Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
If there is a Pulitzer Booby Prize for stupidity, waste no time in awarding it to The New York Times’ Monday feature, The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion. The former “newspaper of record” wants us to assume now that the sky’s the limit for human activity on the planet earth. Problemo cancelled. The article and accompanying video was actually prepared by a staff of 23 journalists. Give the Times another award for rounding up so many credentialed idiots for one job.
Apart from just dumping on Stanford U. biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968), this foolish “crisis report” strenuously overlooks virtually every blossoming fiasco around the world. This must be what comes of viewing the world through your cell phone.
One main contention in the story is that the problem of feeding an exponentially growing population was already solved by the plant scientist Norman Borlaug’s “Green Revolution,” which gave the world hybridized high-yielding grain crops. Wrong. The “Green Revolution” was much more about converting fossil fuels into food. What happens to the hypothetically even larger world population when that’s not possible anymore? And did any of the 23 journalists notice that the world now has enormous additional problems with water depletion and soil degradation? Or that reckless genetic modification is now required to keep the grain production stats up?
No, they didn’t notice because the Times is firmly in the camp of techno-narcissism, the belief that the diminishing returns, unanticipated consequences, and over-investments in technology can be “solved” by layering on more technology — an idea whose first cousin is the wish to solve global over-indebtedness by generating more debt. Anyone seeking to understand why the public conversation about our pressing problems is so dumb, seek no further than this article, which explains it all.
Climate change, for instance, is only mentioned once in passing, as though it was just another trashy celebrity sighted at a “hot” new restaurant in the Meatpacking District. Also left out of the picture are the particulars of peak oil (laughed at regularly by the Times, which proclaimed the US “Saudi America” some time back), degradation of the ocean and the stock of creatures that live there, loss of forests, the political instability of whole regions that can’t support exploded populations, and the desperate migrations of people fleeing these desolate zones.
As averred to above, the Times also has no idea about the relation of finance to resources. The banking problems we see all over the world are a direct expression of the limits to growth, specifically the limits to debt creation. We can’t continue to borrow from the future to pay for our comforts and conveniences today because we have no real conviction that these debts can ever be repaid. We certainly wish we could, and the central bankers running the money system would like to pretend that we could by making negligible the cost of borrowing money and engaging in pervasive accounting fraud. But that has only served to cripple the operation of markets and pervert the meaning of interest rates — and, really, as a final result, to destroy any sense of consequence among the people running things everywhere.
The crackup of that financial system will be the signal failure of the collapse of the current economic regime. The financial system is the most fragile of all the systems we depend on (though the others do not lack fragility). This is the reason, by the way, that oil prices are so low, despite the fact that the cost of producing oil has never been higher. The oil customers are going broke even faster than the oil producers. Does anybody doubt that the standard of living in the USA is falling, despite all our cell phone apps?
The basic fact of the matter is that the energy bonanza of the past 200-odd years produced a matrix of complex systems, as well as a hypertrophy in human population. These complex systems — banking, agri-biz, hop-scotching industrialization, global commerce, Eds & Meds, Happy Motoring, commercial aviation, suburbia — have all reached their limits to growth, and those limits are expressing themselves in growing global disorder and universal bankruptcy. Do the authors of The New York Times report think that the oil distribution situation is stable?
There were two terror bombings in Saudi Arabia the past two weeks. Did anyone notice the significance of that? Or that the May 29th incident was against a Shiite mosque, or that the Shia population of Saudi Arabia is concentrated in the eastern province of the kingdom where nearly all of the oil production is concentrated? (Or that the newly failed state of neighboring Yemen is about 40 percent Shiite?) Have any of the 23 genius-level reporters at The New York Times tried to calculate what it would mean to the humming global economy if Arabian oil came off the market for only a few weeks?
Paul Ehrlich was right, just a little off in his timing and in explicating with precision the unanticipated consequences of limitless growth. But isn’t it in the nature of things unanticipated that they generally are not?
The third World Made By Hand novel
!! Is available !!
(The Fourth and final is near completion)
“Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist
My local indie booksellers… Battenkill Books (Autographed by the Author) … or Northshire Books…
or Amazon…
JK once again sees error and simply adds to it.
1. The world is running out of NOTHING. Nearly limitless power is available via nuclear systems “we” simply refuse to use. Current reactors were originally intended to process and reprocess fuel and use it until it was entirely depleted. Instead, we have only systems that use the first pass, leaving highly radioactive (but useful, if it were simply reprocessed and used again) waste to accumulate, melt down and pour into the sea.
2. The problem is that humans in large numbers produce toxic social systems. We are designed to operate in families, clans and tribes. Every indication exists that once human social systems rise above a certain level, all hell breaks loose. THIS is the problem humanity faces, not a depletion of land or energy.
3. The human population of Earth will be limited by social system toxicity, not a shortage of resources as predicted by Erlich. It will be warfare, or behaviors that cause a collapse in birth rates (homosexuality, porn, 3rd wave feminism and other like vices are gutting the normal interest in pair-bonding and family) that limit the size of human populations.
I doubt there will still be 7 billion people around 100 years from now. I hope there will be 70,000,000. If JK gets his “world made by hand,” it would probably cause 6 billion people to die off.
He seems to have NO IDEA just how fragile is the system that produces food, antibiotics, surgical instruments, obstetrical equipment, or (above all) effective sanitary sewer systems, without which human populations would collapse in disease and death.
Kunstler needs to be more specific . Converting fossil fuels to food?
Is that the system that takes nitrogen out of the air and puts it into the ground as fertilizer?
“The world is running out of NOTHING. Nearly limitless power is available via nuclear systems “we” simply refuse to use” ————- dc. sunsets
A quick search shows that at CURRENT rates of consumption, that there’s 200 years of uranium left.
Coal, natural gas, phosphorus, and oil will all be gone within 200 years at current rates of consumption.
And no one knows the availability of necessary rare earth elements — such as scandium and terbium, 95% of which are currently supplied by China.
Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying. But, logic indicates that using up a non-renewable resource can only mean one thing …. eventually it will be gone, forever.
Mark
Farmers need oil for fertilizer, production (unless they develop nuke powered tractors) and transportation.
Mark
The process that converts nitrogen gas to water soluble nitrates is
http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/haberbosch.html
Stucky, if uranium was actually used to completion I suspect that figure would be a 1000 years, not 200. Current “spent” fuel has only about 10% of its useful energy expended. That was one of my points. Lest you forget, there’s more energy in the thorium going up coal smokestacks than there was in the coal. Waste, not depletion, is the problem.
Second, hydrocarbons on Planet Earth are not biological in origin, else why are they found on celestial objects that have never supported life? The theory of abiotic oil is clearly correct, and thus the entire “running out of it” meme is silly. Whoever foisted the notion that oil & gas are the product of organic matter plus millions of years has to be laughing his ass off at how popular such a delusion became. (It reminds me of H.L. Mencken’s claim that the first bathtub in America was installed in the White House…a hilarious story of how stupid people are, and how they “re-tweet” stuff that is false on its face.)
The problems we face with energy are entirely a product of politics, which is the same thing as what I ranted about in the first place: too many people in too-large of aggregates.
As for food, imagine if instead of spending billions on Kentucky Bluegrass and Red Fescue, people raised vegetables on their 1/4 acre? It’s really not that difficult to imagine. People don’t do it because it’s not in fashion, that’s all.
There are NO SHORTAGES except those created by choice.
The Midwest is covered with farms producing corn and soybean for purposes at most tangential to human food consumption. North America could be fed using a tiny fraction of that land planted in crops meant for direct human consumption, and the rest of the land could be used for pasture so production of beef, dairy, sheep, chickens and such would be just fine, it would just be decentralized instead of run by a few massive corporations.
Our problem isn’t what we don’t know, it’s what we THINK WE KNOW that just ain’t so.
” … if uranium was actually used to completion I suspect that figure would be a 1000 years, not 200.” ——–dc. sunsets
I don’t mean to be a smart-ass, but that proves my point …. you’re pushing it out another 800 years, so running out takes longer … but running out is a given.
Is silver abiotic? Gold? All nonrenewable elements we take from the earth will eventually be gone. Just a matter of time.
Hey, I did a serious post on Abiotic Oil quite a while back. I was met with derision and scorn. I wish you better luck.
Stucky,
If we have enough uranium to last 1,000 years, we’d discover plenty of other ways to power things. Look what we’ve learned the last 1,000 years. We could fuel civilization with controlled fusion perhaps or space-based solar arrays. I agree with DC that a bigger trend than depletion of resources is the vanishing willingness to reproduce (or the adoption of extreme feminist philosophies that effectively preclude reproduction). This is true even of such countries as Iran & Mexico that are barely at replacement levels of total fertility. Europeans are being replaced by Arabs and North Africans, but even among developing countries the young don’t want large families – if they want a family at all. Personal autonomy is valued above reproducing. We have the illusion of population growth in the US only because of immigration (same legal, most illegal).
dc, I second everything you wrote, the only thing I would add is to point #3 in your first post, the (intentional) dispersion of endocrine disrupters, toxic chemicals, GMOs, etc., designed to bring about the population crash that the Overlords so ardently desire. The overpopulation meme is a truly dangerous idea.
Anarcho,
I’d go along with endocrine disrupters if I got to pick where they’re disbursed. I’d drop them on ISIS. Obama (and Soros) would probably drop them on Norway.
Another thought about plummeting fertility rates. Ireland just approved gay marriage with a 62% majority of the vote. Think about that. Ireland. Ireland, by the way, has a total fertility rate of 2.00% (which is less than the est. 2.2% that is replacement). 2.00% would only be replacement level if no one died before reproducing and every single person (on average) reproduced 2 people. Unlikely in a country that has had the social change Ireland has had over the last 3 decades. The days of the 13 child Irish family (we had several such in our parish when I was a kid) are long gone.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html
Any thoughts on the future seem to be tethered to a misconception, which is; What kind of people are going to be running things going forward: Intelligent or Moron? Yes, I know that we have plenty of morons running things today and things still work, but that just reinforces my point. I’m not talking about in 50 years or a 100, but in several hundred years. The world population then will most likely be some mongrel combination of tan and darker skinned people. The White race will be few in number, if they will exist at all. My guess is that we will be extinct in 400 years.
I’m not saying that only White people can trigger progress, what I am saying is that Humanity has come very far, very quickly because of the genius of the Whites. Technology that the Chinese (and others) sat on for centuries, and in addition to the amazing discoveries and engineering Whites did, lighted the world. But our light is dimming, and it looks like the morons are going to out breed the more intelligent. So, because of that, the future could, and very probably will, be a Earth teeming with low IQ people who digress further back in intelligence as each generation passes until they reach some dismal plateau of savagery.
Big cities powered with nuclear energy, spaceflight, even flight itself, and many other wonders of White-created civilization will be a distant memory in those future times. The people will be little more than hunter-gathers and farmers, poking through the ruins of ancient cities searching for bits of metal to fashion into spear points.
Never again will Man reach to the Heavens. All that will be left of Mankind will be brown morons pointlessly wandering around the landscape, looking for food and murdering each other, existing just for the sake of existing. Perhaps some crude art. Perhaps.
So don’t sweat what kind of fuel our descendants will be using. They’ll be burning wood.
He lost me when he wrote ‘climate change’. We used to just call it ‘the weather’.
The climate has been changing for as long as the planet has been around. Humans and other species have adapted, moved or died out as a result of regional climate fluctuations.
The end is not nigh. Change, however (not the hope kind) is a constant. Adapt or face the consequences. And quite wining about it. Ya – I’m talking to you California!
Francis
I heard the Japanese aren’t interested in sex anymore. No need for endocrine disrupters just more video games and iPhones