Various idiots have been clucking about "peak oil" since 1885. Known reserves of oil, gas, and coal have increased almost monotonically since then, and are now higher than ever and still sloping up.
Long hot showers are a major contributor to electronic design productivity.
e:
ld.
ound.
couple centuries has been an exponential growth in fossil carbon extractio n and combustion.
Of course the reserves have been increasing monotonically. Once you've foun d oil, it doesn't go away - at least not until you've extracted it, sold it and seen it burnt as fuel, which does take time.
"Peak oil" is when production starts falling, and since a lot of the new re serves are hard to extract, that is definitely in sight.
We've burnt about half a trillion tons of carbon since 1750, and if John La rkin had the wit to understand anthropogenic global warming - he doesn't, a nd prefers to believe the comforting denialist propaganda he gets fed by th e Murdoch press - he'd know that we can't afford to burn more than about an other quarter of a trillion tons, so the reserves aren't all that interesti ng.
How would John Larkin know? He confuses persistent tinkering with electroni c design, and congratulates himself on his imagined electronic design skill s wherever he gets something to work.
We know that you are a gullible sucker, prepared to believe anything, who refuses to do the work required to distinguish plausible nonsense from evidence-based facts.
- but unreal -
In a real circuit, "falter" would mean electrical breakdown. No insulator can withstand an arbitrarily high voltage.
Any single economic activity will have a sigmoid growth curve - initial rapid quasi-exponential growth that will slow down as the activity runs into its limit which can be anything from the resources available to the number of potential customers.
The claim that economic growth was exponential would have to depend on the idea that an economy can include a potentially unlimited range of potential economic activities, with new ones taking off as the older ones hit saturation.
Perhaps a community getting fabulously wealthy writing apps for one another's mobile phones ...
that must explain your failure then, you stink!
Jamie
Except that the goal posts keep moving. What counts as economic output keeps changing, because what's available and what people want to buy changes. BITD your wealth depended on how much land you owned and how many servants you could afford.
In particular, the number of BTUs required to generate a dollar's worth of economic output has dropped dramatically in the last 50 years. The Malthusian arguments fail for the same reason they've always failed--human intelligence adapts.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Yes and no.
Frequently Malthusian arguments have proven correct within individual civilisations, especially where such civilisations have depleted the *local* resources, beyond the locals' knowledge and ability to adapt.
Now we have a single civilisation exploiting *global* resources. What happens when those global resources are depleted beyond mankind's knowledge and ability to adapt is *unproven*.
If you are an Pickwickian optimist you choose one answer; if an Malthusian pessimist, the other. Realists should choose a precautionary principle.
ronic design, and congratulates himself on his imagined electronic design s kills wherever he gets something to work.
Jamie can't construct plausible chains of logical consequences.
John Larkin advances a hypothesis about electronic design, which he couldn' t have tested because he doesn't do electronic design, and Jamie makes what seem to be a number of irrational assumptions - including that I've failed at electronic design, which doesn't happen to be true - and comes to the c onclusion that I stink (which doesn't happen to be true either).
Jamie really can't do joined up logic, and doesn't seem to have clue how it might be done.
So do birth rates, which the alarmists always miss.
But we should try to lift the poorest people on the planet out of their misery, before we clamp down on resource use. In the long run, providing for them will reduce birth rates and resource waste.
Ideally yes.
In practice it is a hell of a dilemma.
Birth rates are half of the story; death rates are just as important. Both are indirect measures.
I contend a simple and more direct measure is simply the number of people alive. We haven't seen that fall in the long term, although there have been a few blips.
Yes. Peaceful co-existance and progress are not normal states for mankind. The most moral approach would be benign colonialism, as in the UN or someone taking over a poor country and enforcing progress until it becomes the accepted state. In many cases, even that might not work.
Nature wired people to want sex, not necessarily to want babies. Sex used to reliably make babies, but it doesn't any more in developed countries.
Developed countries are mostly making babies at below the replacement rate.
In some countries, young people don't even want sex.
True, but orthogonal to the points I made.
For energy (or GDP), the key is number of people times energy per person; no surprises there.
In the long term there may (or may not) be a steady state of fewer people. In the short/medium term it takes a one or two generations for the populace to believe they can "safely" have fewer children. Hence there is usually a short/medium term peak before some form of steady state is reached.
That peak could bring unpleasant consequences.
And, of course, societal influences may encourage societies to out-breed their competition. Religions are notorious for encouraging that, and the Chinese look like they are abandoning their "one child" policy.
d--human
Nobody wants to clamp down on the use of renewable resources. Solar power i s very popular in really poor communities - you don't need to get connected to a non-existent national grid to enjoy the benefits, nor truck in diesel fuel from your non-existent refineries to power a diesel generator.
John Larkin seems to think that because the west made it to a high-energy-u se economy by burning fossil carbon, everybody else has to go through the s ame phase. If we drill down a bit we may find that he thinks that you can't get to electric lighting without going through whale-oil burning lamps and gas lamps.
led--human
It mostly doesn't. Colonialism doesn't seem to breed a class of local admin istrators and politicians who understand how to run a country for the benef it of the population as a whole. They simply switch from sending the money to the remote colonial power to Swiss bank accoutns in their own names.
Good book, with some related observations:
I've no intention of spending my little remaining life reading it, of course, but from the blurb it looks like I would agree with much of it.
Engineers, particularly safety engineers, have to deal with "unintended consequences" and "perverse behaviour". I wish politicians did.
Tom, You often speak like you expect to drop dead next week. If I'm not being too personal, do you have some form of aggressive cancer or something? (And ignore this if you don't want to talk about it.)
George H.
Not aggressive, but there are too many interesting things left to do and books left to read. I'm seriously contemplating never buying another book because I've already have too many unread books on my Round Tuit list.
Having seen people of my age drop dead from a heart attack (despite being thin and fit), and "drop DNR" from a stroke (despite being flying instructors), I'm only too aware that my average heart rate is below 1micro bpm.
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required