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Posted on 11/26/2012 8:51:24 PM PST by Lorianne
Last year, legendary investor Jeremy Grantham of GMO published a treatise on exploding commodity prices.
He also offered a startlingly depressing outlook for the future of humanity.
Grantham believes the world has undergone a permanent "paradigm shift" in which the number of people on Earth has finally and permanently outstripped the planet's ability to support us.
The phenomenon of ever-more humans using a finite supply of natural resources cannot continue forever, Grantham says--and the prices of metals, hydrocarbons (oil), and food are now beginning to reflect that.
Grantham believes that the planet can only sustainably support about 1.5 billion humans, versus the 7 billion on Earth right now (heading to 10-12 billion). For all of history except the last 200 years, the human population has been controlled via the limits of the food supply. Grantham thinks that, eventually, the same force will come into play again.
The hope of the optimists, of course, is that science will find a solution to this problem, the way it has for the past 150 years.
Let's hope so.
In the meantime, here's a snapshot of Grantham's argument, along with his key points at the end.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Even as we speak Captain Sir Elton John and an intrepid rear admiral are planning a trip to Uranus hoping to root out mineral rich assterrhoids which would ... this isn’t going anywhere.
Never mind.
More sensible to mine Venus for resources (with high temperature robots, to be sure — resurgence of thermionic tube technology anybody?) than to try to move there. Unless maybe the sun decides to shrink.
I ain't cooking for 'em.
I'll stay here in this dump that isn't smouldering or radioactive (today).
I've seen rivers on fire in my childhood. It was ugly.
Today, the air is cleaner, animal populations are increasing, hunting is getting better to the point that Texas has a problem with feral hogs.
I think I'll stay here, and snag some resources from the solar system if required. ;)
/johnny
Well there goes my time-share.
/johnny
What a load of crap!
And after all, if the oracle says people will be partying right up to the finish, that doesn’t suggest something intolerably horrible is going to beset before that point. I like a lot of the astrological/cosmological ideas of Hugh Ross, http://www.reasons.org even if some of his projections seem a little too tidily tied up with ribbons. (I will cheerfully confess to being an old-earth creationist, though.) Modern science, when not driven by selective agendas that give us stuff like modern global-warmism, keeps succeeding in revealing more and more what a wonder it is that we inhabit.
It is not 7 billion people, most of whom live in abject poverty anyway, it is the few tens of millions in developed nations that are killing their economies with a mountain of debt and socialist governments.
We have peaked. Our leaders lack the will to do anything but buy votes out of the public treasury. We start wars, but for all of our might we can't seem to convincingly win them. The barbarians will only attack more frequently now, and our response will be ever more lethargic.
The disaster will be of our own making. Whatever external event will just be the background.
People who use the phrase, “ biblical proportion” probably haven’t read the bible much.
That DOES seem to suggest acts of God more than acts of man...!
What he’s seeing is MASSIVE money printing thats going on around the world that is causing price hikes in food and commodities
You folks in the cities need to prepare for riots on a scale never seen in this country. Your “union cops” will do everything they can to protect themselves.
Yes - in a 20 years we will think out lack of knowledge astounding!
Mel
And will just as enthusiastically be chasing after the new world panic du jour.
Time Magazine. Mom insisted that I read the article. We were gonna die.
Frozen. Corpscicles. Ice to the equator.
They wanna impress me, they need to predict the drought in the summer of 2011, and the wet, early spring we had here in 2012.
I'll stick with watching the mesquite blossoms and oak trees.
/johnny
Source?
,,even though they create the oxygen we need. But what the hell, once the forests are gone along with oxygen, we will find other “solutions,” right?
Maybe the phytoplankton which are in the top 300 ft. of 70% the world's surface might like to weigh in...
We are a fundamentally insane species.
No argument there...
” For all of history except the last 200 years, the human population has been controlled via the limits of the food supply. Grantham thinks that, eventually, the same force will come into play again.”
He’s delusional - he’s also a “sustainable” envirowacko according to his bio in wikipedia.
If he took five seconds to do a bit of research he would discover that the countries that have the most available food supplies (the developed countries) are all dropping in population. Famine is no longer the result of inability to produce food but of despotic social systems.
The problem nowdays is not famine but obesity. And the best population controller has been wealth.
Like Buffet, he may be a great investor but a very poor judge of human nature. They both should stick to what they know and stay away from social policy.
Of course the sky is in a perpetual state of falling and Chicken Littleism rules!
Mel
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