4 ms·
The US population is about 300 million and is not growing that fast. In fact, it might even be declining if immigration were not a factor. China's and Europe'
by cmccabe 14y ago
The US population is about 300 million and is not growing that fast. In fact, it might even be declining if immigration were not a factor. China's and Europe's populations will start decling in our lifetimes. Only India and Africa are set to keep increasing their populations.
"Resources" is a conveniently vague word which could mean almost anything that people happen to think they need at any given point. Are horses and buggies a resource? Because if so, we're running pretty low. If not, though, we're probably good. If software is the "resource," I could probably make 300 million copies in my apartment.
Most of the "resource" problems in the world are actually governance problems. For example, if the government is too corrupt and/or unstable to set up desalination plants, then there is a critical water shortage. On a pure physics basis, we have enough energy for hundreds of thousands of years. There's a reason why the northeast US is sometimes called the "Saudi Arabia of coal."
The whole Limits to Growth thing from the 1970s should be thoroughly discredited by now. They picked a particularly bad time to come up with it, too, right before the Green Revolution and a prolonged slump in commodity and energy prices...
- richardjordan 14y agoSemantics don't help us. Easily mined metals are a resource. Petrochemicals are a resource. As stated elsewhere the green revolution was just pouring oil on fields (as pesticides) and natural gas (as fertilizer). When we run out of those we run out of our ability to sustain even current food yields. Then there's topsoil. That's a resource, and in much of the midwest we're down to barely the amount needed for plants to root. Potable water is a resource. The state of many of our aquifers is precarious. Your statement that begins "on a pure physics basis..." bears little resemblance to any known facts about our current energy position. I'm a physicist by training, fwiw.
- cmccabe 13y agoLook, there is a shit-ton of coal in the ground. There is a process for converting coal into oil. The Germans used it during WWII. Not exactly cutting edge technology. If you are going to predict doom and gloom, you could at least give me a plausible scenario, like a supervirus or nuclear war. Running out of energy is just not going to happen any time soon. If you wanted to stretch your horizons beyond the 1940s (hard, I know)... you could predict that soon enough we'll be able to synthesize oil using yeast and some energy input. There are ways to replenish topsoil. Or even not to use it at all. Look up hydroponics-- another not-particularly-new technology. People are pretty good at dealing with gradual change, especially when there are huge economic incentives to do so.