Hastur wrote: ↑Fri Aug 23, 2019 1:28 am
Food should not be a problem. 1/3 of all food produced is going to waste so there is enough being produced today to cover any projected increase in population.
The biggest problem we are facing is the overuse of non-renewable resources and lack of recycling. That is always going to come back and haunt us. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases or remains constant. Once we dig up a resource it will start to disperse and everything is finite. We just have to deal with it and keep innovating to find alternative solutions and better ways to do things. I can't see what the alternative would be. Killing people? Forced sterilization? Just give up and drug ourselves to oblivion? Going back to a previous "better" time? When was that?
What are you suggesting Ottern?
It's pretty much what I've been trying to say. People just don't know how much humanity relies on non-renewables to keep up with out current food production. Fertilizers, transport, machines, all rely on fossil fuels. Food should not be a problem here in the west, but it's already starting to become a problem in poorer countries. And not in the sense that they're necessarily starving, but they have to use such a significant percentage of their wealth and wages on food, that it hampers other economical development. I would advise everyone here to look into the agricultural precursors to the Arab Spring. When food prices increase, poor people get pissed off.
And I don't think there is a solution to this. Human nature can't be changed. The Chinese and Indians are going to consume more, and therefore use more energy, and emit more CO2. They need to do so to raise their standard of living, to get out of the poverty trap.
The global trends just don't suggest there's a way out of this. Population growth rate keeps decreasing, and that's just about the only positive trend going on at the moment. But it's dwarfed by the rate of energy use, CO2-emissions, aquifer loss, and loss of suitable agricultural land.
Food production will be hit by these factors, eventually. If China, or India manages to raise their standard of living to somewhat comparable to Western standards, their consumption behavior will change accordingly too. Agricultural land being used for biofuel will be more common in the future, to support global air travel. Battery powered airplanes simply can't do what liquid fuels can do. Then we have the fashion industry, as the middle classes get larger in India and China. More land being used for cotton production, and even more when we're turning away from synthetics, because of microplast and fossil fuel depletion.
Noones going to advocate killing a large part of the global population. But it's the logical conclusion we can draw from it. And it's what's going to happen. Not "race war death squads roaming through other countries, killing every person they see". Starvation and disease will take care of most of it, and we'll look the other way. Just like the English did during the starvation in Ireland. Just like the average German did when he moved into a nice new house in Poland. All we can hope, is that we're not one of those poor people.
