 | A North American Energy Plan for 2030: Hydro-electricity the forgotten renewable energy resource | The Oil Drum | Forecasting Coal Production Until 2100 |  |
164 comments on Drumbeat: April 7, 2009
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164 comments on Drumbeat: April 7, 2009
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Whether we're looking at the world or just the US, powering down without addressing population is a short-sighted and ill-fated gambit.
10 billion people scrabbling for bare sustenance will leave the world as bad off, or worse, as 6B people blowing through fossil fuels.
I don't know how we can possibly control population on a worldwide basis except through war, disease, and starvation. I don't know how we'll even do it within the US. People will move toward jobs and food, and that probably means the US will be quietly overrun by economic refugees.
If I were amoral, I could come up with solutions that favored the US. Biofuels would go near the top of the list, right below warfare.
I can't come up with any morally acceptable solutions to the worldwide population crisis. How do you get the entire world to stop having children?
."CHILDREN OF MEN".
Good film.
A glimpse of the future? (Hope not)
Generally, larger urban areas have a decreased birth rate. If we increase commute costs via taxes, energy prices, maybe this will slow down the birth rate as more move into urban settings.
I think part of the solution can come from our reconnecting to the soil via dense small towns close to agriculture which are locally and regionally self-sufficient in basics. In a situation like this, the communities themselves take responsibility for resource management, including human reproduction rates.
There also has to be some global and regional coordination, but it could be a lot less coercive once people are directly and deeply involved in immediate resource management.
But I can see that there might be a few bumps on the way to getting to that position. :)
On the question of having more "children"...
Has anybody thought of letting the old die? It sounds cruel but the effort of prolonging 90s & 100s year old ended up costing us more than bringing up a new person who soon will take care of the earth. If we plan to have human remain on earth in the next 1000s years, having no babies is out of the question. So the answer comes down to having fewer babies.
Now, if we think the world population is unsustainable right now and this requires fewer and fewer babies -- these kids will have to take care of us in old age by paying taxes toward social services and health care. For them, this burden is also unsustainable as the whole infrastructure of energy and society collapse -- what will they do?
Whether we realized it or not -- this past few generations had pretty much destroyed the earth through its selfishness of consumerism. Most are still in denial about the consequences.
I was having a discussions with my "older" friends about the status of our (US) debt and liabilities. I, playing the devil advocate, am putting a lot of responsibilities on the baby boomer generation for that. With +50Trillions total, it's just hard enough to see if the future generations can get us out of this mess -- now added to that with fewer people (decrease growth: economic also), this becomes a huge huge mess. Sooner or later, a lot of people holding the US debt will realize that the greatest Ponzi schemer is the US government.
I'm 68. I don't want extraordinary and expensive efforts made to keep me alive even now should something happen, much less when and if I make it to 80 or 90.
Another way of dealing with the elderly is to have the younger elderly help in caring for the older elderly. There are a multitude of ways to reduce the resource consumption of the elderly (along with everyone else!), but they are almost all in conflict with the profit system.
Letting the old die is not a good way to put it however. Not going to extreme and expensive measures is a better way. Where and when resources become scarce, choices may have to be made, and it a lot of the interventions performed now, even in the case of the middle-aged sometimes, will make no sense in the near future.
Still, in Cuba, with the teeniest fraction of the resources they have a longevity matching ours and they take pride in it. I doubt this is because of interventions, but probably more because of basic health care, more exercise, and a healthier although much more frugal diet.
Of course -- I meant it as a provocation into the "don't have kids" ideal. It sounds good but ...
The point is "we are running into the wall hard." There have to be sacrifice in our way of life -- both young and old. We shouldn't think of piling debts onto our younger and expect them to pay b/c they won't and can't b/c it's not sustainable. Living w/in our mean implies we have to pay enough taxes to fund our budgets -- which we haven't done for a long long time. Government shouldn't raid Social Security & should think about an extra tax to save & pay for medicare and medicaid. Those are the moral concepts that I wish people stand up and demand from our government.
I've no doubt the old will die, and that some of the high-tech methods we use to prolong life will fall by the wayside.
However, letting the old die really isn't the answer to the population problem. It's females that determine fertility, and elderly females do not have children (aside from a handful who are able and willing to use high-tech methods like in vitro). It's those of breeding age or younger that matter when it comes to population growth. They are the "exponential function" part of the equation.
I also think the elderly might have knowledge that will be extremely useful in the post-carbon age. My grandparents made most of their possessions. They did buy their car, but they built their house, their boat, their fishing gear, much of their furniture, their greenhouse and planting pots, sewed their own clothes, etc. If things get really bad, those skills will doubtless be more valuable than my skills with computers, Nintendo, and programming the VCR.
"letting the old die" doesn't distinguish between various categories of old people. There are many old (and not so old) people who are kept alive against their will. They suffer, sometimes incredible agony. They are kept alive because the living do not want to accept that we humans are mortal. For them, the end of endless treatments will be a blessing. I was a hospice volunteer for many years and visited nursing homes from my teenage years. I know that what I am saying is quite true.
Unfortunately in this country the number of elderly that have knowledge that will be useful to us and that still have their full minds is decreasing but not gone. One hopes that people will make good use of the knowledge they have.
I volunteered in Haiti about 20 years ago at one of Mother Theresa's children's homes. I came away with very mixed feelings. While it felt good to help save these lives, the environmental disaster was there right in your face at all times. Saving lives meant more overpopulation, more environmental degradation and more children to be born to suffer in the future. No doubt some of the kids I helped save are now eating mud cakes to try survive and feeding them to their kids.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080130-AP-haiti-eatin.html
My question when I left Haiti is "is good always good" - my answer is "NO". Nothing is simple and doing good can have bad consequences and vice versa - Eastern Philosophy has a better handle on this than Western Philosophy does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang
I am afraid that oil has subsidized not only our lifestyle but also our moral sense allowing us to indulge in sentimental feelings that we will no longer be able to afford. We will have to make much more difficult moral decisions in the future.
I recommend the movie "The Grey Zone" for anyone wishing to explore some of these moral questions. It asks such questions in the context of a Nazi prison camp - this is a hard movie, but well worth watching.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0252480/
Life is a terminal condition. We are ALL going to die, every person now alive is going to die. Every baby born has a (usually) delayed death sentence as soon as they take their first breath. We are mortal. What will change in the future is not whether or not we die, but when it is likely we will die, how we will die, whether or not we pass on our genes, how many other people will be alive at the same time we are alive and how desirable being alive will be.