Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked. It won't be the end of the world, but we will all be poorer and there will be suffering while we adjust. I too hope for some near free energy and material source to appear somehow and prevent this, but I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in.
Not only are we picking the low-hanging fruit in energy production, but we're picking it at a temporarily discounted cost (with carbon emissions not being priced in) at the expense of our future selves and future generations.
To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based on pure thermodynamics is somewhere around 1 trillion people.
> Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked.
This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.
> This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.
I don’t agree with all of the article’s premises but this is not wrong. Population is still increasing, even if population _growth_ (first derivative) is declining. And energy usage is skyrocketing, according to the EIA (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/).
I don't want to say "this time is different" (because I don't know that).
But we do find our self in a situation where technology hasn't peaked, but we aren't using the new tech we have
This is a straw man. The arguments against humanity’s survival are not technological, but economic: we will not survive because our economic systems continue to poison the environment, to the detriment of all. Solutions exist, but because it is taken as a matter of faith that economics is more important than environmental impact, no technological solutions are implemented. Capitalists fight almost literally to the death to maintain the status quo of a fossil fuel driven society, and has shown no ability to change in ways needed to stave of doom.
Sure without regards to any other than food organisms and pulling a "puppeteer" world (Ala Larry Niven) I don't see it. And I won't either way.
Rich/knowledgeable people can benefit from fission but poorer people are still dependant on simpler resources such as rain fall and fertile soil. We're he correct, we wouldn't see increased poverty right now. But we do. Knowledge itself is not equally distributed, just as resources aren't. Be good if countries relied on their own resources, protected shared resources, and shared knowledge. It's impirically incorrect to presume that some people having knowledge of how to effectively use resources is sufficient to end poverty for others.
People are still looking after themselves at the expense of shared (or imported) resources.
We see basic resources depleted.
We are in a boom of misinformation vs knowledge expansion.
It's odd that people think "we understand/we have the knowledge" when they themselves don't.
This is the line I'm straddling at the moment. If you're not realistic about our ability to take a catastrophic step backwards you'll always just see things as "business as usual" until "business as very unusual" hits.
I find it interesting to research technologies and methods that are potentials for replacing our unsustainable practices and some of what I learn gives me hope, but it's super naive to pin your hopes on "business as usual" continuing based on all of that panning out before the current system is pushed outside its safe operating envelope for too long and non-linear behavior kicks in.
People believe what's convenient. It's inconvenient to be realistic and accept that we're heading in a bad direction (because then we all have to sacrifice comforts). Rome and its way of life fell, the British Empire and its way of life fell, and one day our global consumerist society and its way of life will fall too
Even the most optimistic projections put the world population peaking well before 2100. Growth has slowed considerably and will likely continue to slow even more as worldwide economic malaise puts further pressure on birth rates (especially since the developing world is urbanizing and urbanization is correlated with a decline in births per woman).
Is it projected to level out or to decline? Because birth rates below replacement indicate decline, not leveling out.
We'll heat ourselves to death before we'll run out of resources and energy, because humans are 100 watts space heater. The problem is not about the amount of energy but the side effect of pollution.
We about to get some new entries
Sure, billionares will lose much of their wealth, and will try to hide in off shore funds (even more so than they do at present) but we can legislate for this and de-anonymise the wealth. We would then collapse those off shore legal structures, allocate the wealth to individuals, and apply the 10m limit.
It wouldn't be that difficult, it would leave everyone with plenty of wealth, and is a simple answer.
PS - I don't think this is the right answer. But then how can the answer to the environmental issues be to socialise the risks and expenses across all the population, while allowing the owners of the corporations that have exploited the world's resources for profit get keep and hide their immorally-gained wealth?
In particular, I look at suburban areas with no stores or workplaces for miles, where the only transport option is the car, and I struggle to see how they won't become blighted slums (like what Detroit's became as it shrank) when gas and cars are too expensive for the average person to afford.
Those two problems must be solved but solving one will probably amplify the other.
Even for the conventionally wealthy, much of their wealth is in investments, so all those bonds and shares get taken and go where? Who manages them? Who makes investment decisions down the line? The current entire investment community can't, they've just had most of their assets taken away. So what you're talking about is the dismantlement of the ownership and management structures of huge swathes of the economy and what? Handing it over to who, civil servants?
It would of course also make it impossible for anyone to start a company and grow it to becoming large and successful, because as soon as it became significant, the founders would have ownership and therefore control taken away from them.
If you mean 10M assets, then you will now have to estimate the value for a lot of things, including stocks. It will also take motivation away from founders and investors - why they take a big risk if they have an upper limit of roi?
I agree that the current inequality is a big problem, but your solution is certainly not a "simple answer" unless you accept potential decline of quality of life for everyone.
In fact, it is quite amusing to see capitalists talk about free markets when the currencies they use quite literally exist to prevent free markets from forming. A precious metal currency is a tool for maintaining power with the aristocracy. Perpetual land ownership is effectively the same. Feudalism ended by giving everyone the freedom to become a feudalist, that's capitalism. It works much better but how about we stop the concentration of power for good?
When you are rich, you have the option of investing or lending. If you lend, then someone else must invest on your behalf. When you think about it, lending simply shifts all the risk of an investment onto the borrower. In an increasingly saturated economy, which the author of the original article doesn't even recognize as a thing, most investments are unable break even. The risk adjusted return of an investment is negative but you, the lender, can always pull out your money as cash to get guaranteed 0%, this threat makes banks unwilling to lower their interest rate below 0%. Banks stop lending to risky lenders. Saved money is no longer circulating in the economy. Deflation/low inflation sets in.
If the government does nothing or austerity, then you get a great depression very soon. If the government does something, then it must act as the borrower of last resort, who is creating artificial demand for capital. If I had to describe QE it is actually as if the government created a state operated investment fund for government bonds that is exclusively accessible to banks. It's not really money printing. It's a weird ass way of letting banks find a solvent borrower of last resort. When you deposit money on your bank account, the bank doesn't know when you are going to spend it. A bank reserve created by QE is just as liquid as money so it does the job. You can spend your money instantly and no bank is going to care. They can just shrug off the fact that they are lending out deposits that can be spent instantly for 30 years.
This is still better than doing nothing. For all we know, the money could be spent on climate change or whatever. However, it would be better to address the problem at its root and just tell the rich to get lost by no longer guaranteeing automatic capital accumulation and free capital preservation.
As with the rest of the article, I'm really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If everybody had these conditions of living, we would either need a larger planet or a lot less people on it.
I don't think it's malicious or anything - I just think that this perspective is a little ignorant of how the world really works.
and they become less poor afterwards. Eventually, they will no longer accept the low wages as their own wealth increases. i think this is a good outcome - all parties benefit from the transaction.
This will take a long time to play out, and in the mean time, the research and development of tech would progress enough to find a solution to the energy and resource problem - increasing efficiency, or finding new sources to extract (my money is on asteroids).
But the way it will play out, means that there's always a gradient of relative "conditions" - from the lowest, to the highest. As long as this gradient is always shifting up - aka, everyone's condition is improving - i think it is acceptable.
So sand shortages, and water shortages are not a thing?
If you had a lot less people on it, you wouldn't have the labor force needed to keep that standard of living functioning :)
It's hubris in the extreme.
> But only because no resource has yet been discovered that is objectively better at producing electricity more cheaply.
Um, no. Only if you hide most of the deaths it causes off the balance sheet and pretend they don't exist.
The track record on this appears to be 100%. Are there any examples of a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?
Ten years before the collapse of Easter Island, someone could have made the same argument: When we cut down all the trees so we couldn't hunt dolphins any more, we replaced that with clams. When the clams were gone, we began hunting birds. When the soil became so poor that we couldn't grow one crop, we replaced it with another one. Our track record is 100%; there's no reason to believe we can't go on replacing one resource with another forever.
And then one day they couldn't.
Or listen to Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
"Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests,' as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief." [2]
So far we've been able to replace wood with coal, coal with oil, and so on; so far there hasn't been anything critical to civilization that we've run out of. But it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that something like that could happen.
[1] http://employees.oneonta.edu/allenth/Class-Readings-Password...
[2] As quoted in https://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-talebs-black-swan-tha...
Keep in mind that until about 200 years ago we didn't consume anything even close to the scale of what we're doing now.
So far we basically replaced everything with petrol derived products (whale oil, coal, natural fibers, fertiliser, insecticide, &c.) and good luck replacing that, virtually anything you have in direct line of sight contains petroleum products. The fact that we did it in the past at some lower scaler doesn't really tell us anything about the future.
I always found the "fuck it we'll figure it out later (when I'm dead)" argument to be extremely questionable. Burning your bed to stay warm once your sofa is done burning doesn't really sound like a smart plan, but it seems to be the one we're adopting
Even "safe" seafood is only recommended to be consumed 2 times a week now due to the build up of heavy metals.
It's also true that we'll always been able to purify water for consumption/use, but there is a cost to that and I don't see that cost decreasing.
Maybe it lowers your lifespan. That's not that big of a problem, humans have lived like that for the vast majority of their existence.
As for water, it's everywhere. Obviously, some people can run out of it, but then again a minority is always fucked in this world.
This perspective also assumes enough creativity and capital available to do this will always there. If you're going to need to develop potentially more complex and expensive technology it's going to need a certain level of complexity and population to support that complexity available. With birth rates being below replacement level it seems population of young people is heading down generation after generation. So... I'm not so convinced this assumption will always hold. In fact, it's a concrete example of a negative feedback loop kicking in and correcting the status quo for us as in order to have a society capable of such a level of innovation it has to be structured such that it's population refuses to reproduce in sufficient numbers.
If we were to have depleted something we need without finding a replacement, humans would be extinct by now, or at least on a path towards it.
We’re alive and, on average, extremely safe (life expectancy is higher than ever, despite obesity, opioids, etc)
So, if we assume that we’re better of than ever in history, I don’t think there can be any way the answer to that could be “yes”.
Of course, one can claim that assumption doesn’t hold. for some, having all the modern stuff may not make up for not being able to see dodos, passenger pigeons or huge herds of bison.
Even a resolute “no” answer doesn’t say much, though. Past performance is no guarantee for future results.
Why would we make the universe ape our biologically-inspired needs and desires, when we could transcend them and become so much more?
Maybe our wants, pleasures, ideas of how the universe should be, don't make any sense in the context of physical reality, just like moving at 1 billion m/s relative to a stationary observer doesn't make any sense in the context of physical reality.
edit: Hmm. I get a negative score for celebrating some optimism. How dare I step out of line.
More steel was manufactured per year [1] in the 2010s, than humanity produced in its entire history up to World War I. The whole century of the industrial revolution -- from the Eiffel Tower, to the steam ships, railways -- is but a drop in the ocean of material production by today's standards.
Most basic resources have a similar looking chart. And not everything is as abundant as iron.
- today "needed resources" might be different, at least partially, than tomorrow ones, as they are partially different than yesterday, but such differences are very hard to estimate since we know the past, but we can't really know the future, planning cover development with already or almost already known things, future scientific discovering are not predictable;
- resource estimate is done and sold as a "tangible number" however I'm not sure how approximate it can be. So saying on earth we can source X gazillion tons of a certain mineral for me is "probably near truth but until extracted we can't really know" and that's similar for agriculture production vs climate change;
- another issue is the meaning of "renewable" and "circular", wood is renewable at a certain rate of usage, recyclable one ore two time for different usage in a more or less significant percentage, Al is formally 100% renewable ad infinitum, glass the same, but the scale and the cost of such supply chains are not immediately measurable on scale etc.
Long story short my own personal opinion is: for actual technology, actual number of people, actual human development, we probably have significant resource issues witch does not means "we run out" in the broad sense, but we still are in a very bad situation. Planning moves to evolve is mandatory, but must be done at both scientific and social level, certainly not at economical level as is done today.
If we make even 10% of the entire earth's surface at that density, it will be an environmental catastrophe that would likely collapse the food web.
Over half the world's population lives on less than 1% of the land [0]. Only 14% of the land has been modified in any way.
Long before we turn the whole thing into a cityscape, the natural world on which we depend, from the soil biology, to the pollinators, to the apex predators, will all collapse.
Sure the author has a point about the transformative ability of knowledge, but he's also basically an idiot about system dynamics.
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3389041/Wher... [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/human-impact-earth-pl...
We closed a remarkable bit of that gap in the 19th and 20th centuries - the gaps remaining are getting really difficult to fill. This is the counterargument to innovation will solve all our problems.
When you combine this with birth rates below replacement level that leads society in the direction where it's a) harder to fill those gaps, and b) much less people to fill them. So, having far less bandwidth available to do that discovery/work seems to be in general a trend people don't seem to acknowledge.
As an example, I've heard people say that if Russia shut off the gas supply, Europe would freeze to death. Maybe that's true at first glance, but it ignores that gas is used because it is the best option. But it's not like freezing to death is the second best option. Heated blankets that run on a fraction of the electricity of electric heaters, still exist. Wood stoves exist in older homes. Adults moving back to their parents homes with wood stoves exists. On and on. Most people aren't just going to give up because one resource dies out. Theyll just move to the second best option, that's more expensive. And that's ignoring innovation even.
Worried about farmland? Check out advances in vertical farming.
Worried about space to live? Just wait for a housing price correction.
Worried about energy? Check out the advances in Solar, Small modular reactors, and grid storage possibilities.
The better question isn't "are we running out of resources?" it's "should we be using different resources or the same resources differently?" to which the answer is yes and being explored by scientists and engineers
[1] Once generation IV nuclear powered is mastered, that is.
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/04/ipcc-rep...
If you look at the mass of material extracted from the Earth, fossil fuels > all mineral resources. To first order, the resource problem is the fossil fuel problem, and we're on a trajectory to get off fossil fuels.
I think we are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment - in a good way!
But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured. In the name of protecting us and the environment, the governance structure creates artificial rules on behalf of their stakeholders (corporations) that stops innovation and pushes the costs and risks on to the population at large.
> But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured.
The second sentence contradicts the first one.
But if you have a vested interest, they will want government legislation to prevent alternative solutions. Now people who have an idea face legal repercussions fines, jail, etc if they try to offer a solution.
This is the case in many industries, from taxis, to rubbish collection, to banking, to medicine. There are artificial barriers to entry that support rent-seeking by those industries already in place.
Edit: To correct myself, the docs https://docs.netlify.com/site-deploys/deploy-previews/ do say the URLs of such preview sites are different (they begin with "deploy-preview"), so I'm not sure why the URL of this submission is like that.
Are we wasting resources? yes
