has nothing to do with fossil fuels and it can't be compared with fossil fuels. When you burn a fossil fuel, it turns into exhaust gases and ash and it's no longer recoverable in any form as a fuel. But phosphorus stays phosphorus and potassium stays potassium. Only the losses need to be covered and at worst you will have to extract the lost minerals from the sea. But you can't ever run out of a mineral, unless you burn it in a nuclear reaction.
6. >Even highly abundant mineral resources such as iron and oxygen are available to us through previous biological activity on the planet. Look up "banded iron formations" and "the great oxygenation event" for background. Humans have plowed through a billion years of iron accumulation in a couple of centuries.
These elements have always been present on Earth. These events didn't create iron reserves, on the contrary, they turned (immediatelly usable) elemental iron into oxidized iron ores that we need to turn back into their unoxidized form.
7. And don't make the mistake that fossil fuels store millions of years worth of energy, they don't. They did take millions of years to form, but they hold relatively little energy. ALL fossil fuels likely don't hold more than one week of sunlight. It's absolutely nothing. They were the first thing we happened to develop, but sunlight provides vastly higher amounts of energy. If we went the way of solar energy, energy would be so cheap by now it probably wouldn't even be metered.
The problem is the same order of complexity as chess, where you have to understand the future implications of an action many steps in the future. But in the real world, economy, politics, and society are rather more complex than a chess game.
In addition, in the real world there is no chess master playing the game. The pieces are acting on their own, at times independently and at other times dependently.
Different people want to solve different parts of the problem. Do you want to run faster than a bear, or just run faster than your neighbor who is also being chased by the bear? Some people are focusing on how to survive the chaos caused when one major player reaches the state of collapse. Because only the survivors will get to pick up the pieces.
Personally, I think making energy less environmentally costly is a better route than worrying about population size.
And the East Asian and European immigration could continue -- those national origin immigrants assimilate to American birthrates or lower immediately. It's the Central Americans, Caribbeans, Middle Easterners, and Africans that are driving all long term population growth.
And now I see why the opening paragraphs warn about political incorrectness. Comment readers, please just ignore that aspect.
U.S. Mormons have greater-than-replacement fertility rates, making Utah top the nation's fertility rates. (Posting as WildUtah, you should know this!)
To slow population growth anyway educate young women and provide them seed capital.
A new person in the U.S. uses far more resources than a new person born in China or India, so the U.S. population growth has a far greater effect than they do despite their greater growth rate. (A good reason not to have children if you live in the U.S., as the author has chosen not to do.)
In the final section titled "Oil-Clouded Crystal Ball" the author ignores fusion. The word "fusion" appears nowhere in the article.
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EDIT:
What's with the fusion hate y'all?
First: Dr. Bussard on fusion: $200M and done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8
And THE SUN: A fusion reactor that will burn out your eyes from 150 Giga-meters away.
We're going to have plenty of ergs for the foreseeable future. Heat pollution will be an issue before the deuterium runs out.
I don't like to be vulgar in public but hating on fusion power is just stupid.
As he should. Fusion is still at least twenty years away, the same as it has been for decades. We need to work on solving these problems now and not depend on the possibility of magical future technology to clean up our messes for us.
Why not blame the author for not mentioning one of any other miracle energy sources that might never happen? I don't. Commercial deployment of fusion technology might never happen. Cleaner sources of energy are already here and now.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2015/09/you-call-this-pr...
"We continue to work on nuclear fusion (note that we have succeeded in producing fusion in Tokamaks, for instance, and also in the spectacular explosions of hydrogen bombs). Should we succeed at controlled, sustained, net-positive fusion, we would qualify it as a new face at the table. I might characterize it as the most expensive way to create electricity ever devised (and electricity is not the hard nut to crack). If that’s our only substantial hope for game-changing innovation, we risk losing this game."
Essentially, don't count your chicks til they hatch. Especially not free-energy fusion chicks.
However, I'm one of those nutters who thinks a technological singularity is reasonably plausible. So I think an AI speciation event (a sort of Cambrian explosion of non-biological intelligent agents, a key point here is selection operates just as much on non-biological agents and much faster) is more concerning than a population bomb.
The first was the development of reliable birth control and the second was widespread learning about fertility cycles. For the first time, people could be in control of their fertility without celibacy. Our genes programmed us to be mostly unable to be celibate but the allowed us to continue wishing that we could have fewer children so that we could care for them better and not see so many of them crowded in misery and starving. Once reliably vulcanized and molded rubber was practical around 1910, our wish for fewer children could be realized and evolution is slowly breeding out the desire to have a reasonable number of children and stop. The pill and rhythm just intensified the effect.
You mostly see evolution in the form of population replacement. Educated and modern Iranians and Egyptians, along with other Middle East and Sahel populations filled up cities and created an Islamic rebirth of learned culture, education, and prosperity in the early and mid 1900s. The people who stayed behind in rural areas continued having eight babies each while the urbanites averaged one. It's amazing to see the photos of free educated modern young men and especially women on the streets of Cairo or Teheran in the 1950s. Those people planned to educate the next generation into modernity but the next generation weren't their children; they were the children of the villages they left behind. Now we have a fertile and intensely fundamentalist, rural, and violent predominant culture in those nations and the renascence exists only in exile populations in the West.
European descended populations that plan ahead to have fewer babies are being replaced by more fertile populations from elsewhere across Europe and by native populations in Latin America. Within the USA, you can watch Mormons and fertile evangelicals expand their share of the white population every generation.
The demographic transition is a temporary thing. Evolution absolutely demands it. Creationism or Lamarckism is not going to just start being true because it would be convenient to our demographic comfort.
You watched US PLO Marxists join Hamas in 2003?
This is probably all as boring as just being about who has money (Communists then, conservative Saudis now), and thus, ultimately about oil. But I don't think it has much to do with population-level selection.
And then in developed countries, we just need to massively improve energy efficiency. Like, instead of leaving all the lights on all night in offices "for security reasons", we put some disincentives on it and get people to put the extra money from the energy bill into some goddamn insurance.
What is usually described is the pattern is birth rates decline as life expectancy rises, but the lifespan itself hasn't changed. Because so much of the life expectancy increase has occurred within the last couple of lifespans, and it hasn't globally reached the lifespan limit, we haven't seen population level off yet.
But even when we do extend the lifespan, there will still be a death rate. And if the trend continues, the longer it gets the fewer births there will be. As we approach practical immortality, the dangers of catastrophes will be greater. That's the long-term population problem - when we only have one birth per year, and some disaster wipes out a million people.
Thus you can have all this number crunching alongside a complete failure to talk about the role of medicine, the role of technological progress as a whole. This is a blindness to the essential nature of our time, which is rampant, accelerating progress towards the generation of more resources as they are needed.
You can't just throw up a thesis that population scales by energy (since, hey, population growth has a much better correlation with medicine and computing power and bandwidth) and then put a question mark on the chart of what happens after oil. We have perfectly good substitutes for oil now, and they are being made ever cheaper and more effective by vast numbers of people in response to past years of high oil prices. Which are on the way out for now because other groups of people have been uncovering vast new exploitable reserves of oil, and much cheaper and better ways to extract it and use it.
Meanwhile other people are working on getting to orbit, so as to provide infinite room, and really anyone who argues that somehow we're going to somehow run out of either energy or space any time soon just isn't thinking clearly about how the world really works.
People respond to future expectations of price. Nothing is static. The world will be upheaved and changed by as many people as it takes to replace a high price resource with a low price one. That will keep on happening and Malthusians of the death cult environmentalist variety like the author of this piece (let's kill some people, who goes first) will keep on looking confused as they try to explain their contrary viewpoint while ignoring the reality of what is going on day by day around them.
These people are evergreen of course. Here's an interesting reference from a time when there were on a couple hundred million people in the world:
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/7723
"In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180million human beings on the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’"
And what has changed between then and now, and what will change between today and tomorrow? Think on that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman...
"The decline in population is in fact a benefit in many respects for Japan. It is a very crowded island with expensive land prices. A falling population will reduce the pressure on land making housing more affordable. It will also reduce congestion in cities. In addition, the decline in population will make it easier for Japan to meet commitments for reducing greenhouse gas emissions..."
http://www.cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/contrary-to-the-nyt...
But that is only a popular image of Japan. Areas clustered close to the central districts of large cities are crowded with expensive land prices. But even in the suburban outskirts of the Tokyo metropolitan area (pop. 37 million), there is plenty of space. Farm land, forests, empty tracts of land, golf courses, ... you name it. Most residential dwellings are fully detached single family homes.
We have Google Street View; anyone can check this easily.
E.g. Noda City, area close to the Edo river, not far from Umesato train station:
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.9133252,139.8796061,3a,75y,2...
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2008/02/26/reference/japan-...
But the quality of life and access to wild land, open space, wilderness, forest, woodlands, park space, farm land, ski slopes, bike trails, and beaches will improve with less population. The pressured fish stocks will be able to recover and free range beef won't be so expensive. Living space will be much cheaper and wages will be higher.
Maximizing population is not the goal of a community. Offering the best chance at a good life is. And as long as we are rational animals and not economic production robots, that is dependent on more land available per person.
Japan will be much better off in 2100 with 60-80 MM people than it is today with 127MM in the same land area. Here's hoping that the mass immigrationists don't get a chance to ruin it.
> Meanwhile other people are working on getting to orbit, so as to provide infinite room
In addition to orbit, there's Antartica (it's certainly not colder than Mars, with more plentiful water ice and oxygen), oceans (desalinization + sea based habitats), not to mention very sparsely populated parts of the US just a few hours drive away from Bay Area.
By all means, let's go to orbit, explore colonize the solar system, and at the very least send probes[] to the stars.
One other side effect of tremendous growth in energy production: we can use that energy to do things we've never thought powerful, such as accelerate a probe to ~5% of c, allowing a probe to reach the Alpha Centauri system within the lifetime of someone born today...
> "In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180million human beings on the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’"
Imagine if the population did stay at ~200mm through the time period. _What_ tremendous advances would we have missed out on had the extra billions of people not been born?
Calling environmentalists a "death cult" is hardly appropriate. I know very well that many of them are very naive when it comes to "sound bite" advocating, and there are a few extreme crazies that don't hesitate to advance scenarios that imply mass extinction of great numbers of people. But the author of this piece isn't one of them and, frankly, deserves better.
At least admit that your position is one of faith, not reason. Do you predict the future? No. I have faith in science and human nature, I think we will solve our problems through e.g. fusion and psychology.
But do you want your grandchildren to grow up in a world that has no Snow Leopards? No tigers? No whales?
I believe future generations will hate us, profoundly, if we don't take care of the living world that is our inheritance and legacy.
Only if you count the fully-loaded mass (not number) of ships to the mass of the fish. But even then, you're comparing the fish to ships+cargo, not just to the ships. A quick search doesn't show me evidence, but I expect that modern ships carry considerably more in cargo than they themselves weigh. (That is, the fully-loaded displacement of the ship is considerably more than double the empty displacement.)
> who’s population growth is having the largest effect on global energy demand?—it’s the U.S.
> On the long view, the fossil fuel age is a blip, with a down side mirroring the (more fun) up side.
Humanity has a lot of ground to cover before we starve.
Humanity has a lot of ground to cover before we starve.
Here's what it looked like the last time I was interested in this material: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.YLD.CREL.KG?page=3&or...
I think the choice to not have children is perfectly legitimate. There is plenty of social pressure to procreate if you're involved in a committed Heterosexual relationship.
But it's a difficult problem to pose ethically. If I were the author I would have left that out. There be dragons in the ethics department.
This is the real future of the USA if it is not able to curb and even to reverse its per capita energy consumption.
When any system grows beyond its capacity to manage itself, then that system tends to collapse. We see this most clearly in economic bubbles, but the same mechanisms are at work in foreign policy, in NATO, in the EU, in China, and so on.
There will never be a simple way to understand the problems of growth and overreach so this means that countries which have greater capacity for self reflection and thinking through the consequences of their actions, are the ones most likely to dominate and to thrive in the long term.
Right now it looks like the USA will be a historical oddity by the year 2500 if not sooner
Anyone who has spent time on planes knows that the world is mostly empty. I recently flew from Seoul to Moscow and there was nothing but forest in between. The first visible roads were on the descent to Moscow.
If you assume that innovation is impossible, then sure, I can see how he conflates future energy use with CO2. But it's a failing of the piece that he never explicitly states that assumption.
Indeed, a disproportionate share of energy use goes toward supporting life in places nature did not will to be particularly habitable. Very expensive contrivances--none altogether successful, and whose sustainability is in doubt--exist to create water and indoor cooling in places like Las Vegas, for example, and to pump water out of New Orleans or parts of the Netherlands. Technology is impressive and can compensate, but neither cheaply nor without all kinds of negative externalities.
I've seen this effect at multiple startup companies. If the company has success, the babies start to come.
Are the Africans noble savages who are so in tune with the land that they have a smaller ecological impact? No, they desperately want better health care, clean water, and more modern amenities. They want a bigger footprint, and we shouldn't begrudge them that. In 100 years, it's very likely that the impact of a US citizen will be very close to that of an African.
There is no dichotomy between population reduction and impact reduction - most advocate both as unsustainable. This is poorly masked white guilt.
One example: building a modern communication grid is much less expensive today than it was when e.g. America first built out telegraphs and then telephones etc. Much less copper, etc.