You rely on a faith based notion that because something may ultimately turn out to be possible (e.g., to produce elements economically through nuclear transmutation) it will solve our immediate and growing problems.

You fail to address the time line issue I mentioned.

You ignore the historically massive destruction wrought so far by increases in energy.

Some of your statements are, in my view, patently absurd, so much so that I don’t feel a need to respond to them. Any rational reader will spot their flaws.

Maybe someone else will want to debate the details. But again, if you really want to debate this stuff, try a site like The Oil Drum where there are hundreds of posters who know energy well and would love to debate you. Or maybe go back and debate IQ on Grist. I have other things to do. I have to say, as well, that I was turned off to discussing things with you from our first interaction on Grist. Having looked at some of your other interactions there, that’s not likely to change. Maybe that’s just me, but it’s the case. Really, just go please.

why the intense compulsion to grow?

There is no need to grow. At the moment, since society has vast energy resources at hand, growth is less risky — e.g. trashes less resources, and creates more new ones — than stasis. To not grow would be to squander resources, and to squander an opportunity for responsible stewardship.

Regarding mass extinction, climate change, aquifer depletion, etc., I am considering those resources, and hence I consider those to be things that can be conserved or created through the application of energy. I would say that the more energy society uses, the more ability it has to steward its other resources. It’s a counterintuitive statement, and we might call it my strong thesis. I would predict that if society were to drop its energy consumption rate to the level it was in the medieval era, but kept its population at 6.6 billion, the biosphere would soon be trashed. Therefore, energy availablity is necessary — but not sufficient — for the preservation of the environmental resources of a population.

More energy, like more food, might encourage more population growth — as Edward Abbey complained through the voices of the characters in his novel The Monkeywrench Gang — but that might also be remediable through culture modification. However, with enough energy available, the biosphere might be able to contain a much-larger human population. (I have estimated that at least 500 trillion humans could be comfortably sustained in the biosphere, assuming one horizontal square meter for each, and vertical depth of a kilometer. Perhaps sustaining a mere 100-billion persons would not be a hardship.)

Regarding minable elements (copper, etc.): yes, they can be — and, in fact, presently are — created through fusion and fission. However, more-immediately important is the fact that they are easier to mine, conserve and recycle when more energy is available. In that way, more copper is available when more energy is available. Also important is the fact that functional substitutes for minerals can be, and today frequently are, made — and this, again, is easier when more energy is available. One example of the latter would be the fact that steel has largely been substituted over the past few decades with synthetic polymers (“plastics”).

I believe that Hopfenberg’s, and your, thesis can be presented as weak and strong versions.

Hold on. I don’t think there is any particular thesis associated with both Russ and me. His thesis is that population grows in accordance with food supply. I think it’s an interesting thesis with some merit, worth discussion, leaving some difficult questions.

The rest of your comment is the ol’ Julian Simon argument. While it may or may not come to pass that humans will develop new ways to produce things like, say, copper, economically (versus the cost of something like nuclear transmutation… what are the myriad other ways?), we’re talking about a crisis unfolding as we speak, with major changes developing in just decades (e.g., see your Lovelock references). We need to look at the today’s reality.

The application of sci-fi ideas to the problems now at hand is fun and interesting but does not have a lot of practical relevance to the problem at hand. (Similarly, some folks like to argue population growth isn’t a problem as we can just populate the rest of the universe. Somehow I think they don’t appreciate the time line we’re dealing with.)

Much more importantly, though, it appears you’re again overlooking my whole point on this site. If we do develop the means of continued growth, that’s a huge problem! The current convergence of mass extinction, climate change, aquifer depletion, and many related environmental problems is enough to make that clear. In fact, mass extinction is enough by itself.

Finally, and just as important, why the intense compulsion to grow? We can just stop. No big deal.

At any rate, as I suggested before, if you want to debate energy, try one of the energy sites.

* It can be accepted as axiomatic that all resources (e.g. commodities) can be produced in any of myriad ways as long as there is energy available. I.e. energy can be transformed into anything else — including the resource of space to grow. There is nothing that cannot be made from energy, except for additional energy.

* There is enough energy available that a limit to society’s growth would not necessarily occur soon.

something being a commodity doesn’t mean it can be produced in myriad ways. Many commodities can only be produced in one or very few ways.

A believe that your strong-thesis depends upon that being true. My corresponding thesis –that growth can occur indefinitely, regardless of non-energy resource availability, as long as there is sufficient energy available in any usable form — can be falsified by citing even a single verifiable example of a commodity that can only be produced in one or very few ways, regardless of the amount of energy available.

(Regarding the resources coal, petrolium, and natural gas, they are not simply energy resources. They are composed of energy and, in addition, special packaging. The total energy within a system that contains these resources cannot be replaced, but the special packaging can be replaced — by energy.)

Also, something being a commodity doesn’t mean it can be produced in myriad ways. Many commodities can only be produced in one or very few ways.

BTW, I think your comments might produce more productive discussion if you’d just present your ideas rather than acting confrontational. The latter seems to lead to missing the point much of the time anyway.

While that consideration may be more of a factor in a discussion of the meaning of “sustainability”, to we ignore it at our peril even when talking about carrying capacity. All complex dynamic systems will have inter-element support mechanisms that are not obvious at first blush. As a result, in our effort to maximize the purely human-food element of the niche we might inadvertently break a link that turns out to be a lot more important than we assumed. We may be on the verge of doing this with the bees…

Ascribing some importance to the maintenance of pre-existing life inhabiting the niche, even if doing that reduces the carrying capacity for our species somewhat, seems sensible and responsible as well as ethical.

I disagree with Russ’ exclusive focus on food as the arbiter of carrying capacity. The concept of carrying capacity at the very least needs to incorporate the role of waste. The demonstration of this is trivial. Take a container of sugar water, add yeast, then as they yeast begins to multiply start adding more sugar mixed with ethyl alcohol. If you titrate the solution properly this addition will keep the food supply of the environment constant while introducing additional wastes. When the alcohol concentration reaches 10% or so yeast multiplication will cease. It will stop even though the sugar percentage in the solution (the food supply) remains unchanged, and with the yeast population well below what it would have been if the alcohol had come solely from the fermentation of the yeast.

Like others, I disagree with the world-level aggregation of population and food in Russ’ analysis. I tried that as well in earlier articles, and ended up feeling that while it presents a picture that’s technically valid and pedagogically useful, it is unhelpful for the purposes of understanding the system dynamics in depth and determining where and how we might intervene to alter its behaviour – especially when the system is composed of intransigent human beings and sovereign nations.

On the question of whether food drives or follows population, I don’t know if answering that question does us a lot of good. I think of it more like a feedback loop. When animals reproduce the offspring will need food to survive. The parents then go out looking for it (food follows population). If they find it the offspring survive and go on to reproduce in turn (food drives population). What is undeniable, and is more important to our current predicament is that a limited food supply will cap population growth.

Finally, IMO any analysis of human carrying capacity that ignores exosomatic energy is fatally flawed. How you address its role (by saying that energy inputs make the carrying capacity variable, or by characterizing the overshoot created by the one-time gift of fossil fuels) is less important than the basic recognition of the role of energy in supporting human numbers.

Interestingly enough, you are following a recent example from Magne in another thread. On that occasion he saved his very best words for last. I think you have the same thing above.

Recognizing that human population numbers are a function primarily of food supply and NOT that food supply must be increased to feed a growing population has profound implications, I believe. This misperception, or preternatural misunderstanding, or faulty reasoning, or contrived logic for political convenience, or magical thinking or specious idea that we widely share and consensually validate today (and ironically shared from the time of the establishment of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population) may one day be seen as one of the greatest mistakes ever to have occurred and thereafter to have gained virtually universal acceptance.

This astonishing failure in human thought both of common sense and reasoning will soon be looked at as a colossal error, compared to ones like we remember when our ancestors were certain that the Sun revolved around the celestial orb we inhabit and that the Earth was at the center of the Universe .

Sincerely,

Steve

I’ve forgotten the source now but was reading about the origins of the World Food Bank in something Hardin wrote. His objection to such a thing was that it would allow countries (and their dictators) to ignore the need the stockpile food during good years against needs in bad years. Naturally he talked of this in terms of the tragedy of the commons and how much of the benefit of a World Food Bank goes directly to the food producers who, in the USA, are paid market rate for their contributions out of tax dollars. And the affect of the distribution is to obviate the need of the receiving countries to take their own steps to mitigate the problem. Thus, the problem occurs again and again.

China and India shouldn’t be importing food. China only began to import grain relatively recently; I don’t know about India. Similarly, to my mind, the USA shouldn’t be importing cheap goods from China which only supports that country’s draconian human rights, labor, and environmental policies.

Africa seems a special case. They have little to trade with except for raw natural resources. My sense is we need a massive humanitarian effort to provide education, family planning, and capital for them to become self-sustaining — as opposed to our current policy of taking their raw materials, sending in grain when starvation becomes too obvious, and looking the other way as dictators rape their own nations.

I wonder as well, BTW, about the issue of regional differences Trinifar mentions. It does seem, though, that the food supply/population link must be brought into the discussion on an international level, if only because we have heretofore been acting on what is in a sense probably the opposite of the truth of that link (i.e., that food supply must be increased to keep up with population rather than that it actually drives population).

Magne said,

Among the most probable consequences of global warming, lies our future food supply. If the ocean water keep warming, and if the soils keep eroding due to floods, draught and stupid farming techniques, chances are you won’t have to plan for a future of less food production, as it is going to happen anyway.

It’s interesting (well, sad really) to consider that the growth of our population may lead before long to a decrease in food production being forced upon us before we would ever have the chance to consider anything like a purposeful cap on global food production.

On another tack, one place where I would view part of this slightly differently from Russ concerns carrying capacity and overshoot. It’s not a disagreement so much as a different way of looking at it. But to me it’s an interesting topic:

As I understand it, Russ would say food supply sets carrying capacity. On the other hand, I would say it’s been a large factor in allowing us to overshoot carrying capacity. Overshoot is indicated by our degrading the global ecosystem. So I think our learning to grow the food supply to such huge levels has really created a kind of “phantom carrying capacity” as Catton terms it.

That is, our present and growing numbers, enabled (or caused) in large part by the growing food supply, cannot be sustained because they’ve led to ecological degradation which will pull some of our life support out from under us. That’s overshoot.