I think this is the beginnings of an economy based on perpetual growth and fossil fuel energy running headlong into geological energy constraints. Basically I see an undulatory downward path for the rest of my life. From here out, I think any rallies in our economic condition are going to be met with spiking commodity prices that knock us right back down.
Joined: Mar 26, 2008 Posts: 1371 Location: Seattle
Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 10:27 pm Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
Homesteader wrote:
OF2, The drivers of demographic transition are education, urbanization of the population, women employed in a cash society. So, an inexorable result is increasing consumption of goods and services. That is causing global demand for those goods and services to go up.
You can't have it both ways: Either you have a rural, relatively uneducated and non-consumerist society with a high birthrate and a rapidly growing population, or you can have an urban, well-educated, consumerist population with a declining birthrate and declining rates of growth (and, in extreme cases like Japan, declining populations). Like it or not, that's just the way it works.
Quote:
Global grain production per capita, energy production per capita, loss of arable farmland due to urbanization, erosion, salinization, desertification. I'm sure you will ignore facts that don't fit your argument, but that won't change the outcome.
Global grain production per capita has been rising over the past 40 years, not declining. I'll repeat what I posted in another thread:
OilFinder2 wrote:
Here is a chart of world coarse grain production: Coarse Grain Chart
Notice that it's risen from about 540 million metric tons in 1968 to about 1070 million metric tons in 2007. That's an increase of 98%.
In 1968, world population was 3.556 billion: source. In 2007, world population was 6.602 billion: source. That's an increase of 86%.
In other words, world coarse grain production has outpaced world population growth since 1968.
Same is true of energy production/consumption. The other things on your list are relatively trivial and little more than fear-mongering. _________________ Abundance - what a concept!
Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 1:49 am Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
OilFinder2 wrote:
MrBill wrote:
but certainly anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that we are at an inflection point now where those gains are starting to fall behind steeper increases in population growth,
There are no "steeper increases in population growth." The rate of human population growth has been slowing down for at least 40 years.
you are, of course, making the classic error of comparing percentage increases and not absolute increases in population numbers.
Quote:
A few milestones in world population:
1600 - 500,000,000
1850 - 1,000,000,000
1900 - 1.500.000.000
1930 - 2,000,000,000
1960 - 3.000.000.000
1974 - 4,000,000,000
1987 - 5.000.000.000
2000 - 6,000,000,000
2008 - 6.800.000.000
2050 - 9.000.000.000-10.000.000.000 (est.)
We have added 8 hundred million people in the last 8-years alone. Roughly the size of America and the EU combined. Needless to say those population gains were not in the developed world where as you point out population increases are levelling out and even falling. But it is the absolute numbers that count and not the percentage gains. _________________ The organized state is a wonderful invention whereby everyone can live at someone else's expense.
Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 5:36 am Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
virgincrude wrote:
Mr.Bill:
Quote:
resource depletion; and, yes, resistance to GMO and other techno-progress from certain groups of consumers (mainly, the well-fed ones I might add).
Have you seen the movie I posted a link to about Monsanto? It's disappeared from Google and other sources I posted at the time, but you can still find it here: Wide Eyed Cinema In it, you'll find ample proof that it is certainly NOT just the well fed and able to choose, who are resistent to GM food. Apart from that, you seem to have hit the nail on the head!
VC, thanks for the link. I will get to it today, but so far we have had power-outs, so just getting back to work here. As for Monsanto, I really do not have a problem with any private company getting paid for their intellectual capital. Not Google, Microsoft or IBM. Not Big Pharma. Not Ag Cos. They are driving innovation and development. That is not a defense of any market manipulation that may or may not occur from time to time. We already have laws against such behavior and it is up to governments to enforce those laws.
We need crops that mature more quickly; are drought and pest resistant; grow in salinated soils and on marginal land; etc. That process has been going on through natural selection indefinitely and by human hands for the past 80.000 years or so. The crops on which we depend on for our survival scarcely resemble their natural cousins anymore. They have been genetically manipulated for their good characteristics already.
Governments and supranational organizations already are researching new and better seed varieties, and have been doing so since before the first land-grant colleges were founded in or around 1869. This process is a natural and necessary balance to private, for profit research carried out by companies like Monsanto.
As far as I am concerned LDC governments would be far better off subsidizing fertilizer imports and paying for the best seeds rather than spending that money on food aid and/or imports of gasoline for the non-agriculture economy. For that matter LDC governments would be much farther ahead helping their farmers build and develop the necessary agriculture infrastructure like irrigation and best water practices rather than wasting that money on defence and security that is often aimed at their own people. But who am I?
The argument that someone else used that stated that the developing world was growing economically faster than their population overlooks several fundamental problems with such an assertion.
First of all the developing world is not homogenous. Asia, which is part of the developing world, is growing economically almost 34 times faster than sub-Sahara Africa that in some cases is experiencing negative economic growth, but postive population gains. In some cases their populations have increased 34 times since their political independence while in inflation adjusted terms their economies are actually smaller.
Secondly, it is not me, but there are natural and manmade famines occuring in the developing world all the time. That does not even begin to address under-nurishment. Anyone who argues differently is just a dumb prick!
Thirdly, if you travel throughout the ME where oil producing countries have some of the fastest growing population sand where coincidently economic growth is also faster than in the developed world you will immediately notice how little of that economic development is sustainable.
Turning deserts into sand castles that rely on nat gas fired air conditioning 24/7; do not have enough fresh water to sustain them; and that rely on gasoline to run their infrastructure is hardly sustainable post peak oil much less pretending that this faster economic growth is somehow generating a sustainable agricultural surplus. Deserts are not a substitute for arable land without expensive inputs of water and energy.
Posting graphs that show historical increases in crop yields is very educational about past increases in agricultural productivity, but says very little about future productivity increases if we find natural or artificial bottlenecks in those inputs of water and energy. Without extensive innovation from GMOs we will struggle to maintain the status quo. Failing to innovate will only guarantee die-off. Gradual, voluntary or otherwise.
UPDATE: not just the issues of GMOs, but also protecting bio-diversity, and maintaining a balance between arable land needed for food production as well as for nature...
Quote:
Nearly 200 governments will say next week they are unlikely to meet a target of slowing the rate of extinctions of living species by 2010, a failure which could threaten future food supplies.
Up to 5,000 delegates and some heads of state, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, will try to agree at the Convention of Biological Diversity in the German city of Bonn on ways to save plant and animal species.
U.N. experts say the planet is facing the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago and some say three species vanish every hour as a result largely of human activity causing pollution and loss of habitat. "We hope to give a wake-up call to humanity. We need an unprecedented effort to meet the challenge of biodiversity loss,"
Source: U.N. experts to say 2010 biodiversity target elusive
.... even if food security was not an issue we would still have enough pressing economic and environmental problems to address between food, fuel and urban development post peak oil resource depletion. _________________ The organized state is a wonderful invention whereby everyone can live at someone else's expense.
Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 3:48 pm Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
OilFinder2 wrote:
Homesteader wrote:
OF2, The drivers of demographic transition are education, urbanization of the population, women employed in a cash society. So, an inexorable result is increasing consumption of goods and services. That is causing global demand for those goods and services to go up.
You can't have it both ways: Either you have a rural, relatively uneducated and non-consumerist society with a high birthrate and a rapidly growing population, or you can have an urban, well-educated, consumerist population with a declining birthrate and declining rates of growth (and, in extreme cases like Japan, declining populations). Like it or not, that's just the way it works.(...)
nice, you provided your own counter example. A declining population with a declining growth, Japan. But I don't want to check if Japan has a negative economic growth, AFAIK it's around 0-2%.
Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 5:29 pm Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
OilFinder2 wrote:
mididoctors wrote:
thats the wrong graph for comparasion.
you need to compare the RATE of agricultural production increase
Boris
london
Then if you want to do that, you can compare your graphic to the one I already showed showing the RATE of population increase.
yeah I don't think thats unreasonable...
what is interesting of course is when you compare these 2 with
the whole thing appears to grinding towards zero growth... which is kinda of the point
is 9 billion people a sustainable possible or desirable number?
the doomer scenario is premised on whether fossil fuel depletion makes 9 billion unsustainable. And that time is too short to mitigate via mass solar (or whatever).
it will defiantly be too short even if we accept peak dates in the 2030s if no viable transition starts soon IMO.
in a way peak oil isn't the problem.. concrete organised political/practical action is required..
there is no graph for the rate of arseholeness... Is the human race getting its act together or not?
phuh?
doomers/cassandras have always been around.. I'm bit of one myself...
but that doesn't mean their wrong.. thats the problem with this whole fossil fuel depletion deal...
it really is a problem.. the bottom line basic maths is indisputable
the cry wolf thing.. the moral is the wolf does come not that the boy isn't believed anymore.
my position on peak oil is I doubt the extremes of the doomer position but I seriously repeat seriously doubt its going to be a non event.
Boris
London
Last edited by mididoctors on Tue May 20, 2008 3:58 am; edited 1 time in total
Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 7:57 pm Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
mididoctors wrote:
the whole thing appears to grinding towards zero growth... which is kinda of the point
is 9 billion people a sustainable possible or desirable number?
I don't think we'll ever reach 9 billion.
Lets not forget these population projection studies were made years ago, before the rise in commodity prices. What about the massive rise in food prices just this year and the bull market is not over yet! Once new population studies are made to factor in these recent variables I think we're going to see a cliff drop in growth rates. Expect peak population to occur before 2030....IMHO
Vital research programs have been slashed. At the rice institute, scientists have identified 14 genetic traits that could help rice plants survive the plant hopper, which sucks the juices out of young plants while infecting them with viruses. But the scientists have had no money to breed these traits into the world’s most widely used rice varieties.
The institute is the world’s main repository of rice seeds as well as genetic and other information about rice, the crop that feeds nearly half the world’s people.
Posted: Thu May 22, 2008 7:17 am Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
As much as I believe in market based solutions the bottomline is that governments 'exist' to fulfill those public policy roles that private enterprise is not able or unwilling to undertake themselves. If not, then of what good whatsoever are governments?
Crops' wild relatives need better protection: WWF
Quote:
Wild relatives of crops such as wheat, rice and potatoes are "dangerously vulnerable" and areas where they grow need more protection to aid world food supplies, the WWF conservation group said on Thursday.
Wild varieties often have natural characteristics that can be bred into food crops to help them resist everything from new pests or diseases to a changing climate.
"Basic food crops dangerously vulnerable," the WWF said in a headline of a statement about a new WWF map showing that areas in which wild varieties of crops are protected often cover less than five percent of their natural ranges.
Bio-diversity and safe-guarding wild plants and habitat are crucial public policy. Ironically we will likely spend more time and taxpayer money regulating consumer packaging than fulfilling these essential roles. Actually we will collectively spend more on bubble gum this year than our politicians will on election campaigning! ; - )) _________________ The organized state is a wonderful invention whereby everyone can live at someone else's expense.
Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 2:08 am Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
BigTex wrote:
Fossil fuel was the sugar cube dropped in the petri dish.
Indeed fossil fuels are like glucose, once they are depleted we will have to switch over to more abundant but less efficient energy sources, like lactose. Thankfully we have the lac operon to handle this situation.
Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 4:22 am Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
As in places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela not all our food security problems are caused by the limits of Nature.
Quote:
Chavez has also been expropriating private agricultural land he says is underused and turning it over to peasants.
``If you don't produce on your land, then don't complain when we come and take it away,'' he said on April 24 on state television. He says 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of ``idle'' land have been taken. Together, that would make up an area larger than the state of Connecticut.
`Flight of Investment'
Food producers say the seizures by the National Land Institute have made shortages worse.
``There's a flight of investment from food production,'' says Rogelio Pena, a former cattle rancher in Barinas state whose land was confiscated in 2003. ``Many of the ranches they've taken over produced milk and beef.''
Pena, 49, says the land institute accused him of leaving too much of his 3,600-hectare ranch idle and of not having proper paperwork to prove he owned it. He says his documents were in order and that he was raising 2,300 cows. Institute representatives accompanied by soldiers showed up one day and ordered him out, without compensation, he says. Pena now works at his family's hardware store in downtown Barinas.
Juan Carlos Loyo, director of the institute, didn't respond to calls seeking comment.
Beef Output Falls
Whether through idle land or lack of investment, milk and beef output have suffered. Though milk production has risen 8 percent in each of the past three years, it's still down from a decade ago. Output peaked at 1.72 billion liters (454 million gallons) in 1988 and last year stood at 1.5 billion liters, according to the National Cattle Ranchers Federation of Venezuela. The group says beef production fell 22 percent to 343,798 metric tons in 2007 from a year earlier.
The government divides expropriated land into small units for individual farmers, while larger communal areas are devoted to cooperative projects. The farmers don't own the plots. While grateful for the land, many co-op farmers express frustration at delays in obtaining promised government funding and training.
``We've had to fight,'' says Marisol Ramirez, president of a 1,000-hectare cooperative of 42 families in Barinas state. ``There's a lot of negligence at the state entities that are supposed to help farmers.''
Only nine co-op families have electricity, and most live in wooden shacks without plumbing. Since expropriating the property in 2004, the government has built a school and given the farmers a 340,000 bolivar ($158,000) loan to build a corral and prepare part of the land for cattle grazing. Promised loans and grants for a clinic, a plant nursery, housing and electrification projects are stalled in the bureaucracy, Ramirez, 41, says.
Imports Surge
The farmers, many of them former laborers, grow fruits and vegetables, taking to market only what's left over after feeding their families, Ramirez says. Together, they raise 160 head of cattle on communal land.
With domestic production lagging behind demand, companies and the government have turned to imports. Purchases of goods from abroad surged 40 percent last year to $48.6 billion, according to the central bank. Exports rose 6.1 percent to $69.2 billion.
Buying abroad isn't easy. Importers need dollars, and the biggest bottleneck is the government's Foreign Exchange Administration Commission, known as Cadivi, which decides how to allocate the currency. Red tape can stretch the process to months, merchants say.
Posted: Mon Jun 02, 2008 4:28 am Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
Responses to high food & energy prices.
Quote:
As food costs around the world continue to increase, scavengers known as 'freegans' are raiding supermarket bins to find edible food.
Staples such as rice and bread are getting much more expensive for the world's hungry. But people in the Western world are still throwing out huge amounts of food - those in the UK throw away around one third of the food that is purchased.
One group of people trying to combat the amount of waste are so-called freegans who raid supermarket dumpsters to salvage food that is otherwise tossed out as rubbish.
Major UK supermarkets tell Reuters they're working to reduce this kind of waste by improving packaging and portion sizes - but only a few lock their bins. So for the freegans, the discarded food is there for the taking.
Five Arctic coastal nations have agreed to let the United Nations rule on conflicting territorial claims on the region's possibly energy-rich seabed.
The Arctic Ocean may hold up to a quarter of the world's undiscovered hydrocarbon reserves.
Ministers from Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States have been meeting in Greenland to discuss sovereignty over the Arctic Ocean seabed.
Manila residents are taking to urban farming in bid to avert rising prices.
With prices of rice, bread and other food items reaching record-highs in the Philippines, jobless folks can turn to farming even for income, as they harvest enough to sell at a local market.
With backlash mounting over using food for fuel, scientists and industry leaders in North America are looking beyond the corn kernel in their quest for the "holy grail" of biofuels.
Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2008 5:37 am Post subject: Malthus Redux: Is Doomsday Upon Us, Again? (Doomer Delight!)
I would say "Coming to a nation near yours"...except...it already has. Got popcorn?
During the last American food-and-gas-price crisis, in the 1970s, one of my colleagues on the Berkeley student newspaper told me that he and his semi-communal housemates had taken a vote. They’d calculated they could afford meat or coffee. They chose coffee.
The decision was slightly less effete than it sounds now — the Starbucks clone wars were still some years off, so he was talking about choosing Yuban over ground chuck. But it nonetheless said something about us as spoiled Americans. Riots were relatively common in Berkeley in those days. But they were never about food. (That particular revolution was starting without us on Shattuck Avenue, where Chez Panisse had just opened.)
However, elsewhere on the globe, people were on the edge of starvation. Grain prices were soaring, rice stocks plummeting. In Ethiopia and Cambodia, people were well over the edge, and food riots helped lead to the downfall of Emperor Haile Selassie and the victory of the Khmer Rouge. Link to complete article _________________ Dieoff. Fun to watch. Better with hot buttered popcorn!
Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 7:08 am Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
The premise behind articles like this one are just wrong on so many levels that I do not know where to start. First of all they are all premised on the notion that only an endless supply of young workers can be creative and hardworking. False. Life-long learning is the key to creativeness later in life. Brain dead children turn into zombie-like adults.
Quote:
The catastrophes foretold by Malthus and his epigones - some of them in bestsellers like "The Population Bomb," which predicted that "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now" - have never come to pass.
That is because people are not our greatest liability. They are our greatest asset - the wellspring of every quality on which human advancement depends: ambition, intuition, perseverance, ingenuity, imagination, leadership, love.
True, fewer human beings would mean fewer mouths to feed. It would also mean fewer entrepreneurs, fewer pioneers, fewer problem-solvers. Which is why it is not an increase but the coming decrease in human population that should engender foreboding.
For as Phillip Longman, a scholar of demographics and economics at the New America Foundation, observes: "Never in history have we had economic prosperity accompanied by depopulation."
And secondly they assume that we can never pay for our old age without a constant supply of new workers. Again false. With another 3-billion people still to be born in the next 40-years the problem is not a lack of demand or potential workers, but that many of those potential workers will not have access to clean water, sanitation, nutritional food, education or live and grow up in a civil society, so that they can learn the skills needed to replace existing older workers in the developed world as they near retirement.
We could have 20 billion people on an already crowded planet living beyond our means, and intellectually lazy authors like this one would lament de-population to only 10 billion as being a great loss to our creative potential. Creative at what? Turning this earth into Planet Moldar?
All the achievements of human history up to 1900 were miraculously accomplished with less than one billion. I do not know about you, but I would sooner have circa three billion happy, healthy and productive people living in a sustainable manner than play the earth's equivalent of trying to see how many people we can jam into a VW Beetle!
UPDATE: Kunstler being his usual cheery self...
Quote:
Like a lot of other activities in American life these days, agribusiness is unreformable along its current lines. It will take a convulsion to change it, and in that convulsion it will be dragged kicking-and-screaming into a new reality. As that occurs, the US public will have to contend with more than just higher taco chip prices. We're heading into the Vale of Malthus -- Thomas Robert Malthus, the British economist-philosopher who introduced the notion that eventually world population would overtake world food production capacity. Malthus has been scorned and ridiculed in recent decades, as fossil fuel-cranked farming allowed the global population to go vertical. Techno-triumphalist observers who should have known better attributed this to the "green revolution" of bio-engineering. Malthus is back now, along with his outriders: famine, pestilence, and war.
source: Status Quo-oh _________________ The organized state is a wonderful invention whereby everyone can live at someone else's expense.
Joined: Aug 03, 2006 Posts: 4331 Location: Graceland
Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 12:06 pm Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
ThunderChunky wrote:
BigTex wrote:
Fossil fuel was the sugar cube dropped in the petri dish.
Indeed fossil fuels are like glucose, once they are depleted we will have to switch over to more abundant but less efficient energy sources, like lactose. Thankfully we have the lac operon to handle this situation.
I can't tell if that's a joke or not.
If you're being serious, tell me more about this alternative to fossil fuels that is a more abundant but less efficient energy source.
I hate to ask such an obvious question, but what happens when the lactose runs out?
Is that so far in the future that it's not worth worrying about today?
The fundamental issue, I think, is whether our goal as a species is the survival of our species, or if it's survival of each of us individually, no matter the cost to other individuals (including future generations).
If we have no greater duty than to ourselves individually, then this is a dumb conversation to be having. We will simply compete with one another for scarce resources until the last scrap is consumed and whoever is around then will just have to count himself the loser in the game of evolutionary musical chairs.
However, if the matter of species survival is one that is worth discussing, then I think the comment about switching out the glucose with the lactose is incredibly short-sighted.
Part of our problem seems to be that we want all the benefits of being god-like, but we don't want the responsibilities.
So far, we have used our time in the temple to have a series of ugly brawls with one another amid a more or less continuous orgy of consumption.
How long will it be before the gods evict us from the temple and bring in the cosmic cleaning crew to try to put the place back in order for the next attempt at intelligent life? _________________
Joined: Apr 12, 2007 Posts: 1185 Location: Central NC
Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 2:39 pm Post subject: Re: Malthus, the false prophet
BigTex wrote:
The fundamental issue, I think, is whether our goal as a species is the survival of our species, or if it's survival of each of us individually, no matter the cost to other individuals (including future generations).
If we have no greater duty than to ourselves individually, then this is a dumb conversation to be having. We will simply compete with one another for scarce resources until the last scrap is consumed and whoever is around then will just have to count himself the loser in the game of evolutionary musical chairs.
However, if the matter of species survival is one that is worth discussing, then I think the comment about switching out the glucose with the lactose is incredibly short-sighted.
You nailed it to the wall there. _________________ "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…"
Sir Winston Churchill
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