World Energy Use - There's No Tomorrow - Let's Fix This!

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I understand the example. My point was that we will not hit a wall such as the volume of the bottle. Exponential growth will slow like the top of a bell curve rather than immediately revert to a sustainable level at half or less of current consumption. It will be a tough transition. Life is very difficult today for many many people. That group will expand even as we campain to end the strife. I don't know if there will be a preferred place to be. There will always be a tomorrow for some as they make the transition, many will not.
 
AndyH said:
Guys, before we get into a fusion tangent, let's remember that we can solve ALL of our current problems - everything listed in the video, for example, with ZERO NEW TECH. Everything we need is on the planet right now - all we have to do is pull it out of the box (ok, some we'll have to make and box more of first ;)) and then put the tools to work.

I think we are way past the back-to-stone-age (or equivalent) point without condemning millions to die of starvation. I think the video presents some viable solutions (but does not call them that).
In any case, we have to transition to a sustainable energy economy and maintain our current levels at least. This requires some innovation, but not too much to be impossible.

I dont know where people get this absurd idea of geometric or exponential growth, it just is not possible in a finite system (such as the earth). Even bacteria stop growing eventually, because of boundary conditions.

As for the world population, we already experience a slow in growth rates (I think peak growth was in the 50s or 60s).
 
AndyH said:
Barter and local currency is happening all over the world as we speak - including in a number of places in the US - and it's working well!

Just try to imagine Silicon Valley with barter and local currency....That is not going to work for more than a low-tech medieval (at best) civilization.
You can embed it into a highly developed civilization as ours and dream it could work, but try e.g. paying the radiologist in India, who just examined the images from your latest routine checkup, with the promise of a barrel of apples or an hour of carpentry work...

We need many people to make our civilization work, and they simply cant be "local".
 
I found the first quarter of the video to be interesting and relevant about peak oil and energy use. After that, I got a strong impression that population control was the ultimate message of this video. I didn't like it.
 
kubel said:
I found the first quarter of the video to be interesting and relevant about peak oil and energy use. After that, I got a strong impression that population control was the ultimate message of this video. I didn't like it.
Sorry. Unfortunately, it's our number one problem - the single problem that is supporting all the other challenges we face.

I know it's depressing - I just finished my third semester of an undergrad environmental science program and I'm spending more time under my desk in the fetal position than I'm comfortable admitting. ;)

We just blasted through 7 billion souls on the planet - and we can't** feed a full 1 billion of them, much less give them a house in the burbs with two cars!

edit
**sorry... "...with our current methods..." ;)
 
Everyone going to self-reliance cannot happen without a massive die-off. 600M acres of farm-able land in the world. 0.25-10 acres required per person for subsistence farming (depending on the availability of water and quality of the land). Even if we assume all of it is prime land (0.25/person) and don't consider the long-term impact of destroying natural habitat, that means the most people the planet can support through this model is 2.4B. So very conservatively, there's already 4.4B too many people for this to work.
 
klapauzius said:
... I dont know where people get this absurd idea of geometric or exponential growth, it just is not possible in a finite system (such as the earth). Even bacteria stop growing eventually, because of boundary conditions.
Sure - but do we want to go there? After all, we're not talking about the bacteria or deer population having meetings to hand out birth control, are we? ;)

The reason environmental scientists and ecologists and biologists use that 'absurd idea' is because it is happening all over the planet as we speak.

crash.JPG

Environment 7th Edition, Raven, P173. Reindeer population study on one of Alaska's Pribilof Islands in the Bearing Sea.

klapauzius said:
As for the world population, we already experience a slow in growth rates (I think peak growth was in the 50s or 60s).
While the RATE has slowed, the actual growth is still climbing - and yes, it's still exponential. In financial terms, think daily compounding...

CIA said:
World [Growth Rate] 1.096%
note: this rate results in about 145 net additions to the worldwide population every minute or 2.4 every second (2012 est.)
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2002.html

This really is the significance of the bottle analogy and the earlier threads that mentioned Dr. Bartlett's video. The population curve doesn't 'nose over' until we get enough birth control scattered around the planet to hit a zero % growth rate.

At our current 1.096% growth rate, we DOUBLE the world's population in 63.59 years - that's more than 14 billion by 2075.

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
http://www.miniwebtool.com/doubling-time-calculator/
 
TickTock said:
Everyone going to self-reliance cannot happen without a massive die-off. 600M acres of farm-able land in the world. 0.25-10 acres required per person for subsistence farming (depending on the availability of water and quality of the land). Even if we assume all of it is prime land (0.25/person) and don't consider the long-term impact of destroying natural habitat, that means the most people the planet can support through this model is 2.4B. So very conservatively, there's already 4.4B too many people for this to work.
Based on what farming methods?

Consider Russia's family farms (dachas) for one data point:
http://www.cinram.umn.edu/afta2005/pdf/Sharashkin.PDF

(Much of the data in the above paper can be found with a 'slight accent' ;) in the first 20 minutes of this video:)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQnlItXE-RQ[/youtube]

And look to Permaculture, food forests, edge effects, etc. for another view.

Those that are working with the planet to grow food in sustainable ways consider 'agriculture' to be one of mankind's most damaging inventions to date.
http://www.barkingfrogspermaculture.org/PDC_ALL.pdf

Watch the first six minutes of this and see of your definition of 'farmland' changes:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gPvsl9ni-4[/youtube]

edit...
PS... What's the United State's number one cultivated crop?

Answer: Grass. 40 million acres of lawn.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/050516/16lawn.htm

In Dr. Sharashkin's talk, he points out that Russian's Dachniks grow 51% of the country's food on 19.7 million acres (7%) of marginal land... In one 110-day growing season. ;)

Another edit...sorry

Here's a view from closer to home - Joel Salatin, 3rd generation Virginia Farmer, and author of "Folks, This Ain't Right" among other books - wrote this article in 2010:
http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/reprints/Sept10_Salatin.pdf
Make no mistake, if we had had a Manhattan Project to capitalize on Howard and Voisin, not only would we have fed the world during that time, but today we would not have a Rhode Island-size dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. We would not have lost half of Iowa’s topsoil in a mere 100 years. We would not have degenerated the landscape with three-legged salamanders and infertile frogs.

Add now to that body of knowledge the work of Carey Reams, William Albrecht, Allan Savory, Lee Fryer, Fletcher Sims, Phil Callahan, permaculture, and the Acres U.S.A. hall of fame and our side has not only caught up with the chemical pushers, we’re lapping them. We eco-farmers do not have to apologize for anything. We built the knowledge, developed the protocols, paid for the distribution when the USDA pooh-poohed everything we were doing. It still does, assuming that irradiation, genetic prostitution, pasteurization, sterile food, and robotic machines will save us.

Edit...reprint is no longer available on the acres usa site. It is located here:
http://www.soilassociation.org/moth.../ecological-agriculture-can-we-feed-the-world
 
AndyH said:
At our current 1.096% growth rate, we DOUBLE the world's population in 63.59 years - that's more than 14 billion by 2075.

14 billion by 2075, its not going to happen. Because there is no exponential growth. You cannot take current rates and simply extrapolate them.
Take a look at this figure
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_grow&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=world+population+growth+rate" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The growth rate is subject to change and it is dropping.

Just 30 years ago if you had made the same prognosis for 2075, you would have come to 23.7 billion.
If you had done the "exponential" calculation in 1972, you would have come to 29.7 billion in 2075.

So which number is it going to be? 14 billion (2012), 18.6 billion (1992), 23.7 billion (1982) or 29.7 billion (1972)?

Taking the current growth rate trend it is going to be significantly less than 14 billion.
Needless to say, mankind is not going the way elks and bacteria go.
More wealth and education lead to less population growth. Ultimately resulting in stagnating or shrinking populations.
Problem solved, and in the process we have gotten richer and better educated.
The real problem is energy, since even at slowing population growth, we will use up the non-renewable fairly quickly,
but it can be solved, and fairly painless too.
 
klapauzius said:
AndyH said:
At our current 1.096% growth rate, we DOUBLE the world's population in 63.59 years - that's more than 14 billion by 2075.
14 billion by 2075, its not going to happen. Because there is no exponential growth.
Sorry, this is incorrect. The growth is clearly exponential, though as you point out the RATE is changing. It's not the growth RATE that's eating all the potatoes - it's the 2.4 new people on the planet EACH SECOND that want to eat. ;)

worldpop.jpg

Source: http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html
klapauzius said:
You cannot take current rates and simply extrapolate them.
Take a look at this figure
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_grow&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=world+population+growth+rate" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The growth rate is subject to change and it is dropping.

Just 30 years ago if you had made the same prognosis for 2075, you would have come to 23.7 billion.
If you had done the "exponential" calculation in 1972, you would have come to 29.7 billion in 2075.

So which number is it going to be? 14 billion (2012), 18.6 billion (1992), 23.7 billion (1982) or 29.7 billion (1972)?
It's all of them...or none.

300px-World-Population-1800-2100.png

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
klapauzius said:
Taking the current growth rate trend it is going to be significantly less than 14 billion.
Needless to say, mankind is not going the way elks and bacteria go.
More wealth and education lead to less population growth. Ultimately resulting in stagnating or shrinking populations.
Problem solved, and in the process we have gotten richer and better educated.
Did you catch the part that we're already over 1.4 Earth's TODAY? We don't have time to sit back and wait for sub-Saharan Africa to reach Western European economic levels! (With or without a 'war' on women and/or contraception!)
 
AndyH said:
The growth is clearly exponential, though as you point out the RATE is changing. It's not the growth RATE that's eating all the potatoes - it's the 2.4 new people on the planet EACH SECOND that want to eat. ;)

I think here lies your misconception of an exponential curve...You can express any real valued time series in terms of an instantaneous rate, that does not make it exponential. Note that the logistic function, y=1/(1+exp(-t)) can look like an e-function for some time.

AndyH said:
It's all of them...or none.
Exactly, so how much value would you attribute to such a number? Would you start digging a bunker and hoarding ammunition based on such predictions???

AndyH said:
Did you catch the part that we're already over 1.4 Earth's TODAY? We don't have time to sit back and wait for sub-Saharan Africa to reach Western European economic levels! (With or without a 'war' on women and/or contraception!)


Yes, but again, that is a >> rate <<. Such levels will have to come down OR we will increase the "capacity" of our planet,
as we have done time and time again in the past. I said it somewhere else already, but by the capabilities and standards of e.g. the Roman Empire, we would already have exceeded the earths "capacity" by a 100 times and more. Yet we are still here, all 7 billion of us.

Sub-Saharan Africa will reach western European economic levels ( I hope) eventually, or indeed population limits will take effect through famine, disease and war, not unknown in these regions. But I am hopeful. Give them a few more decades and they will come around too. Keep in mind Africa is less than 1 billion people, so their impact will not be severe anyway. So there is plenty of time for them to develop.

But look at Asia, which makes up the bulk of humanity, and the numbers there look rather encouraging.
 
Population, just like real estate and dot com stocks, can never go down.

Oh well, one good asteroid hit and none of it will matter. Who knows, maybe 50 million years from now we'll be the ones they're pumping out of the ground to put in their gas tanks.
 
LTLFTcomposite said:
Population, just like real estate and dot com stocks, can never go down.

Oh well, one good asteroid hit and none of it will matter. Who knows, maybe 50 million years from now we'll be the ones they're pumping out of the ground to put in their gas tanks.

Who knows what we are pumping out the ground to put in OUR gas tanks :D
 
klapauzius said:
AndyH said:
The growth is clearly exponential, though as you point out the RATE is changing. It's not the growth RATE that's eating all the potatoes - it's the 2.4 new people on the planet EACH SECOND that want to eat. ;)

I think here lies your misconception of an exponential curve...You can express any real valued time series in terms of an instantaneous rate, that does not make it exponential. Note that the logistic function, y=1/(1+exp(-t)) can look like an e-function for some time.
Thanks but really I do understand. You're expecting a logistic curve for humanity so are likely seeing the beginning of the curve from exponential to level-ish ;). I agree (and hope) that we're smart enough to reach a sustainable level, but we won't know until we look backward to know if it was logistic/sigmoid or boom-bust.

Where we are now:
worldpop.jpg


Possible future outcomes:
320px-Logistic-curve.svg.png

Dsigmoid.png

crash.JPG


Considering that we've got more than 7 billion of us pulling in different directions, it ain't lookin' good for the home team just yet... :lol:

klapauzius said:
Yes, but again, that is a >> rate <<. Such levels will have to come down OR we will increase the "capacity" of our planet,
as we have done time and time again in the past. I said it somewhere else already, but by the capabilities and standards of e.g. the Roman Empire, we would already have exceeded the earths "capacity" by a 100 times and more. Yet we are still here, all 7 billion of us.
But in the past the capacity increases have come in a relatively 'large bottle' by making better food, messing with bread mold (medicine) and other tech achievements. The limiting factor in the past wasn't the planet. This time around appears to be very different - we've run out of bottle! We're living off principle and interest now - deficit spending, deficit mining, deficit water extraction...you get it, I'll stop. ;)

As I sit here we humans are still growing our numbers 145 souls each minute and we will continue to do so until later when we might reach the predicted 0.5% rate in 2040ish (when we'll still be adding people). But we crossed the 1-planet ecological footprint in about 1985 by one estimation[1] and this "population Titanic" of ours isn't slowing enough to make a noticeable change in wake. We're living on borrowed time and we don't know when the Mother is going to call the loan. And realizing that most people in the US don't even know that there is a problem and that they should be rowing backward as hard as they can doesn't leave me feeling very secure... ;)

Earth_Overshoot.jpg


[1] http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/
 
AndyH said:
But in the past the capacity increases have come in a relatively 'large bottle' by making better food, messing with bread mold (medicine) and other tech achievements. The limiting factor in the past wasn't the planet. This time around appears to be very different - we've run out of bottle! We're living off principle and interest now - deficit spending, deficit mining, deficit water extraction...you get it, I'll stop. ;)

I beg to differ.
a) There is lots more to discover. Progress has nowhere slowed down.
b) All the stuff we mine or the water we use does not vanish. It can (and will) be recycled.
All you need is energy to do this. The sun provides way more energy than we can possibly
use right now, we just need to harvest it.
Here e.g. that cartoon you posted is grossly wrong: We are far from utilizing all the sunlight reaching the earth.

c) There is a lot of fat (literally too) to trim, that wont hurt anyone. I dont care much for golf courses in the desert, nor for 7-ton SUVS (and believe it or not, I have kids too to drive around town), nor do I need a TV running all day to make me happy. If you take all that (and more), there will be room for a lot more people to live comfortable, until world population reaches its peak.
 
The US used 95 Quads of energy in 2010. Take the current US population of 310 million and a 78 year life expectancy to get a total energy per person per lifetime. Now if you get all your energy from nuclear for those 78 years you would need a big pile of uranium and would leave a big pile of waste behind.

That big uranium pile would weigh 310 grams and fit inside a 3 inch box. The recycled waste pile would also weigh 310 grams since fission doesn't consume much mass. Why we can't get people to use electric cars seems to be going the way of why we can't use nuclear power.

There are real working solutions available but we choose to do something else. Either you are part of the solution or you are part of the problem.
 
klapauzius said:
AndyH said:
But in the past the capacity increases have come in a relatively 'large bottle' by making better food, messing with bread mold (medicine) and other tech achievements. The limiting factor in the past wasn't the planet. This time around appears to be very different - we've run out of bottle! We're living off principle and interest now - deficit spending, deficit mining, deficit water extraction...you get it, I'll stop. ;)

I beg to differ.
You don't have to beg - agreeing to disagree is fine with me. :lol:
klapauzius said:
a) There is lots more to discover. Progress has nowhere slowed down.
b) All the stuff we mine or the water we use does not vanish. It can (and will) be recycled.
All you need is energy to do this. The sun provides way more energy than we can possibly
use right now, we just need to harvest it.
Here e.g. that cartoon you posted is grossly wrong: We are far from utilizing all the sunlight reaching the earth.
:shock: What? The 'cartoon' is not about energy - it's about the sum of all we're taking from AND DOING TO the planet on which we depend. (The source is linked in the post, BTW.) Energy is only one small part of the process.

As for recycling finite resources, it's probably not socially acceptable to take the Coke can away from Joe before she's finished the drink in order to recycle it! Ok, maybe too obscure. Continually dividing the number of tons of available aluminum among a continually growing population suggests that we'd better forget 12 ounce drinks and learn to accept little 2-ounce cans - for a while, anyway.

Look back at the carrying capacity/logistic curve for a minute. This beautiful curve represents "The maximum number of individuals of a given species that a particular environment can support for an indefinite period, assuming the environment doesn't change."

That blue part is significant, because we're not growing our population in isolation in a lab. Neither are we continually adding more CO2 to the atmosphere in isolation, or releasing more chemicals (the effects of which we have zero clue) into the environment in isolation, or cutting down all the trees in isolation. We've got a boatload of variables running around in no semblance of order and they all dramatically affect the outcome of the experiment and the eventual shape of the population curve.

Just from a CO2 stand point - paleoclimate folks have charted that the planet has made regular and routine dramatic temperature shifts - in as little as 10 years from toasty to ice age - in the past in response to CO2. One of the fears is that we're in the vicinity of one of those tipping points now (or maybe next year? Wanna bet?). That's just one graph-shape-changer -- and it's connected to the elbow bone and up to total population. (Don't look at me - I don't know what's going to happen - but I'm certainly not looking to buy property within 200' of mean sea level!)

I guess the main reason I don't think a single logistics curve is the right match to the data is because it's clear that we've already overshot the carrying capacity - otherwise we wouldn't be in the deficit zone in so many areas critical to our survival. I hope I'm wrong.

klapauzius said:
c) There is a lot of fat (literally too) to trim, that wont hurt anyone. I dont care much for golf courses in the desert, nor for 7-ton SUVS (and believe it or not, I have kids too to drive around town), nor do I need a TV running all day to make me happy. If you take all that (and more), there will be room for a lot more people to live comfortable, until world population reaches its peak.
Sorry - just like unplugging the cell-phone charger -- it's an atom in the ocean.

Have a good evening up there!
 
Nekota said:
The US used 95 Quads of energy in 2010. Take the current US population of 310 million and a 78 year life expectancy to get a total energy per person per lifetime. Now if you get all your energy from nuclear for those 78 years you would need a big pile of uranium and would leave a big pile of waste behind.

That big uranium pile would weigh 310 grams and fit inside a 3 inch box. The recycled waste pile would also weigh 310 grams since fission doesn't consume much mass. Why we can't get people to use electric cars seems to be going the way of why we can't use nuclear power.

There are real working solutions available but we choose to do something else. Either you are part of the solution or you are part of the problem.
With respect, Nekota, how much ground is removed to extract the ore that is processed to the required concentration? How much low-level radioactive and poisonous waste is created just in the mining phase?

In terms of both short and long term environmental impact, uranium mining is by far the most environmentally problematic of any mining activity because radioactivity of the ore presents an intangible that cannot be chemically mitigated. Even after the mining activities ceased on the Navajo Nation, the legacy of environmental harm continued from events such as what happened in 1979 at Church Rock. The Church Rock disaster is the largest accidental release of radioactive material in U.S. history. A tailing dam burst, sending eleven hundred tons of radioactive mill wastes and ninety million gallons of contaminated liquid pouring toward Arizona into the Rio Puerco River. The Navajo still cannot use this water
http://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/nativelands/navajo/environmental.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

We've gotta do better than this - and it's certainly about more than 310 grams. :(
 
klapauzius said:
Here e.g. that cartoon you posted is grossly wrong: We are far from utilizing all the sunlight reaching the earth.
The cartoon's been updated, and the 2012 report is due out in mid-may. Here's the thumbnail sketch from the 2010 report:
1.5 Earths

Ecological overshoot is growing
During the 1970s, humanity as a whole passed the point at which the annual Ecological Footprint matched the Earth’s annual biocapacity — that is, the Earth’s human population began consuming renewable resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate them and releasing
more CO2 than ecosystems can absorb. This situation is called “ecological overshoot”, and has continued since then. The latest Ecological Footprint shows this trend is unabated (Figure 16). In 2007, humanity’s Footprint was 18 billion gha, or 2.7gha per person. However, the Earth’s biocapacity was only 11.9 billion gha, or 1.8gha per person (Figure 17 and GFN, 2010a). This represents an ecological overshoot of 50 per cent. This means it would take 1.5 years for the Earth to regenerate the renewable resources that people used in 2007 and absorb CO2 waste. Put another way, people used the equivalent of 1.5 planets in 2007 to support their activities (see Box: What does overshoot really mean?).
Source: 2010 report, page 18 in the PDF
http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr2010.pdf

What does overshoot really mean?

How can humanity be using the capacity of 1.5 Earths, when
there is only one? Just as it is easy to withdraw more money
from a bank account than the interest this money generates,
it is possible to harvest renewable resources faster than they
are being generated. More wood can be taken from a forest each
year than re-grows, and more fish can be harvested than are
replenished each year. But doing so is only possible for a limited
time, as the resource will eventually be depleted.

Similarly, CO2 emissions can exceed the rate at which
forests and other ecosystems are able to absorb them, meaning
additional Earths would be required to fully sequester these
emissions.

Exhaustion of natural resources has already happened
locally in some places, for example the collapse of cod stocks in
Newfoundland in the 1980s. At present, people are often able
to shift their sourcing when this happens — moving to a new
fishing ground or forest, clearing new land for farming, or
targeting a different population or a still-common species.
But at current consumption rates, these resources will
eventually run out too — and some ecosystems will collapse
even before the resource is completely gone.

The consequences of excess greenhouse gases that cannot
be absorbed by vegetation are also being seen: increasing
concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, leading to increasing
global temperatures and climate change, and ocean acidification.
These place additional stresses on biodiversity and ecosystems.
 
AndyH said:
Sorry. Unfortunately, it's our number one problem - the single problem that is supporting all the other challenges we face.

I guess it all depends on who "our" is and what they plan to do. I have a theory that we really don't need to do anything about it since I don't see it as a problem.

Population control by means of legislation will likely be met with civil unrest in areas of the world that grasp the concept of liberty (which ironically, any resistance will probably help decrease population even more). I can't speak for anyone else here, but I will not accept government telling me I can't have kids. I don't particularly want kids anyway, but I just don't want big brother figuratively cutting off my balls (or treading on my liberty in any way). :)

Anyway, the data I've seen suggests birth rates are dropping and have been since the 60's. World population will probably peak in my lifetime. It's not something we need to control. It's happening automatically. We will have an interesting time ahead of us, but humans are very resourceful creatures. Never underestimate our ability to adapt. Then again, never underestimate our ability (and desire) for self annihilation. The turn of a few keys and the push of a couple buttons is all that's needed to take care of the population problem once and for all.

I'm not losing any sleep over it.
 
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