There's plenty of river water available in the US West for a lesser population, which can be attained through attrition.
Downvotes predictable, tech solves everything, more people is always better, there's nothing to see here, please move along.
The water issues the West face are because of decades of mismanagement by the Bureau of Reclamation and at state levels has distorted water usage. The amount of farm land in California that only exists because of inordinately cheap water has resulted in too many water intensive farms not sucking dry the water table.
The fix is simple but not popular, start charging for water what it costs to deliver there. Building dams and supporting infrastructure to deliver water is not cheap, nor is their maintenance. So charge appropriate amounts for it.
Yeah, some farms are going to revert back to grasslands and maybe even forest over the long term. The farms themselves will simply move to where water is more readily available and cheaper. That is how things should work, but the government distorted this with water that was so cheap it encouraged the problem that exist.
I think articially cheap farming is the whole idea. We subsidize our agriculture market to make us competitive as an exporter (note that we howl in protest when other countries artificially prop up their export businesses, e.g. cheap Chinese steel).
Please explain the rationale behind this argument; the substance of your reasoning is not clear from this statement.
We prop up the government of Saudi Arabia, and to some extent this is true of Israel as well, and in fact most of what we do in the Middle East - at great cost diplomatically - all for oil. And food is more important than oil.
The food supply is simply too useful a lever for politics, to hand it over to a third party, i.e. a foreign country.
I am also unconvinced that foreign aid (and other instruments of foreign relations) are largely being used for the purpose of obtaining oil. If one closely examines the history of OPEC, there is little evidence that it has had any significant impact on the determination of oil prices since the 1970s. Foreign aid seems to be used for all sorts of unproductive (and sometimes unintelligible) reasons, which can easily be demonstrated by looking at where the foreign aid budget is spent. A large proportion of foreign affairs spending appears to be on mercantilist ventures, which often overlap with oil extraction, but is clearly a very different motive.
Perhaps not, at least not in modern times. However, a powerful, even corrupt, farm lobby is preferable to a suzerain, which is what any third party who you rely on to feed your people would be.
For the rest of your post, I agree most foreign aid is money not well spent, at least in the case of the US. But, that's only because most of the money spent by the US government is not well spent, because it is corrupt beyond redemption.
It's not clear that propping up Saudi Arabia decreases the price of oil for the US. It's not clear that keeping Israel around as a destabilizing presence in the Middle East, decreases the price of oil for the US. Hell, it's not even all that clear to me that the Middle East is so strategically important when it comes to oil in the first place - we get more oil from Canada than from the ME, and Latin America as well, after all. Not to mention domestic production. It figures largely into the political calculus nonetheless - I never said American leaders were smart.
Perhaps our actions in the ME are more about denying resources to others, than securing them for ourselves. Perhaps, more than anything, they are the result of a world power being run into decline by a pack of short-sighted fanatical xenophobic fools (and here, I am not referring to the American political establishment).
I was just pointing out what should be obvious - not disagreeing with the parent comment.
- what lifestyle do you want for your population?
- what processes do you have in place to achieve this lifestyle?
It is often mentioned that the US lifestyle cannot be sustained for 7 billion people and that therefore Earth has an overpopulation problem. Of course, given how insanely wasteful the US lifestyle and its underlying processes are, this is ridiculous. The problem lies not with the number of people, but with waste, mismanagement, and general consumerist insanity.
Worth noting is that Japan has ten times the population density of the US (while having a mostly inhabitable country due to its mountainous geography) while sustaining higher levels of comforts for its citizens than the US. One glaring difference is that Japan recycles most of its trash. In the US, everything is disposable and essentially no recycling ever occurs. The same level of complete waste applies to water management, energy management, and so on.
For example if they want wild salmon for dinner I'd like the rivers to be teeming with salmon, like they used to, and for a salmon to always cost $1 in today's dollars, instead of $15 a pound today and $30 a decade from now and so on.
And yes I'd like everything to be recyclable and recycled to the maximum extent, whatever is needed to keep the good life sustainable until the Sun becomes a red giant.
Source: http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_211EHChapter2R.pdf
I'm ignorant about the topic, but is there produce that can only be grown in those areas and not in other parts in the US or even Mexico, or is the concentration of agriculture there mainly due to increasing returns?
Sounds like a root cause to me. Make it more expensive and food prices would rise, and we could resume doing things like growing greenhouse vegetables in Massachusetts, etc.
Our fertility rate went below 2.0 in 1994, so we'll see noticeable natural decreases in population in the second half of the century unless life expectancy increases by more than 20 years.
No.
Google: 'US births per woman'. In the US, that is ~1.7. 2.1 is considered the replacement rate in developed countries.
After that, check out: 'world births per woman' Currently (2011) @ 2.41 down from 2.67 in 2000, 3.23 in 1990. Do you expect this trend to suddenly flatten or reverse?
In the future, longer life expectancy will likely have a larger impact on population numbers than birth rates. In specific developed countries, I would also expect immigration to be part a large part of growth.
Global average population growth rate is 1.1%.
[1] http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/2005/09/2005-immigration-tr...
As for being swamped, lately, in spite of the recent economic downturn, global population growth rates have been lessening by more than demographers expected. All of this can be read with a cursory Google search. My numbers are from the UN, US Census Dept., and Pew Research.
And yet media reports consistently imply that restricting immigration is both impossible and unethical.
That's fast growing to me.
Would you rather be counted amount the attrition?
That's a completely false dichotomy.
There's nothing irrational about eating beef from a resource standpoint. For example, if we were to allow the Market to act efficiently (which we might not (which would actually be irrational, from my standpoint)), the resource requirements of raising beef would 100% guaranteed make it impractically expensive to eat, and there would be no issue. As it stands, beef is already rising in cost much faster than other forms of meat! See http://www.buedelmeatup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/chart...
It's a market problem. Because of the way water rights were allocated, it's cheap to do wacky things like farm the desert. You can very easily farm beef cattle in places where water is abundant... Places like New York, Kentucky, etc, just not at the scale as on massive plots of empty land.
It's specifically Beef that is the massive drain. Chicken/Pork/other meats are magnitudes of orders more water-conscious per calorie. (Pork uses 75% less, and is yet the most wasteful of water outside of cows/bovine)[1]. Beef is astoundingly wasteful of water. You could take an hour-long shower and it would use about the same amount of water needed for a pound of beef. [2] and [3]. [1] http://gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the-big-wat.... [2] http://www.wsscwater.com/home/jsp/content/water-usagechart.f.... [3] http://blog.epa.gov/healthywaters/2012/03/virtual-water-real....
Those scale that you can operate on with modern, subsidized agriculture is unstoppable. A farm in upstate NY is 50-500 acres. A ranch in the high desert may be 50 miles^2. Also, the land isn't empty in the east, and people won't put up with the smell of thousands of cattle.
Stop giving away water to desert farmers. Prices will rise, and demand will shift to places where water is plentiful.
Do I have a choice?