[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', ' ')first, it's less efficient, and thus will be MORE resource intensive;

[LoneSnark]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he problem, as I see it, is not just that modern agricultural practices involve many fossil fuel inputs on the cultivation side, but remember there are huge fossil fuel inputs involved in getting the product from field to market.

[Ludi]

In my locale, neither the rails nor the rights of way exist. You can still see where the train used to run, but the train is gone and it ain't comin' back.

[ReserveGrowthRulz]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', '
')
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'U')sing exponential increases as explained by Bartlett, its quite easy to generate reasonable increases in whatever within reasonable timeframes.

[LoneSnark]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n my locale, neither the rails nor the rights of way exist. You can still see where the train used to run, but the train is gone and it ain't comin' back.

[Tyler_JC]

RGR,

You are ignoring the law of diminishing returns.

The 21% growth rate of renewable energy will not continue indefinitely.

If we pretend that 21% growth can continue indefinitely, by 2050 the average American would have well over 300MW of electricity at his disposal...far above what anyone could possibly consume.

That being said, even if you decelerate that growth rate extremely rapidly (as I did with that second graph), renewables start to soak up a rather large chunk of the energy picture very quickly.

Another important note is that most renewable power projects have not yet reached the point of maximum production efficiency. Production levels will rise, efficiency will increase, and price will drop as we start to ramp up production.

As for those who think that increasing investment in our renewable energy infrastructure hurts the economy.

GDP = consumption + investment + (government spending) + (exports − imports), or, GDP = C + I + G + (X-M)

[dohboi]

To my suggestion that people be limited to one person after age 35, Monte wrote:

"Biological suicide. You cannot use birth control to reduce the population quickly. Think of the demographics. You'd end up with the opposite of a baby boom. The majority of the population would become old. The breeding population would become too small to avoid inbreeding and defects. We are already seeing the socio-economic effects of this in countries with low fertility rates. Eroding tax base, no workers, etc. They must be a balance between births and deaths for stable population."

Thanks for this thoughtful response, but as you would say, what is the option? You have few converts to your planned die off. Isn't it more acceptible to restrict birth than to kill (or even "let die") billions of people? Granted that none of the measures needed are acceptible to most because most do not yet see the dire consequences that are upon us, or they are willing to remain irresponsible.

Look, there is no "solution" that is even remotely "scalable" that is itself problem free. I don't know whether one-child-after 35 is certain biological suicide, but as you have rightly pointed out, most other scenarios are suicide for the human species and (near total) ecocide for the planet. Frankly I think it is quite clear that we have lost the right to continue as we have on this planet, and even if a policy spells extinction for humans, if it gives some chance of slowing the meltdown of life on earth that is now underway.

btu said somewhere that ethics based on narcissism is illigitimate. He was talking about individual narcissism, but I think we have to examine our human-centered narcissism.

Would my policy be problem free. Of course not. We have totally f'd everything up beyond all recognition. No way forward is without major negative consequences. The question is, to my way of seeing things, which way involve the least harm to the living planet.

Massive wars would destroy not just humans but much of the rest of the wild life that is still hanging on by a thread (besides its many other problems). Other forms of "increasing the death rate" at the scales you are talking about are just not going to be acceptable to pretty much anybody, and are likely to have other negative consequences.

A one-child-at-35 policy at least seems equitable and crashes the pop. You may say it screws up demographics...but this is just the necessary result of what we have already done. If you pile five hundre pounds of bricks on a man's head, and then, when he can no longer hold them and starts to tip them off in a direction which will cause the least, but still some, harm, you can't blame the man. It is the people who piled the bricks on that are to blame. As you have said here repetedly and eloquently, we have created an incredibly unballanced situation which is going to reballance either in a totally horrific way or in a somewhat less than totally horrific way. (Sorry if this is too different from what you intend, but that's my take on it.) I don't think we should be too ready to discard plans because they have problems--all plans have problems.

"We are already seeing the socio-economic effects of this in countries with low fertility rates."

Right, so should they do everything they can to increase birth rates? Of course not. Are they going to do anything to increase death rates. I really doubt it. They have to live with the consequences of the idiocy of their rapid increase in births, as do we all.

And I don't see why inbreeding need be a problem. I thought this was a problem with close relatives interbreeding, and there won't be any siblings in the first genreation or cousins in the second. Perhaps you can enlighten me here.

Anyway, thank for your fervor and your grasp of the enormity of the problem.

[Tyler_JC]

The "birth defects" or "inbreeding" problem is a red herring.

If humanity were reduced to only the city of Boston, less than 600,000 people, we could add another billion people to the planet without running into the problems of inbreeding.

One billion wicked awesome Red Sox fans.

A population of a few hundred thousand is genetically stable.

And we are no where near that level.

Go Ahead, Kiss Your Cousin

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n Paris in 1876 a 31-year-old banker named Albert took an 18-year-old named Bettina as his wife. Both were Rothschilds, and they were cousins. According to conventional notions about inbreeding, their marriage ought to have been a prescription for infertility and enfeeblement.
In fact, Albert and Bettina went on to produce seven children, and six of them lived to be adults. Moreover, for generations the Rothschildfamily had been inbreeding almost as intensively as European royalty, without apparent ill effect. Despite his own limited gene pool, Albert, for instance, was an outdoorsman and the seventh person ever to climb the Matterhorn. The American du Ponts practiced the same strategy of cousin marriage for a century. Charles Darwin, the grandchild of first cousins, married a first cousin. So did Albert Einstein.
In our lore, cousin marriages are unnatural, the province of hillbillies and swamp rats, not Rothschilds and Darwins. In the United States they are deemed such a threat to mental health that 31 states have outlawed first-cousin marriages. This phobia is distinctly American, a heritage of early evolutionists with misguided notions about the upward march of human societies. Their fear was that cousin marriages would cause us to breed our way back to frontier savagery—or worse. "You can't marry your first cousin," a character declares in the 1982 play Brighton Beach Memoirs. "You get babies with nine heads."
So when a team of scientists led by Robin L. Bennett, a genetic counselor at the University of Washington and the president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, announced that cousin marriages are not significantly riskier than any other marriage, it made the front page of The New York Times. The study, published in the Journal of Genetic Counseling last year, determined that children of first cousins face about a 2 to 3 percent higher risk of birth defects than the population at large. To put it another way, first-cousin marriages entail roughly the same increased risk of abnormality that a woman undertakes when she gives birth at 41 rather than at 30. Banning cousin marriages makes about as much sense, critics argue, as trying to ban childbearing by older women.
But the nature of cousin marriage is far more surprising than recent publicity has suggested. A closer look reveals that moderate inbreeding has always been the rule, not the exception, for humans. Inbreeding is also commonplace in the natural world, and contrary to our expectations, some biologists argue that this can be a very good thing. It depends in part on the degree of inbreeding.

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', ' ')first, it's less efficient, and thus will be MORE resource intensive;

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('LoneSnark', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he problem, as I see it, is not just that modern agricultural practices involve many fossil fuel inputs on the cultivation side, but remember there are huge fossil fuel inputs involved in getting the product from field to market.

[dohboi]

Thanks for the article and comment, Tyler. I thought I had read something like that before. The potential genetic threat with 35-year-old moms that btu pointed out is that aged eggs are more likely to have mutations. But lot's of things can cause mutations, and a healthy life style probably does more to reduce this risk than adding a few years to the egg's life does to increase them.

So here's my powerdown plan (though I prefer the term "humbledown"):

one child per couple but only after 35,

severe restrictions in energy and resource use (say, down to well below the "one world" level on the www.myfootprint.org survey),

moratorium on new coal plants and rapid decommissioning of existing ones (James Hansen has really been focusing on this lately),

large and increasing carbon taxes, with rationing of fossil fuels, rapidly reducing allowed quantities used,

but mostly a change from looking at ways to expand human power over nature to looking at ways to restrict and limit human power over nature.

Fortunately I have a magic wand which will make this all happen now...oops, I must have forgotten it somewhere

[LoneSnark]

^ Interesting. Well, if you ever attain political power I will raise up an army against you in the name of Liberty and Justice. God willing, we shall defeat your tyranny (I seem to say this a lot on this message board).

[yesplease]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'T')he median of estimates Monte cites is actually 2- 5 billion.

http://www.ilea.org/leaf/richard2002.html


In my opinion, as safe carrying capacity would probably be 3 billion or less, but we have to work with the numbers we have (short of actively killing billions of people).

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesplease', ' ')Food production otoh, while still wasteful and destructive imo, doesn't waste orders of magnitude more than it produces,

[ReserveGrowthRulz]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ReserveGrowthRulz', ' ')Trying your old strawman tricks on me again?

[ReserveGrowthRulz]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesplease', '
')
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', '1')0 billion is 7 to 8 beyond carrying capacity.

[yesplease]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'I')ndustrial agriculture uses 5 -10 calories per 1 calorie produced.

[ReserveGrowthRulz]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', '
')
To take a shot at bringing this topic back to the original scalability discussion, perhaps it is ultimately the industrialization of food production that facilitates population growth, and in the same way that coal and oil fueled the explosion of industrialization, the scarcity of fossil fuels will choke off industrial expansion, and with it the ability to grow vast amounts of food and deliver it to hungry populations thousands and thousands of miles away.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesplease', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', 'U')sing what source of energy other than solar.

Solar-fossil fuels does not equal solar+fossil fuels.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesplease', 'B')ut it doesn't use a tenth of the food it creates. That, and we don't have to use excessive amounts of fossil fuels, sustainable organic food production has marginally smaller yields per are with significantly less fossil fuel use. Fossil fuel based agriculture is only cheaper as long as we don't account for all the externalities with it's production and allow those to be passed on to the rest of the world.