10 ms·

The Real Population Problem (2013)

62 points by nkurz 11y ago

debacle 11y ago
There's little value in discussing energy and carbon footprint per person when you're looking at the next 50 to 100 years. Are the Africans noble savages who are so in tune with the land that they have a smaller ecological impact? No, they desperately want better health care, clean water, and more modern amenities. They want a bigger footprint, and we shouldn't begrudge them that. In 100 years, it's very likely that the impact of a US citizen will be very close to that of an African. There is no dichotomy between population reduction and impact reduction - most advocate both as unsustainable. This is poorly masked white guilt.
- carapace 11y ago
  There is a distinction we can make between the standard of living and the means that are employed to achieve it. One example: building a modern communication grid is much less expensive today than it was when e.g. America first built out telegraphs and then telephones etc. Much less copper, etc.
Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
I think population control is worth discussing, but I do not see its implementation as ever being very feasible. I also don't think the demographic transition will last long. People are as affected by selection effects as any other animal. Those who choose not to have children will be out-breed by those with a more deliberate need for children. To the extent that this deliberate desire is heritable, (either genetically or mimetically or both) it will eventually reach fixation. As a side note, the way modern people riducle Malthus (both libertarian and liberals alike) is very arrogant. Of course there are temporary boons, even very large ones. His point was gains will eventually be eaten. In the absence of outside intervention by an agent with more power than any individual, there are very general reasons to believe he will be correct in the long run. However, I'm one of those nutters who thinks a technological singularity is reasonably plausible. So I think an AI speciation event (a sort of Cambrian explosion of non-biological intelligent agents, a key point here is selection operates just as much on non-biological agents and much faster) is more concerning than a population bomb.
- brlewis 11y ago
  I used to subscribe to the same theory, that having lots of children would breed itself into the dominant behavior. But that theory has not borne out in many developed countries. You actually need incentives to get educated people to have more children; it's a lot of work. If the theory were correct, this wouldn't be a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
  - Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
    I agree that the demographic transition has occurred; I do not think it will last.
    - brlewis 11y ago
      What mechanism do you think will cause it not to last? Why would the same mechanism allow it to occur in the first place? The U.S. had a lot of large families generations ago. This behavior not been generally inherited. What makes you think the future will be different from what we've observed so far?
      - Symmetry 11y ago
        Evolution. The propensity to have many children in our current environment was not selected for previously because our species evolution didn't occur in this environment. But it is selected for now.
      - WildUtah 11y ago
        We had two massively destructive events that devastated the human population in the twentieth century. The first was the development of reliable birth control and the second was widespread learning about fertility cycles. For the first time, people could be in control of their fertility without celibacy. Our genes programmed us to be mostly unable to be celibate but the allowed us to continue wishing that we could have fewer children so that we could care for them better and not see so many of them crowded in misery and starving. Once reliably vulcanized and molded rubber was practical around 1910, our wish for fewer children could be realized and evolution is slowly breeding out the desire to have a reasonable number of children and stop. The pill and rhythm just intensified the effect. You mostly see evolution in the form of population replacement. Educated and modern Iranians and Egyptians, along with other Middle East and Sahel populations filled up cities and created an Islamic rebirth of learned culture, education, and prosperity in the early and mid 1900s. The people who stayed behind in rural areas continued having eight babies each while the urbanites averaged one. It's amazing to see the photos of free educated modern young men and especially women on the streets of Cairo or Teheran in the 1950s. Those people planned to educate the next generation into modernity but the next generation weren't their children; they were the children of the villages they left behind. Now we have a fertile and intensely fundamentalist, rural, and violent predominant culture in those nations and the renascence exists only in exile populations in the West. European descended populations that plan ahead to have fewer babies are being replaced by more fertile populations from elsewhere across Europe and by native populations in Latin America. Within the USA, you can watch Mormons and fertile evangelicals expand their share of the white population every generation. The demographic transition is a temporary thing. Evolution absolutely demands it. Creationism or Lamarckism is not going to just start being true because it would be convenient to our demographic comfort.
reasonattlm 11y ago
People are just willfully blind when it comes to population. Thus you can have all this number crunching alongside a complete failure to talk about the role of medicine, the role of technological progress as a whole. This is a blindness to the essential nature of our time, which is rampant, accelerating progress towards the generation of more resources as they are needed. You can't just throw up a thesis that population scales by energy (since, hey, population growth has a much better correlation with medicine and computing power and bandwidth) and then put a question mark on the chart of what happens after oil. We have perfectly good substitutes for oil now, and they are being made ever cheaper and more effective by vast numbers of people in response to past years of high oil prices. Which are on the way out for now because other groups of people have been uncovering vast new exploitable reserves of oil, and much cheaper and better ways to extract it and use it. Meanwhile other people are working on getting to orbit, so as to provide infinite room, and really anyone who argues that somehow we're going to somehow run out of either energy or space any time soon just isn't thinking clearly about how the world really works. People respond to future expectations of price. Nothing is static. The world will be upheaved and changed by as many people as it takes to replace a high price resource with a low price one. That will keep on happening and Malthusians of the death cult environmentalist variety like the author of this piece (let's kill some people, who goes first) will keep on looking confused as they try to explain their contrary viewpoint while ignoring the reality of what is going on day by day around them. These people are evergreen of course. Here's an interesting reference from a time when there were on a couple hundred million people in the world: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/7723 http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/7723 "In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180million human beings on the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’" And what has changed between then and now, and what will change between today and tomorrow? Think on that.
- acqq 11y ago
  Tertullian knew what he talked about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman...
- 11y ago
acqq 11y ago
In short, the points: > who’s population growth is having the largest effect on global energy demand?—it’s the U.S. > On the long view, the fossil fuel age is a blip, with a down side mirroring the (more fun) up side.
carapace 11y ago
We convert fuel into people. As the author states, "It’s so blindingly obvious that I am embarrassed to have belabored the point as long as I have." To slow population growth anyway educate young women and provide them seed capital. A new person in the U.S. uses far more resources than a new person born in China or India, so the U.S. population growth has a far greater effect than they do despite their greater growth rate. (A good reason not to have children if you live in the U.S., as the author has chosen not to do.) In the final section titled "Oil-Clouded Crystal Ball" the author ignores fusion. The word "fusion" appears nowhere in the article. ------- EDIT: What's with the fusion hate y'all? First: Dr. Bussard on fusion: $200M and done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8 And THE SUN: A fusion reactor that will burn out your eyes from 150 Giga-meters away. We're going to have plenty of ergs for the foreseeable future. Heat pollution will be an issue before the deuterium runs out. I don't like to be vulgar in public but hating on fusion power is just stupid.
- AngrySkillzz 11y ago
  > the author ignores fusion As he should. Fusion is still at least twenty years away, the same as it has been for decades. We need to work on solving these problems now and not depend on the possibility of magical future technology to clean up our messes for us.
  - deleted 11y ago
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- theandrewbailey 11y ago
  > In the final section titled "Oil-Clouded Crystal Ball" the author ignores fusion. The word "fusion" appears nowhere in the article. Why not blame the author for not mentioning one of any other miracle energy sources that might never happen? I don't. Commercial deployment of fusion technology might never happen. Cleaner sources of energy are already here and now.
- lisper 11y ago
  > the author ignores fusion http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2015/09/you-call-this-progress/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2015/09/you-call-this-pr... "We continue to work on nuclear fusion (note that we have succeeded in producing fusion in Tokamaks, for instance, and also in the spectacular explosions of hydrogen bombs). Should we succeed at controlled, sustained, net-positive fusion, we would qualify it as a new face at the table. I might characterize it as the most expensive way to create electricity ever devised (and electricity is not the hard nut to crack). If that’s our only substantial hope for game-changing innovation, we risk losing this game."
biomcgary 11y ago
The paper has a strong anti-immigration implication for the US, if you think energy use is inherently dangerous (since it historically correlates with CO2 production). According to the paper, the US has the largest energy consumption per unit of population growth. Thus, to save the world, we must limit US population increases more than increases in other countries. US government policy to reduce population growth can target reproduction and/or immigration. Of the two, which do you think will have more support in the current climate (pun intended)? Personally, I think making energy less environmentally costly is a better route than worrying about population size.
- WildUtah 11y ago
  All US population groups other than post-1965 immigrants have below replacement fertility. If you really care about energy use, stopping mass immigration is the only choice -- reducing population growth among core Americans is moot. And the East Asian and European immigration could continue -- those national origin immigrants assimilate to American birthrates or lower immediately. It's the Central Americans, Caribbeans, Middle Easterners, and Africans that are driving all long term population growth. And now I see why the opening paragraphs warn about political incorrectness. Comment readers, please just ignore that aspect.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    This reasoning is spurious, I feel. We know that illegal immigration happens; we also know that wealth and happiness, especially education and stability for women, results in lower birth rates. Attempting to stem immigration means that instead of immigrants being happy, stable and educated they will be poor, marginalized and unstable. This will push up birth rates. In addition, preventing immigration only helps if the immigrants use more resources here than they do in their nation of origin - this is not clear. Are those immigrants with high birth rates even burning fuel at the rate of a typical American? Let's know that first before we start banning them.
  - kbutler 11y ago
    > All US population groups other than post-1965 immigrants have below replacement fertility. U.S. Mormons have greater-than-replacement fertility rates, making Utah top the nation's fertility rates. (Posting as WildUtah, you should know this!)
whiteboarder 11y ago
If one believes in a Malthusian apocalypse then one must explain why THIS time things are different. People have been talking about a supposed Population Bomb for literally hundreds of years. And each time, they have been wrong. Obviously, there exists some theoretical carrying capacity maximum on planet Earth, but perhaps that maximum is closer to 1 trillion people than 7 billion. That would be plenty of time for humans to figure that space travel thing out. Especially since it is predicted that pop size will peak within the next 40 years.
- graeme 11y ago
  >why THIS time things are different. Because all growth since Malthus' time has been due to the use of stored Carbon energy. Malthus' observations had been largely true until then. Maybe we'll figure out some way to replace our stored carbons inputs in a way that lets us keep the same energy surplus. But, that's the short answer for why things may be different: the past 200 years have been a historical aberration. The fact that an effect takes a while to work itself out doesn't mean that that effect is nonexistent.
  - astine 11y ago
    When we run out of stored carbon energy we will probably switch wholesale to splitting atoms and harnessing the energy of the sun. Alternate energy is a matter of how soon, not whether.
    - c22 11y ago
      I tend to agree with this view. While population growth definitely comes at a cost it also provides us with our most valuable resource: human intellect. Perhaps this is the perfect time to tap our earth's carbon battery to propel us into the next orbital of energy production and consumption. Or perhaps we are not socially and culturally smart enough to make efficient use of this energy and we will exhaust our surplus and perish, another evolutionary footnote of history. Either way, I doubt we have the power to stop this juggernaut now so might as well assume (and try to achieve) the optimistic option.
  - 11y ago
griffinkelly 11y ago
This really brings up the question of the ultimate carrying capacity of the world. Anytime you see graphs that hockeystick they eventually plateau and stagnation is usually caused by mass famine, disease, or other catastrophic circumstance; potentially war in the case of human beings. We haven't reached that point in any countries yet, and when the US/Europe throws away half of harvested food at the point of sale, I think its probably not something to worry about in the immediate. However, particularly with China just removing their 1 child per family policy, it looks like we may reach one of these issues sooner than later, probably not in our lifetimes, but I don't think too far off.
- valarauca1 11y ago
  Human still hasn't fully modernized/mechanized farming on the India Subcontent or Africa. Humanity has a lot of ground to cover before we starve.
  - merpnderp 11y ago
    The Japanese get the most production per hectare of land. The rest of the industrialized world isn't even close. Humanity has a lot of ground to cover before we starve.
    - mc32 11y ago
      Do you have a source for that, my impression was that many of those family farms were rather small and inefficient, but I could be wrong.
      - merpnderp 11y ago
        Looks like my data is outdated and the US has caught up. Here's what it looked like the last time I was interested in this material: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.YLD.CREL.KG?page=3&order=wbapi_data_value_2013%20wbapi_data_value%20wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.YLD.CREL.KG?page=3&or...
johansch 11y ago
Bullshit. The real population bomb is a certain religion called islam.
temo4ka 11y ago
The title implies that there is the other, “unreal” problem. What is it?
andrewprock 11y ago
Most of the comments here are addressed in excruciating detail in other posts on this blog. Suffice it to say, Dr. Murphy has done his homework.
deleted 11y ago
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andyl 11y ago
Starts as a scientific exploration on the relationship between population and energy. Ends as self-loathing.
jhallenworld 11y ago
"We were full of hope and optimism, and believed we could do anything. That’s good baby-making weather, folks." I've seen this effect at multiple startup companies. If the company has success, the babies start to come.
agentultra 11y ago
The discussion at the end regarding the moral and ethical implications of having kids is interesting. I struggled with this on an intuitive level having not run the numbers myself. However some friends also pointed out that maybe the world doesn't need fewer people but more smart ones. I think the choice to not have children is perfectly legitimate. There is plenty of social pressure to procreate if you're involved in a committed Heterosexual relationship. But it's a difficult problem to pose ethically. If I were the author I would have left that out. There be dragons in the ethics department.
Falkon1313 11y ago
Immigration doesn't change the population, it just shuffles it around. The only ways to increase it are to increase births or decrease deaths. The article isn't convincing that the U-shaped graphs are predominantly from increased birth rates. What is usually described is the pattern is birth rates decline as life expectancy rises, but the lifespan itself hasn't changed. Because so much of the life expectancy increase has occurred within the last couple of lifespans, and it hasn't globally reached the lifespan limit, we haven't seen population level off yet. But even when we do extend the lifespan, there will still be a death rate. And if the trend continues, the longer it gets the fewer births there will be. As we approach practical immortality, the dangers of catastrophes will be greater. That's the long-term population problem - when we only have one birth per year, and some disaster wipes out a million people.
Qwertious 11y ago
We already know what we need to do to curb population growth, it's just counterintuitive - http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/ http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth... . Essentially, people have lots of kids because they're expecting one or two to die. If you reduce child mortality, then they can stick with one or two kids without significant risk of ending up childless. And then in developed countries, we just need to massively improve energy efficiency. Like, instead of leaving all the lights on all night in offices "for security reasons", we put some disincentives on it and get people to put the extra money from the energy bill into some goddamn insurance.
paulsutter 11y ago
The authors data leads me to entirely the opposite conclusion. His data perfectly support the point that we need massive new sources of clean energy (for example, nuclear or even solar which is on an incredible downward cost trend), to support growth. Anyone who has spent time on planes knows that the world is mostly empty. I recently flew from Seoul to Moscow and there was nothing but forest in between. The first visible roads were on the descent to Moscow. If you assume that innovation is impossible, then sure, I can see how he conflates future energy use with CO2. But it's a failing of the piece that he never explicitly states that assumption.
- abalashov 11y ago
  Perhaps, but to be fair, there are fairly specific geophysical criteria for plopping down a nontrivial human settlement, mainly relating to the water table and agriculture. Inland, arid tundra, for example, isn't good place to found a town, and neither is any place where you can neither grow local food nor deliver it easily from other places. The more anthrocentric aspects, like proximity to transportation networks and economic activity, also play a huge role. All in all, it's not reasonable to suggest that much of the empty space seen from a plane can be filled out with people equally well. Indeed, a disproportionate share of energy use goes toward supporting life in places nature did not will to be particularly habitable. Very expensive contrivances--none altogether successful, and whose sustainability is in doubt--exist to create water and indoor cooling in places like Las Vegas, for example, and to pump water out of New Orleans or parts of the Netherlands. Technology is impressive and can compensate, but neither cheaply nor without all kinds of negative externalities.
  - paulsutter 11y ago
    Hmm, to solve those problems, would it help to have massive supplies of clean energy?
memracom 11y ago
The USA is overreaching and the further it overreaches, the greater the risk of various parts of the socio-economic system breaking. The more things break, and the more serious the problems, the faster the USA will collapse. This is the real future of the USA if it is not able to curb and even to reverse its per capita energy consumption. When any system grows beyond its capacity to manage itself, then that system tends to collapse. We see this most clearly in economic bubbles, but the same mechanisms are at work in foreign policy, in NATO, in the EU, in China, and so on. There will never be a simple way to understand the problems of growth and overreach so this means that countries which have greater capacity for self reflection and thinking through the consequences of their actions, are the ones most likely to dominate and to thrive in the long term. Right now it looks like the USA will be a historical oddity by the year 2500 if not sooner
sunstone 11y ago
One of the problem with this analysis is that it uses population growth as a proxy for fertility rate. Another is that it assumes that future energy will come from the same sources as they currently rather than increasingly from solar and wind.

62 points by nkurz 11y ago

There's little value in discussing energy and carbon footprint per person when you're looking at the next 50 to 100 years. Are the Africans noble savages who are so in tune with the land that they have a smaller ecological impact? No, they desperately want better health care, clean water, and more modern amenities. They want a bigger footprint, and we shouldn't begrudge them that. In 100 years, it's very likely that the impact of a US citizen will be very close to that of an African. There is no dichotomy between population reduction and impact reduction - most advocate both as unsustainable. This is poorly masked white guilt.

carapace 11y ago
There is a distinction we can make between the standard of living and the means that are employed to achieve it. One example: building a modern communication grid is much less expensive today than it was when e.g. America first built out telegraphs and then telephones etc. Much less copper, etc.

Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago

I think population control is worth discussing, but I do not see its implementation as ever being very feasible. I also don't think the demographic transition will last long. People are as affected by selection effects as any other animal. Those who choose not to have children will be out-breed by those with a more deliberate need for children. To the extent that this deliberate desire is heritable, (either genetically or mimetically or both) it will eventually reach fixation. As a side note, the way modern people riducle Malthus (both libertarian and liberals alike) is very arrogant. Of course there are temporary boons, even very large ones. His point was gains will eventually be eaten. In the absence of outside intervention by an agent with more power than any individual, there are very general reasons to believe he will be correct in the long run. However, I'm one of those nutters who thinks a technological singularity is reasonably plausible. So I think an AI speciation event (a sort of Cambrian explosion of non-biological intelligent agents, a key point here is selection operates just as much on non-biological agents and much faster) is more concerning than a population bomb.

brlewis 11y ago
I used to subscribe to the same theory, that having lots of children would breed itself into the dominant behavior. But that theory has not borne out in many developed countries. You actually need incentives to get educated people to have more children; it's a lot of work. If the theory were correct, this wouldn't be a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
- Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
  I agree that the demographic transition has occurred; I do not think it will last.
  - brlewis 11y ago
    What mechanism do you think will cause it not to last? Why would the same mechanism allow it to occur in the first place? The U.S. had a lot of large families generations ago. This behavior not been generally inherited. What makes you think the future will be different from what we've observed so far?
    - Symmetry 11y ago
      Evolution. The propensity to have many children in our current environment was not selected for previously because our species evolution didn't occur in this environment. But it is selected for now.
    - WildUtah 11y ago
      We had two massively destructive events that devastated the human population in the twentieth century. The first was the development of reliable birth control and the second was widespread learning about fertility cycles. For the first time, people could be in control of their fertility without celibacy. Our genes programmed us to be mostly unable to be celibate but the allowed us to continue wishing that we could have fewer children so that we could care for them better and not see so many of them crowded in misery and starving. Once reliably vulcanized and molded rubber was practical around 1910, our wish for fewer children could be realized and evolution is slowly breeding out the desire to have a reasonable number of children and stop. The pill and rhythm just intensified the effect. You mostly see evolution in the form of population replacement. Educated and modern Iranians and Egyptians, along with other Middle East and Sahel populations filled up cities and created an Islamic rebirth of learned culture, education, and prosperity in the early and mid 1900s. The people who stayed behind in rural areas continued having eight babies each while the urbanites averaged one. It's amazing to see the photos of free educated modern young men and especially women on the streets of Cairo or Teheran in the 1950s. Those people planned to educate the next generation into modernity but the next generation weren't their children; they were the children of the villages they left behind. Now we have a fertile and intensely fundamentalist, rural, and violent predominant culture in those nations and the renascence exists only in exile populations in the West. European descended populations that plan ahead to have fewer babies are being replaced by more fertile populations from elsewhere across Europe and by native populations in Latin America. Within the USA, you can watch Mormons and fertile evangelicals expand their share of the white population every generation. The demographic transition is a temporary thing. Evolution absolutely demands it. Creationism or Lamarckism is not going to just start being true because it would be convenient to our demographic comfort.

reasonattlm 11y ago

People are just willfully blind when it comes to population. Thus you can have all this number crunching alongside a complete failure to talk about the role of medicine, the role of technological progress as a whole. This is a blindness to the essential nature of our time, which is rampant, accelerating progress towards the generation of more resources as they are needed. You can't just throw up a thesis that population scales by energy (since, hey, population growth has a much better correlation with medicine and computing power and bandwidth) and then put a question mark on the chart of what happens after oil. We have perfectly good substitutes for oil now, and they are being made ever cheaper and more effective by vast numbers of people in response to past years of high oil prices. Which are on the way out for now because other groups of people have been uncovering vast new exploitable reserves of oil, and much cheaper and better ways to extract it and use it. Meanwhile other people are working on getting to orbit, so as to provide infinite room, and really anyone who argues that somehow we're going to somehow run out of either energy or space any time soon just isn't thinking clearly about how the world really works. People respond to future expectations of price. Nothing is static. The world will be upheaved and changed by as many people as it takes to replace a high price resource with a low price one. That will keep on happening and Malthusians of the death cult environmentalist variety like the author of this piece (let's kill some people, who goes first) will keep on looking confused as they try to explain their contrary viewpoint while ignoring the reality of what is going on day by day around them. These people are evergreen of course. Here's an interesting reference from a time when there were on a couple hundred million people in the world: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/7723 http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/7723 "In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180million human beings on the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’" And what has changed between then and now, and what will change between today and tomorrow? Think on that.

acqq 11y ago
Tertullian knew what he talked about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman...
11y ago

acqq 11y ago

In short, the points: > who’s population growth is having the largest effect on global energy demand?—it’s the U.S. > On the long view, the fossil fuel age is a blip, with a down side mirroring the (more fun) up side.

carapace 11y ago

We convert fuel into people. As the author states, "It’s so blindingly obvious that I am embarrassed to have belabored the point as long as I have." To slow population growth anyway educate young women and provide them seed capital. A new person in the U.S. uses far more resources than a new person born in China or India, so the U.S. population growth has a far greater effect than they do despite their greater growth rate. (A good reason not to have children if you live in the U.S., as the author has chosen not to do.) In the final section titled "Oil-Clouded Crystal Ball" the author ignores fusion. The word "fusion" appears nowhere in the article. ------- EDIT: What's with the fusion hate y'all? First: Dr. Bussard on fusion: $200M and done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8 And THE SUN: A fusion reactor that will burn out your eyes from 150 Giga-meters away. We're going to have plenty of ergs for the foreseeable future. Heat pollution will be an issue before the deuterium runs out. I don't like to be vulgar in public but hating on fusion power is just stupid.

AngrySkillzz 11y ago
> the author ignores fusion As he should. Fusion is still at least twenty years away, the same as it has been for decades. We need to work on solving these problems now and not depend on the possibility of magical future technology to clean up our messes for us.
- deleted 11y ago
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theandrewbailey 11y ago
> In the final section titled "Oil-Clouded Crystal Ball" the author ignores fusion. The word "fusion" appears nowhere in the article. Why not blame the author for not mentioning one of any other miracle energy sources that might never happen? I don't. Commercial deployment of fusion technology might never happen. Cleaner sources of energy are already here and now.
lisper 11y ago
> the author ignores fusion http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2015/09/you-call-this-progress/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2015/09/you-call-this-pr... "We continue to work on nuclear fusion (note that we have succeeded in producing fusion in Tokamaks, for instance, and also in the spectacular explosions of hydrogen bombs). Should we succeed at controlled, sustained, net-positive fusion, we would qualify it as a new face at the table. I might characterize it as the most expensive way to create electricity ever devised (and electricity is not the hard nut to crack). If that’s our only substantial hope for game-changing innovation, we risk losing this game."

biomcgary 11y ago

The paper has a strong anti-immigration implication for the US, if you think energy use is inherently dangerous (since it historically correlates with CO2 production). According to the paper, the US has the largest energy consumption per unit of population growth. Thus, to save the world, we must limit US population increases more than increases in other countries. US government policy to reduce population growth can target reproduction and/or immigration. Of the two, which do you think will have more support in the current climate (pun intended)? Personally, I think making energy less environmentally costly is a better route than worrying about population size.

WildUtah 11y ago
All US population groups other than post-1965 immigrants have below replacement fertility. If you really care about energy use, stopping mass immigration is the only choice -- reducing population growth among core Americans is moot. And the East Asian and European immigration could continue -- those national origin immigrants assimilate to American birthrates or lower immediately. It's the Central Americans, Caribbeans, Middle Easterners, and Africans that are driving all long term population growth. And now I see why the opening paragraphs warn about political incorrectness. Comment readers, please just ignore that aspect.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  This reasoning is spurious, I feel. We know that illegal immigration happens; we also know that wealth and happiness, especially education and stability for women, results in lower birth rates. Attempting to stem immigration means that instead of immigrants being happy, stable and educated they will be poor, marginalized and unstable. This will push up birth rates. In addition, preventing immigration only helps if the immigrants use more resources here than they do in their nation of origin - this is not clear. Are those immigrants with high birth rates even burning fuel at the rate of a typical American? Let's know that first before we start banning them.
- kbutler 11y ago
  > All US population groups other than post-1965 immigrants have below replacement fertility. U.S. Mormons have greater-than-replacement fertility rates, making Utah top the nation's fertility rates. (Posting as WildUtah, you should know this!)

whiteboarder 11y ago

If one believes in a Malthusian apocalypse then one must explain why THIS time things are different. People have been talking about a supposed Population Bomb for literally hundreds of years. And each time, they have been wrong. Obviously, there exists some theoretical carrying capacity maximum on planet Earth, but perhaps that maximum is closer to 1 trillion people than 7 billion. That would be plenty of time for humans to figure that space travel thing out. Especially since it is predicted that pop size will peak within the next 40 years.

graeme 11y ago
>why THIS time things are different. Because all growth since Malthus' time has been due to the use of stored Carbon energy. Malthus' observations had been largely true until then. Maybe we'll figure out some way to replace our stored carbons inputs in a way that lets us keep the same energy surplus. But, that's the short answer for why things may be different: the past 200 years have been a historical aberration. The fact that an effect takes a while to work itself out doesn't mean that that effect is nonexistent.
- astine 11y ago
  When we run out of stored carbon energy we will probably switch wholesale to splitting atoms and harnessing the energy of the sun. Alternate energy is a matter of how soon, not whether.
  - c22 11y ago
    I tend to agree with this view. While population growth definitely comes at a cost it also provides us with our most valuable resource: human intellect. Perhaps this is the perfect time to tap our earth's carbon battery to propel us into the next orbital of energy production and consumption. Or perhaps we are not socially and culturally smart enough to make efficient use of this energy and we will exhaust our surplus and perish, another evolutionary footnote of history. Either way, I doubt we have the power to stop this juggernaut now so might as well assume (and try to achieve) the optimistic option.
- 11y ago

griffinkelly 11y ago

This really brings up the question of the ultimate carrying capacity of the world. Anytime you see graphs that hockeystick they eventually plateau and stagnation is usually caused by mass famine, disease, or other catastrophic circumstance; potentially war in the case of human beings. We haven't reached that point in any countries yet, and when the US/Europe throws away half of harvested food at the point of sale, I think its probably not something to worry about in the immediate. However, particularly with China just removing their 1 child per family policy, it looks like we may reach one of these issues sooner than later, probably not in our lifetimes, but I don't think too far off.

valarauca1 11y ago
Human still hasn't fully modernized/mechanized farming on the India Subcontent or Africa. Humanity has a lot of ground to cover before we starve.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  The Japanese get the most production per hectare of land. The rest of the industrialized world isn't even close. Humanity has a lot of ground to cover before we starve.
  - mc32 11y ago
    Do you have a source for that, my impression was that many of those family farms were rather small and inefficient, but I could be wrong.
    - merpnderp 11y ago
      Looks like my data is outdated and the US has caught up. Here's what it looked like the last time I was interested in this material: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.YLD.CREL.KG?page=3&order=wbapi_data_value_2013%20wbapi_data_value%20wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.YLD.CREL.KG?page=3&or...

johansch 11y ago

Bullshit. The real population bomb is a certain religion called islam.

temo4ka 11y ago

The title implies that there is the other, “unreal” problem. What is it?

andrewprock 11y ago

Most of the comments here are addressed in excruciating detail in other posts on this blog. Suffice it to say, Dr. Murphy has done his homework.

deleted 11y ago

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andyl 11y ago

Starts as a scientific exploration on the relationship between population and energy. Ends as self-loathing.

jhallenworld 11y ago

"We were full of hope and optimism, and believed we could do anything. That’s good baby-making weather, folks." I've seen this effect at multiple startup companies. If the company has success, the babies start to come.

agentultra 11y ago

The discussion at the end regarding the moral and ethical implications of having kids is interesting. I struggled with this on an intuitive level having not run the numbers myself. However some friends also pointed out that maybe the world doesn't need fewer people but more smart ones. I think the choice to not have children is perfectly legitimate. There is plenty of social pressure to procreate if you're involved in a committed Heterosexual relationship. But it's a difficult problem to pose ethically. If I were the author I would have left that out. There be dragons in the ethics department.

Falkon1313 11y ago

Immigration doesn't change the population, it just shuffles it around. The only ways to increase it are to increase births or decrease deaths. The article isn't convincing that the U-shaped graphs are predominantly from increased birth rates. What is usually described is the pattern is birth rates decline as life expectancy rises, but the lifespan itself hasn't changed. Because so much of the life expectancy increase has occurred within the last couple of lifespans, and it hasn't globally reached the lifespan limit, we haven't seen population level off yet. But even when we do extend the lifespan, there will still be a death rate. And if the trend continues, the longer it gets the fewer births there will be. As we approach practical immortality, the dangers of catastrophes will be greater. That's the long-term population problem - when we only have one birth per year, and some disaster wipes out a million people.

Qwertious 11y ago

We already know what we need to do to curb population growth, it's just counterintuitive - http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/ http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth... . Essentially, people have lots of kids because they're expecting one or two to die. If you reduce child mortality, then they can stick with one or two kids without significant risk of ending up childless. And then in developed countries, we just need to massively improve energy efficiency. Like, instead of leaving all the lights on all night in offices "for security reasons", we put some disincentives on it and get people to put the extra money from the energy bill into some goddamn insurance.

paulsutter 11y ago

The authors data leads me to entirely the opposite conclusion. His data perfectly support the point that we need massive new sources of clean energy (for example, nuclear or even solar which is on an incredible downward cost trend), to support growth. Anyone who has spent time on planes knows that the world is mostly empty. I recently flew from Seoul to Moscow and there was nothing but forest in between. The first visible roads were on the descent to Moscow. If you assume that innovation is impossible, then sure, I can see how he conflates future energy use with CO2. But it's a failing of the piece that he never explicitly states that assumption.

abalashov 11y ago
Perhaps, but to be fair, there are fairly specific geophysical criteria for plopping down a nontrivial human settlement, mainly relating to the water table and agriculture. Inland, arid tundra, for example, isn't good place to found a town, and neither is any place where you can neither grow local food nor deliver it easily from other places. The more anthrocentric aspects, like proximity to transportation networks and economic activity, also play a huge role. All in all, it's not reasonable to suggest that much of the empty space seen from a plane can be filled out with people equally well. Indeed, a disproportionate share of energy use goes toward supporting life in places nature did not will to be particularly habitable. Very expensive contrivances--none altogether successful, and whose sustainability is in doubt--exist to create water and indoor cooling in places like Las Vegas, for example, and to pump water out of New Orleans or parts of the Netherlands. Technology is impressive and can compensate, but neither cheaply nor without all kinds of negative externalities.
- paulsutter 11y ago
  Hmm, to solve those problems, would it help to have massive supplies of clean energy?

memracom 11y ago

The USA is overreaching and the further it overreaches, the greater the risk of various parts of the socio-economic system breaking. The more things break, and the more serious the problems, the faster the USA will collapse. This is the real future of the USA if it is not able to curb and even to reverse its per capita energy consumption. When any system grows beyond its capacity to manage itself, then that system tends to collapse. We see this most clearly in economic bubbles, but the same mechanisms are at work in foreign policy, in NATO, in the EU, in China, and so on. There will never be a simple way to understand the problems of growth and overreach so this means that countries which have greater capacity for self reflection and thinking through the consequences of their actions, are the ones most likely to dominate and to thrive in the long term. Right now it looks like the USA will be a historical oddity by the year 2500 if not sooner

sunstone 11y ago

One of the problem with this analysis is that it uses population growth as a proxy for fertility rate. Another is that it assumes that future energy will come from the same sources as they currently rather than increasingly from solar and wind.