By middle class, I’m thinking roughly equivalent to the lifestyle a family of four could expect on a 40,000 or 50,000 dollar salary in the USA. Does the earth even possess enough resources for such to be possible?
Probably, yes. We currently have something like $12,400 per-person GWP (gross world product). Since you posit a family of 4 that is right around $50k per family.
Numbers from here: Gross world product - Wikipedia and https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html
Going by memory, in The Time Before History, Collin Tudge theorized that no, we don’t have the resources to support a middle-class American lifestyle for every person alive on earth, but we could afford the traditional lifestyle of the Mediterranean peasant with the addition of electricity. No individual cars or air-conditioning, but Internet and modern medicine.
You need to define middle class lifestyle. For example if you include the average amount of driving and gasoline usage of an American family then definitely NO–you have numbers of the U.S. using 22% of petroleum use but only 4.5% of the population.
And in the not too distant future a significant number of the current American middle class will no longer be able to afford the current middle class lifestyle (due to exploding energy prices, recession, baby boomer retirement, exploding medical care costs, export of good jobs overseas, financial crisis…)
In order to have a middle class life one would have to produce like a member of the American middle class. If everyone did that then everyone could have a middle class life. In general natural resources are not the impediment to a richer life. The world is so much richer than 100 years ago and we are not running out of natural resources. For example the world has been burning huge amounts of oil for the past thirty years but proven oil reserves worldwide are twice what they were in 1980.
Are you completely unfamiliar with Peak Oil?
Furthermore, if there is enough oil for us to run industrial civilization for several decades more, that presents a different environmental problem, since using it mostly means burning it and adding more CO2 to the atmosphere and warming the globe.
If oil consumption is a necessary part of the middle class lifestyle, then no. But I don’t think it needs to be, so yes. At least for some time. But eventually, no, unless there are some major technological or cultural changes.
That’s a bit misleading. Much of the energy consumption of the US also is due to the fact that we are also one largest manufacturers (just slightly under the largest, China).
Maybe a family of four making $50k and living in NYC. Tiny apartment, no car, public transportation. Certainly not everyone living in McMansions and 5 cars to a family.
I think ultimately the answer is “depends”. Some resources like wood, farmland, livestock and certain forms of energy are renewable as long as they are managed properly. Other resources like water and metals are finite, but they aren’t really destroyed either. Just converted to different uses and can often be recovered.
Non-renewable energy will become a problem if other sources of energy aren’t utilized. Ultimately everything depends on how much energy can be harnessed.
This is pretty much the answer. Can everyone live a rich life if we have to burn oil and coal for it? No. There is not enough oil and coal, and even if there were, burning it would probably cause some fairly dramatic (catastrophic?) problems with the climate.
But, if we can get enough nuclear power or more efficient solar panels, then we can certainly have 7 billion people with a high standard of living. Even a higher one than current middle class. It all depends on how well we can harness energy. Although nuclear power isn’t renewable the way solar is, its environmental impacts are much lower and there’s (likely) enough fuel for thousands of years.
I am familiar with Peak oil, I am also familiar with the fact that it is not true in any meaningful sense. Global oil production set record in both 2011 and 2012,and is predicted to grow 8.4 billion barrels a day in the next five years.
Global warming is a separate issue but most people would rather be hot than poor.
The problem with that view is that the ones telling you that, do not want to pay the comparatively little price now to prevent a harsher future. The current executives figure out that they will not be here when we become **poorer **for not having demanded to be more responsible early on.
Or, simply, stored. In Heinlein’s novel Friday, the world’s energy problems have been mostly solved by the invention of the “Shipstone,” a storage battery of near-limitless capacity, making power lines obsolete and blackouts a thing of the past – every electric-powered device has its little Shipstone, every building has a big one in the basement. Heinlein’s point (right or wrong) being, “It’s raining soup, we just need the right bucket.” A lot of power is lost in transmission over power lines.
:dubious: Think again about that. Think hard.
As I understand it, resources are not the limiting factor here. Technology is, and that shows no signs of slowing down. So, as others have said, using today’s technology, not everyone can live like a middle class American. Using tomorrow’s technology, who knows?
Sure, I don’t see why not with a few caveats. First off, we have to leave aside global climate change, which would only get worse (MUCH worse) in such a scenario. We’d need to pretend it’s not going to happen or that we will just mitigate the effects or otherwise work around them and just look at this from a pure resource perspective, and not environmental impact. The other caveat is that to get there you’d need to have everyone be as productive as the average European/American/Japanese/South Korean in order to possibly build that level of standard of living. But pure resource wise? Yeah, the earth has the resources for that, though you’d need to make some serious changes and allow some things that today are unacceptable (such as wide scale use of the new generation of nuclear power plants, wide scale use without NIMBYism for things like wind power and large solar power plants, wide scale mining of all manner of natural resources, including rare earth elements, land usage and environmental impact would have to be heavily loosened up, etc). A large part of the world and the population isn’t being utilized optimally either for agriculture or material or energy exploitation, but if you COULD do that, then theoretically a large portion of the worlds population could lead a much higher standard of living.
Of course, in reality it’s not going to happen, and the environmental impacts of trying would be quite devastating, especially in the short and medium term. In the long term the population levels would drop pretty dramatically world wide for a variety of reasons, and probably the environment would actually benefit in the long run.
We’d have to get really good at making and using plastics if we did.
Well, that’s just it. We do not know the potential nor the limits of future technology. We know technological progress will continue so long as the funding and incentives are there, but we cannot predict its directions. We can be fairly certain no one ever will invent a faster-than-light drive, some things the laws of physics (as we now understand them) just don’t allow; but we have no way of knowing whether anyone will ever invent practical nuclear-fusion power plants, or matter-antimatter plants, or Shipstone batteries. And since we don’t know what technology may or may not bring, we should not base any plans on the expectation or hope that any particular problem of today ever will be techno-fixable.
I think you need to distinguish different parts of lifestyle. iPhones for everyone? No problem. Air-conditioning? Hurry up with commercial-scale fusion power. Beef for everyone? No way.
In a recent related thread, Stranger On A Train suggested that present population is already much too high in the long-term. Brief excerpts:
You need petroleum for those too.