Arachnid wrote: Not talking about Left versus Right here either. It's just logic, we cannot grow our economy forever.
Sustainability is not achievable, a noble goal but short sited...like the trendy Wall Street protests...
People keep saying this, but I'm not so certain that it is correct. And if the site is too short, buy a bigger one.
We've been running out of coal, copper, iron, oil, whatnot for centuries, and still it never happens. Modern manufacturing tends to use less and less resources to produce a specific product, and since most products have an expiration date, they will eventually become scrap that we can recycle, and by constantly fine tuning manufacturing we can produce more from less and have a growing economy even with a fixed amount of commodities. The only reason I can see that we would eventually run out of commodities is if we refuse to recycle and instead start using rockets to send all scrap into outer space, and I'm pretty sure there are very few proponents of this.
What is sustainability anyway? To me it seems that all these theories are based on some zero sum theory where the same amount of resources and labour are forever linked to the same outcome. I don't subscribe to that.
Between 1950 and 2000, during the so called "second agricultural revolution of modern times", U.S. agricultural productivity rose fast, especially due to the development of new technologies. For exemple, the average yield of corn rose from 39 bushels to 153 bushels per acre (+292%). Now, most of the third world have not even reached those 1950 levels of productivity! By funding irrigation of areas that today are mostly desert and by educating people and spreading modern farming technology, I'm pretty sure we could easily produce twice the amount of food that we do today. Heck, 80% of Sweden is forest. If we had to focus on food production we could probably produce ten times what we do now.
And contrary to popular belief, the global population is not goint to grow at an exponential rate forever. In fact, birth rates peaked in the mid 90's and are now falling. The reason no one seems to have noticed is that thanks to better health care, people live longer, so the total population will still grow for another 50 years or so before stabilising and then possibly starting to drop. In two thirds of countries women today on average give birth to less than two children, which means that the long term trend is a shrinking population. That coupled to the very skewered proportion between boys and girls born in places like China and India will only further strengthen this trend.
If we were to live like hunters/gatherers, the earth could probably only feed less than a billion people, but thanks to agriculture and specialisation of trades we already manage to feed seven billion, and I'm sure we can fit in twice as many if necessary. Most likely the global population will peak somewhere between ten and twelve though, and then start declining.
Arachnid wrote: Time to eat the family dog
Thanks, but I think I'll pass.
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). The worlds resources are finite Per. This we know, if we keep our world population to today's levels, maybe, just maybe we can recycle and develop renewables to sustain us but we are not doing that. The worlds pop just popped at what? 7 Billion? It is estimated to double by the end of the century...you do the math...there is no way in hell we can sustain anything....I said it before and I'll say it again...change is a come'n...and it's gonna be a dousy...
