Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

> So if you go to a person on the street, and ask them: "are you happy to live through something like the black death, but slighly better"? and the responce is gonna be "yeah, that's fine. We should not take action to prevent that"

It's not on the same scale, but 7 million people have just died to a pandemic and there is certainly no universal agreement that massive restrictions were appropriate to prevent that. So while the black death probably provides an upper bound, COVID provides a lower bound. Somewhere between, people will have a breaking point - but nobody was proposing "to solve COVID we need to roll back the industrial revolution and slash world population." I think we're agreed that would have been excessive? Let's say the measures for COVID, which significantly restricted civil liberties for two years, were a hundredth of that level; well, the deaths were a hundredth of the Black Death. It's certainly not obvious to me, at least, that the remedy isn't worse than the disease (pun not intended).

> And if it induces drounght, crop failures and famine, it could kill hundreds of millions, maybe two billion - and then it would be worse

I don't know, seems a stretch. You're kind of bridging an OOM here with great ease. :) I don't think it's plausible at this point to speculate that climate change will even reduce the food production capability of the world at all. It will certainly make the equator much harder to inhabit and create massive migrations; I think that's already dire enough, honestly. To be clear, I think it should be stopped. Just not at any price. I think spending an appreciable fraction of GDP on climate change mitigation and compensation while massively stepping up renewables is reasonable, abolishing capitalism and imposing birth restrictions, for instance, is not.

It feels a bit like some people here are only interested in climate change insofar as it provides a justification for enacting their preferred policies.

> Are all fertilizers and material used renewable or are they coming out of finite earth resources?

Nitrogen is about 75% of the earth's atmosphere and potassium and phosphorus make up 2.6 and 0.1% of the Earth's crust, so we have plenty of all of them. To turn them into most of the common fertilizers, we need energy (and water, which is plentiful for this purpose).

And atoms don't go away (with the exception of atoms used for nuclear power). All we do is to recombine them. Some of these recombinations release energy (burning fuels) while some require energy as input.

Some elements may be very rare and difficult to extract (from sea water, for instance) except when found in deposits of high consentration. But first of all, N, P and K are not among those, and for those who are, extracting them from other sources simply means more energy is needed.

>> > If we're able to produce enough energy,

> That's a big if yes?

There is enough uranium on earth to cover our energy needs for a very long time. Way before that happens, we should be able to use Thorium or fusion. In addition, there are massive amounts of solar energy that goes untapped. The main limitation, even now, is human labor, and the fact that other sources of energy require less effort to leverage.

> It's not like the energy/resource crunch is a totally separate problem to war.

Not completely separate, but it is also not the case that war is a deterministic result of problems surrounding energy and resources. Even if we never expierience severe problems with energy and resoures, war is still possible, simply because some old man wants to be seen as a "great man" before he dies. Conversely, it is quite possible to navigate challenges with resources without war, by learning to co-exist peacefully.

Also, there is a third element, namely human and cultural capital. One indicator of this is the "workforce participation rate". One challenge of long lasting prosperity, is that an increasing percentage of the population stop contributing to the economy. Partly because of increased life spans, partly because they have personal savings that allow them to retire and partly because the system may collect inefficiencies and forms of corruption over time. (Just to list a few).

Some fraction of the population has the ability to be immensly productive, due to factors such as education, talent, opportunity, motivation, dedication and luck. Others are only marginally productive, while some will produce a lot less than they consume.

Generally, the relative frequencies of these groups is a much bigger influence on the affluence of a society than the availability of natural resources. This is linked to the fact that the production and optimal utilization of energy is primarily limited by (qualified) human labor, as stated above.

For one, they could be a high-end export-driven economy, as there were lots of wealthy (by global standards) consumers. They've now built out the bureaucratic and practical infrastructure of building where they sell at scale. They also had time to test out various central bank/financial/strategic policies to figure out what worked.

With the rest of the developed world (outside of the US and a few others) moving into aging demographics more-or-less all at once, export-driven economies are going to be hard-pressed as global consumption decreases in the developed world. They also won't have time to experiment.

Now sure, theoretically governments could learn from Japan's successes and failures and, being forward looking, could initiate policy 5-10 years in advance to offset the worst of the impacts and... sorry I just laughed into my keyboard. It's going to be a show, people will wake up one morning, stuff will be expensive and broken, no one in power will understand why, problems will be denied for months until things break beyond the point of no return, and the solutions will be rushed, poorly directed and half-assed. See Germany's current energy woes.

No, you don't, because "resources" don't magically vanish once you've used them. They just become harder to extract (assuming they're not already being renewed--in the biosphere, "resources" are constantly being renewed by biological processes); but that's what technology is for. For example, it is said that we are using up fossil fuels; but combustion processes don't need "fossil fuels" specifically, they just need easily transportable liquid fuels with decent chemical energy content, and we can make those, because the atoms that the fuels are made of are still there; they didn't vanish when we burned the fuel. We don't do that now because it's cheaper to use fossil fuels while we have them; but of course that will change as fossil fuels run out.

Similar remarks apply to just about anything we currently call "waste"; sooner or later, if we need to, we will find ways to recycle all of that "waste" into something usable. The key limitation is population growth, but as I've already said, population growth is already into the "asymptotically flattening" phase.

It's possible, of course, that population growth will in fact go negative (many projections assume that); but that doesn't mean it will stay that way. The exact sigmoid curve is obviously an idealization; real world systems do oscillate about reasonable equilibrium points instead of just staying stuck at them.

"Justice" is difficult enough to define that many books have been written about the topic. Personally I don't find it just to let a small number of individuals transfer wealth from future generations to their current self.