In Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe there's a fictional rock band, Disaster Area, inspired by Pink Floyd. They're so loud that the audience listens from bunkers thirty seven miles away. Their PA system violates stategic arms limitation treaties. Just doing their accounting and tax returns requires the invention of a new branch of mathematics.
Most of us have probably been to a concert of some sort, and paid a lot of money for tickets. So you can imagine if Diaster Area gives a performance and sells 9 billion ticketsm and when those folks start arriving, imagine there are only 3 billion seats inside those bunkers. What do you suppose happens next? Yeah...pretty ugly, I think.
World populations is expected to be over 9 billion by 2050. Yes, the rate of growth peaked in 1989 and has declined every year since. But that doesn't mean much. It's growing slower, but it's still growing. The math is inexorable. If it keeps growing, eventually the earth is full.
Take another look at Athens.
The actual carrying capacity of the earth for humans is unknown, but estimates are usually 2-3 billion. Right now population is approaching 7.2 billion. At the end of WW II it was about 2 billion--pretty near the carrying capacity of the planet.
We currently convert energy, mostly from petroleum, into food and water. That's how we make up the difference between carrying capacity and population. It's not just fuel for tractors or fishing boats. Think about all the industrial processing and fuel requited to turn Kansas wheat or Iowa corn or Chinese rice into something you or I can buy locally. Meat, by the way, takes at least 100 times the energy input of rice or wheat. Think about all the transportation, refrigeration, processing, reprocessing, packaging, the lights in the processing plants, the machinery, and getting the workers to and from work.
Got it in your head? Okay, now cut world oil production by half and increase demand by..oh...20 percent. What do you suppose happens to the price of food in your local store? In Athens?
For some chilling reading try the Hirsch Report, prepared for the US D.O.E. in 2005.
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf
Take another look at Athens, and consider that the planet isn't ever going to look like that. The earth isn't going to ever "fill up" with people.
Deer don't control their population, so nature does it for them. You find them in the woods around here sometimes, usually in the spring. Sometimes people feed them corn or deer pellets to get them through the months of deep snow and starvation, but a lot of folks have stopped doing that because the costs have risen so much, and the economy is so bad. In severely over-populated areas the state encourages predition by humans, i.e. more deer hunting.
Three billion seats, nine billion tickets. It won't work. That's six billion too many. For every three people on earth, two won't get a seat at the dinner table.
No comments:
Post a Comment