Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumMalthus was an optimist
This essay was written a decade ago by David Delaney of Ottawa. I worked for David in the 1990s when he was CEO and CTO of a small high-tech startup here in our self-styled "Silicon Valley North". Over time he became a friend and more than a bit of a mentor. David was dedicated to uncovering the uncomfortable truths about what's going on in the world. He died last year. I was reminded today of this essay that languished on his personal web site. It's classic Delaney - short, incisive, spare and uncompromising.
Thomas Robert Malthus, 1766-1834, famously observed that human population, if unchecked, would grow faster than its food supply. He argued that education in "moral restraint" might prevent starvation from being the operative check on population growth. It is implicit in his writings that uncontrolled population growth, failing "moral restraint", would stall near the natural limits of the food supply. The population would remain stable thereafter, with many people living on the edge of starvation. But general undernourishment of a stable population is not a likely result of the current fantastic expansion of the human population. Like many who have commented on population growth, Malthus did not understand overshoot.
A species may greatly overshoot the long term carrying capacity of its environment. (Its population may become greatly larger than its environment can sustain.) Overshoot becomes possible when a species encounters a rich and previously unexploited stock of resources that promotes its reproduction.
The creation of stocks is due to ongoing geological and biological activity. A resource stock forms when a part of the daily production of a resource, a flow, accumulates slowly without being exploited, perhaps over millions of years. An enormous stock of a resource may accumulate before it encounters a species that can exploit it easily. After such an encounter, only predation and disease limit reproduction of the species.
Without significant predation or disease, and while large amounts of the stock remain easily available, the population of a species can grow to a size hundreds of times that which can be supported by the flows that created the stock. The daily production of a resource is a mere trickle compared to the flood available from a stored accumulation.
After a long period during which more of the stock is consumed each day by the growing population than was consumed on the preceding day, the stock starts to exhaust. Deposits of the stock become harder to find. Less can be obtained from the stock each day than the day before.
The time now remaining before complete exhaustion of the stock may be much shorter than the time that elapsed between encounter with the stock and the first signs of approaching scarcity. Soon, individuals begin to compete desperately for the remaining stock. To stay alive, they resort to alternative resources of lower and lower quality. By consuming the sources of flow, they destroy the capacity of their environment to produce the original flow. They also destroy the capacity of their environment to produce flows of alternative resources. Most of the population dies.
Ecologists call the resulting collapse of the population a crash, or die off. As a result of a crash, the carrying capacity for the overshot species, and for other species, becomes less than if the overshot species had not stumbled onto the stock in the first place. The population may remain at a very low level for a shorter or longer time--or forever. Because of the exponential nature of population growth in the presence of abundant resources, a single generation of the population--the most numerous generation-- experiences abundance in its youth, starvation in maturity, and premature death for most of its members. "Crash" is an apt term--a population crash can happen very quickly..
Malthus thought that population would approach a sustainable limit, then hover there, with many people living in poverty and misery. He did not imagine overshoot and sudden collapse. He did not understand that technology was converting mineral concentrations and much of the biosphere into windfall stocks that would stimulate rapid population growth. Now, two hundred years after Malthus, humans have multiplied their numbers far beyond any sustainable limit, and the end of the windfall stocks is in sight.
David M. Delaney, Ottawa, October 2003
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On the Road
(20,783 posts)Good luck with that.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Dave didn't give a flying fuck who believed him, because he knew that most people are incapable of even taking such information on board, let alone acting on it. He was concerned with publishing what he understood to be the truth.
"Whoever has ears to hear..." and all that.
On the Road
(20,783 posts)The first set of projections haven't panned out that well.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Nobody understood the significance of overshoot.
I know you don't like it, but...
kristopher
(29,798 posts)Nor even the full concept itself.
The reasoning engages in data trimming by the unfounded and incorrect assumption that adequate or superior alternatives do not exist for the resources being used.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)In his rather famous work on the subject?
http://www.amazon.com/Overshoot-Ecological-Basis-Revolutionary-Change/dp/0252009886/
Or Rees and Wackernagel? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint
This is standard, non-controversial ecological science, kristopher.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)What's the adequate or superior alternative for a living ocean?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112754976
Your view seems to be straight Chicago School of Economics stuff.
JEFF9K
(1,935 posts)And aren't a huge number of children "accidents?"
As technology leads to fewer "accidents" there will be more negative growth around the globe.
Problem solved.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)According to the World Bank figures, in 2009 only 20 out of 210 countries had negative growth - so long as you include pipsqueak "nations" like Samoa, United States Virgin Islands, Isle of Man, Guyana and Greenland. Of the remaining 15, only Germany and Japan were not part of the Soviet block.
The remaining 190 countries - including China, India, USA, all of Africa and all of South-East Asia - are still growing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_growth_rate
JEFF9K
(1,935 posts)Of the countries with over 2.4 million people, 9% have negative growth and many more are close.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Into a world where humans are already in overshoot, by at least 70% up to as much as 100 times, depending on how you look at it.
stuntcat
(12,022 posts)"already in overshoot" !! The fact that almost no one realizes this is the best proof to me that we're acting like a plague killing it's only host. And I know that baby girls made now will still be pressured in 2050, just like I have been, to give this to their own baby.
If there were 2 billion people we'd be okay right now, we could maybe stop fighting and start cleaning up after ourselves. But no, we'll get to 9 billion and there will still be tens of thousands of children dying of starvation each day. And the seas will be deader. And the forests will be goner. And ALL the animals species will be suffering and disappearing more.
This is the truth. Let's go on mocking Malthus, y'all. I join in! That dummy could not even imagine how shitty it's going to be.
Last edited Thu Oct 3, 2013, 04:14 AM - Edit history (1)
Here's the world's net annual population increase over the last 60 years:
Notice how it's been essentially constant for the last 40 years?
Unfortunately, due to increased energy use, a child born today has twice the planetary impact of a child born in 1950. Overshoot isn't just about population numbers.
Boomer
(4,168 posts)Excellent essay, quite succinct in outlining the dynamic and growing more uncomfortably true every day.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)I took a look at it here: No really, how sustainable are we?
And got this:
The answer, as far as I can tell, is between 10 and 50 million people.
How do we get from here to there? Maybe like this:
We now rejoin your regularly scheduled hopium, which already in progress.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)As I recall, that is another (soon to be discarded like all of your other 'profound revelations') skin for the same doomsday echo that's been bouncing around your noggin for more than a decade. You keep trying to find a way to measure your dread through a series of poorly researched proxies constructed out of basically random data thrown into some sort of chart ominously labeled with your newest toy.
All you've done here is rediscover carbon intensity and miscast it & its significance in an attempt to find the profundity you are sure lies just around the corner.
Know how you catch a unique rabbit?
U-Nique up on it!
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Last edited Thu Oct 3, 2013, 06:57 AM - Edit history (1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_SlaveSame thing. I just did a minor repackaging of Dr. Jack Vallentyne's work from the 1970's. Carbon intensity has nothing to do with it - it's all about energy-enabled human activity and numbers.
In order to dismiss this line of thought you have to deny two things: that humanity is in overshoot, and that increasing energy use is responsible.
???
kristopher
(29,798 posts)You wrote: "In order to dismiss this line of thought you have to deny two things: that humanity is in overshoot, and that increasing energy use is responsible."
"In order to dismiss this line of thought you have to deny two things", you say?
Not at all. The "line of thought" is not synonymous with the bogus technical creation you are labeling "Thermodynamic footprint". You've given a fundamental concept a different name and then make up out of whole cloth some numbers that have Zero Validity.
Your premise is, as you say "humanity is in overshoot", and "increasing energy use is responsible". However, the numbers behind your graphs do not even remotely begin to "prove" that true.
So it is entirely possible to dismiss your post and its antecedents without even touching on the line of inquiry relating energy use to population, population growth and environmental impact. You have casually dismissed all thought of an abundant list of confounding issues in the creation of your latest "theory" and as a consequence it lacks any validity at all.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)I didn't even mention TF, and TF theory isn't required to validate overshoot in any event. Evidence for overshoot has been developed by the Ecological Footprint researchers, for example. That humanity is in overshoot seems irrefutable at this point. The question now is just, "By how much?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint
Regarding the role of energy in the growth of population and consumption, I'm a little nonplussed that you would find that at all controversial. Energy is the primary resource that underpins all human activity, from building houses to growing wheat. The fact that we're using fossil fuels due to their historical convenience is immaterial to that process.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)Your graph is clearly using "Thermodynamic Footprint" to support assertions you are making. I'm making no comment on those issues, I'm pointing out that your position is not supported by valid data or analysis and that you've resorted to making things up and then presenting the fiction in the form of a graph.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Two simple questions:
Do you think we're in overshoot?
If so, do you think energy plays any role in that situation?
