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.
Exactly true !
There are "elites " in every age and generation who 'know better than us on what we should be doing'
but who don't follow their own advice .. paging Al Gore , paging Al Gore ...
I think the long-term goal of the environmentalist is to have 90% of the population living in clusters of massive high-rise apartment buildings, partially powered by solar power, and that the private home will gradually be phased out except for the government/media/entertainment/corporate/scientific elites. A city of a million would consist of about 100 of these towers with about 500-800 hundred private homes or luxury condos for the elite. The Left has always been offended by the ownership of private property by the “unworthy” middle class.
The article could have ended right there, and been functionally complete to define the eternal fallacy.
Amazing, how an otherwise excellent analysis of the problem is clouded by the current social imperative to bow to the God Of PC.
A little editing makes the issue perfectly clear.
I don’t think the people who produced this report are “politically militant foreigners”.
Like any good bureaucrat they didn’t start the study until they knew what the study was supposed to prove.
One final thought - since when has NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center had anything directly to do with national socio-environmental synthesis other than on the orders of Washington based bureaucrats?
bkmk
A national research center funded through a grant to the University of Maryland, SESYNC is a resource for the scholarly community, facilitating innovative, cross-discipline research by providing a unique array of support and activities, as well as a physical collaborative space, to accelerate socio-environmental research and synthesis.
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.While this is not an invalid assumption, it relies on premises that may or may not be true. Doing as little as possible to "get by" is actually a superior trait; in my world it's called "doing minimum effort for maximum gain", also known as "working smart, not working hard". I work smart all the time. Why work hard when working smart will net you as good or even better result?
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.Currently. Currently. Never assume that there won't be technological breakthroughs on energy. There are a ton of people working on renewables, especially the US military in conjunction with the DOE (easy enough to figure why too).
Finally we must put a stop to the subsidizing of those who insist on breeding like rabbits.To do that requires some serious MANDATING of birth control and abortion and there is NO WAY that a good Christian is going to endorse that. So you can forget it.
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 paradigmIn ALL paradigms, buddy. And that was started back in the 1970s with the "shareholder value" thing. All short-term, all quarterlies, and no real planning for the future. Only for the now.
In the Eighteenth century Thomas Malthus said that the food supply would never keep up with population growth for mathematical reasons. He was wrongThe only reason he was wrong though is because of the British & Scottish Agricultural Revolutions and the Green Revolution of the 20th century. He couldn't forsee our technological advances.
NASA’s most important mission is to make Muslims feel good about themselves. -Charle Bolden
Now they want us all to be equally miserable living in third world standards.
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