I totally agree. On the other hand, wouldn’t the impact decrease without immigrants into Europe driven in part by population growth in their home countries? There is definitely going to be a race between the impact of industrialization on the bad side and the resulting decrease in fertility on the good side. However, things on this front look better than I did when I was in college (remember Make Room, Make Room?) - but worse in terms of AGW.
I agree that the only permanent cure is long term population reduction, but 30 years ago we had no examples of that ever happening except from war, disease and famine. Today we do.
I agree with the overall thrust of your posts that things will have to change and we have many unsustainable/idiotic practices, but I’m wondering about the transportation of water (mainly due to my ignorance). From what I understand, all you need to move water around (assuming no gravity assist) is electricity. And there are many states and nations which dedicate large chunks of their electrical production to that task (5-20% of their total pie). So as long as we increase our total electrical production, is it really that big of an economic loser? Aren’t we right now regularly transporting oil and natgas over hundreds and hundreds of miles through pipes? Or is that different somehow?
I just don’t see why when push comes to shove we couldn’t set up desal plants on the Gulf of Mexico and pump that water to the interior states, powered by renewables in the long run – unless, of course. some other nation can replace our contribution to the world’s food supply at a cheaper price.
Nice little hyperbolic remark. What is that, schmuck, some kind of sick fantasy?
Well, it is hyperbolic. Make it 10% instead; I like our species, and don’t want us going extinct. With a population of a billion, we (humans; probably not including me personally) could all be living in a paradise, with a liveable environment, long lives and low birthrates. Obviously, I wouldn’t have the moral right to do such a thing on my own, and it’s a good thing nobody has that kind of power. But, goddamnit, I do like that ol’ civilization, and I’m afraid I’ll see it crumble under unsupportable burdens in my lifetime.
(By “civilization” I’m not referring to my own personal middle-class Western lifestyle. I’m talking about things like the rule of law, some respect for human rights and dignity, room in people’s lives for art and science and something more than a struggle to stay alive. Oh, and potable water, breathable air and some remaining wilderness are nice too.)
Population pressure is the driving force behind every single really big problem that’s being talked about these days. Unless we control that force, everything else we do is just palliative care, when we need chemotherapy. We’re bailing water without fixing the big hole in the boat. For God’s sake, how many metaphors must we bring to bear before something gets done?
My understanding is that the optimum sustainable population for the Earth is 2 billion people, we’re about 4 billion over that limit and expected to top out at 7 billion more than the planet can handle.
We need to seriously change our way of living, if we’re going to survive. Even if we switch to clean energy sources, we’re going to wind up choking on our own filth because there’s just so many of us using things. Recycling and reducing consumption is part of the solution, but the “toughest nut” to crack (from an ideological standpoint not a technological one) is the lack of longevity in the things we build. Not only do we need to make things more efficient, but we need to design them so that they last 10 years or more. It can be done, but we have to stop being so short sighted.
It’s not just a matter of energy, though you’re going to need a hell of a lot of that–a couple of orders of magnitude more than we currently produce for residential and industrial use now–as well for desalination and pumping losses, bringing its own problems with pollution and waste. (Even renewable energy is going to produce waste heat if it uses any thermodynamic cycle, as will nuclear fusion.) The sheer amount of water needed to irrigate food crops is overwhelming, even though it is invisible to the end user. We’re talking about several thousand gallons of water per bushel of grain or legume. Most of these areas are substantially inland and often hundreds of feet above sea level, and it’s not just a matter of getting from a wellhead to a refinery as with oil and gas; you’ll have to deliver water directly to every field via a vast network of lines that makes the most elaborate refinery complex built by Bechtel look like a small box of Tinkertoys. Anyone with experience in the oil industry will know how difficult it is to make even a modest refinery and distribution installation work reliably; now imagine billions of acres, each requiring thousands of gallons per day during growing season. And of course there will be losses from evaporation, broken pipes, et cetera.
That is what it will take to replace the normal hydrological cycle processes that are normally powered by the Sun’s natural energy at 1kilowatt per square meter. This isn’t a problem to pass off as soluable by simple, predictable evolutionary advances in technology; this is a massive logistical nightmare, even if you could come up with the necessary energy sources. It’ll be much easier to change agriculture methods and relocate populations, even with all of the disruption that will cause.
I don’t know where Tuckerfan is getting his number, but estimates of sustainable population vary all over the place, based upon what set of assumptions you use regarding resource depletion, average resource footprint, advances in energy and agriculture technology, et cetera. This is not a simply bounded problem with static resources, and so any estimate that anyone chokes out has to be qualified by the bounding assumptions. The physical space argument (“See, there’s plenty of room in flyover country,”) is as specious as is the notion that technology will be static, or that a population living at a mere sustainment level will be stable and healthy. Reasonable estimates vary from around 1B (assuming a world population enjoying a modern industrial lifestyle with modest degrees of recycling and eventual transition to mostly non-fossil fuels) to ~16B (assuming sustainence agriculture and effectively infinite resources of energy and water). If you make some speculative assumptions about advances in energy and an essentially infinite expansion of agriculture capability you can get estimates upward of 100B (I’ve seen 1T, though that would cover most readily habitable landmasses with urban concentrations of people) but I don’t think this is a reasonable assumption, nor is the population likely to grow to this density unchecked by the internal economics of the population.
For a long time the limiting parameter was assumed to be oil, and it may still be a driving economic force limiting expansion, but as detailed above, I suspect that water will be the limit for much of the current population growth, and likely one that such populations and governments are manifestly unprepared for.
That’s the figure I’ve heard given in The Population Bomb and other places. Admittedly, it seems a bit low, considering that we’ve got 6+ now, but when you figure that there’s barely a billion people with a First World lifestyle and the planet’s choking, it may not be all that unreasonable (give or take a few hundred million).
In addition to what Stranger has said as to the total population we can sustain, there’s the problem that we don’t really have sustainable technology, yet. And who knows when that will happen? Even if it’s developed tomorrow, it’s going take a long time to filter out to everyone.
Almost every other claim in The Population Bomb was wrong, so why should that one be right? It’s strange how that book gets such a blind pass when it was a book of very specific predictions that all turned out to be wrong. I would always have assumed that if you wrote a big famous book full of predictions of what would happen in the next twenty years, and they twenty years passed and none of your predictions was correct, people would laugh at you. And yet people still take that book seriously.
Now, if you want to talk about “the population bomb” in the generic sense of a population problem, that’s one thing, but it was well established a long time ago that the book of that name by entomologist Paul Ehrlich is almost universally wrong in its specific claims and predictions.
Attempts to predict the future are almost always wrong, and the likelihood of their being wrong gets closer to 100% in proportion to 1. The length of time necessary for the prediction to come true increases and 2. the complexity of the issue the prediction concerns.
Thank you! About time someone mentioned that. An interesting side note is that while people keep bringing up The Population Bomb no one seems to bring up Julian Simon. I have never quite figured out why the guy who has been proven to be wrong keeps getting cited yet the guy who was right is ignored.
Of course, Simon was only right about the price of copper in the short term. The price has skyrocketed and thefts of copper are becoming increasingly common.
According to the article, copper hit a high of 27.2 cents per pound in 1916.
According to this inflation calculator, 27.2 cents in 1916 is equivalent to approximately $5.50 today.
Of course the price in 1916 was likely affected by World War I. But still, it’s clear that there are always short term swings in the price of commodities. Just because copper has been expensive lately doesn’t mean that Julian Simon was wrong.
Here’s a quote attributed to Simon from Wikipedia:
