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Malthus said the same thing - that we wouldn't be able to produce enough food because of whatever reason. And yet we humans found some way to continue living an
by benihana 14y ago
Malthus said the same thing - that we wouldn't be able to produce enough food because of whatever reason. And yet we humans found some way to continue living and producing food just fine. We increased our food yield and continue to do so. We found creative solutions to our problems with our available resources and there isn't any reason to think that we'll sudden lose the capacity to do this because of peak oil or lack of alternative fuels, neither of which were concepts in Malthus' time.
- kstenerud 14y agoMalthus said that our population would eventually outgrow our capacity to produce food. What I'm saying is that we've already outgrown our future ability to produce food, and are now in a race against time to stabilize our energy supply before the population bomb goes off. And unless we do come up with a novel source of cheap energy, it WILL go off.
- roflc0ptic 14y agoI read things like this because I so desperately want there not to be a population bomb, but the crux of their argument is waving their hands and saying "human ingenuity will take care of it." In essence it's a faith based argument cloaked in scientific jargon. The only answer shy of taking state power and forcing powering down (deeply improbable) is building resilient local communities and food systems.
- Filligree 14y agoNovel? What about nuclear fission?
- np422 14y agoJust because one man said something back in the 18th century and was wrong does not mean that anyone who says something vaguely similar also is wrong. World population, energy consumed, paper clips manufactured, fishes caught in the sea - all the graphs shows us a exponential growth. There are physical limits to growth. I would very much prefer to do something before we run into them rather then being around when it happens.