Can nine billion people enjoy the standard of living of the rich?

Great Debates
21

We have plenty of energy. We know how to produce all the energy we will ever need. The only thing stopping us is cost. And it’s not even that we can’t afford new energy sources - it’s just that we have cheaper ones available now, so there is no need to do it.

But the time will come when the price of oil crosses over the cost of alternative forms of energy. Then you will seee them enter the energy market. Nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, even harnessing the energy in ocean waves and thermoclines.

And if worse came to worse, yes we could set up solar power satellites and beam power to Earth.

In addition, nuclear power is here now, and it has improved dramatically in the past couple of decades modern CANDU and pebble-bed reactors can’t melt down. They can’t explode. We know how to deal with the waste. As the cost of energy increases, you’ll see the political opposition to nuclear fade.

22

I’m curious, what exactly would be the environmental impact of large scale air-welling in arid regions? It would seem to me (and my untrained mind) that removing humidity from the atmosphere in the Aral Sea and sub-Saharan regions would destroy much more than it could protect.

23

Not necessarily, since the humidity isn’t doing anyone a whole heck of a lot of good in it’s present form. Also many “rainforests” don’t see much rainfall at all, they do however get a lot of moisture from dew and ambient humidity, when the forest is cut down the natural dew collection system is removed, and the area becomes a desert.

Of course, one of the problems with increasing the rainforest in places like Africa is that you can expect a corresponding increase in insect populations and disease. That’s one problem which will be created by reversing desertification. Another problem is that if the locals decide that air wells are the greatest thing since sliced bread and begin putting them up all over the place, they’ll begin to wipe out the habitat of desert dwelling creatures.

24

When you look at the ecological footprint of a range of nations, we see the size of land required to sustain one individual from that country. This is based on the level of consumption of that average individual.

Ecological Footprints of Nations - 1997 figures.

If you look at high consumption countries the amount of biologically productive land needed to sustain one person, it is up near 10 ha/capita.

e.g. the USA is 10.3 ha/ca, but it only has 6.7 ha/ca available, so it is consuming resources from other nations to maintain its level of consumption.

India is 0.8 ha/capita with 0.5 ha/capita available.
China is 1.2 ha/capita with 0.8 ha/capita available.

Only 1.7 ha/capita are available per person averaged for the whole planet.

Keep in mind that with time more of the arable land on the planet is being removed from service. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 10 million hectares of arable land are abandoned annually because of serious degradation.

We are 6 billion now and are expected to stabilise at 9 billion around 2050.

The limiting factor is not just energy, it is also water and arable land. Even if we set up fission powered desalination plants, that is not going to have a great impact on maintaining our standard of living when we are adding half the worlds population to the planet in another 50 years.

On the rich - poor thing, is it a bit like thermodynamics that the difference in temperature creats work? If everyone was as rich as everyone else wouldnt the economy stop?

25

I was under the impression that humidity had a lot to do with local weather patterns and specifically cutting down the salinity levels, which is a primary concern, especially regarding the Aral Sea. The region of Central Asia does not get much humidity, most of the water being spent by the time it passes over India. The major water sources are melting snows and the rivers the create. Overuse of these rivers and pollution from agricultural growth (the pesticides and chemical fertilizers) contributed to the drop in the Aral’s levels, which in turn “caus[ed] a 90 % decrement of air humidity and an increment of salty dust in the air by windblown sediments.” From what I’ve read on the issue, decreasing humidity is a major problem in the region.

Situations in Africa are partly similar, but have more to do with overfarming and overgrazing, destroying some of the arable land with each crop and turning the region into low-humidity desert.

I can’t see how, in any situation, how removing humidity from the atmosphere on a large scale can possibly be a good thing. As I said, it just seems to me that this would do the above - erosion and salinisation, with regional weather pattern changes to less rainfall. The salinisation, of course, is the major problem to restoring the areas.

Actualy, the “magic energy source of the future” focused on in this thread could help the problem a great deal, assuming that we could get the energy to the places that need it and encourage them to use it instead of firewood etc. That in itself would be an enormous engineering feat.

26

But you won’t be eliminating the humidity in the area, you’ll be collecting a portion of it. What you collect will still continue to evaporate to some degree, this will mix with the humidity which is being brought into the area by current weather patterns, so you’ll be increasing the humidity in the area.

Now, of course, there’s the question of what will happen to the weather patterns once you really start cracking on greening the deserts. That, I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else knows, either. I started a GQ thread on the subject some time back asking if anyone knew, but it got no responses.

The beauty of air wells is that they’re a totally passive system, and thus will function without much human intervention, so even in low humidity areas (plastic ones are parts of desert survival kits, and folks have even improvised them to stay alive at sea), they’ll continue to produce water, and unless you use building materials with a high salt content, they’ll produce low saline water.

And while I’d like to see fusion come online as much as anyone outside of the fossil fuels industry, I don’t see it as a panacea to the world’s problems. When you bring fusion to a third world nation, you’re also bringing the same technological needs to that nation as well. So while you might cut down on the use of firewood, you’re going to be increasing the need for paper (The book I linked to in my first post in this thread was inspired when the author noticed that the amount of paper in his office increased with the introduction of computers.) and other things.

If nine billion people are going to be sharing this planet, then all of us are going to have to be making a lot of changes to our lives. Agriculture is going to have to change (we’re going to have to get more food from the same amount of land that we do now), living structures are going to have to change (houses will need to be made out of materials like steel and concrete), mass transit will have to become the dominant form of transportation (land will be too valuable for farming/housing/industry to be used for google-laned highways), and we’ll have to maximize how we use every resource.

It can be done, IMHO, but there’s going to be a lot of kicking and screaming by folks in order for it to come to pass.

27

What the “austerity school” gets wrong is the presumption that wealth will always be based on the “reap the Earth’s bounty” type of economy we currently have. Of course the world would be in dire straits if nine billion people were all trying to pump enough petroleum, pipe enough fresh water and till enough acreage to maintain the same standard of living as North America, Europe, or the Pacific rim.

If we’re ever going to colonize the solar system, we will have to develop the technology to have virtually closed arkologies, with near-total recyling of air, water, biomass and industrial substances. The same technology would allow people to live on Earth’s surface with minimal impact on the ecology.

28

Interesting article on how much of the world’s plants humans currently consume.

They’re working to expand the map to include things like fossil fuels, but haven’t quit gotten there yet.

29

We do? We can’t even seem to get Yucca Mountain up and running within a reasonable amount of time.

I think that one statement is a whole debate in and of itself, certainly not an assertion to be bandied about.

30

Perhaps the best response to the OP is that while we may or may not be able to have 9 billion people running around with a relatively wealthy standard of living, why would we possibly want to take the risk that it wouldn’t work and it would screw up the chances of not only those 9 billion but also of their descendants for a high standard of living? Count me in as a person thankful that wealthy, industrialized countries tend to have low birth rates.

I’m all for experimentation, just not on this scale! :wink:

31

Wevets said:

Yucca mountain is the victim of politics, not scientists. The scientific and engineering consensus is that Yucca Mountain is safe. It’s being help by NIMBY voters and activists.

Yes, we know how to handle waste. It is not 100% safe, but nothing in this world is. The problem with the anti-nuclear activists is that they hold nuclear power to an impossible standard of perfection, when the correct standard should be, “On balance, is it safer than what we have? Or are the risks manageable?” Perhaps one day there will be a toxic spill while waste is being shipped, and it’ll require a big hazmat cleanup job costing a billion dollars, and maybe even a few dozen or a few hundred people will get sick and some will die. But the alternative forms of energy kill thousands per year, and run the risk of raising the temperature of the planet. Compared to that risk, the risk of localized spills or reactor site cleanups is worth taking.

But if we got our heads out of our butts and stopped snaring nuclear power and waste disposal in a web of politics and fear, we would have more flexibility to do it right.

And the thing is, lower cost has a habit of overcoming excess caution. A day will come when Oil is $60 a barrel, and people will look at their gasoline and energy bills, and suddenly nuclear won’t seem so scary any more.

32

To add detail to what Sam’s said, I refer you to this thread on another message board. A couple of the posters have first hand experience with the nuclear industry and give accurate details of the political problems associated with it.

33

Gee, that sounds swell, Sam! Maybe people won’t be so shy about using old folks for firewood, either. Seems to me, as a general sort of rule, solutions prompted by desperation are seldom progressive.

Nuclear power remains inherently dangerous. The remarkable safety record thus far is due entirely to vigilance, planning, and a smattering of luck. Problem is, it requires all three: the operators and beneficiaries have to be technically up to the task, it is unlikely that nuclear power is going to be of much benefit to the people who most desperately need energy. (The most important factor in our need for energy is our insistence on squandering it.)

The ideal would probably be very much similar to gasoline: liquid, more or less transportable, useful in any number of engine designs. Without, of course, gasoline’s drawbacks. If we could figure a way to make alcohol burn like gasoline, for instance, we could bio-mass our way to energy sufficiency and not have to replace much of anything.

(“You just keep thinking, Butch, that’s what you’re good at…”)

34

You do know that every damned nuclear plant in the US is unique because of the Byzantine amount of regulations involved, don’t you? And that there are ways of reducing the dangers of fission reactors? The CANDU reactors Sam’s so fond of mentioning are a Canadian development. Given that the Canucks are a pretty sensible lot, I’d say that the design was sound.

Una’s the expert on such matters, and IIRC even she’s not certain that things like gasohol aren’t viable. IAC, if you want to know how to produce your own alcohol for fuel (legally), there’s books out there which will tell you how to do it.

35

Sam, do you support the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea?
I like nuclear power myself, although I don’t believe that massive new energy sources will be enough to give 9 billion people a decent standard of living, nuke plants could still be helpful. However, if you’re going to propose nuke plants as the basis for a stable, high population, future, you need to have some plan for getting that power safely into the hands of people living in rogue states. Perhaps a world government? That seems pretty unpalatable. What’ve you got?

36

I’m not considering the problem of rogue states at all. Maybe they can buy oil, or use their own. Maybe they can import energy from a middle-east power grid. Or perhaps we can work towards not making the ‘rogue’ anymore so that we don’t have to worry about proliferation.

The fact that we don’t want Iran and North Korea to have plants capable of producing weapons material should not stop us from implementing nuclear power if it is cheaper than the alternatives.

37

SS: And, it seems to me that standard of living is going to be increasingly measured by access to information. As the internet improves we’re going to be doing more and more of our interacting and business through it. That should require us to use less energy.

Sounds reasonable, but it doesn’t seem to be happening so far: US (and the world’s) energy consumption has been steadily increasing, although per-capita energy consumption for the US (and the world) has recently been flat or declining. Unfortunately, the overall effect on the environment is a function of the total consumption (and the type of energy used) more than the per capita consumption.

Plus, think of the 3rd world as an untapped resource. For them to become wealthy they will have to create goods and services to sell to the rest of the world.

That sort of developmental transformation tends to increase a society’s energy use, though: look at China’s burgeoning energy demands.

The biggest threat to the wealth of the third world is the growing ludditism of the anti-globalization crowd. For example, there is strong pressure to ban genetically modified crops, yet these crops could save millions and millions of lives. […] Genetically modified crops can be designed to resist pests, to survive in arid environments with less water, and to provide the balance of nutrients people need.

Emphasis mine. By that reasoning, I might argue that our CEO ought to have a new stretch limo and private jet because he could give impoverished children rides to school in them on his way to work. But the question is, is that what the new development is really most likely to provide?

Saying that “the biggest threat to the wealth of the third world” stems from resistance to certain technologies that could be useful to it sounds rather shaky to me. I’d like to see some evidence that we should feel confident that widespread commercialization of GM crops in the third world definitely would produce benefits that would far outweigh disadvantages such as higher seed prices, intellectual property acquisition and protection pressures, and unwanted environmental consequences. Otherwise, you’re just plastering save-the-poor-people warm fuzzies on a new technology whose only definite, dependable function is to make money for its owners.

(* This mirrors the human destruction caused by the enviro-movements work to ban DDT in previous decades.*

See Cecil’s column on this issue for a more balanced perspective.)

38

OP: Falling prices may be more important than rising incomes. Increasing productivity that results in decreasing costs for goods and services has been responsible for the greatest gains in the standard of living. There is every reason to believe that invention and productivity growth will continue.
As machines get ever cheaper, more people will be able to afford more of them.

The question is, though, which prices are falling, and what is the standard of living that is rising? It’s very true that in the US in recent decades, the price of many consumer goods (compared to the median income) has plummeted, and so the average consumer can afford to buy many more of them. But is that equally true of major goods and services like housing, automobiles, health care, education, municipal services, and maintenance?

Electronic gadgets and many other mass-produced goods are indeed remarkably cheap, but does that really mean that on average we need to spend less money for a high quality of life? Certainly, on average, we’re decreasing our saving and increasing our debts, which suggests that just “being able to afford more machines” doesn’t necessarily mean we’re getting richer.

39

Ok, but GM crops can only do this if they meet all of the other strictures you listed.

40

pervert: Ok, but GM crops can only do this if they meet all of the other strictures you listed.

Not necessarily, at least in the short term. It’s perfectly possible for a product to be profitable for its producer (phew! please pardon all the p’s, she pleaded parenthetically) while still having severe disadvantages for its consumers and others. That’s the beauty of externalized costs.

Also (and this is more the point I was trying to make), it’s perfectly possible to create GMO products that make a profit in the commercial agriculture of the developed world even if they don’t have any significant benefits for the environment, for consumers, or for improving the lot of poor Third World subsistence farmers. That doesn’t mean that such products are automatically bad, but it does mean that we shouldn’t let ourselves be dazzled into thinking that because they could somehow someday produce such benefits, therefore they must be good.