That’s right, Shodan. The problem is we have a finite amount of oil. And the solution is we should consume it faster. Another problem solved by not thinking.
Harrison was hardly the only writer saying this - in fact I think it is fair to say that the consensus sf view was that 2000 would be a year of pollution, overpopulation and food shortages.
As for the OP, I hardly think it is correct to say hippies were the ones worried about this. I don’t remember real hippies caring at all. Now, if you consider people like Isaac Asimov hippies on the other hand …
But then some scientists are saying now that their is no finite amount of petroleum and that it is NOT a “fossil fuel” made up of dinosaur bones but a product of a hydrocarbon process that occurs naturally in the earths deep regions. That’s why old oil fields, long ago thought pumped out, are still pumping and new oil reserves are constantly being found.
I dont have all the links on this issue.
Any scientist who says no oil is biological in origin is an idiot. we have ample evidence that it is. Some petroleum is abiogenic, we have some evidence for that, too.
And scientists have been saying petroleum is abiogenic since the 1850s. There’s nothing new about it, only the proposed mechanism. Before the 2009 round, the last big push was Soviet scientists in the 50s. Given the state of Soviet science at the time (Lysenkoism, anyone?) it wasn’t really believable then, either.
The Population Bomb is a good citation. Ehrlich went on to write Limits to Growth.
Limits was widely panned by economists: basically it was thought to be a model of the economy which lacked any notion of pricing or substitution. In other words it was junk. Economists didn’t deny that the world was going to hell in a handbasket (though it wasn’t). They just claimed that Ehrlich’s model was close to useless as a way of thinking about it.
Discussion: "Global economic collapse" by 2030? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board
Policy #2 is defensible. Show that there are low and high cost sources of oil, then assert that higher prices oil will lead to ordinary market adjustments ending with electric cars. So we don’t need to think about it because the market will handle the problem.
I don’t agree with that by the way (at all), but it’s more defensible than Ehrlich’s effort. (Which, to be clear, is not crackpot stuff.)
I agree entirely; Africa’s well-being is, or should be, of the highest priority. But it is difficult to convince many people in the West of this fact.
It is also difficult to be proactive in these matters without being paternalistic or insensitive. Colonialism was a failure; we can’t expect cultural imperialism to be any better.
Actually the technical and productivity advances which prevented the 1960s apocalyptic predictions of food shortages (including within the US) were well underway by then. All the worrying and haranguing wasn’t what prevented this – the remedies were already in motion. This is simply a matter of history, which was already obvious by the 1960s. The doom and gloom writers in the 1960s were either uninformed or intentionally misleading. The trends were obvious in the below data, much of which was available by the 1960s.
US Agricultural Output, 1880-2004: http://www.financialsense.com/sites/default/files/users/u496/images/2012/1120/08-agg-agri-output-input-1880-2004.jpg
History of World Hunger and Food Provision: Our World in Data
[Moderating]
@ralfy , since you apparently have nothing to say, here’s your chance to not say it.