96 comments on Some Congressional Action on Energy?
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96 comments on Some Congressional Action on Energy?
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GAIA Host Collective
One would expect that, as a survival mechanism, population increase would slow to fit the resource supply. Are there species that fit this idea in the animal kingdom? If mushrooms do it why can't we?
I believe Deer spontaneously abort when they are under resource stress. Best hopes for spontaneous abortions.
Or a fire at the Viagra plant...has anyone done a sperm count comparing the New York male and the average Appalachian mountain man? (hirsute-separate category)
Lots of species can fit poor environment. Our problem is that we aren't at a poor one yet.
Because we're not mushrooms?
Seriously, I urge you to assess the behaviors and consequences of overshoot in the vast majority of mammalian species and then come back here and tell me that humans are special and will somehow be exempt from the same consequences. Or will you join the ranks of those who can proudly say "We fool ourselves" despite the evidence in front of your nose?
If humans are not special and not exempt, then what do you see as the logical conclusion? Be careful though. If you think about such questions too long you may be forced into Jumping Off the Fence.
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
Read your two articles 'we fool ourselves', 'and jumping Off the fence' and find them very reasonable. I would add that possibly greater centralization, movement back to city life, would lower the rate which the population is growing.
About bio-diesel, I don't know how the energy values would compare but there might be some idea to use anaerobic methane production from all forms of human waste, particularly in a city situation. I may be wrong in my thinking but I tend to shudder when the talk of growing things to convert to liquid fuels rises. It stems from the idea that unless there is some way that the conversion results at least in a net equal energy position, without land destruction, it would be better to directly use the feedstock; as in ethanol, burn the corn directly for their BTU's rather than loose them in conversion.
You are right we are not mushrooms, there will be clever little mushrooms long after we have gone. ATB.
CrystalRadio, re: " I would add that possibly greater centralization, movement back to city life, would lower the rate which the population is growing. "
It may lower reproduction rates, but in a energy constrained future, I would not want to be in a city. Consolidation of population only works if the logistics of keeping a city alive don't break down. If the logistics fail you would literally be in deep doo-doo. Recall New Orleans/Katrina? That would be the fate of every city where logistics failed.
If I had to depend on my local environment for shelter, food, water, waste disposal, etc. , then survival in reasonable comfort would be infinitely easier in a rural setting.
Then you are arguing for a global population no greater than 700 million, which was the global population right before the beginning of the industrial era. And, further, that population lived in absolute squalor for the vast majority with short, ugly, diseased, and brutish lives interrupted only by the occasional war that rumbled through the countryside.
If you want comfort, you have to drive global population around 100 million, something approaching the 20 million in North America before the Europeans came would be near max.
So tell me - who are you going to kill to get your population down to where it needs to be for you to have safety and decency in a rural life?
Oh, you're not going to address this problem? Well then nature will address it. And your rural abode is no more proof against what nature will throw at us than a city is. If you naively think "life in the country" is going to save your ass, then you have no idea of what may be coming, if we cannot stabilize population and then stabilize the ecosystem around us.
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
While I hope not by my son's generation but maybe in that magical 7th generation we could aspire to 700 million... Greece had a golden age with only a million, or was that half a million?... dunno coz my civilize is almos 7 billious an after 3 is many and P.O. is generally understood as merely an abbreviation for get lost jerk.
Cities have been around for 5500 years. Only an American would believe that cities didn't exist until after World War II. Some of them were pretty grotty, but we have better plumbing these days.
As well we not only still have the opposable thumb which has been around things even longer, we have slaves we call the electric drill and the Skilsaw which are much more dependable than Solly the sullen.
.....yeah, yeah......I'll get back to ya' when I see a zebra taking a birth control pill.....:-)
RC
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
There are not that many zebras left in the world today. In fact, if you add up ALL of the primates, except for homo sapiens, there are an estimated 300,000 of them TOTAL around the world, Roger. Yet there are 200,000 homo sapiens born per day. Something is badly wrong here, Roger, and it is not the other primates, is it?
Despite the rise of contraception there has been no significant slowdown in global birth rates. The government lackeys who do these studies "assume" that people will eventually become as wealthy as the west and reduce their birth rates, yet even in the US we still have a 1% growth rate. That's from 300 million in 2006 to 600 million in 2076 to 1.2 billion in 2146.
And unlike oil, we have a very clear handle on population growth yet nothing is being done to stop it. Yet population growth is a far larger problem than peak oil.
Thankfully though, peak oil will help solve the population problem, Roger, though I doubt you will approve of the solution.
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
I doubt there is a direct connection between birthrates and wealth since birthrates and total fertility have been dropping in virtually all nations regardless of religion, politics, economics, education, or anything else. Very likely it will be too little, too late to avert major die-offs but I'd like to at least see some factual accuracy when discussing the matter.
World Birthrates by region
World TFR by region
Global population was 3,040,617,514 in 1960, 4,447,068,714 in 1980, 6,073,265,234 in 2000, and 6,605,046,992 projected for mid-year 2007.
If you care to do the math, that's a 1.92% growth rate from 1960 to 1980, a 1.74% growth from 1960 to 2000, and a 1.66% growth rate from 1960 to 2007. It's coming down but it's still well above doubling every 70 years. At current rates it will double again (to almost 13 billion people) by 2050.
UN projections call for world population to cap out near 9 billion by 2050. I don't see the birth rate falling fast enough to achieve that yet.
What are the units of your graph? What is your data source? I've given you mine - the US Census Bureau.
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
GreyZone,
Does look pretty hopeless, maybe all we can realistically do is something in the form of leaving a Rosetta stone. Which can be very easily done we'll just put some bleachers out in the sun and leave it out on route 61.
To put that in context: starting with drawings it would not be a stretch to describe in sequence basic technology that would allow the relatively speedy recapture of the knowledge our age of energy has produced, no matter how far we mighty have fallen or even if it is us that are around. Maybe pill popping Zebras will pick up the threads...they are pretty zippy dressers as well, no?
The information comes from World Resources Institute at
http://earthtrends.wri.org/searchable_db/index.php?theme=4
I would guess that they are the same data gathered by and used by the UN given that the dates begin ~1950.
Sorry about the units. I think the birthrate is number of live births/1000 population. Total fertility is avg. number of children per woman of child-bearing age. TFR is the main leading indicator of future birth rates.
Given the non-linear behavior of the rates, leveling off of population by 2050 seems a reasonable assumption (though I haven't done this kind of math in 40 years, I suspect the 2050 date was arrived at mathematically). The assumption is obviously based only on the math and likely does not take into account Peak Oil, peak food, global warming impacts, pandemics, and on and on, all of which IMO become more likely as time goes on.
My general take on the trends is that humans do respond to overcrowdedness and shortages of resources by limiting family size, just likely not quickly enough.
ET
Humans are smarter than yeast, but not by enough.
BEST tag line yet ! LMAO !
Funny because it is true.
Best Hopes for a wide delta between yeast & human behavior,
Alan
ET,
I once saw a documentary 'Rat City' on TV circa 1980. I do not know how valid the science was but it apparently was an experiment in population density using rats. The rats were given unlimited access to food and water with the only stricture being the size of the 'city', about the size of an average living room. What was shown was the behavior of the rats as population increased until a certain density was reached when there was an automatic and complete die off of all the rats. Like I say I don't know how valid this research was.
BTW I do like your 'designation' as ET but has anyone mentioned that doing a word search to find you is difficult?
Also am trying this in what is called 'reply in new window' so don't know what this will look like anyway beaming somewhere...
If you study biology, mammals, and overshoot, you become aware of General Adaptation Syndrome. GA Syndrome occurs whenever mammals are under stress. One side effect of GAS is lowered fertility. GAS appears to kick in within populations in overshoot before the peak of the population is reached. This causes population curves to slow and level out near the peak rather than experiencing a sudden drop. (Note that this slowing is also a function of the contest for available resources.)
Are people responding? Or are their bodies responding to the overall stress of absurd human densities? And don't say these are not absurd. Are you even in a position to rationally consider this if you were born and have lived your entire existence inside the context of a biological overshoot event?
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett