And btw, renewables like wind and solar are giant bird killing machines that only exist as part of a conspiracy by the fossil fuel and fracking industry to sell more gas. And so on.
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Of course you do have to read the reports with a critical eye. Be very careful any time you see linear growth or constant absolute numbers in a growing population portrayed as a success because the percentages are dropping. You tend to get summaries and explanations like this.
The Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen, has argued that nations with democracy and a free press have virtually never suffered from extended famines.[20] Nevertheless, in 2010 the UN reported that 925 million of the worldâs population of nearly seven billion people were in a constant state of hunger.[21] The UN report notes that the percentage of the worldâs population who qualify as âundernourishedâ has fallen by more than half, from 33 percent to about 16 percent, since Ehrlich published The Population Bomb.
Weâve still got the ~1b people in extreme poverty and a constant state of hunger that we had in 1970 and that we had in 1820. Theyâre probably the same people; subsistence farmers in the 3rd world. And of course as a proportion of total population thatâs a falling percentage. And of course in the same time frame from 1820 weâve added 6b people who are NOT in extreme poverty and constant hunger. And ~4b since 1970. And of course we can go on doing that again and again indefinitely. So thatâs all good then. Until we canât. And unless youâre one of the 1b subsistence farmers in the 3rd world in extreme poverty and constant hunger. Then black flag weather, black swan events from climate change, pestilence in all its forms and the rest of the grim meathook futures are going to be a bitch. But Iâm not, so thatâs ok.
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I was with you right up until you started bashing people based on labels.
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Reminds me of this article I found interesting. A dialog between an economist and a physicist arguing that even modest (2.3% per year, or a dactor of 10 per century) of energy growth (which goes hand in hand with economic growth) ill lead to boilng the surface of the earth in a mere 4 centuries, and thatâs just considering the black-body radiation, not even greehouse gasses and such.
The economist who will be remembered for centuries to come is the one who figures out a functioning steady-state economy.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
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IMHO, Nuclear IS the best mass energy source we have right now. I would rather see more nuclear plants and less coal plants, wouldnât you? Clean coal is also possibly viable, as China is has a prototype plant they are working on that is supposed to have very few emissions.
While many attacks against them arenât valid, some of the criticism is. I think ultimately solar will be our savoir, but we just donât have the technology yet to make it happen with everyone. We will get there, just not sure when.
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Any time I see someone ask for numbers, I sigh and ask if they would understand them if they saw them. To be clear, itâs not about this specific issue. Itâs about people who demand specialized information that they donât have the ability to understand, and then insist that the numbers donât mean what they say they do. You see this all the time with global warming, where the more complex the numbers and working are, the more people are willing to deny what they mean. Iâm sure @doctorow is a smart guy, but what you need is to listen to experts, what you want is a pointless exercise in rhetoric.
Again, this is without specific regard to the issue of carrying capacity, and goes more to the annoying tendency for people to ask for âevidenceâ when what they are really asking for is âevidence that will convince me.â A subtle distinction that makes a lot of difference.
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Well that is definitely unfortunate.
Personally I would support a massive nuclear power rollout if I thought aiming for that was politically feasible and wouldnât irreparably harm chances of doing all the other important things, like massive wind and solar and (soon) energy storage rollouts. I also think that eventually new methods of intensive farming will be really important - possibly some sort of indoor/vertical farming w/ water and waste recycling? - but right now I think implementing and continuing to improve organic, permaculture, polyculture etc. farming methods is more important. And I fully expect the future to show me a whole host of paths and limits I havenât ever considered that change all that.
But, far too many people donât like the idea that we can have different priorities on different time scales, because it seems inconsistent or is too nuanced or whatever.
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I was only addressing the most basic aspect of Malthusâs premise-- animals do starve when population overwhelms food sources. I absolutely agree that the rest of Malthusâs elitist baggage, where he took that premise, is bullshit. But whether humans are subject to the same natural laws as animals is still debatable, and insisting we are above natural laws because so far weâve gotten away with it sounds like hubris. Should we toss out evolution because Darwin was influenced by Malthus?
Of course, I absolutely agree, but then the big problem is religion getting in the way of family planning. I want population growth to stabilize but so far it hasnât, that doesnât mean I am in favor of genocide or forced sterilization.
Oh please, you are reading way more into my words than is necessary. We are all âlittle peopleâ in the grand scheme of things, and I donât want any of us to suffer, I donât even want insects to suffer. Just because I want to âsave the whalesâ doesnât mean I want to âkill the humansâ-- when I compare humans with herbivores I am showing respect for animals, not disrespect for humans.
The big crux of this whole argument is whether population will just sort itself out and there will eventually be a stasis and sustainable economy. I sure hope there is, but I have a hard time seeing how we get there from here.
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I donât think it is a capacity issue. It is a distribution issue.
We have tons of food that goes to waste. We have too many people living in non-fertile areas. But we have the ability to physically make enough food. It is getting it to everyone and/or having everyone have the ability to pay for it that we lack.
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Not sure if you meant to reply to meâŚ
Er yes and no. Your reply about carrying capacity numbers got me thinking about capacity, even though I wasnât replying directly to your reply about âhaving the numbers doesnât mean you know what to do with them.â
Sure, fair enough. We tend to be peculiar here.
Iâve not heard this term before, so thanks.
I do think that there is some problems with assuming that our technology will save us by default, given our troubled history of technology in the first place.
Belief in the virtue of free trade is so central to the neo-liberal orthodoxy that it is effectively what defines a neo-liberal economist. You may question (if not totally reject) any other element of the neo-liberal agenda - open capital markets, strong patents or even privatisation - and still stay in the neo-liberal church. However, once you object to free trade, you are effectively inviting ex-communication.
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
Ha-Joon Chang; Bloomsbury Press; 2008; page 66
Perhaps before we begin asking âwhat is neo-liberalismâ, we should first ask âwhat is liberalism and where did it come from?â
Why do all history books have to be secret histories? I think Iâm going to write a secret history of secret historiesâŚ
But yeah, thatâs a good question. I think that the history of capitalism shows that the structures, hastly put up, came first, and the definitions came when the structures were in place. Often, capitalismâs stauchest defenders had to hastily work up a language in order to defend against critiques of the system. Think about those who responded to Marx or more to the point, the rise of modernization theory during the Cold War, which responded to Marxist theory about development.
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Youâve experienced it. Shortly after Kaczynskiâs Unabomber Manifesto it got relabeled âneoconservatismâ. Today itâs called âmainstream American politicsâ if itâs called anything at all.
As practiced, the basic idea is that the traditional values of American conservatism (such as conservation of resources, self-sufficiency, local control of politics, capitalism, &etc.) as well as those of American liberalism (openness to new solutions, government sponsored education, egalitarianism, socialism, &etc.) should be wholly subordinate to business and technology interests; that human values are best served by crippling or dismantling government and allowing corporations to self-regulate. In such a system individual humans should aspire to be internal parts of large business interests and gain their rights through those entities rather than from citizenship or by virtue of being human.
Exemplars of neoliberalism/neoconservatism are: regulatory capture, deregulation of insurance and banking, elimination of pension systems, tax handouts to businesses from states and municipalities, opposition to labeling laws, and hatred of environmentalism. You will note Cory channeling that last one:
Whoa, neo-conservative propaganda alert!
This is the exact equivalent of Microsoft saying all open source software is the product of stinky hippies, murderers and clinically insane people. Yes, such people exist, no, they are not the mainstream.
I am about as green as Americans get, and exactly zero of the hundreds of environmentalists I know espouse this view. And while Iâm not really in any sense âleft wingâ nearly all my environmentalist friends identify as âgreen leftâ politically.
In reality, greens both left and right have been at the forefront of modern technological progress since the 1970s - we were the ones building electric cars in our garages when the car companies wouldnât, we were the ones putting up solar panels at our own expense (while Reagan ripped them off the White House) we were the ones building 3-D printers to test homebrew turbine designs, we were the ones exposing the hydrogen scam and developing sustainable materials science - with the exception of the hair-shirt greens that the media wants you to focus on, we are the highest tech people on the damn planet.
Thatâs the neoconservative (formerly neoliberal) mantra. Your burger is better if it is bigger - and comes with a free plastic toy made from petroleum. Itâs a short step from this âgreed is goodâ philosophy to believing anything you do to other people is OK, as long as it means more materials, more stuff. Functionless plastic tchotckes are worth any number of lung cancer victims, after all; pollution deaths count as nothing compared to wireless charging for your smartphone.
More propaganda. The world can be fed without any problem on the acreage already under cultivation - our government literally pays people not to grow crops. The supposed need for unlabeled GMOs is just a manifestation of corporate greed and the supposed inferiority of scare-quoted âorganicâ farming is just part of a petroleum-fueled chemical company marketing campaign. Here in reality, the biggest difference between brown farming and green farming is that the latter employs more people in more rewarding work - which is exactly what the neo-liberal/conservative does not want, because cheap labor is one of the keynotes of their economic and political philosophy.
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So what do you think of supplemental currencies such as LETS schemes? E.g., the Puma in Sevilla: https://monedasocialpuma.wordpress.com/
It certainly couldnât hurt given the unnecessary internal devaluation imposed on Spain. This gets into issues of price inflation which also seem to cause problems in understanding, especially given how much suspicion people have of regular 'ole macroeconomics, especially the suspician elites have toward any kind of democratic action to build useful infrastructure outside their privatized, financialized control.
And if I understand you correctly, there will be economic growth in a stable, sustainable state?
âWillâ? Dunno, but I see the way forward through trusting peopleâs self-determination, not through limiting ourselves to the limited filters of tech âownersâ. That way lies unsustainably produced and disposed goods and infrastructure as well as unsustainable antidemocratic meddling and oppression.
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the big problem is religion getting in the way of family planning.
Which has happened and been overcome in every country which has industrialized and undergone demographic transition. And a few besides, Iran, especially.
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But at least now thereâs a possible explanation for bOINGbOINGâs focus on every candidate who isnât Jill Stein?
The problem with this quotation is that it doesnât think about what âgrowthâ means. In the year following the big economic collapse in America 121% of the recovery was captured by the top 1% of the population. Food, shelter and clothes were all down. Numbers on a computer server representing the wealth of a few individuals were up. If that is growth then we can continue to grow at 2% per year until the heat death of the universe if we can continue to power a single 1T hard drive.
What is growth? Suppose someone genetically engineered a bacteria that ate carbon dioxide from the air and sunlight and crapped out petroleum, how much âgrowthâ would that be? It would probably be a âlossâ since oil would go down in price and that would create economic problems as it always does. Or, another question, since such bacteria already exist, why isnât anyone putting them to significant use (or further working on them to make them more useful since I think at present they arenât effective enough to be worth implementing)? Neoliberal ideology is in the way of environmentalism and in the way of improvements in quality of life. In reality, environmental improvements and quality of life improvements are likely to go hand in hand if we let them.
When growth is the rearrangement of electrons we actually have so much room for growth that there is no point in worrying about it. When all of that rearrangement of electrons goes to serve a few people who maintain their power by denying climate change, weâve got a big problem. Growth isnât the problem, what is growing is the problem.
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