Similar things were predicted in the 70s but new sources of energy and improvements in productivity invalidated those predictions. Obviously at some point limits will kick in (unless we can expand to other planets) but what to do about that is more of a political question than a scientific one. I personally think it is more appealing to attempt expanding the limits, as we've done in the past, than to pre-emptively adopt austerity measures to live within estimated limits.
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I petition that the most pertinent predictions from the 70s came with works such as 'Future shock': there is "too much change in too short a period of time" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock ) and the "small is beautiful" motto, which were inherited from a more generic analysis published by L. Kohr ~20 years before ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy )
In a few words: there is too much of everything (size, density, speed, frequency...): no human group can anymore understand the current state of affairs quickly and correctly enough to be able to predict and therefore to plan adequately.
In such a light the PLAN proposed by the authors may difficult to pursue.
> Similar things were predicted in the 70s but new sources of energy and improvements in productivity invalidated those predictions.
ok, cool. So you've identified the limits (energy and productivity).
Are you sure productivity has grown? Is this growth sustainable?
For example, agriculture. Highly dependent on rapidly disappearing resources Like i.e. dirt. If you look at erosion rates in the US, we are on track to run out of soil by end of century. The petro-chemical fueled "green revolution" exhausts and kills biodiversity, leading to soil death in a century-- and we are 50 years into this. Water. See "US Drought Monitor".
So have we really achieved long-term (> 100 year) productivity improvements in agriculture?
> For example, agriculture.
I suppose this is not only an example, but probably the most critical type of productivity when determining how big of a population our planet can sustain.
> So have we really achieved long-term (> 100 year) productivity improvements in agriculture?
If you look back over the past 100 years we definitely have. If you look back over the past 60 years, yields of modern agriculture have tripled. Looking forward will always be speculation.
> For example, agriculture. Highly dependent on rapidly disappearing resources Like i.e. dirt.
I'm not disputing that such effects are going on in many places. Still, for productivity not only slow down but to actually go down, you need pretty strong effect sizes for such issues.
> Water. See "US Drought Monitor".
This is a factor that is harder to compensate for by fertilizers and modifications to farming practices. And some locations (possibly the US and even more likely, China) may be hit by this. As temperatures rise, more water is likely to evaporate from the world's oceans, though, and it has to come down somewhere. But that may be elsewhere, such as Central Asia, Canada or the Middle East.
I think part of the issue is how willing we are to increase our energy production. In dry, warm climates, solar is likelty to become quite cheap eventually. In other locations, I believe nuclear is our best bet (though wind is maybe more popular with many). If we're able to produce enough energy, we can produce most of the phosphates, nitrates and even de-salinated water that is needed for farming.
Personally I have relatively high faith that human ingenuity will provide technological answers to most such problems caused by our environment. I have way greater fear that war or similar conflicts may cause us to exterminate each other, or even that some day, AI will take over completely.
> I have way greater fear that war or similar conflicts may cause us to exterminate each other, or even that some day, AI will take over completely.
It's not like the energy/resource crunch is a totally separate problem to war. Together with climate change it is only going to increase the likelihood for war. It's kinda already happening in the the Middle East / Africa (I'm saying kinda because it's not the only reason for war...people are messed up...but it's not helping).
> If we're able to produce enough energy, we can produce most of the phosphates, nitrates
That's a big if yes? And even if, is the whole supply chain for modern agriculture sustainable? Are all fertilizers and material used renewable or are they coming out of finite earth resources? If it's finite - how long have we got? I'm not claiming to have all the answers but I just started looking at everything through this lens a few months ago ...and it's not going away.
> Are all fertilizers and material used renewable or are they coming out of finite earth resources?
Nitrogen is about 75% of the earth's atmosphere and potassium and phosphorus make up 2.6 and 0.1% of the Earth's crust, so we have plenty of all of them. To turn them into most of the common fertilizers, we need energy (and water, which is plentiful for this purpose).
And atoms don't go away (with the exception of atoms used for nuclear power). All we do is to recombine them. Some of these recombinations release energy (burning fuels) while some require energy as input.
Some elements may be very rare and difficult to extract (from sea water, for instance) except when found in deposits of high consentration. But first of all, N, P and K are not among those, and for those who are, extracting them from other sources simply means more energy is needed.
>> > If we're able to produce enough energy,
> That's a big if yes?
There is enough uranium on earth to cover our energy needs for a very long time. Way before that happens, we should be able to use Thorium or fusion. In addition, there are massive amounts of solar energy that goes untapped. The main limitation, even now, is human labor, and the fact that other sources of energy require less effort to leverage.
> It's not like the energy/resource crunch is a totally separate problem to war.
Not completely separate, but it is also not the case that war is a deterministic result of problems surrounding energy and resources. Even if we never expierience severe problems with energy and resoures, war is still possible, simply because some old man wants to be seen as a "great man" before he dies. Conversely, it is quite possible to navigate challenges with resources without war, by learning to co-exist peacefully.
Also, there is a third element, namely human and cultural capital. One indicator of this is the "workforce participation rate". One challenge of long lasting prosperity, is that an increasing percentage of the population stop contributing to the economy. Partly because of increased life spans, partly because they have personal savings that allow them to retire and partly because the system may collect inefficiencies and forms of corruption over time. (Just to list a few).
Some fraction of the population has the ability to be immensly productive, due to factors such as education, talent, opportunity, motivation, dedication and luck. Others are only marginally productive, while some will produce a lot less than they consume.
Generally, the relative frequencies of these groups is a much bigger influence on the affluence of a society than the availability of natural resources. This is linked to the fact that the production and optimal utilization of energy is primarily limited by (qualified) human labor, as stated above.
Nitrogen is only one ingredient, what about the others phosporus and potassium? If it was so readily available why did the war in the Ukraine affect the fertilizers market? Also what about soil degradation...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus
In the top 5 phosphorus producers are China, Russia, Morocco and Jordan. Sounds super stable.
> Way before that happens, we should be able to use Thorium or fusion.
I hope we can but it's not a given and no one knows the likelihood. Bigger VC investments are finally being poured into energy but nuclear fission and fusion are not new concepts - we haven't been able to do anything with them at scale yet.
> I hope we can but it's not a given and no one knows the likelihood. Bigger VC investments are finally being poured into energy but nuclear fission and fusion are not new concepts - we haven't been able to do anything with them at scale yet.
If we're willing to use uranium, we have enough energy there for a few hundred years (even if extracting it gets somewhat more expensive over time, it will take a while before the fuel becomes more expensive than hydrocarbons). And let's say we use 40/40/20 solar/uranium/other renewables, we can double that or more.
I'm pretty confident we will be able to leverage some other energy source before that time.
> Nitrogen is only one ingredient, what about the others phosporus and potassium?
I did cover that, above.
> If it was so readily available why did the war in the Ukraine affect the fertilizers market?
Primarily because the most popular chemical processes for creating ammonium is to use natural gas to bind the nitrogen. (It carries the hydrogen needed as well as the energy, and is cheap when natural gas is cheap.)
But if you don't have natural gas, you can take the hydrogen from somewhere else (like water) as long as you have the energy needed.
A key insight into agriculture is that the main reason we spread our farms out over massive areas of land is because it is simply more economical. If you think about it from first principles, farming outdoors has major flaws the biggest of which is seasonality. Most crops mature in a handful of months but must be grown only at specific times of the year in order to maximize yield. Doing this out in the open puts you at the mercy of nature. Besides the limited growing season you also have to deal with losses due to weather, pests, competing plants (weeds), and other local conditions like drought or soil quality. The only reason we do it is because it's cheap. It requires less initial cost to set up and less energy input.
If you were to redesign the process you could conceivably build massive greenhouses to control conditions. If you had surplus energy you could also actively heat, cool and light these greenhouses. From a quick look, greenhouse conditions can produce 15 times more yield per acre. They reduce wastage by a comparably large amount as well since half of produce is thrown away due to cosmetic blemishes. They would also drastically reduce the amount of fertilizer and pesticide needed. I think you could drive yields even higher with round the clock lighting, studies as well as practical experience from farmers in northern territories have shown that longer daylight hours allow plants to mature much more rapidly.
An ideal farming setup to me would look like hectares of greenhouses located next to a nuclear power plant that can provide heated water for keeping them warm and cheap power for cooling and lighting.
> The petro-chemical fueled "green revolution" exhausts and kills biodiversity, leading to soil death in a century
Interesting. Is this version of Capitalism better described ad Vandalism?
Would law of physics kick in ? If it takes thousands of years to produce oil/gas/coal, and months to extract and consume it... then what political solution do have ?
My concern is that we might hit an energy crisis (Russia/Ukraine is just the tip of the iceberg). We need oil/gas/coal for everything around us (clothes, transportation, heat, cement, iron, energy).
For energy we could use nuclear for baseline, and some renewable.
For iron, we could use hydrogen instead of coal (see above for energy)
For cement, we could electricity (see above for energy)
For heat we could use electricity (and better insulation) (see above for energy)
For transportation we could use electricity for ground transportation (trains, trucks, cars, light mobility) and keep the planes on oil, hydrogen, etc.
For clothes... well we could use the rest of oil left.
Our needs in energy are growing, and the reserve or oil/gas/coal is finite and even if there are still a lot available, it might be a long tail and so too expensive to extract. We might need to plan for a shortage (or too expensive) oil/gas/coal. Renewable is nice, but the amount of energy needed to replace oil/gas/coal is just massive, we cannot produce and install renewable fast enough. We need hundreds more nuclear reactors, just for US alone. This is likely a national security question. In that sense it is a political question based on physic emergency.
Electricity can be turned into gas. People do not need to live like US suburbanites. As fossil fuels deplete, this will happen automatically, through the price mechanism. That said, fossil fuels are nowhere near to depletion and may well last for centuries.
To give a recent estimate[0], here's what McKinsey (the big management consultancy) has to say:
> Global fossil-fuels demand is projected to peak between 2023–2025, accounting for a dwindling share of energy use, with oil production dropping by 55 percent and gas production by 70 percent in 2050
You're right that fossil fuels won't be depleted, and they will still be burnt long after their peak, but I don't imagine fossil fuels being extracted at scale next century.
> That said, fossil fuels are nowhere near to depletion and may well last for centuries.
They ARE getting more expensive (see U.S shale oil in the last decade) because the best spots are always mined first. Once gone you have to dig deeper and harder and use increasingly more complex and expensive methods to extract it. At some point you will get negative return on energy - so even if it is there it will be wasteful to extract.
> They ARE getting more expensive
Good.
We can all try consuming less. I'm hoping the market will have to correct us all out of sheer shortage. E.g gas for the car, meat and flight will get too expensive for many people. At some point it will probably happen I'm just hoping we'll get there while we can still correct our future.
Is meat, a car and cheap holidays worth destroying the planet and ravaging through the precious resources we have left? Very doubtful. We can use trains, eat more beans/soy and go to nearest beach/mountain where we live.
and as far as I read nuclear fuel isn't endless either...
"The fission of 1 g of uranium or plutonium per day liberates about 1 MW. This is the energy equivalent of 3 tons of coal or about 600 gallons of fuel oil per day, which when burned produces approximately 1/4 tonne of carbon dioxide."
https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/14/1.html
Uranium is everywhere, enriching (separate 235 from 238) is a mechanical process (no chemistry involved).
"Uranium is a naturally occurring element with an average concentration of 2.8 parts per million in the Earth's crust. Traces of it occur almost everywhere. It is more abundant than gold, silver or mercury, about the same as tin and slightly less abundant than cobalt, lead or molybdenum." https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
And its "combustion" is carbon free. Nuclear power plants works exactly like coal or gas ones. A big boiler. Water is used to "slow" the neutrons to keep the reaction going, and also use to transport the heat.
Nuclear technology and engineering is quite impressive.