The Oil Drum | DrumBeat: January 2, 2009

302 comments on DrumBeat: January 2, 2009

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

Show without comments | PDF version

Positive_Phototaxis on January 2, 2009 - 10:37am

What do you mean that wasn't what you said? Who were the "people" to which you referred in the final line if the antecedent be not, or include not, the gov't activities from the previous line?

Never heard of Malthus? How about "The Population Bomb"? They are hardly the only examples.

The belief structure of the late 70's and early 80's was in perhaps correct... Being 20 years too early in calling the peak might have been considerably better than now being a few years too late.

That's certainly true... but we only know that they were at least 20-30 years too early. As I said... the eroneous assumption that has been made over and over throughout history is that today is that day.

Rarely does a man or a nation much suffer from living too fiscally conservatively.

I'd say that's a truism.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

aangel on January 2, 2009 - 2:11pm

but we only know that they were at least 20-30 years too early.

Which parts? From one perspective, they were already too late. The momentum in the system (population growth etc.) might have already been extremely difficult if not impossible to change. Technically, yes, we might have been able to slow down population growth had we started in 1970. But in reality people are very protective of their "right" to have to children and they get quite testy even in casual conversation about it.

It would have taken a global police state to change the population trajectory, most likely.

Another way of looking at this is that if we hadn't started steering the ship a different direction by 1950 (or earlier) and teaching the whole world why resource consumption would eventually be a problem, it was too late. It's even worse because the reality is that people were talking about this back then but nobody believed them.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

302 comments on DrumBeat: January 2, 2009

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

Show without comments | PDF version

Search The Oil Drum with Google

Support The Oil Drum

Click the button to learn about supporting The Oil Drum with a secure donation.

Peak Oil Primers

Beware email scams!

Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.

“So one may almost say that the theory of universal suffrage assumes that the Average Citizen is an active, instructed, intelligent ruler of his country. The facts contradict this assumption.”

—James Bryce (1909, 35)