No Population Bomb
theratchet.ca
theratchet.ca
Industrialization and fossil fuels are what have allowed the population to exponentially grow this far. But now that energy is more expensive to extract, food is becoming more and more expensive. We're already seeing food riots in the poorer nations, and that trend will continue to grow, leading to a massive energy shock and die-off never seen before.
This trend could be slowed by massive adoption of alternative energy, but the only currently viable alternative energy (nuclear) is not likely to be exploited in a meaningful way any time soon, considering political and weaponization concerns. If we're really lucky, we'll discover a solar energy tech + energy storage system efficient and cheap enough to see us through before too many people die off, but that's a big "if".
The only answer shy of taking state power and forcing powering down (deeply improbable) is building resilient local communities and food systems.
World population, energy consumed, paper clips manufactured, fishes caught in the sea - all the graphs shows us a exponential growth.
There are physical limits to growth.
I would very much prefer to do something before we run into them rather then being around when it happens.
Exponential curves don't go on forever in the real world. Ideas don't replace energy, nor do they replace resources. Saying it hasn't happened yet so those who are worried about it are wrong is naive and logically flawed.
Both of those are energy, and you need energy to make pesticides and fertilizer - but you need ANY energy, it doesn't matter what kind. So even if oil flow rates were peaking (which they aren't), it wouldn't matter as long as we had another source of energy, and we do.
You can get hydrocarbons anywhere, petroleum is convenient, but certainly not required.
The raw material of fertilizer is nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur. Methane is none of those - it's just a carrier for nitrogen.
Same with pesticides, they are organic molecules so need hydrocarbons, but you can use any hydrocarbon, from trees, grass, whatever. Oil is cheap, so they use it, but it would not be a big problem if you had to use something else.
95% of the world'a food supply is dependent on petrochemical based inputs of which we are starting to see a decline in availability.
If you can show me ANY process to turn trees into pesticides as you suggest in any kind of energy efficient manner I'm open to revising my opinion, and would probably change careers to focus on that industry as I think it'd be a world changer. However I think you are very wide of the mark on the science in making such a suggestion.
Use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification to turn the tree into useful feedstock gases, then use the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process to turn those gases into the exact same mixed hydrocarbons found in petroleum.
I have been respectful of your comments in this thread so please don't see me as being overly harsh, but you are saying things that are nonsensical.
We don't love hydrocarbons because of what they are but because the energy we get from them exceeds the energy necessary to produce them so they're a net source of energy, and not by a little - oil is something like 100:1 EROEI positive. Nothing comes close in terms of lifecycle EROEI.
Talk about moving the goal posts.
Look, of course oil is used for energy, no one disputes that. The method of making synthetic hydrocarbons is not as efficient as just finding it in the ground. But it is a net positive for energy, and in a world where it's hard to find oil it would work just fine - especially if all you needed was pesticides and other organic chemicals.
If we run out of energy we are going to be in much bigger trouble than pesticides - but we won't run out of energy, because if we come close then public sentiment will shift and nuclear power will be OK again - and we have at least 10,000 years worth of that - at a minimum.
This article is about population, and your claim (I think), is that we can't actually sustain as much population as we think because we're going to run out of oil AKA energy. Except you are wrong about that, just like you were wrong about "If you can show me ANY process to turn trees into pesticides" - which I did.
We have many many options for energy besides oil, and we can sustain our population just fine.
Oil is a fundamental part of our food making process. Something that's 1x EROEI positive is not remotely analogous to oil at 100x. Oil is used throughout the entire process from pesticides to mechanical farming instruments to shipping. Any small change in pice, availability or EROEI of alternatives affect all elements of the chain. We currently add about 10 calories of oil per calorie of food produced. This is unsustainable. Oil production is at or near peak flow rates. This is widely understood by folks in the industry, of which I was once one. Oil's relationship to food and population is complex and multifaceted but it is absolutely tied to it at this point.
This is a problem both in terms of oil as a feedstock and as an energy source. You cannot separate these out.
I really am interested what this mythical new energy source is you have in mind. I suspect you understand properly neither the science behind nuclear nor solar which also have significant full life cycle EROEI issues and are dependent on other resource inputs.
Further NPK inputs to agriculture are also incredibly energy intensive - go checkout some pictures of phosphorous mining to get an idea. The original point I was making was that the Green revolution and other solutions of the past bought us temporary respite. Exponential curves don't continue forever in the real world.
Of course you can. They are completely independent of each other.
> I really am interested what this mythical new energy source is you have in mind. I suspect you understand properly neither the science behind nuclear nor solar which also have significant full life cycle EROEI issues and are dependent on other resource inputs.
Nuclear. I'm not a big fan of solar - the EROEI is too low, and it requires too many resources to make enough of it, and too much land area.
I am well aware of how much energy it takes to grow food, and make fertilizer. But energy is fungible - it makes no different how you get it, as long as you get it.
You keep saying that oil is 100x, but that is no longer true. Oil is now 35 or lower. New nuclear reactors beat oil now. Older ones don't but are quite close.
You seem obsessed with the need for oil, that oil is somehow special. But oil is just another source of energy. It can be easily eliminated (assuming another source of energy is available).
Many synthetic fertilizers are synthesized directly from natural gas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer
Synthetic fertilizers are not synthesized from natural gas - they can't be. Methane has no elements that plants need. Methane is just a carrier for the elements acquired elsewhere.
Apart (afaik) from rural-to-urban transition, all of those are heavily promoted by people who are concerned about population growth.
Euthanasia really needs to step up its game, though.
Fortunately sodomy is now pretty popular and increasingly legally accepted, and unfortunately suicide is very high, particularly among young people (so it affects the largest number of quality adjusted life years, as well as preventing future reproduction).
Cannibalism seems to be a non-starter, though. Other than bath salts induced crazy people.
When you don't have any money, $150 for a doctor visit and $30/mo for birth control is a lot of money.
I'd far rather live in a world with 10b Elon Musks, where each was contributing a huge surplus, vs. 3b sub-today's-median-ability, though, so it's not absolute numbers which matter.
If people you respect in tech don't have children, it'll be someone else's children that get to do the cool stuff in the next generation. It's not as if the demand for new technology is going to decrease as a few hundred million Chinese (hopefully) hit the middle class in a couple of decades.
I believe China might accomplish that, but I don't have much confidence in a lot of other countries, including those with very high populations or current growth rates (and high inequality, largely supported by natural resources). And I think much of the US is regressing -- the son of a random unemployed Detroit person is less likely to become a first-class member of society today than the son of a factory worker was 30-50 years ago.
I don't want to get into the argument about whether the U.S. has regressed or is regressing, but I have a hard time seeing how we're worse off than in 1973.
The Middle East and Africa appear to be the big exceptions.
Africa (at least, sub-Saharan) is actually doing better now than in the past. The Islamic world is the big laggard. A lot of this was due to the cold war legacy, though (same in Africa), so there's some reason to be optimistic in both.
India's recent success I'd put down to ending some stupid socialist policies in the 1990s, which were also fairly tied to the cold war (and personal preferences of early leaders). And in Asia, a lot of the problems were also due to communism or weird military dictatorships propped up by communism (absent the cold war, I really hope the US would have wanted Suharto, Marcos, etc. hanging from gallows vs. giving them billions in support).
There's also some selection bias in my crystal ball in that I've spent more time in places which were objectively superior in 1975 (Iraq, Afghanistan, certain parts of N.A., etc.) to 1990-2013.
And plenty of people who got rich (not usually billionaires, but certainly local warlords, etc.) who were purely extractive and lowered quality of life for humanity as a whole. Patent trolls. Dudes running jihadi operations in Zabul. Corrupt politicians. etc.
There are probably some people who could be a lot more productive than they are (the "Einstein in a rural Chinese rice paddy" example), but that's decreasingly likely thanks to the Internet and more open political/economic systems.
This is within my expected lifetime, and my children will be at the peak of their careers during that time. It will be a different world.
I'm reminded of Yancy Fry Sr.'s advice to Fry: "Someday, you may face adversities so preposterous, I can't even conceive of them."
So we can't predict the future, but the other guys' 50-year predictions "were wrong" [sic] and my 50-year predictions are right. Did I get that right?
His argument can be summarized as "Everything will probably work itself out. Trust me, brah. I'm a futurist."
The demographic transition can be viewed as a failure of our adaptations, made during times when birth control and sex education were unavailable, and children were useful workers instead of expensive luxuries, to the modern world. Some people's adaptations have failed harder than others. The people who have 0-1 kids are being selected out; those who have more than 2 are expanding. Future generations will be descended from the latter group, not the former. Unless you believe that fertility is completely invulnerable to selection, genetic or memetic, this must lead to increased fertility, just as selecting for bigger dogs would lead to bigger dogs.
There are already groups which are immune to the demographic transition - Hasidic Jews in the middle of NYC who have ~8 kids per couple, for example - and there's no reason to believe that they're going to change.
And if evolution did turn out to be false and the demographic transition turned out to be permanent, there's no reason to believe that fertility rates would magically converge at 2.0 (replacement rate). If they stayed below replacement rate, eventually the human race would go extinct. That's a far more dire prediction than any Malthus ever made. If they started going up again, is there any reason to believe that they would stop at 2.0?
And having read Malthus, I'd also bet that the author never has.
Does he mean that in some countries the range is 2-3 and in others 0-1? Or is it that there are two peaks in the histogram?
I do believe the UN conclusion is correct by 2050 our birth/death rate will match and a decrease in population.
First, regarding absolute human numbers, we do have too much, mostly because we are rapidly using up fossil resources (not only fuel, but also fertilizers), and some important ones already peaked (phosphorous for example).
But I don't believe that making your population decline fixes things, it only create other problems, the solution for the problem that I mentioned last, is develop more technology.
Malthus was right on his diagnostic, wrong in the solution (please, stop blabbering that Malthus is some stupid dude that is wrong, even on school I heard that, more than once, by several different teachers in several different grades), Malthus was absolutely correct in his calculations, he only did not accounted for the mining of phosphorous (that is one of the major enablers of green revolution).
Now we are running out of phosphorous and energy, and our food will return to levels Malthus calculated, unless we figure new tech, I hope someone does so soon.
Now regarding declining fertility levels... This is a problem too.
In history, there are several accounts of prosperous civilizations that had declining fertility, and all of them collapsed (usually when fertility reached around 1.3 per women). Several of the current western world problems are related to that, the need of external wars to keep some income flow (alright, no major powers are at war... between themselves, but how much wars US, France, etc... are involved with other smaller countries and forces? Even Brazil that is not developed is currently participating in a occupation force in Haiti and in civil war, although the media refuse to count the latter), debt problems, specially coming from welfare programs and wars, economies that are following their population numbers (thus we have Japan for example with economy declining with the same speed that their population is), and a increase in far right and far left party powers (example: brazillian military dictatorship apologists never been stronger, Greek far-right went from having no votes in parliament to 7%, and a estimated 35% in next election, Japan also has a new far-right nationalist party that got some respectable votes, the rise of Tea Party in US and Democrats steering leftward...)
And some groups, know of all this, and have a plan to take over when they can... The most famous one being Al Quaeda (that is the Arab translation of the name of Isaac Asimov books The Foundation, and it was known that Bin Laden was fan of the series). Al Quaeda is clearly aiming to teach their followers to keep a high fertility rate, so that they can conquer developed nations when they collapse under their own bureaucracy and population decline.
All those advocating that to fix the first problem I mentioned (peek resources), don't realize that by doing that, other nations still have population increasing, some of them will collapse because of it and cause further problems for everyone (and most likely will ignore the attempts of developed nations to stop their own population decline), and other nations are increasing in population on purpose, knowing well of its military effects, and will use it against any fool that voluntarily decline his population and ends struggling to keep itself up.
In the US, formerly marginalized groups like Catholics (Irish/Italian/polish) and eastern european Jewish immigrant came to wield considerable power in the mid 20th century, owing largely to burgeoning numbers. The Catholics actively organized colleges, universities and fraternal organizations that brought young Catholics into the civil service ranks.
Huh? Care to explain how did Mexico come into the picture when talking about Al-Qaeda?
These folks are very much in the fringe, and I shouldn't have mentioned it,
Phosphorus is the 11th most common element in the earth's crust. Let that sink in for a while. It running out makes about as much sense as the humanity running out of hydrogen. Deposits economically extractable at present market prices will run out within a few decades. This doesn't mean we run out of phosphorus, it just means that the market price will rise until other extraction methods provide enough supply. It will not have to rise far, given just how common the element is.
> Now we are running out of ... energy
We are not running out of energy. Nuclear and solar each provides the capability to run for effectively forever -- fracking provides the short-term supply to build them out.
The idea of resource depletion is completely anachronistic. Today, we can produce or substitute absolutely everything we need, given input of common elements and energy. And we have sources of energy that do not depend on scarce resources. The time when the economy was based on extraction of limited resources has passed.
Like I said, we are reached peak phosphorous as we mine it currently, and reaching peak energy as we currently use mostly fossil fuels.
And like I said, I believe we can use new technologies (like, solar power... or underwater phosphorous mining) to fix it.
There's a book that was written back in the early 90s called The Ultimate Resource, by Julian Simon. A fair amount of it is typical libertarian wishful thinking, but he very strongly makes the point that in a free society, there is no such thing as a peak. There are always alternatives, and if a resource becomes more expensive, we will start switching to them. If need be, we will also change our behavior to accommodate these alternatives.
To take a great example, look at gasoline prices. There is no shortage of gasoline in the United States. The price goes up, and suddenly fuel efficiency becomes much more important. As a result, economy cars are much more common, as are hybrids and electric cars. Consumption then goes down.
This would be the case even if gasoline were ten dollars or even twenty dollars a gallon. People would simply take the alternative options, which become more and more attractive as the "default" becomes more expensive.
Prior to WWII, US foreign policy was one of isolationism, where the United States largely ignored other nations politics and conflicts. This policy is very cost effective as long as war is avoidable. Unfortunately, neither WWI or WWII were, and both were massively costly. In the wake of WWII isolationism was abandondoned, in part because the United States was the only nation with nuclear arms. The United States decided to take an active role in stabilization, largely through the use of nuclear deterents to prevent interstate conflict between major powers, and smaller, more frequent "stablization" conflicts.
Evidence for this is first seen less than three years after WWII ended, with the Berlin blockade, where the Soviet Union attempted to force the west into giving up control of Berlin by blocking supply access. This led to the delivery of 2,236,406 tons of supplies over 278,228 flights in eleven months (the Berlin airlift), which was enabled directly by the United States threat of Nuclear retaliation against the soviets. The United States publicly moved B-29 bombers to Britain to discourage the Soviet Union from interfering with the airlift. Had this deterent not existed, it's entirely possible that the situation would have escelated.
Less than five years after WWII ended, with the outbreak of the Korean war, the pattern is reinforced. Before the start of the war, the United States produced 120 MK-III "Fat Man" nuclear weapons yielding 18-49 Kt, and started production of MK-4 1-30 Kt bombs, of which it produced 550 by May 1951. Interestingly, all of the Mk-III's were retired in 1950, and the MK-4's were retired in 1953 because the pace of development was so fast. The US deployed additional B-29's to Britain, with bombs, to discourage the Soviet Union from entering the Korean War. When the Chinese entered the war, MacArthur intended to deploy nuclear weapons against the Chinese, in part to distrupt supply lines with radioactive fallout, and planned to destroy China until it surrendered. MacArthur also made clear that he intended to use nuclear weapons against China if they crossed the 38th parallel, and this was communicated to them. MacArthur was relieved in part because of these plans, and his belief that the power to order the use of nuclear weapons was his, and not the President's.
Ridgway, MacArthur's replacement, was authorized to use nuclear weapons in the event of major air attacks originating from outside Korea, and china was directly notified of such. The United States entered the war pre-emptively, then used the threat of nuclear weapons to prevent others from doing so, and to prevent the escaltion of the war.
It is not difficult to imagine that without these stabilizing actions either the Berlin airlift of the Korean war could have quickly escelated into World War 3. In 1954, just after the Korean war, the first thermonuclear weapon (5-7Mt) was deployed, marking an end to interstate war between major powers. The highest yielding thermonuclear weapon the US ever deployed, the 25 Mt Mk-41, entered service in 1960, but by that point, the line in the sand had already been drawn.
Since 1945 US policy has been clear, it will interfere in foreign affairs, using economic sanctions, conventional war and nuclear deterents to prevent costly large scale conflict. The direct result of this has been stabilization, a long-term decline in war deaths, and the end of interstate war between major powers. It will be interesting to see what happens as this strategy is abandoned as the survivors of WWII die off, and memory of why the US spends so much on its military fades. Hopefully enough time has gone by that a return to hostilities seems unthinkable; no doubt if there is a return, major hostilities will be massively costly in terms of life, money, liberty, and safety.
1: The Declining Risk of Death in Battle Bethany Lacina, Nils Petter Gleditsch and Bruce Russett International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), pp. 673-680
>It will be interesting to see what happens as this strategy is abandoned as the survivors of WWII die off, and memory of why the US spends so much on its military fades.
What about all of the other members of the nuclear club? To me it seems that full scale war of the WWI/WWII type isn't really possible between nuclear armed opponents.
And since we're talking about the number of battle deaths, it seems like the numbers will only decrease further once human front line combatants aren't really necessary.
It seems like the scale of WWII isn't really possible anymore either, even if we remove nuclear weapons. How would you move millions of troops when satellites are tracking your every move?
Once the industrial era began, nation-state warfare turned into total war, and led to a consolidation of the nation states that mattered. The US Civil War was the first example of this.
You cannot have general warfare between major states, as they will inevitably assure the complete destruction of one or both. Eventually, the US, Russia or to a lesser extent China get involved, and the final escalation point is ICBM salvos.
Historically, when economies grew at the rate of population, the only way to become wealthier is to conquer more land. Now, with the global/knowledge based economy, you can become wealthier without having to take over someone else's land. In fact, the costs of the war probably outweigh the spoils.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/
"For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 100-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60), the total population increases by 22% only (from 9.1 to 11.0 million). Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time."
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In the long term, there's no reason not to expect further exponential growth once human psychology and physiology are removed from the picture as the main drivers of whether or not population expands. The earth could support vastly more people than it does even with today's technology. Once it is possible to create intelligences very rapidly, and when there are non-human intelligence creators involved in the picture, I'd expect to see a vast explosion of sentience and colonization.
We need to account for resource use as in food, energy, fertilizer, freshwater etc.
I hope you'll feel refreshed to hear about a different resource peak than the usual, here's about limited phosphorus for fertilizer: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-phosphorus-essential-lifeare.ht...
The only reason we don't do more nuclear power now is because there are cheaper options.
Claiming that all that will happen is the price (for energy, food, water, soil, maintaining biodiversity, etc) will rise is exactly the problem.
If we have cheap non-renewable resources, they allow us to live a much better quality of life than we would otherwise. If a barrel of oil comes out of the ground with 5 minutes of human effort, and then lets us fly from SFO to NYC, that's one level of awesomeness. If we burn up all the easy oil and the barrel of oil requires an hour of human effort to bring out of the ground, we're worse off.
Technology helps (maybe we can drill more efficiently, and maybe we can burn the oil more efficiently, and maybe we can find a good substitute for oil), but
If we had a certain economic surplus due to high quality natural resources being available, then having more people means we need to use lower-quality marginal sources. Plus, with time, we use up the high quality natural resources.
More productive people should help us improve technology as well, vs. just providing more total labor. On the other hand, if population increases to the point where surplus is reduced, we're less likely to invest in education or other investments which improve the value of human capital, focusing instead on subsistence.
Solar has a much lower EROI than oil and coal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inves...
Nuclear has a better EROI. One question is if we could build enough plants before an increase in energy prices due to scarcity. That would make investment much more cost prohibitive.
Malthus was right and wrong. He was wrong about economic growth being linear (even then, it was a 0.5% per year exponential increase that just looked linear). The Industrial Revolution kicked in and now economic growth is (for the first time ever) faster than population growth. That change happened around 1850; until that point, per-person economic improvement was virtually nonexistent because population gobbled up any gains.
Economic growth has been faster-than-exponential as long as there have been humans. If you treat biological complexity or energy capture as the analytic extension of "economic growth" that goes back to the origin of life ~3.8 billion years ago: a faster-than-exponential curve that just happened to be very slow (but always getting faster) for 3.7999 billion years.
Now, we're also seeing population growth rates drop, due to causes cited by OP.
Malthus was right insofar as the stronger countries of Europe (Great Britain, Germany, Russia) spent the next 150 years viciously outsourcing their Malthusian catastrophes (probably without need to do so) to the weaker ones (Ireland, Poland) and other parts of the world.
Malthus didn't actually predict starvation. He predicted moral malfeasance (with his religious beliefs, this included birth control, although I wouldn't call that malfeasance) driven by population pressure, and that happened.
Humans are a mix of r-selective and K-selective impulses. Psychopathy is what happens when the r-selector within us is unchecked by K-selective conscience/fairness modules. The reason it is more common in men is that it conferred a stronger r-selective advantage in men (who could possess harems and "fan out") than in women (who are limited to about one child per fertile year, and 30 fertile years in a life).
Also, if you look at the "corporate paternalism" as more than metaphor, most people work in r-selective get-big-or-die gambits or large companies that have a lot of employees (children) but don't invest anything in them. Very few people work in K-selective enterprises that grow more slowly but invest in their people.
I don't think one can say, for sure, that the K-selector has won outright. I think that contest between the two sets of impulses still exists.
Much of how humans have imagined good and evil comes from the conflict (perhaps a neuroevolutionary arms race) between the r- and K-selective selves.
As CS engineers dominate this place, it should be standard practice to examine, both, the input and output sides of any system during load analysis.