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Comment by johnsea | Hacker News Reader

> although local situations obviously have tragic effects (Syria, Venezuela)

Considering people who came to Europe in the last time you can at least add Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palaestina, some African countries to this list. And I'd say (apart from often atrocious politics) it's b/c there are too many young men and no work.

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

with worldwide measurable effects on the sea. (Immission probably due to only 6 large rivers, but still)

(many more signs)

I fear the Club of Rome will work out very well in time

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Don't conflate being critical of the CoR of not being afraid for our environment. Mostly I am saying that the global market has shown to be more robust to changes in population and that supply and demand has been able to accomodate more changes than the CoR held for possible. That's positive point for our global system. It seems robust within the parameters of the last 150 years.

Coincidentally, the last 150 years corresponds quite closely with the Industrial Revolution and the age of fossil fuels. With the damage they are doing to the oceans (plastic, acidification) and the atmosphere (global warming, respiratory illnesses etc), it no longer seems quite so robust.

The thing is, even renewable energy sources are not that green. The energy that is diverted for human use used to take part in atmospheric, geologic and biological/ecological processes. It is also disruptive (if less than carbon dioxide emissions).

Yes that's true. Personally I don't care too much about the precise prognoses but about the general idea. 40 years ago, the model was simple and also today I don't think the complexity could be modeled accurately.

There are examples in smaller areas, e.g. Easter Island, Trinidade South were 'over-usage' lead to consequences. I could image this to happen to the earth as a whole in time when we do not regulate.

The global system seems robust, yes. But there is plenty of oil still and most nations are stable. But who knows? This will/could change. For the former there is technology. But for the latter it seems difficult, a former-china-like-one-child-policy would be in order for certain regions, but I don't see this coming.

I think agricultural collapse is a great place to start researching. 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.

You are disregarding the dissipation side of energy consumption: i.e., concretely pollution and wildlife destruction.

While the supply-side of the equation will at some point prevent growth, the dissipation side is not concerning, but alarming.

While in theory economic growth may stem purely from gains in efficiency, historically efficiency gains have spurred so much activity that the total entropy creation has increased nevertheless.

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