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Comment by tom_mellior | Hacker News Reader

> No exhaustible has been depleted yet

What did they predict would be depleted by December 2017, and where did they predict it? Be specific please.

> The world has seen massively more population growth than they modelled

Has it? What does their model predict for December 2017? Be specific.

(http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/M... shows an almost perfect fit of population growth predictions and historical data until 2014)

> Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high.

Yes, that's lovely. Where did they predict otherwise, for December 2017?

> I guess outside of way we are treating our environment, humanity has a lot to be proud of. (I feel the environment is going bonkers and we are a plastic-addicted throw away society.)

Agreed.

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Are you not asking of me a much higher degree of rigour than the Club of Rome demonstrated?

The simplest: No exhaustible has been depleted yet. See table 4. Add the years in columns 3 or 4 or 5 to 1972. Gold, mercury, silver were predicted to be exhausted by 2017. None are.

"The simplest: No exhaustible has been depleted yet"

You are correct. In fact, they never will be depleted. Same with the oil. Most of the oil that is still in the ground will stay there.

"These forecasts are made possible by assuming the limit on the amount of oil extracted is the amount of oil in the ground. In fact, the limit is likely to be a financial (debt) limit that comes much sooner." https://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/01/13/why-eia-iea-and-rander...

Please also see: Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet https://www.amazon.com/Extracted-Mineral-Wealth-Plundering-P...

It is well possible we are beyond the peak already. This brings us to the "Seneca effect" http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-or...

Otherwise: Business as usual.

I find it hard to have an open discussion if you're mainly dropping links without much added substance in the content (quotes like "business as usual", "keep bullshitting" don't help). The links are really long, actually seem to contain some relevant points, but also raise my BS-filter-flag (especially the links to 'prehistoric' economics papers).

As I posted below:

Own words? Most of the blog posts are done by people much smarter than me. I could do a 1 or 2 hour PPT Presentation trying to get to the point. I think only a few people would be able to follow me. Not, because I am so tremendously smarter than them (I have a PhD), but because the topic is so tremendously complex and interlinked.

This being said. It does not hurt to read this blog posts and think about them. The conclusion would be: We are f...ed. I may have a very negative outlook into the future and I hope that I am wrong. But I am afraid we are running into mathematical limits. Quote from the last blog post (Galactic energy scale) "But let’s not overlook the key point: continued growth in energy use becomes physically impossible within conceivable timeframes." Then again, if you understand how energy, debt, growth and our society are interlined, this is NOT good news. Stay on the level we have now? Impossible. Read the first blog post. We are running in circles.

Ok, read the Galactic energy scale-post. Does an analysis like that scare you? Not me. Holding energy growth constant is a fun exercise, but not realistic.

My take-aways: all energies except nuclear are finite in about 200 years barring unrealistic technical advances (like 100% efficiency). Don't forget the catch-up consumption for the other 6.7B world citizens. That would shorten the process. Supply and demand for energy could easily create incentives to better allocate our 7000TW budget. In the long run (and we are talking really long run) S&D should allocate research (nuclear fusion for one, but consumption lowering as well) incentive compatible with our energy budget. The end of the demographic divide suggests falling population rates in 100 yrs. One of the largest drivers of that growth percentage is population growth. But that seems ending. I agree with the CoR there. Another big energy saver.

Energy usage is not my worry. Man induced climate change without the political will the make pollution endogenous to markets, that is. Market forces cannot work on CO2 without world wide agreement. I'm a market optimist and a political pessimist.

> This brings us to the "Seneca effect" http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-or...

Thanks for the reference, seems a nicely concise overview. The resources and industrial output graph almost jumps out ...

> Are you not asking of me a much higher degree of rigour than the Club of Rome demonstrated?

I was mostly asking about details of what exact points you said they were wrong about.

> The simplest: No exhaustible has been depleted yet. See table 4. [...] Gold, mercury, silver were predicted to be exhausted by 2017. None are.

Indeed. Thanks! Though I should add that these tables are not based on their system simulation, but simply on known reserves and know rates of consumption at the time.

I think agricultural collapse is a much more likely scenario then us running out of oil. The book 1493 all about the ecological exchange of contact with the new world has some phenomenal perspective about it all. Our high input monocropping is pretty tenuous. Look at the lifespan history of commercial pesticides and fungicides, they used to be 30+ years around the turn of the century. Today, a newly discovered pesticide has a lifespan of about three years before it becomes not effective. The extreme lack of genetic diversity in our crops is a time bomb waiting to happen. If you think the Irish Potato famine was bad, it's going to be a mere footnote to the kind of agricultural disasters we will see come out of the next century. Rubber trees are a particularly vulnerable piece, 99% of all rubber produced in the world comes from southeast Asia from a handful of clones brought over from the Amazon. They can't monocrop rubber in South America because of leaf blight. Yet when that blight makes it over to se Asia on somebody's boot, things are going to get weird fast. No rubber means no industrial hoses, gaskets, and tires. We don't have any economic means to reproduce natural rubber. All the computers in the world won't make a difference

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