It’s interesting to consider how the UN recently upped its projection of global population for 2050 from 8.9 billion to 9.2 billion. The difference doesn’t seem like so much until you stop to realize that’s the population of the US today. Not to mention that that amount of growth (from today’s 6.5 billion) is more than the entire world population of 1950. But I digress… :-/

I’ll definitely take a look at the Strange Days series.

Now, links back at you…. A small film which I just received, and so haven’t seen yet, but which is highly regarded is What a Way to Go. From what I hear of it, it should be a good (if somewhat pessimistic) way to take in a whole lot of our ecological plight in one sitting.

Another which I should have seen by now, but (sigh) I still haven’t gotten to, is The Planet. Not sure which link here goes to the film itself, but Magne Karlsen, who comments here praised it highly and provided these links to part 1 and part 2.

I honestly don’t know. I’ve never seen a detailed quantitative analysis.

Alternatively, the question could be – does anything besides pollution from fossil energy use have an environmental impact?

Sure, lots of things do. Edward Norton once hosted a series called “Strange Days” which covered a lot of stuff you might be interested. Only saw a few of them but the ones I saw were excellent. Best environmental DVD/Movie/series I’ve ever seen.

Linky to Strange Days

One of the episodes showed a researcher genetically modifying plants to soak up and decompose different types of pollution.

linky

So with many forms of pollution, where there is a will there is a way….

I think that gets at it more clearly than my previous long comment, no?

Abstract thinking is not my forte. I need a mechanism to analyze or a hypothesis that can undergo quantitative analysis. I strongly suspect that you are right and we will run into another pollution problem but at this point I have no idea what that problem will be.

The question is – what would be the environmental impact of those 10 billion fossil-fuel-free people?

Alternatively, the question could be – does anything besides pollution from fossil energy use have an environmental impact?

I think that gets at it more clearly than my previous long comment, no?

BTW, I’ve seen another estimate which put the photosynthesis stat at 25%. I haven’t looked into it in much depth, but even 25% is an awful lot.

Thanks for the response. That graph is interesting but if solar and battery technology pans out then it will be pretty easy bring 10 billion people up to the standard of living currently enjoyed by Americans (at least energy wise). The metals argument is interesting. I’m not sure if I’d consider metals as non-renewable as we can always recycle them. I’m sure after a while extraction and collection costs can go through the roof though. Heck the cost of copper is skyrocketing right now. The 40% of photosynthesis argument is, if accurate, very disturbing.

Let me first emphasize that we absolutely do need to transition completely away from fossil fuels. Using nonrenewable resources is, by definition, unsustainable.

Now, we both recognize that solving energy is highly unlikely to happen in time to avoid serious impacts of peak oil. But the question is — if somehow it did, or somehow we managed it somewhere post peak oil, would that solve our environmental problems? You see, that is the argument made by many who dismiss the role of population in our ecological woes. They say, “If we could just develop abundant clean renewable energy, population growth wouldn’t be a problem.” (For some reason they ignore that reducing population size would be much easier and cheaper than developing such sources of energy. Again, though, it’s not that we don’t need to do the latter as well. We do.)

An important preface is that population has historically grown in tight correlation with energy use per capita. It seems fairly clear, in fact, that energy availability and use has been a central driver of population growth. Here’s a graph Paul got somewhere or made. William Catton talks about this in his book Overshoot, which you should definitely read. It’s a true classic.

I’m not sure there are any precise numbers to quantify this, but the question, then, is whether any environmental problems would remain given a growing/larger population using abundant clean energy. The answer seems clearly to be yes. The problem is not in the depletion of deuterium. With abundant energy (and continued pop growth) there is still the problem of growing energy use and associated kinds of depletion such as ground water, minerals (copper, aluminum… whatever… these things are nonrenewable, and so their extraction is unsustainable), and sea life, as well as the takeover of land for farming and associated soil erosion, and waste associated with manufacturing and disposal of goods.

Just a guess, but I would think the first bottleneck would result from groundwater depletion since it’s already a growing problem and verging on a disaster in the coming decades. Next in line could be impacts of accelerating extinction rates resulting from habitat loss. We’re already in the “sixth extinction” (human caused this time!) and there’s little reason to think that wouldn’t continue as more land were taken over for farming, urban development, etc. We really don’t know what the “tipping points” would be, but it seems pretty clear we humans are dependent on the web of life just like other species. And there are apparently cascade effects associated with species loss whereby impacts suddenly and unpredictably grow. We don’t know where those will happen, but we’re playing with fire.

So I think we’d have clear ecological problems remaining until we begin acting on an awareness that we are just one species, and that any species which grows its numbers hugely out of proportion with those of comparable species., thereby eliminating other species as it goes, is heading for trouble.

In his paper, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Hardin says, “[G]iven an infinite source of energy, population growth still produces an inescapable problem. The problem of the acquisition of energy is replaced by the problem of its dissipation….” And even that seems to ignore things like land takeover which isn’t included under “energy.”

Well, I suppose there are numbers that would highlight this. For instance, some analyses have concluded [1] that humans now appropriate as much as 40% of the products of photosynthesis. Of course some digging could turn up numbers for available water and its projected depetion, and so on.
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[1] Original article in BioScience, Vol. 36, No. 6 (Jun., 1986), pp. 368-373

I think one of the best lines is this one of Paul’s in the thread on Democratic Underground:

“Is there any reason the rest of the planet’s inhabitants might not appreciate a fusion-powered humanity?”

I really don’t think nature is going to miss deuterium. That being said there is considerable controversy whether or not fusion will ever become economical. Plus by the time it gets here it will be too late to stop ecological disaster if we are still using fossil fuels.

As for the theme of this thread may I ask what is the strongest quantitative argument? There is a lot of logic here but not much in numbers. Lets pretend energy is solved. What will be the first bottleneck that humanity runs into?

I’m glad to learn of The Natural Patriot too. Just had a nice look around there, and found it to be a great resource. Thanks for stopping by.

You say, “However, given unlimited cheap energy, I still suspect resource constraints would be a hell of a lot easier to deal with via technology.” While that might ideally be true, two comments spring to mind.

The first is that we do not live in an ideal world. Unless dealing with the externalities of eliminating resource constraints is truly free, universally available and enforced, it probably won’t happen. Additionally, sytems as complex as industrial civilization are by nature chaotic and unpredictable, so the probability of encountering unintended consequences while trying to mitigate a known problem is extremely high.

The second concern is more fundamental to points I’ve made elsewhere. It is, “What about habitat?” Say we were able to come up with the 3 times our current energy production needed to achieve universal demographic transition (along with an additional order of magnitude or two to clean up the existing mess), human population would still top out over 10 billion people. That many people need a LOT of lebensraum, all of which currently has other occupants. No amount of energy is going to fix that situation.

With unlimited energy we might be able to decarbonize and desalinate, but we will still cause extinctions due to habitat loss. Again, the intrinsically chaotic nature of the system and our own limited understanding of its interactions will work against us – how do we predict which species are crucial to the web of life?

Yes, it is the social (and other) conditions that need to be changed. I said in my reply to you on my blog that perhaps we need to look at micro-living concerns which is what you and I are talking about here. So we are on the same page. It is a matter of emphasis.

“It means we need urgently to work out how to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of our foodstuffs.”

Okay, but not a word about how we’d not be in this mess had our population not quadrupled in the last nanosecond of human history — which just might point to an issue worth addressing aside from the greenhouse gas intensity of our foodstuffs.

“Walking to the shops damages environment more than going by car”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2195538.ece

While this piece makes some unfair assumptions (that we all eat a lot of beef) to make its point, the bottom line is still true – conservation and efficiency alone are not going to solve our sustainability problems.

Interesting points. Clearly, a full transition to clean and renewable energy is essential. Reliance on nonrenewable energy is fundamentally unsustainable. I’m just trying to underline that such a transition, alone, wouldn’t solve our environmental problems, as population growth would remain a problem (apart from its current role in energy consumption), and may even be exacerbated by such energy if it were abundant.

But you raise some fascinating points about the idea of unlimited (or nearly so) cheap energy. It would indeed make space colonization far more feasible. But, as you suggest, when we talk of spreading our kind throughout the universe, it does lead to the question, “Where are the other species which, by now, should have done the same thing?” Of course one can speculate in all sorts of directions on that, but it does hint it must not be as simple as just hitting on an unlimited clean energy source and then going out there and populating the universe.

In my mind, the Fermi Paradox is an argument against ‘cheap’ energy, or the ability to ‘solve’ the energy problem. If we were to solve the problem and colonize the galaxy, we would presumably stick out like a statistically sore thumb for being the first to do so.

However, given unlimited cheap energy, I still suspect resource constraints would be a hell of a lot easier to deal with via technology. We could de-salinate water, implement vast recycling programs, remove pollution from the atmosphere. Growth would sky-roket, and technology would bloom. Surley during this time of vastly increased natural wealth, we would build space elevators and begin to transfer biomass to the moon and mars. After all, financing is free.