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What I don't understand about these charts is they completely dismiss the impacts of diminishing returns. Suppose the population continued to grow and grow and

What I don't understand about these charts is they completely dismiss the impacts of diminishing returns. Suppose the population continued to grow and grow and grow. What would happen to available non-renewable resources? They would become more and more expensive to a point that their cost would exceed the cost of finding alternate means of producing energy. What happens then? we stop relying on fossil fuels, and start relying on more sustainable energy sources, as a practical matter of the economics of it. Food production isn't a non-renewable source, but it is a control. Only so many people can afford so much food; at a point it will be prohibitively expensive to procreate. If they can't children die, or families stop having children. Does that mean all population growth will backslide? No; why would it? It just means there becomes a harder cap on how many children a person or family can afford to have. No more 3+ children in families.

refurb 15y ago
Agreed. These predictions assume that behavior never changes. Just like when gas prices skyrocketed a few years back and you could buy a SUV for a fraction of the value a year ago. Another great example is oil. When oil was cheap and plentiful, people screamed "we're running out!!". Prices went up and suddenly it was economically viable to frack and extract from tar sands. Boom, we have a bunch of "new" oil.
- dclowd9901 15y ago
  One takeaway I got from the oil uptick a few years back (~$150/barrel, if I recall), is that people will change their behavior. In 50 years, driving habits continued trending up and up, but in that time people actually drove less. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what that means. They actually changed their lifestyles to accommodate the pinch they felt. Carpooled. Took fewer road trips. Consolidated trips. And it wasn't even an issue of shortage; it was purely speculative increases.
taliesinb 15y ago
I don't think that is true. As for as I recall, the World3 model includes price feedbacks like this. But even if it didn't, one of the lessons of World3 is that it takes time for negative feedbacks like this to achieve equilibrium. If the feedback is slow enough, you get overshoots, and those overshoots either are (by definition) or could trigger (as a side effect) environmentally and socially damaging events. In the case of population, for example, the recovery after a large overshoot could take the form of mass famine or civil war. There is another problem with the argument that many free market optimists make about energy: to actually scale up whatever fancy clean-energy technology happens to become economically viable in the future might require huge swathes of our economies to be reconfigured at an impractical rate. To give an example, there are physical limits to how quickly you can ramp up the volume of solar panels, no matter how cheap the technology is, to do with quickly we can ramp up the production of pure silicon, build plants that make solar panels, and train engineers to oversee those plants and install those panels into the grid. Of course, we can't quantify these limits for some mystery future technology, but we can play the game for known technologies, and it doesn't look good. In particular, it seems that it is only really realistic to be off fossil fuels by 2050 if we start transitioning aggressively now using many different approaches --simultaneously. In other words, we need to place a lot of large bets, not just one large bet or several small ones -- see [1] for example. Given the reluctance of the world's largest producers, consumers, and polluters to even get serious about one of these approaches, it seems pretty hopeless that we have the political will to execute on all of them, simultaneously, at global scale, as we need to. As usual, the poor will suffer disproportionately. [1] http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/mtg_200702/socolow_hotinski.pdf http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/mtg_20070...

refurb 15y ago

Agreed. These predictions assume that behavior never changes. Just like when gas prices skyrocketed a few years back and you could buy a SUV for a fraction of the value a year ago. Another great example is oil. When oil was cheap and plentiful, people screamed "we're running out!!". Prices went up and suddenly it was economically viable to frack and extract from tar sands. Boom, we have a bunch of "new" oil.

dclowd9901 15y ago
One takeaway I got from the oil uptick a few years back (~$150/barrel, if I recall), is that people will change their behavior. In 50 years, driving habits continued trending up and up, but in that time people actually drove less. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what that means. They actually changed their lifestyles to accommodate the pinch they felt. Carpooled. Took fewer road trips. Consolidated trips. And it wasn't even an issue of shortage; it was purely speculative increases.

taliesinb 15y ago

I don't think that is true. As for as I recall, the World3 model includes price feedbacks like this. But even if it didn't, one of the lessons of World3 is that it takes time for negative feedbacks like this to achieve equilibrium. If the feedback is slow enough, you get overshoots, and those overshoots either are (by definition) or could trigger (as a side effect) environmentally and socially damaging events. In the case of population, for example, the recovery after a large overshoot could take the form of mass famine or civil war. There is another problem with the argument that many free market optimists make about energy: to actually scale up whatever fancy clean-energy technology happens to become economically viable in the future might require huge swathes of our economies to be reconfigured at an impractical rate. To give an example, there are physical limits to how quickly you can ramp up the volume of solar panels, no matter how cheap the technology is, to do with quickly we can ramp up the production of pure silicon, build plants that make solar panels, and train engineers to oversee those plants and install those panels into the grid. Of course, we can't quantify these limits for some mystery future technology, but we can play the game for known technologies, and it doesn't look good. In particular, it seems that it is only really realistic to be off fossil fuels by 2050 if we start transitioning aggressively now using many different approaches --simultaneously. In other words, we need to place a lot of large bets, not just one large bet or several small ones -- see [1] for example. Given the reluctance of the world's largest producers, consumers, and polluters to even get serious about one of these approaches, it seems pretty hopeless that we have the political will to execute on all of them, simultaneously, at global scale, as we need to. As usual, the poor will suffer disproportionately. [1] http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/mtg_200702/socolow_hotinski.pdf http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/mtg_20070...