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Are we running out of resources?

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Re: Are we running out of resources?

#181

Post by ZeroGravitas »

throwaway6532 wrote: post #170
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The multistory rather than merely spacious homes and 'pool' with the implication of a private pool, which are both very space inefficient make this seem foolish to me, but I see no issue with billions of people living in cities with easy access to pools, parks, schooling, jobs, and comfortable safe, warm/cool housing and living standards that are science fiction to their immediate ancestors.

>but I see no issue with billions of people living in cities with easy access to pools, parks, schooling, jobs, and comfortable safe, warm/cool housing and living standards that are science fiction to their immediate ancestors So sand shortages, and water shortages are not a thing?

The problems with water and sand are not physical limits. Like climate change and pollution generally they're just unpriced externalities.

We have better solutions already, getting people to use then when they can abuse the situation for short term profit is the hard bit.

And ironically, if you intend to abuse the system for short term profit, one of your best moves is to claim the problem is not solvable (though only once claiming it's not happening stops working).

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#182

Post by louky »

pfdietz wrote: post #48
volatilecarbon wrote: post #13

There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me. Our ever increasing…

What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve. To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based…

Source for 1 trillion humans estimate? That's 1,000 Billion humans. There's ~8 billion now.

Sure without regards to any other than food organisms and pulling a "puppeteer" world (Ala Larry Niven) I don't see it. And I won't either way.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#183

Post by southerntofu »

unique_other wrote: post #103
southerntofu wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond the warming, the consequences of climate change are very real. Hurricanes that used to be the feat of a decade are now an over-yearly occurrence. Beyond climate change, the consequences of pollution are very real. Many water sources can't be drunk anymore, and the agro industry is killing bees/insects (necessary for vegetal life) on a wide scale and depleting the soil of its water/nutrients turning it slowly i…

> Hurricanes that used to be the feat of a decade are now an over-yearly occurrence. I couldn't find any data that proves this. Maybe you could share?

I don't have detailed that because it's not my field, but there's a lot of people studying this phenomenon. I found this to be a good introduction: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/07/how-climate-chang...

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#184

Post by beaconstudios »

ericmay wrote: post #158
dragonwriter wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US and UK for example went through the Industrial Revolution too, where people were paid subsistence wages and worked in sweatshops... Then they had mass, deadly, pro- and anti-labor violence culminating in various labor protections which resulted in a less-miserable distribution of the rewards of industry, a process which has been interspersed with backsliding and repetition over time.

Right and so then they became less poor afterward.

This argument boils down to "it was a good thing we exploited them, it gave them the impetus to fight back against our exploitation". Is this meant to be a dialectical argument or just a really weird moral one?

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#185

Post by pfdietz »

louky wrote: post #182
pfdietz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve. To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based…

Source for 1 trillion humans estimate? That's 1,000 Billion humans. There's ~8 billion now. Sure without regards to any other than food organisms and pulling a "puppeteer" world (Ala Larry Niven) I don't see it. And I won't either way.

I can't find the specific reference, but that was the upper limit set just by thermodynamics; i.e., when the waste heat from human activities becomes large enough to heat the Earth too much. Insolation on Earth is about 100,000 terawatts, or 100 kW/person; a few kW per capita would be a few % of this, arguably close to that upper limit. That 1 trillion population would live in a very artificial environment, more like a space colony than a planet. All wastes would be recycled, including exhaled CO2, and food would be manufactured artificially rather than by agriculture (because photosynthesis is so inefficient.)

(I think it's referenced in J. E. Cohen's 1996 book "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" but I don't have a copy of that in front of me.)

This is not at all to say that this would be a desirable situation, or that human population is a metric that should be maximized at the expense of any other metric.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#186

Post by ericmay »

beaconstudios wrote: post #184
ericmay wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right and so then they became less poor afterward.

This argument boils down to "it was a good thing we exploited them, it gave them the impetus to fight back against our exploitation". Is this meant to be a dialectical argument or just a really weird moral one?

> and they become less poor afterwards.

> This doesn't happen when you're paid subsistence wages, which sweatshop workers are.

I’m just trying to figure out if this is true or not. Seems to me the evidence is clear that such workers become wealthier over time. China, the United States, United Kingdom, and others seem to be clear examples of that.

Injecting a moral argument here doesn’t change the practical reality of how the world works. The opportunities presented to sweat shop workers are not great, and often times working at a sweatshop is the least bad option. But my point of contention was with this exchange of comments. I do think sweatshop workers become less poor over time, and the evidence I see is present in many countries where this happened.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#187

Post by pfdietz »

throwaway6532 wrote: post #167
silicon2401 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in. People believe what's convenient. It's inconvenient to be realistic and accept that we're heading in a bad direction (because then we all have to sacrifice comforts). Rome and its way of li…

Don't forget how the bronze age ended.

With the widespread adoption of Naue Type II bronze cutting/thrusting swords and organized infantry that rendered centralized chariot armies -- and the societies that depended on them for defense -- obsolete.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#188

Post by pfdietz »

cupofpython wrote: post #108
volatilecarbon wrote: post #13

There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me. Our ever increasing…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines We about to get some new entries

Why? Are you referring to consequences of the war in Ukraine, where about 1% of global grain production may be at risk?

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#189

Post by silicon2401 »

beaconstudios wrote: post #149
silicon2401 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't imagine living somewhere where I can't nip to the shops 2 minutes down the road (walkable or drivable) have you lived in the US? there are lots of different kinds of suburbs. my suburbs have shops > I have to drive long distances to get to the nearest economic hub because it was plonked down in the middle of nowhere long distances is relative so I can't comment here. > I want walkable human-friendly environ…

> have you lived in the US? there are lots of different kinds of suburbs. my suburbs have shops Well, good - that's not the type of suburb I was taking issue with, as I would hope was apparent. > I want low-density accommodations. I want everybody to have acres of land and I want to go days without seeing other people. That's not possible. If everybody were to live in that kind of isolation, nothing would get done. >…

> Talking about population control and low-education immigrants isn't definitive but it certainly smells bad.

If you want unbounded human population growth and unbounded immigration, that smells pretty bad, just not to you.

> I'm not against that, if it can be done in such a way where everybody gets what they want. I'm only really against hording of resources to the detriment of others

Then this is the closest point we have to common ground. I don't want to force anyone to live in the countryside, and in fact I would rather nobody did so I could live there alone, but I want people to have the option to, just like you want people to have the option to live in cities. However there's a limit to how much livable space we have and that means we can't just keep expanding cities forever. We do differ though on our view of property, it seems. Where you seem to view resources as inherently collective, I see property as a human right and reject the premise that we should take from those with plenty just because others have little. I'm all for taxes though,

> we just have to do it sustainably so the biosphere doesn't collapse.

IMO, that inherently means keeping urban development and population growth contained. I think the evidence speaks for itself: just look at how many animal species have died, how many biospheres have already collapsed, how much pollution and other climate damage has been done, just in the past century, when many countries were still developing and the population was much smaller. Now you're suggesting that with the current population continuing to grow freely, and urban development continuing freely, we'll somehow manage to both ensure everyone can live according to their preferred lifestyle and preserve nature? Sorry, but I think that's fantastically utopian. At the end of the day there's nothing I can do about it, but I do wish we were heading a different direction.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#190

Post by panax »

throwaway6532 wrote: post #162
bgroat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a historical precedent for having a technology that can largely offset these risks (fission and fusion) but not using them? I don't want to say "this time is different" (because I don't know that). But we do find our self in a situation where technology hasn't peaked, but we aren't using the new tech we have

What about technology for fixing water shortages due to over-pumping? What about technology to address usages of sand? What about technology to replace synthetic fertilizers derived from natural gas, and or finite resources of phosphate rock? I think there is a big focus on "fossil fuels" but they are not the only resources we're using in an unsustainable way.

Erosion of top soil is a more significant problem than fertilizer. With respect to fertilizers and inorganic phosphate supply, it seems that these are not really necessary(they might actually be detrimental) as long as you provide the right soil microbiome for the crops which can outperform synthetic fertilization[1-2] (though I am very new to this and is outside my field and I am unsure of the validity of their claims).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO2nGHq40Xc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErMHR6Mc4Bk

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