Posted on 03/23/2014 8:47:10 AM PDT by SatinDoll
How did this manage to find its way into print?
Civilization was pretty great while it lasted, wasn't it? Too bad it's not going to for much longer. According to a new study sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, we only have a few decades left before everything we know and hold dear collapses.
The report, written by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center along with a team of natural and social scientists, explains that modern civilization is doomed. And there's not just one particular group to blame, but the entire fundamental structure and nature of our society.
This is definitely worth reading, but do make sure you bring your saltshaker -- full -- with you. The conclusions and analysis are sobering, but whether they pan out is of course open to question, as is the timeline.
Back in the 1990s when I was running MCSNet I was asked to attend a few meetings of a bunch of folks who are much smarter than I am -- and who were dedicating a fair bit of their brain power to this analysis. Essentially the premise boiled down to the carrying capacity on the planet for we humans on a long-term, sustainable basis. That wasn't precisely how they were looking at it, but it was the inexorable conclusion I reached about an hour into my association with them.
The way Policymic presents this is:
The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth.
Uh huh. The guys writing pieces like this seem to forget a few things, so let me remind everyone of them lest they get drowned out in the flower-children nonsense:
There is a substantial percentage of the population, perhaps even a supermajority, who will do as little as is possible to "get by." This is a serious problem because in order to "reduce inequality" one must take from those with more capability and give to those with less. This inevitably results in anyone in the group that will do as little as possible doing less than they did before, and then the cycle repeats. This is how the USSR and essentially all other socialist systems have failed through history, including, I remind everyone, Bradford's Mayflower group that nearly exterminated itself.
While technology is not a panacea there is one factor that has to be considered and rarely is -- energy is the lynchpin without which we immediately and precipitously return to a roughly 1500's-era lifestyle. There is no free lunch in this regard, and "renewable" energy sources are a crock in the main, because in most cases the end-to-end energy return poorly compares with the end-to-end energy investment. Solar, for example, sounds great right up until you start counting the energy required to mine the materials to make the solar cells and remediate all the environmental damage you do getting the material. I point out that the so-called "leaders" in this space, such as Tesla, would be bankrupt but for stealing from other people through tax credits and similar; see the first point for why this is a self-defeating set of policies.
We use liquid hydrocarbons not due to some jackbooted desire to destroy the environment but because they are the only known means by which you can store roughly 100,000 BTUs of energy in a container requiring only a bit more than a tenth of a cubic foot of space and a mass of less than 10lbs. A very fit individual can probably produce about 1/6th of a horsepower -- for a very short period of time. Your car requires about 20 horsepower continuously, or that of 120 fit men, to cruise on the highway, but those fit men would have to be replaced every 15-30 minutes at best were you to try to use human power for this endeavor. (As an interesting aside the most-efficient means of human transportation known today, in terms of energy efficiency, is a bicycle.)
On balance the most-likely to reproduce individuals are those who are subsidized to reproduce. We subsidize people with children who have no ability and/or desire to cover the cost of those children on their own via WIC, EITC and more. This is self-defeating behavior and yet it is part and parcel of the so-called "equality" that is being advanced here (again, see the first point for why.) If we don't deal with this problem the end point will likely include some form of eugenics, and that should be plenty of incentive for us to put a stop to that crap right now.
We have serious issues facing us; the idea that we can have ridiculously cheap energy, for example, is just plain false and yet we have built our nation around this lie to a large degree. However, what we can do is secure known-priced energy in a format that we believe will be reasonably-defensible for hundreds of years. The only means of doing so is nuclear, and thus far the best argument in that regard is made for molten-salt thorium-based reactors, as I have repeatedly argued for. We know they work at an experimental level because we built and ran one for several years at Oak Ridge. We also know that there are engineering challenges with them and costs, but this is true of all energy technologies.
At the same time we must stop pretending that agricultural "engineering" such as GMO crops is some sort of panacea. Nature finds a way and if we put our eggs in genetic non-diversity we are asking to take it long and hard when nature finds that way adverse to what we have selected for. There is a very good reason that natural diversity exists in the world; it increases the odds that a species will survive adverse events. We do serious harm to that premise when we engineer out diversity, and we've been doing that in spades over the last few decades when it comes to our foodstuffs. The odds of this coming back and biting us hard are quite significant, and if it happens we won't like the consequences one bit.
Finally we must put a stop to the subsidizing of those who insist on breeding like rabbits. You're certainly entitled to have all the children you'd like, but only those you can afford to raise unassisted. If we do not get this pattern under control we are asking for an outright disaster -- and we will get it. You're not going to realistically stop people from having sex; if it wasn't enjoyable none of us would be here. But what we can do is put an end to the perverse incentives for people to reproduce solely due to their ability to steal from others as a consequence of doing so -- and there are a hell of a lot of those people right here in the United States.
I am not in the "doomer" camp, but I do recognize that we have done a terribly-poor job when it comes to longer-run planning, particularly in the energy paradigm. The premise that natural gas fracking will save us, or shale will do so, is idiotic. While we have plenty of both the return on energy invested is falling and that presents a huge problem as the economics of recovery are driven by that ratio and cannot be altered.
But while I'm not a "doomer" I am deeply pessimistic -- primarily because what I've outlined here is seen as political and social poison.
If you doubt me try discussing any of this, especially the energy and social welfare policies, the next time you're hanging around having cocktails and see how well the topic is received.
My brother had his own business & employed about 65 people.
He always said:
ANT person can sign the back of the paycheck.
Only about 1 in 10,000 has the talent to sign the front of the paycheck.
ANT person”””’
ANY person
YES -Same BS that Walt Disney had planned for EPCOT. Experimental Planned Community Of Tomorrow,
This sustainable crap ultimately leads to Soylent Green.
I wonder how many dozen (hundreds?) of people this useless group represents. How many millions$ wasted on "feel good" useless studies about speculative unverifiable future events, using their useless degrees?
I wonder how a Gay African-American Lesbian Studies degree fits into the plan?
Why can't they study the probable fate of the Titanic? They might actually spend ten years and billions$ creating a computer model and maybe even get the answer right!
But I wouldn't bank on it.
They used to have an exhibit at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia where you could crank a generator and power three different loads: a small one (a flashlight bulb, I think), a medium one (a larger light bulb, maybe 10 watts) and a large one (not that large, maybe a 60-watt bulb).
It was amazing how much effort it took to light the 60-watt bulb, even for five or ten seconds. At that, most people couldn't light it "all the way" (so to speak).
Anyone with a brain couldn't fail to walk away from that exhibit without a feeling of thankfulness for the people who invented, developed, built, and maintain the electrical power system.
Of course, that was long, long ago. The Franklin Institute has now been dumbed down to such an extent that nothing more thought provoking than can be handled by a mentally retarded person is present. A crankable electric generator would, I'm sure, send the board of directors scattering in all directions. They might call out the Philly SWAT team to disarm it. They would undoubtedly evacuate the building, and maybe even set up a security barrier around the entire Ben Franklin parkway until the terrifying device was properly encased in concrete and carried off to be buried, preferably in New Jersey.
Back??? I wasn’t aware it went away. Vision 2020 Agenda 21 it’s everywhere and has bee for a very long time.
It could be worse.
It could lead to the rise of a Fascist Planner-O-Cracy, with Czars manipulating the smallest behavior of the individual, from cradle to grave, with delusional assurances, slogans and jingles, that the millennium has arrived.
Wait.
We already got two competing candidates.
A 1200-year-old version, and a 5-year-old version, competing for primacy.
...never mind...
The things he mentions in the article - “reduce economic inequality / fairer distribution of resources”, “reduce resource consumption / use renewable resources”, and “reduce population growth” - were all popular left-wing theses forty years ago when I was in college.
What goes around comes around, it seems.
That gobbledygook den of vipers needs to be eliminated pronto.
This may be the most critical issue of all. It seems that the seeds of our own destruction are set in motion either way.
It's a fairly simple grad student exercise in differential game theory.
The identification of the "Elite" as predator to the "Commoner" prey's income is rather provocative; shows the mindset. Applied Math as Bolshevism...
But there is truth to it, as all feudal societies revolve around "Elite" (er, thugs) schemes to do just that: steal earned wealth. Typically by taxation, which is always a thinly disguised protection racket.
Which in the end is funny. Because the foreigners who wrote this rather simplistic little simulation probably wanted to vilify private investors as the Predator, when in reality it's people in government...who have accumulated far more unearned wealth then the Capitalists can dream of.
We've been here before; there is a germ of truth to it, but reality is far more complex and multi-variate. The early 1970s were full of garbage coming from Paul Ehrlich and Carl Pope about Carrying Capacity; that's where Environmentalism as Marxism really made it big.
But people like Julian Simon fought back and showed that the simulations were juvenile and missed adaptations that would make better use of existing resources and even create new ones. We have seen all of that happen in the last 40 years.
The politically militant foreigners doing this little noodle missed all that, or are merely propagandists attempting to resurrect the vampire of anti-human enviro-marxism.
Yup. Next up, Overpopulation hysteria and a call for Evil Elits (um, "caucasians") to off themselves in the name of Gaia.
In the Eighteenth century Thomas Malthus said that the food supply would never keep up with population growth for mathematical reasons. He was wrong. Probably ninety percent of starvation was caused by politics, not population. Where there is a need there will be a supply. Probably the earth could support many times the present population. Our needs would still be filled as newer and better technologies would be continuously invented. So, we’re all going to die because we’re not doing what these authors say we should? In the ‘60’s we were heading into an ice age. By 1970 there would be little or no oil left. They had all us school kids scared of that an nuclear winter. The only thing I’m afraid of now is a Democrat in office.
#1 :"dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources"- U.N. Agenda 21, eliminating electric and fossil fuel dependancy
#2 : " ..and reducing population growth." - Margaret Sanger, abortion, birth control, and warfare
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