Re: OT: Population vs Energy Depletion

In article <C-ydnQzHKNaXRJPWnZ2dnUVZ_r6dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxx>,
spaco <spaco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I usually don't post about Sarah Palin, etc.., but since many of you DO
make OT posts, Here's one that I think is extremely valuable:
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Hi, guys.
Here's a real eye-opener. I takes a little over an hour to watch this
series of video clips, but I can't think of a better way to use one's
time in this century.
I got this on the a.s.photovoltaic newsgroup:

Recently I came across a series of 8 video-clips on YouTube showing a
lecture with Dr Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus in physics at the
University of Boulder, Colorado about arithmetic, population growth
and energy depletion. Usually a lecture by an old professor in front
of a group of students is not something one would consider to be a
terrifying experience. But this perspective, that he is communicating,
really is.

Not only does Dr Bartlett explain why we are in much bigger trouble
than most people think. He also explains why the nature of exponential
growth is such, that we will not see the problems until a very short
time until we run into them. This lecture goes to the very core of our
challenges ahead.

You don't have to possess university level skills in mathematics to
follow his lines of reasoning, but below high school level you would
probably not get too much out of it.

For your convenience, we have embedded all of the 8 video clips on one
page on our blog. You can find them here:

http://blog.green-life-innovators.org/2009/11/07/the-brutal-end-of-the-growth-
paradigm/


There are no easy answers; we only get to choose WHICH WAY we deal with
these two convergent issues. Sooner is better, later is harsher.

This sounds like a restatement of the old "limits to growth" argument
first propounded by Malthus
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe).

The Club of Rome made a big splash in the 1970s with a computer model
that predicted the end of civilization; there was no new information in
this model, but they did get plenty of media attention, probably because
computers were new and impressive back then.

The mathematical core of the argument is that an exponentially growing
demand on a finite (or linearly growing) resource will quickly exhaust
the resource, which is certainly true, and one does not need a computer
to figure this out.

The problem with the argument is the assumption that a billion people
will just roll over and die when some resource is exhausted. What
actually happens is that some other way to do the job is found. History
is full of examples.

One classic example is the crisis in England when the first industrial
revolution used up all the firewood. The answer was coal. It had been
known since ancient times that this black stone would burn, but it was a
curiosity because wood was far easier to procure. Until it wasn't.

As for peak oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil), this has been
predicted for 150 years (see the Criticisms section at the end of the
Wiki article), but the peak always moves into the future as extraction
and refining technology improves and new fields are found. In
particular, there is an immense amount of oil shale available, and one
can make oil from coal and seawater (sasoil). In may get more expensive,
but it won't be suddenly exhausted. Nor will it be soon.

There was a jocular malthusian analysis published in the 1800s
extrapolating the effect of the growing number of horse drawn vehicles
in London (or New York, I don't recall). The math showed that in say 50
years all city streets would be covered with ten feet of compacted
manure, etc. Of course it never happened, thwarted by the invention of
the horseless carriage.

Joe Gwinn
.

Relevant Pages

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