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You do realize that crop yields have grown exponentially as well? And I hope you also realize that "natural resources" is not an intrinsic property that some t

You do realize that crop yields have grown exponentially as well? And I hope you also realize that "natural resources" is not an intrinsic property that some things have, it's just a way of describing things around us and for which we figured out use cases. It's like when someone says that a certain phenomenon is mysterious. That's not a description of the phenomenon itself, it just describes the state of knowledge of the person making the claim. Likewise, the reason gold, iron, oil and wood are "natural resources" is because we figured out stuff to do with them. Worrying about running out of resources is basically worrying that we exhausted all the ways we can rearrange atoms to better achieve our purposes.

paganel 10y ago
> You do realize that crop yields have grown exponentially as well? I do realize that, yes, only that nowadays people are not content with only eating bread and making it to the next day (which, I agree, we have enough resources for) but they instead want to have a "Western"-style of life, meaning middle or higher education, a car, some electronics (phones, TVs), air-conditioning etc. I'd say our planet doesn't have enough resources to provide a Western-style of life for 7 billion people, feel free to prove me wrong on that. I'll also say that the recent immigration-related issues are resource-related, meaning the poorer parts of the world (places like Pakistan or sub-Saharan Africa) don't have enough resources to provide a Western-style of living for people from there. I remember reading an interview with a 16-year old from Gabon (I think), who was waiting at the Italian-Swiss border hoping to make his way to Germany, and the reason he gave for making it all the way there from his home country was that he wanted to attend University in Europe, he didn't mention not having enough bread to eat at home.
- hx87 10y ago
  > air conditioning It's just a pet peeve of mine, but why is so much blame placed on air conditioning, when heating uses an order of magnitude more energy?
  - paganel 10y ago
    I don't necessarily "blame" air-conditioning, it's just that in order to have AC you need to have a functional power distribution network that works at country level, which in turn requires having the initial capital for building it and then (I say most importantly) the necessary political and economical stability in place in order to raise the power distribution poles and, generally speaking, keeping the power distribution network up and running. I know that us people in the "West" now take this for granted, but I'd say that in a great part of the world the conditions for putting that in place will not be met in the next 30-50 years. I speak from first-hand experience (I spent my childhood in communist Eastern Europe in the '80s, when the going got tough) but one of the first things to go when a regime/society is economically and politically crumbling is the power distribution, meaning country-level power black-outs.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Solar powered AC works just fine without a power distribution network and even tends to track production and demand. Heating on the other hand needs power in the darker parks of the year and needs fuel, much larger investments, or a power distribution network.
      - paganel 10y ago
        > Solar powered AC works just fine without a power distribution network and even tends to track production and demand It's pretty hard close to impossible to scale that to large and dense communities. I know for sure that my Eastern-European city (population: ~1.8 million) has enough problems as it is when in the summer heat people turn the AC on at the same time. And we're a pretty ok country in terms of power distribution, I'd dare to say, we have hydro, nuclear, wind, and of course coal-based energy. More to the point, I fail to see how you can provide power to an African city with a population with 2 million (let's say) only using solar. I know that there's a lot of sunny days in sub-Saharan Africa, but you need to have huge solar farms, for which you need political stability (so that people don't destroy said farms), you need power lines that would bring said solar-generated power to the city (which also requires political and economical stability), you need engineers (preferably locally-trained, that way the costs are manageable) in order to manage all that, you need to make it easy for people to pay for it all (again, this requires institutional stability) and so on and so forth. I'd say that there are still large swaths of the world where all these conditions don't apply. I'd say people here on HN have a slightly skewed perspective on things. Most of them have grown up (and some of them still live) in American suburbia where having the possibility to install your own solar-power thingie is totally feasible. But American suburbia it's not the whole world.
- Retric 10y ago
  70% of the globe is covered by Ocean which is minimally used. If we covered 10% of that with solar we get .7 * .1 * 196.9 * 10^6 mi * 2.59e+6 (miles to meters) * 100 watts/meter average * 20% efficiency ~= 713959400000000 watts / second. Or 100kw 24/7 per person for a population of 7 billion. That's plenty of energy cover loss of fossil fuel, and to upgrade everyone's lifestyle for the next billion years. Granted, nothing keeps up with exponential growth. But, world population does not seem to be on that trajectory long term.
- Decade 10y ago
  Yes. The ‘”Western”-style of life’ needs to change. The intellectual conservatives are aware of this, and react negatively. They believe that nobody should tell them how to live their lives. Rejecting human-driven climate change is a way out of their cognitive dissonance. As for me, I don’t have air conditioning, I don’t own a car, I reduce and reuse before recycling, I don’t buy on credit. (Electronics are astonishingly cheap these days, and once you filter out the noise, the Internet is a vast trove of knowledge.) Westerners might say that they believe in global warming and all that, but when it comes to the cost of lifestyle changes, they balk. I have the “advantage” that I started out cash-poor, so I didn’t grow up assuming that I would need anything. Just something I was thinking about, related to gentrification, urbanization vs NIMBYs, and Elon Musk’s Tesla master plan.

paganel 10y ago

> You do realize that crop yields have grown exponentially as well? I do realize that, yes, only that nowadays people are not content with only eating bread and making it to the next day (which, I agree, we have enough resources for) but they instead want to have a "Western"-style of life, meaning middle or higher education, a car, some electronics (phones, TVs), air-conditioning etc. I'd say our planet doesn't have enough resources to provide a Western-style of life for 7 billion people, feel free to prove me wrong on that. I'll also say that the recent immigration-related issues are resource-related, meaning the poorer parts of the world (places like Pakistan or sub-Saharan Africa) don't have enough resources to provide a Western-style of living for people from there. I remember reading an interview with a 16-year old from Gabon (I think), who was waiting at the Italian-Swiss border hoping to make his way to Germany, and the reason he gave for making it all the way there from his home country was that he wanted to attend University in Europe, he didn't mention not having enough bread to eat at home.

hx87 10y ago
> air conditioning It's just a pet peeve of mine, but why is so much blame placed on air conditioning, when heating uses an order of magnitude more energy?
- paganel 10y ago
  I don't necessarily "blame" air-conditioning, it's just that in order to have AC you need to have a functional power distribution network that works at country level, which in turn requires having the initial capital for building it and then (I say most importantly) the necessary political and economical stability in place in order to raise the power distribution poles and, generally speaking, keeping the power distribution network up and running. I know that us people in the "West" now take this for granted, but I'd say that in a great part of the world the conditions for putting that in place will not be met in the next 30-50 years. I speak from first-hand experience (I spent my childhood in communist Eastern Europe in the '80s, when the going got tough) but one of the first things to go when a regime/society is economically and politically crumbling is the power distribution, meaning country-level power black-outs.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Solar powered AC works just fine without a power distribution network and even tends to track production and demand. Heating on the other hand needs power in the darker parks of the year and needs fuel, much larger investments, or a power distribution network.
    - paganel 10y ago
      > Solar powered AC works just fine without a power distribution network and even tends to track production and demand It's pretty hard close to impossible to scale that to large and dense communities. I know for sure that my Eastern-European city (population: ~1.8 million) has enough problems as it is when in the summer heat people turn the AC on at the same time. And we're a pretty ok country in terms of power distribution, I'd dare to say, we have hydro, nuclear, wind, and of course coal-based energy. More to the point, I fail to see how you can provide power to an African city with a population with 2 million (let's say) only using solar. I know that there's a lot of sunny days in sub-Saharan Africa, but you need to have huge solar farms, for which you need political stability (so that people don't destroy said farms), you need power lines that would bring said solar-generated power to the city (which also requires political and economical stability), you need engineers (preferably locally-trained, that way the costs are manageable) in order to manage all that, you need to make it easy for people to pay for it all (again, this requires institutional stability) and so on and so forth. I'd say that there are still large swaths of the world where all these conditions don't apply. I'd say people here on HN have a slightly skewed perspective on things. Most of them have grown up (and some of them still live) in American suburbia where having the possibility to install your own solar-power thingie is totally feasible. But American suburbia it's not the whole world.
Retric 10y ago
70% of the globe is covered by Ocean which is minimally used. If we covered 10% of that with solar we get .7 * .1 * 196.9 * 10^6 mi * 2.59e+6 (miles to meters) * 100 watts/meter average * 20% efficiency ~= 713959400000000 watts / second. Or 100kw 24/7 per person for a population of 7 billion. That's plenty of energy cover loss of fossil fuel, and to upgrade everyone's lifestyle for the next billion years. Granted, nothing keeps up with exponential growth. But, world population does not seem to be on that trajectory long term.
Decade 10y ago
Yes. The ‘”Western”-style of life’ needs to change. The intellectual conservatives are aware of this, and react negatively. They believe that nobody should tell them how to live their lives. Rejecting human-driven climate change is a way out of their cognitive dissonance. As for me, I don’t have air conditioning, I don’t own a car, I reduce and reuse before recycling, I don’t buy on credit. (Electronics are astonishingly cheap these days, and once you filter out the noise, the Internet is a vast trove of knowledge.) Westerners might say that they believe in global warming and all that, but when it comes to the cost of lifestyle changes, they balk. I have the “advantage” that I started out cash-poor, so I didn’t grow up assuming that I would need anything. Just something I was thinking about, related to gentrification, urbanization vs NIMBYs, and Elon Musk’s Tesla master plan.