X-Message-Number: 7314
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 11:41:00 -0800
From: Tim Freeman <>

>See
>
>http://www.zip.com.au/~pete/uw.html
>
>for reasons why I think there may be a whole damned hell of a lot of future,
>if we're smart about preparing for it. As to your "third world propaganda",
>may I ask that you explain just which parts of the estimations I've referred
>to you think are inaccurate, and why?

The central thesis is that the world cannot sustainably support more
than 2 billion people, and that a lot of chaos will happen between now
and the stable 2 billion mark.  So I looked at the justficiation for
the 2 billion number and skipped the rest.

There is no mention of nuclear energy coming into play when the
petroleum runs out, including fusion of seawater.  At a sufficiently
high cost of living, we'd have more vegetarians (because meat would be
expensive) and fewer commuters (because expensive petroleum would make
telecommuting more attractive).  The sustainable load of people
depends on assumptions about the amount of resources used up by each
individual, and those assumptions are not spelled out.  A high enough
cost of living would reduce population growth, simply because people
would anticipate that they could not raise kids the way they want to.

The assertion that the population will continue going up no matter the
consequences unless some organized effort is made to stop it is also
questionable.  Based on the biology involved, a sufficiently dreary
outlook could in principle cause a cessation in human population
growth in as little as nine months.  Historically the rate of
population growth has changed much more slowly than this, but that may
be because the outlook has changed more slowly than this.

The assertion that fresh water is irrevocably used up by agriculture
seems peculiar, given that it rains.  Assumptions about the required
amount of agriculture need to be carefully thought out, since people
generally eat much more meat than they need and producing meat is so
inefficient.  In parts of the world that have property rights for real
estate, the free market should preserve the amount of fertile soil;
declining fertility tends to happen in tragedy-of-the-commons type
situations, where the fundamental problem is that the commons are
unowned.  (This assertion is testable; for instance, it is false if
there is uncontrolled loss of fertile land in the US and other places
with property rights for real estate.)

If governments begin to act as responsible owners of the commons (true
commons like the air and the water table, not bogus commons like
unowned land for grazing cattle) and they figure out that the price of
water needs to be high enough that the water tables don't fall, and
the price of the right to produce pollution has to be high enough that
the ambient pollution levels are under control, then IMO our chances
are pretty good, even assuming that no radical technological change
will happen in the next hundred or so years (which is a ridiculous
assumption).  We may need property rights for CO2 consumption as well.

If the neo-malthusian scenario is worth worrying about, the obvious
next step is to discover the full citation of the AAAS article cited
at gopher://gopher.cornell.edu:70/00/.files/AN0694/AN0694D/AN0694D05
(which allegedly justifies the 2 billion number), and use the science
citation index to find references to this article.  Reasoned debate on
this issue is likely to be contained in the articles referencing the
AAAS article.  If there were a large consensus on the 2 billion number
I would be more worried.

IMO radical technological change is likely to cause significantly more
chaos than resource allocation problems.

Tim Freeman


Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7314