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0 pointsIHLayman3y ago0 comments

>> 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.

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/).

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pfdietz3y ago

Population is continuing to grow, but that's because of demographic momentum as population age structure relaxes toward equilibrium (with fewer young people and more older people, particularly older people past their reproductive years.)

The long term problem will be population decline as the total fertility rate drops well below replacement.

Energy use is going up, because lesser developed countries are heading toward first world rates of energy use. But that plateaus or even starts to decline (due to efficiency) also.

azornathogron3y ago

Why would population decline be a problem?

If doomsday predictions about population growth are to be dismissed because technology has always kept up with the increasing needs of humanity, what is the argument against technology keeping up with the needs of a demographically shifted smaller population?

throwaway65323y ago

>Why would population decline be a problem? If doomsday predictions about population growth are to be dismissed because technology has always kept up with the increasing needs of humanity, what is the argument against technology keeping up with the needs of a demographically shifted smaller population?

Is there not an aggregate level of people required to sustain the complexity of the technology required to keep all of it functioning below which critical links in the chain begin failing causing a chain reaction where it all completely breaks down?

Am I alone in thinking that? It's mildly obvious if you do a thought experiment where you reduce the population down to a ridiculously small number you can see such a scenario is indeed possible. The question is where exactly is that threshold?

I live in New Zealand and a good example of a weak link in the chain that got exposed by Covid when we completely shut our borders was that we couldn't get the seasonal workers required to operate some of the high tech farm equipment required for harvesting. I recall seeing on the news members of industry and government saying "it's not simply a case of just trying to hire more people locally as these machines are not simple to operate and require specific skills that take a non-trivial amount of time to train up on" etc. So, as we increase the complexity of the technology in order to boost productivity outputs it makes the system more and more fragile to such shocks. So, if we're relying on future technology we're by definition relying on even greater complexity meaning that critical threshold of people needed to maintain it goes up, which is a problem if the population is going down.

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