This is an honest question: How does creating more food prevent these problems? Won't populations grow enough to consume all available food? Haven't populations in 3rd world countries exploded since the "green revolution"?
Couple this with improving sexual education (as tends to occur in wealthier countries) and you end up with population growth going through the floor, not up.
In particular: "Demographers, who had been watching the exponential rise with alarm, now forecast that the population will peak below ten billion—ten gigapeople—not long after 2050. Such a low forecast would have been unthinkable just two decades ago. Already, in developing countries, the number of children born per woman has fallen from six to three in 50 years. It will have reached replacement-level fertility (where deaths equal births) by 2035.
This is an extraordinary development, unexpected, undeserved—and apparently unnatural. Human beings may be the only creatures that have fewer babies when they are better fed. "
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ucs-statement.tx...
Genetically modified meat grown in vats, compact nutrition rich superfoods/tablets.. there are all sorts of technologically possible creations around the corner.
Global oil production has now peaked and will slide, sooner or later, into permanent and progressive decline year-over-year. When that happens, all the blue-sky technology in the world won't keep food production rates increasing.
Hydrocarbons aren't the only source of energy into the future. Your complaint is like noting that a shortage of horses in the 1880s would lead to a lack of future mobility. When resources fail, you change the rules of the game beyond what can be imagined at the time.
Technology has always and will always tackle our scaling problems. At least, if a few thousand years of such is good precedent.
Okay, so name a production-ready source of energy or combination of sources that broadly matches oil's density, portability, fungibility and diversity of uses.
We don't have decades to come up with something else: oil is already at its maximum production rate. As soon as this recession ends and demand for oil starts growing, we'll see triple-digit price spikes again and more economic volatility.
Your blithe mantra about "technology" ignores the crucial fact that the technology that powers our society runs on massive and ever-growing inputs of energy. Our one-time allotment of cheap, abundant energy is already more than half-consumed, and the awkward fact is that we're absolutely not ready to transition our economy over to something else.
I bet people were as cagey as this back when coal ruled supreme and oil was barely used. Solar, nuclear, geo-thermal, tidal, wind - sure, they all have cons compared to oil but they have pros too and technology will advance to a point where these cons are heavily reduced.
We don't have decades to come up with something else: oil is already at its maximum production rate.
That's not true. Just considering OPEC, they keep oil production below maximum to control prices. Further, this past year has been a bumper year for the oil industry with significant new field findings.
Our one-time allotment of cheap, abundant energy is already more than half-consumed
Oil's not a "one time" deal, so I assume you're talking about the Sun. The Sun is half way through its life cycle, granted, but that's a far bigger issue that we can deal with thousands of years down the line.
As far as I know, ever since the discovery of agriculture we as a species have never really been at the point (except on local and temporary scales) where the population was limited by available food. Reaching that point would get extremely ugly.
I get why some human issues lead to catastrophe like, global warming, but I never get why all issues will lead to catastrophes rather than gradual equilibrium.
In practice, though, that's not the way it's gonna happen. For starters, we have a bunch of food stored up, so the population will overshoot the limit by eating stored food, maybe for a bunch of years, enabling the population to get way above what it should. (I'm not just talking about canned beans here -- living animals are "stored food" too). Secondly, food production varies from year to year -- in a good year we might be able to feed eleven billion, and in a bad year only nine... that's gonna cause some problems when a bad year rolls around. Finally, a world where everybody has _just_ enough food to not die is still a pretty miserable and malnourished world... plus you've got the whole "hungry people with guns vs hungry people without guns" problem which leads to a whole bunch of other bad stuff happening.
Anyway, I hope that has been enough to convince you that awful things happen anytime you get a population anywhere near the very fuzzy and variable limit which is the maximum agriculturally sustainable population.