The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks

> its magical thinking that the earth, which has finite resources, can support an infinite number of people, if we only, "manage the resources right"

I have not met a single person that thinks the earth can support an infinite number of people. If that is the position you are arguing against, I believe it is a strawman and a waste of your time.

> Nobody has to be killed off, but what we should be doing is setting as a goal sustainable population levels in the future through reproduction.

Global population growth has been slowing for half a century. If you are concerned about reducing it further, western "baby subsidies" aren't a good place to start. The main place you would have to look is Africa since that is expected be the source for the majority of population growth over the next 50 years. If this line of thought is still making sense to you, you are veering dangerously close to ecofacism and genocide. IMHO, the only remotely ethical way to reduce population growth is to mirror the factors that lead to declining birth rates in the west (i.e. prosperity and social stability.)

This means that the only ethical way to reach sustainability is to find ways to be prosperous and sustainable. To do that we must find ways to aproximate the western standards of living in sustainable ways.

I wonder if Alton Brown has more sway than I thought. He's done a whole series of rants over the years on his show about how chicken don't have fingers. Then, in his last live stage show, he told a hilarious story about how he made chicken feet for his daughter when she insisted that chicken do have fingers.

This is plainly false, if you would actually read what I linked.

We simply cannot grow at a 2-3% rate of energy consumption, period, without shortly running into thermodynamic limits of how quickly Earth can radiate excess heat into space. As I said before, this is while completely ignoring greenhouse gases and assuming Earth is a perfect thermodynamic blackbody. And the real Earth is not a perfect blackbody, so reality is inevitably worse than the theoretical limits.

This is entirely independent of the method of energy generation. It’s true of nuclear, solar, and even magical faerie dust. And there’s no getting around it, at least not unless our most basic understanding of thermodynamics is completely off base. Some future where we have “unlimited” energy is a complete fantasy.

> We are hundreds of years from that thermodynamic limit at our current exponential growth rate

…assuming Earth is a perfect blackbody, which it is not.

> It is also quite likely that extraplanetary energy sources could be available by then.

This is irrelevant. As long as that power is delivered to Earth, it doesn’t matter how or where we generate or collect it.

I mean, just take a step back a second. In the best case scenario, where we completely strip the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane, and any other greenhouse gases, we have maybe five generations before we have to completely halt our energy growth or we’ll literally bake the Earth and everyone and everything on it.

We can’t even get people to believe in a global pandemic, much less take it seriously enough to wear masks and vaccinate. What do you think are the odds we’ll convince everyone to rein in energy production globally to avoid catastrophe here? Especially when that means either a) telling the world’s impoverished that we simply can’t let them continue improving their lifestyle, or b) telling the world’s rich that they’re going to have to cut back dramatically. Do either of those sound like platforms we’ll readily elect politicians on around the globe?

And this is just one axis: energy. Humanity faces dozens of these problems simultaneously, all as a simple outcome of the mind-blowing scale we operate at. The oceans are being fished empty. Aquifers for farmland are quickly being depleted of water across the globe. I mean, we’re even running out of sand!

It’s true and I hope it’s uncontroversial that we can’t continue exponentially growing into a finite space. My fear, which appears to be founded by all the evidence I can find, is that we’ve already passed the point where we can even continue things as-is no matter how much we move to solar and wind, aquaponic farms, and electric cars. All of those things require resources too, and even if it’s less it’s likely still too much.

> I'm sort of unclear where you are goin with your argument? Are you arguing we need to kill of people or economically retard developing countries energy use?

My point is that our current situation of resource usage cannot last much longer. This is unavoidable fact. We can opt to find ways to dramatically cut back—far past current feel-good greening measures—or it will happen automatically for us.

As I said this is an uncomfortable reality. Your need to assume that I’m proposing nefarious, evil, and fascist solutions when I’m merely pointing out the unavoidable truth of our predicament should only highlight that more.

I have proposed no solutions because I personally don’t believe any achievable ones exist at this point. We as a species will continue to consume all available resources until the moment we can’t and then… incredibly bad things will follow. I don’t know how to stop it any more than you do. But it doesn’t bring me comfort to believe that vague promises of human ingenuity will somehow overcome these very real problems.

Fun fact, Birds eye belong to the Nomad Foods which resides in Tortola - British Virgin Island. I guess there neither there for the fish nor the weather.

https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/british-...