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