The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | Conspiracy or Stupidity: The Trouble With Numbers

71 comments on Conspiracy or Stupidity: The Trouble With Numbers

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FMagyar on July 11, 2008 - 6:55am

So really the cause of North Korea's famine was not peak oil, but bad husbandry of the land.

Which is another way of saying that North Korea's famine is the consequence of poor management of natural resources. Global Peak Oil seems to be but one of the many glaring examples that no modern society today is much better at managing these resources than the Haitians or the North Koreans.

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Kiashu on July 11, 2008 - 9:47am

Well, they're different things.

I mean, if you handle it well, you can keep getting food from the land for thousands of years. It's a renewable resource. But if you take up the fossil fuels any faster than in a few hundred million years, then you're depleting them faster than they can replenish.

So you can't really fault people for bad use of fossil fuels, if you use them at all you're using them badly.

The land's a different thing. We also have many examples of people using the land for centuries, good examples we can follow. We have no such examples with fossil fuels. So that bad husbandry of the land takes real, genuine effort at being stupid.

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