mrkelley23 wrote:Growth of population in general is what disturbs me. We have limited space and limited resources, but we reproduce as if all these things are unlimited. If we don't have a natural Malthusian disaster, we'll create our own, and the fact that it appears to me that it might very well happen in the next 100 years motivates me.
Cheap renewable energy would be wonderful. There are some exciting avenues of research out there. Don't give up on solar -- it requires more engineering than we currently have, but it's not out of the question. And it's certainly cheap and renewable. And a good energy source would remove some of the pressure from the equation.
Not to disagree with you, but one major problem with this argument is that it has been made so many times in the past, and has failed to come about. As a result, an awful lot of people just tune out, figuring 'Here comes Chicken Little again...' If you are going to make this argument, you need to point people to a different fable, say, 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf'-- at least in that case, the boy's warnings were (eventually) true, whereas Chicken Little was never right (you cannot use the example of Cassandra, whose prophecies of doom and gloom were also ignored: her prophecies were ALWAYS correct, but NO ONE believed her).
I majored in Biology at Penn in the early 1970's, and my very first Biology course (September 1970) was environmentally oriented (I think it was called something like 'ecological systems,' and dealt with the interdependence of different ecosystems and such; my second course was in Biochemistry; it was not until I got into the third class that I got to get into the really fun stuff, slicing and dicing things). ANYway, one of the authors whose books we used in this class was Paul Ehrlich (himself a Penn grad, who majored in zoology when he was there). In 1967, Ehrlich wrote an article for
New Scientist, predicting massive world-wide famines-- based upon the expanding population-- to take place in the 1970-1985 time frame. The article has a lot of nice money quotes, such as 'the battle to feed all of humanity is over' and 'In the 1970's and 1980's hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now" and "India cannot possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980" or "be self-sufficient in food by 1971." To deal with those problems, he proposed in his follow-up 1968 book,
The Population Bomb, that we begin such things as 'compulsory birth regulation' which would involved such steps as adding (birth control) chemicals to water supplies, with 'the government' rationing the antidote (to selected people?) to ensure appropriate family size. And yet, not only did none of Ehrlich's predictions ever come true (other than the prediction that population would increase, which actually increased far more than he warned about), but world food supplies and surpluses increased even faster, despite the record increases in population.
You may recall the Simon-Ehrlich Wager? Ehrlich once claimed-- in writing-- that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Julian Simon, a 'free market environmentalist' professor of economics, responded with a public offer to bet $10,000 that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (he specifically included grain and oil, which is odd, because both are subject to government controls) would not not rise in the long run. Ehrlich's major point was that population was and would continue to outstrip resources, and the diminishing level of resources would itself cause the famines and other disasters, while Simon, an optimistic libertarian, thought that Erhlich was unduly pessimistic (I think that privately Simon put it in terms of 'he's full of crap').
Under the final terms of their wager, Simon and Ehrlich agreed that Ehrlich and his colleagues could pick any five commodities, and Simon would wager that the prices of those commodities, in real terms (i.e., inflation adjusted) would decline over any long-term (more than one year) period Ehrlich selected. Simon contended that new sources and new uses, etc., would make things MORE, rather than LESS available, as a result of which that pesky law about supply and demand would drive real prices down (supplies would increase faster than demand). Ehrlich, on the other hand, would wager that the prices of those commodities, in real terms, would increase over the ten year period: per his books and articles, increasing populations would put pressure on limited-- and in this case, non-renewable although potentially recyclable resources-- and since supply would fall short of demand, the prices would go up.
Ehrlich consulted with some of his fellow travelers and picked chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten, 'wagering' $200 on each of these metals, for a total bet of $1,000, using prices as of 9/29/80: if the total inflation-adjusted prices of the metals rose between then and 9/29/90, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference of the increases; if the prices fell, Ehrlich and his pals would pay Simon. The wager was clearly in Ehrlich's favor: the most Ehrlich could lose would be $1,000-- and that only if the prices of all of the commodities fell to -0- (this was before Obama changed the basic principles of math and economics: in those days, the most that a price could fall was 100%, down to zero; no one was then smart enough to figure out a way to cut prices by 3000%); whereas the risk to Simon was unlimited-- if prices went through the roof, as Ehrlich predicted, Simon would have to pay out thousands of dollars.
The outcome? ALL FIVE METALS FELL IN PRICE, three of them falling even in absolute terms (i.e., their actual, non-inflation-adjusted prices were lower in 1990 than they had been in 1980); for a couple of the metals the bottoms fell out completely (prices dropped more than 50%). Ehrlich ended up paying Simon something like $560 (that is, prices dropped 56%).
There was an article in
Wired magazine, in February 1997, that had some interesting observations about all this, noting about Erhlich:
All of his grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events. Ehrlich was wrong about higher natural resource prices, about "famines of unbelievable proportions" occurring by 1975, about "hundreds of millions of people starving to death" in the 1970s and '80s, about the world "entering a genuine age of scarcity." In 1990, for his having promoted "greater public understanding of environmental problems," Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award." [Simon, who died a year after this] always found it somewhat peculiar that neither the Science piece nor his public wager with Ehrlich nor anything else that he did, said, or wrote seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large. For some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker.
Anyway, what seems to have happened is that the 'general consensus' among scientific types was that Ehrlich was a genius (hence all of his awards), and the people who argued against him (most, like Simon, were not 'real' scientists, they were economists, the most prominent of them, like Simon, associated with 'conservative' think tanks like the Cato Institute) were just a bunch of deniers with a selfish economic agenda. The problem, of course, is that the people who denied the gloom and doom proved to be entirely correct, and Ehrlich and his fellow geniuses were all entirely wrong (to the extent that people do go hungry in the world, it has nothing at all to do with food or resource scarcity, and everything to do with distribution problems, psychotic regimes like those in North Korea or mid-1970's Cambodia that effectively starve their own people, etc.)
The problem for you, today, is that you are saying
the exact same things Ehrlich was saying 40 years ago, albeit with a longer timeline, and people remember this; you need to convince them that 'this time is different, this time we actually know what we are talking about.' Do that, and you've won the argument; fail to do that, and, well, people (other than the massive consensus of scientific opinion) will ignore you. Again.
Innocent, naive and whimsical. And somewhat footloose and fancy-free.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you. --Bob
