In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180 million human beings on the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us. . . already nature does not sustain us.’ In other words, there were too many people for the planet to cope with and we were bleeding Mother Nature dry.Agreed. See also the November 23rd Wall Street Journal.
Well today, nearly 180million people live in the Eastern Half of the United States alone, in the 26 states that lie to the east of the Mississippi River. And far from facing hunger or destitution, many of these people -- especially the 1.7 million who live on the tiny island of Manhattan -- have quite nice lives.
In the early 1800s, there were approximately 980 million human beings on the planet Earth. One of them was the population scaremonger Thomas Malthus, who argued that if too many more people were born then ‘premature death would visit mankind’ -- there would be food shortages, ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues’, which would ‘sweep off tens of thousands [of people]’.
Well today, more than the entire world population of Malthus’s era now lives in China alone: there are 1.3 billion human beings in China. And far from facing pestilence, plagues and starvation, the living standards of many Chinese have improved immensely over the past few decades. In 1949 life expectancy in China was 36.5 years; today it is 73.4 years. In 1978 China had 193 cities; today it has 655 cities. Over the past 30 years, China has raised a further 235 million of its citizens out of absolute poverty -- a remarkable historic leap forward for humanity.
(via reader Marc D.)
24 comments:
I added some comments along similar lines to the post before I read this one.
The problem with Thai's apparent concern over "limited resources" derives from a failure to fully grasp that not only are we not in a closed system (the sun, alone, adds a huge amount of energy to the planet each and every day which makes human energy use like a candle to an h-bomb -- literally), but we don't even fully grasp the system which is "close" to us.
Case in point, as early as 1995, people were noticing oil fields refilling.
This is not suggesting "infinite supply" -- It's not claiming they are regenerating -- but there are, apparently, substantial aspects to the existing system which we don't currently understand as completely as we thought we did even 30 years ago.
The person to read for the future is not Paul Ehrlich, who hasn't had a single significant prediction come true, it's the late Julian Simon, who HAS predicted much of what has happened in the last 30 years AND even won a bet he made head-to-head with Ehrlich.
As I said, somewhat, in the other thread -- if you believe in "Doom And Gloom", it's not a reality check you need, it's an imagination installation.
Everything has costs. Nothing we use is infinite.
Oh, and China is such a great example that we can just grow our way to happiness!
I am afraid you have completely missed my point and sadly still continue to miss it. I have tried to be more precise that I was not talking about environmentalism, etc...
Malthus was most definitely correct from certain viewpoints... Indeed as I was a little unfairly harsh on Krugman the other day simply to make a joke, I will also be fair to him and agree with him that Malthus was correct, while MALTHUSIANISM!! might not be.
Or as another person I tend to respect nicely said the other day: "peak oil is a fact, PEAK OIL!!! on the other hand might not be.
Though I will ad that if this endless war between Athens and Sparta continues, it just might be. ;-)
For I might remind you that in your restrain on choice/"no oil for pacifists" mindset this blog loves to discuss- hint, any whispers of a"conservation of energy" in that idea?- liberal Denmark did join America in Iraq.
Keep exploring morality/viewpoint/aspect a little more. You might just learn liberals are not out to get you and that they may even have your back at times re: a blindside you might not even recognize.
Anyway, hope you are well. As I said before, I do think we have similar goals.
Be well
There is always the appearance of too many people and not enough resources - food, shelter, wombats - for good reason. When a society produces enough additional resources for its poor to live comfortably, what actually results are more people living at subsistence. When the moldboard plow doubled the amount of food in Europe, people were only slightly better-fed; the population doubled instead. If you apply a simple niche darwinism you can see this is what all species do. Only at a threshold level of wealth do people start limiting their descendants.
Only very recently have we been able to do a great deal of both: grow in numbers and expand the general average caloric intake. What is called Poverty I ($1/day) is finally in sharp decline. Poverty II is less desperate, but still grim. That will take longer.
> Everything has costs. Nothing we use is infinite.
Really? How much deterioration do you see in the bits of the media you watch and use every day?
Oh, wait, those don't get used up. at all, do they? This would make them indistinguishable from an "infinite resource". Every single person on earth, including those yet unborn, can use them, and get the benefit of them, as often as they like, and still they will be there, available, as long as someone takes the trouble to keep them accessible.
And before you make the mistake you're almost certain to -- no, the bits don't get used up at all. The structure used to hold the bits does. Not the same thing -- not by a long shot.
More and more of what we do and create is virtual, not physical. And the virtual world has many properties which are deceptively counter-intuitive, just as economics does.
Failure to grasp the essential and inherent differences between virtual property and real property is one of the key things screwing up copyright law at this point in time.
I also suspect, though cannot prove, that it's one of the chief things screwing up the international economy at the moment. I'd like to see a real, actual accounting of the actual value of every bit of the USA's pirated IP around the world (i.e., not what the BSA, the RIAA and the MPAA claim, but a realistic valuation on it in terms of what those who use it would/could pay for it). While it often would be pennies on the "price" here in the USA, spread across 6.6 billion people, it likely would add up to a large chunk of the worlds production.
My bet is that it would substantially balance the trade deficit, and quite possibly turn the USA into a creditor nation.
Speculative, though, I grant.
> Oh, and China is such a great example that we can just grow our way to happiness!
Yeah, bobn, ignore the fact that China is involved in a crash-course in catchup. As their wealth increases, they can and will devote a larger percentage of it towards cleaning up that kind of mess. My bet is that since the USA is being such utter schmucks about nuclear power, that China (or India, one of them) is going to become the world leader in building nuke plants and, from that, get rich exporting them, too.
Some design standards and componentization should bring the cost for building and installing them down substantially, and at the same time vastly decrease safety concerns.
Oh, and BTW -- the USA used to have that kind of problem, too... with, at the time, 1/6th of China's current population. The air pollution was far worse than it is now, and you might be old enough to recall Lake Erie being dangerous to fall into, and close to a dead lake.
Nowadays air pollution is a tiny fraction of what it was (despite what the Greens endlessly whine about) and Lake Erie is completely recovered.
What happened? America was rich enough that we could, and did, put a percentage of our income towards cleaning that stuff up and dealing with its continued creation in a manner more effective than dumping it into the air and water.
> Or as another person I tend to respect nicely said the other day: "peak oil is a fact, PEAK OIL!!! on the other hand might not be.
Thai, you aren't necessarily quite seeing what I'm getting at. I grasp your point, that oil, theoretically, is going to run out.
This is hardly the first time there have been concerns in human history with some resource running out -- England's forests are a fraction of what they were in the first millenium AD -- why? Because the Brits cut them all down and burned them, or built things with them.
Strangely, though, the UK did not collapse in an economic disaster as they exhausted the wood. They substituted. They changed resources. Coal took over from wood for burning. Masonry and steel took over from wood for building. And other things often have substituted for wood in other places, plastic and glass in many cases.
> You might just learn liberals are not out to get you
Thai, you're projecting -- it's never been about paranoia. That's what you don't get. We don't think you're evil. We think you're clueless.
That sounds like a personal insult, but, regardless of its blunt phrasing, it's the difference between the liberal and conservative viewpoints. Liberals vilify and attack anyone who disagrees with them. They assume evil AND/OR stupidity to motivations. THEN, when the consequences of their actions wreak more havoc than the supposed evil of the Right could have possibly hoped to have achieved even IF they were evil, they shrug their shoulders and say "well, they meant well".
The reason why conservatives don't fail as reliably, or as spectacularly as liberals is the fact that we (conservatives) do a consistently better job than you (liberals) do of seeing the secondary and tertiary ramifications of problems and their solutions. Because we care about consequences -- not just the ones WE SEE, but we look for the ones we DON'T SEE -- because we KNOW those are the ones that BITE YOU IN THE ASS.
And, also importantly, we grasp that really accomplishing something isn't always fun or pleasant, and sometimes takes years of effort to accomplish.
Liberals always try and make a party out of it -- Band Aid, Live Aid, Farm Aid, the US Festival, Woodstock.
Then the plummeting corpse comes smashing down onto the hood of the car and you get surrounded by a hail of bullets: "Welcome to the party, pal!"
911 happens.
And if we keep ignoring Iran and Afghanistan, it's probably going to be a mushroom party next time.
"Oh, but we meant well..."
Tell that to all the dead and dying. Be careful, they're likely to rip your heads off. Literally.
There are parties which aren't fun. Iraq and Afghanistan are two examples. And those problems have been decades in the making -- to expect them to be completely resolved within five years is just flat out asinine.
World War II may have ended in 1945, but the allies did not return self-control of Japan until 1950. Of Austria until 1955. And there was still some Allied control over West Germany until after the Wall fell down and the country was re-unified. We've still got troops in Korea. That war was over in 1953.
Yet we need to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan *NOW* ? You do it when the goal is complete, not on some idiot timetable. Timetables are for goals to be set by. Not an iron casket to bury yourself in.
All that has happened with Iraq and Afghanistan is that the world's lunatics, tyrants, and martyrs have been shown what the attention span of the USA is. About six years. Hold out that long, and you win.
That means that the next time we have to clean things up, it's going to take us TWICE as long to actually do the job before the other side figures out we've got the will to do it. More pain, more suffering, more expense, more American lives lost -- all because of the @#$%%^@$&$@& boomers and their $#^%^$%&$%&#% Vietnam complex. They see Vietnam as their greatest triumph. Screw all those boat people, and the millions who didn't make it out. They got the USA to stop meddling in Vietnam. That's all that mattered. The other consequences -- millions dead in Cambodia, millions more oppressed in Indochina -- "Hey, who cares about them?"
But oooohhhh, the Left is Oh So Much More Compassionate than The Right...
Uhhh-huh. Yeah. Right.
If The Left really, really cared about Vietnam, they would have demanded more openness. They would have demanded more efforts to prevent the kind of repression that WAS admittedly being done in South Vietnam. They would have demanded that things be handled CORRECTLY, not EASILY.
Correctly, not just easily, was what Iraq was all about. "Easily" is to do what has often happened -- take out the existing government, install a new strongarm thug who was favorable to American interests, and get out. It's what the area is even used to -- they expected no better. Total time: 9 months. 12 tops. And that we DID NOT do that belies the entire "War for Oil" claim. If that was what it was all about, then that would have been what we did.
We did not. We stayed and helped clean up the mess we made for our own reasons. We assisted the Iraqis in getting past the turmoil and the schreklikeit from the power vacuum, acted to prevent anyone from taking advantage of the power vacuum, and gave the Iraqi people a chance to make their own government, a free and hopefully independent government strong enough to resist the external depredations of its neighbors.
It may still fail. We were prevented from staying there long enough to be certain that it worked. But, even if it fails, then at the least, the Iraqis have had a taste of freedom. A taste of hope and dreams of prosperity. And that may be enough to make the Iraqis willing to prevent another Saddam from rising again, or from staying in power if he gets there.
It was enough for The Honduras. They had someone try to gain power in a Chavez manner -- and they tossed the SOB out, and made sure he stayed out of power, despite all the efforts that Chavez and pals, and the OAS, and the lickspittle fools in the USA, could manage. Because they had the taste of freedom, and the sense to listen to their own rules designed to prevent someone from taking that away, despite the outside pressures brought to bear against them.
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Back on the thread's main topic:
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I'm dead serious about Julian Simon. He is the answer to malthusian concerns. He understood the key point -- humans are not animals, are not bound by the same rules and limits that animals are bound by. A loss of a resource is not the blatanty disaster for us that it is for an animal -- not just because we can compensate directly, by inventing replacements for those resources, but also because we have time binding ability, which, if it's in animals at all, is exceptionally rudimentary. You don't punish a dog hours after he craps on your sofa, you have to do it when he craps. Otherwise, he has no way to connect the bad behavior with the punishment. Humans are not like that, beyond a very early age. Even a three-year old has a grasp of "if you do that, you will be punished", and understand, when they do it, they may be punished hours or days later when it is discovered what they've done.
In short, the flaw of Malthusianism isn't just the fact that humans are more inventive than animals, we are capable of anticipation and pre-emption. We see a resource running out, and start working to find an alternative before it does. That's a part of what the whole alternative energy thing IS. The problems conservatives have with solar and wind is that they flat out SUCK. As I demonstrated here back in April in a guest column, land-based solar power CANNOT work. Not "it needs work" -- cannot. Literally, not figuratively. There are studies that show that, when the whole power cycle is taken into account, the mining, production, and disposal of solar panels vs. their lifetime power output is a net energy loss.
Wind is similarly problematic -- it's too diffuse and unpredictable as an energy source. Ocean Thermal is the only solar power mechanism which might work but there's literally no money being thrown towards developing that.
And nukes are the real thing we should be building. With good breeder reactors we can run the entire world at current USA levels for literally thousands of years.
The USA could clean up all that pollution in China that bobn is concerned with, by making ourselves rich (or at least paying off that debt) by designing a standardized nuke plant and selling it to China and the rest of the world.
Are we doing anything like that?
Hell no.
So someone else will. India or China is a likely bet, though the French and the Japanese are equally capable.
But in the end, resources are not going to be a problem, for the simple reason that energy is not going to be a problem.
And if you have enough energy, there is nothing you cannot make if need be.
Indeed as I was a little unfairly harsh on Krugman.
Not possible. Krugman is a complete idiot. (Right up there with Mark Perry.) Not for nothing is it called the "dismal science". Or maybe it's just "dismal scientists".
OBH: has nobody ever told you that "brevity is the soul of wit"? I might, in spite of your often nasty attitude, actually read your stuff and respond - if only there weren't so much of it. I've learned that the sheer quantity just isn't worth it.
Just for starters, though, try eating bits. Try heating or cooling your house with bits. Try filling your gas tank with bits. Good luck with that.
bobn
I'm not sure I agree with you re: Krugman being an idiot, but I will agree he has a strong ideological bent to his views- if you could not tell that already... Though I definitely might agree with some of your other comments. I too have tended to notice that the bits I send out in the form of unpaid medical bills never seem to quite convert themselves into bits in my kid's college account. ;-)
> OBH: has nobody ever told you that "brevity is the soul of wit"?
I wasn't attempting to be "witty". I was attempting to have a discussion about a complex topic. People with the attention span of a 3yo are generally not capable of such, so I don't write for them.
> Just for starters, though, try eating bits. Try heating or cooling your house with bits. Try filling your gas tank with bits. Good luck with that.
Where do you think your electricity comes from NOW, child?
Lots of bits created by Faraday, Edison, and Tesla, along with many other people.
All of the magic around you, the magic keeps you alive day in and day out, in a manner that the greatest king that ever lived had no possible hope for just two centuries ago, has two components to it -- the actual physical object that makes that magic, and the vast array of collected bits -- "spells" for people like you -- that makes that configuration of physical objects function to make the magic.
bobn:
a) You're half right -- Krugman is an idiot. Perry is just a lot smarter than you.
b) When I see any evidence that you've read any Julian Simon, you might actually have an opinion worthy of argument. Until then, you're talking about aspects of something you really, really understand even less than you understand fiscal policy.
> Krugman being an idiot
Thai, Krugman is an idiot. Not sure if he's always being an idiot, but he's done enough columns that have shown a total lack of any devotion to truth in recent years that it's clear he's no longer an economist of any kind.
> I too have tended to notice that the bits I send out in the form of unpaid medical bills never seem to quite convert themselves into bits in my kid's college account.
And yet they actually pay bills.
How can something that has no physical existence change the world?
Oh, wait....
"Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has powers of reality."
- 'Dune' -
Sorry, I've communicated enough to you -- if you still don't Get It, it's not a bandwidth problem, it's a PEBKAC issue.
Go hunt up the Simon, maybe he can help you with your density problem.
Or it could be that you don't REALLY care about the problem whatsoever, you just want to, as usual, blather on about stuff you have no real understanding of as though you had any clue at all.
Oh, and, for a viewpoint of how different things are Now, thanks to all these reusable bits,
Bill Wittle contrasts the rather plebian modern convenience store with that wonder of the Ancient World, The Pyramids.
CS 1, Pyramids 0
Okay, so, this topic is important to you, OBH? Bobn had a fair point. You don't have to download it all at once. You can trust us to listen and stick with you in a discussion.
And hey, watch how you throw the term idiot around as an insult. Ours is a very proud profession. We have to have long discussions with the Town Drunk and the Village Atheist to even become an apprentice idiot.
AVI, it's a comment forum in a blog. bobn's point isn't valid.
There are some forums where a semi-real-time conversation can take place, this blog is not one of them.
You make your points, come back a half day or a day later and see if there is anything in response.
Within a couple days, tops, in 95% of the cases, there will be no responses, because no one is paying attention there any more. They've moved onto the next thread.
You can't have an RT discussion even over on Dr. Sanity, and she has a far, far more active commentariat.
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And as far as Krugman being an idiot, he's
a) an op-ed columnist for The New York Times
b) won a Nobel Prize
c) "he was voted sixth in Prospect Magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals"
If that (especially "c") is not matching adequate and sufficient qualifications for the title "Great Big Idiot", I'm not sure what is.
I mean, you have to be a major grade idiot to qualify as one of the "top 100 intellectuals in the world". To be recognized like that you have to appeal to a vast array of really clueless libtards over and over to earn a panoply of support like that. N'est pas?
Ah. The Nobel prize, by the way, being in a soft science or non-science arena is the relevant point. Hard science Nobel prizes are nothing to shake a stick at.
Another point, AVI, as far as bobn's complaint -- it's broken up into distinct pieces -- if you can't keep your attention focused for pieces as little as 3-4 lines (heck -- combine 'em for 7 lines), then you aren't capable of adult conversation at all.
bobn just knows he can't use his little cheats, even less so than thai, who's a good bit slicker at it, so he blows it off as "too long", revealing his inability to actually counter any of my arguments either way.
But this way he doesn't actually have to experience the obliteration of the mental foundations of his damnfoolishness.
Case in point, as early as 1995, people were noticing oil fields refilling. A 15 year old article, which even he backs away from, and which does nothing to explain or mitigate the "bell curve" production of individual and collective oil-fields.
Nowadays air pollution is a tiny fraction of what it was (despite what the Greens endlessly whine about) and Lake Erie is completely recovered.
What happened? America was rich enough that we could, and did,
And we know that OBH was there agreeing with the EPA rulemaking every step of the way. I can just picture a little "green" OBH - oh yeah!
Liberals vilify and attack anyone who disagrees with them. Which is so much better than the stream of bile that OBH spews daily. He must be a riot at parties.
Then the plummeting corpse comes smashing down onto the hood of the car and you get surrounded by a hail of bullets: "Welcome to the party, pal!"
Oh, a movie reference - a piece of fiction! How fitting! And the fact that it's buried in the middle of a long red-herring attack on "liberals" (as percieved by OBH) that has aboslutley nothing to do with the subject at hand makes it that much more convincing.
...the sun, alone, adds a huge amount of energy to the planet each and every day which makes human energy use like a candle to an h-bomb -- literally.... solar and wind is that they flat out SUCK. As I demonstrated here back in April in a guest column, land-based solar power CANNOT work....
Ooooohh, a random factoid, thrown in for effect, which he then *himself* minimizes retroactively!! Gotta love that. (The April post was actually pretty good - probably because Carl editted madly.)
"Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has powers of reality."
- 'Dune' -
Oh, a science-fiction reference! That proves it! Of course, the statement is just plain nonsense. Had Faraday, Edison, and Tesla kept their thoughts to themselves, they would have counted for nothing until somebody else had them and acted on them.
And while we're talking about Faraday, Edison, and Tesla, there is the whopping piece of scientific negligence of trying to equate the consumption of electrical power and fossil fuels - finite resources or produced by same - with the infinitely reuseable bits of media. Without a game-changer, exponential growth will trump finite resources. I concede that nuclear energy can be that game changer. I will admit to having been afraid the risks of nuclear for years - I have accepted the deomonstrations around the world - even the French can do it! - that it's a risk we need to accept if we expect our energy-dependent standard of living to continue.
Perry is just a lot smarter than you.
Oh, my, he put it in bold text, so it it must be true. Not!
For what must be one of the stupidest econ blog posts ever, see here. "Teenagers today can afford things like cell phones with cameras, digital cameras, GPS systems, CD players, DVD players, laptop computers, and iPods that even a billionaire couldn't have purchased 20 years ago." - right - they just have no way to pay their staggering college debt, and the previous generations are spending their futures away. Othere than that, no problems at all.
Thai, for a truly horrendous Krugman post see here where Krugman writes "Oh, and CBO projects that the trust funds will last until 2049." Said trust funds are nothing but IOUs the governement has written themselves, as I note here. AVI is right to state that calling Krugman an idiot is an insult to idiots everywhere - telling a whopper like this is far worse than idiocy.
>> Liberals vilify and attack anyone who disagrees with them.
> Which is so much better than the stream of bile that OBH spews daily. He must be a riot at parties.
I have to be pretty damned ticked off to use the "F" word at all, much less the level that libtards use it constantly. Go spend a few hours over at DU and DK and tell me that ANYTHING you've EVER seen me post has a fraction of the pointless namecalling vitriol which is available in steady streams over there. So, bobn, in short, you can osculate my posterior on this one.
> Oh, my, he put it in bold text, so it it must be true. Not!
OK, little secret. "Not!" was "cool" for about ten minutes back when people were worried about Y2K. It hasn't been used by anyone over the age of, oh, 12, ever since.
> "Teenagers today can afford things like cell phones with cameras, digital cameras, GPS systems, CD players, DVD players, laptop computers, and iPods that even a billionaire couldn't have purchased 20 years ago." - right - they just have no way to pay their staggering college debt, and the previous generations are spending their futures away. Othere than that, no problems at all.
Oh, boy, bobn -- you say they can't afford this "staggering college debt" (which the repayment plans on are sufficiently good that you actually would better spend money on buying house RATHER than pay it back early, it's a more effective use of your money) -- you say this, all the while ignoring the lack of essentiality involved in the listed electronic goodies.
"Let's see, I can pay back the loan this month, or I can buy the new WII2 entertainment console for $400... I think I'll buy the WII2..."
Sorry, citing that as "bad economic discrimination" on Perry's part only marks the overall high level of your incompetence on economics as a whole.
So that's two comments on which even the most dunderheaded fool should be able to grasp just how utterly full of crap you usually are.
Is that truth too vitriolic for you, bob?
.
> Without a game-changer, exponential growth will trump finite resources.
True, it would. What has that to do with ANYTHING to do with human beings?
You should have gotten it before this from other things I've alled attention to, but you're too busy parroting your own crap ideas to actually analyze them in terms of the information you've been given.
Here -- I'll friggin' spell it out for you:
Population paradox: Europe's time bomb
I quote:
"But, fairly suddenly, birthrates are falling all across the globe. In the 1970s women around the world had six children each; today they have just 2.7 children on average, and in some places that figure is as low as 1. "
and
"But the United Nations has had to revise downwards its prediction that the world population would reach 11.5 billion by 2050. The human race is now expected to peak, according to one of the world's top experts, Dr David Coleman, Professor of Demography at Oxford University, at 9.5 billion people. Then, around 2070, it will begin to decline."
THIS IS HARDLY NEW INFORMATION bob.
Where is this "exponential growth" you're worried about?
It's NOT THERE.
And your failure to grasp this, despite the ready availability of this data for some 15-20 years or more, and its relevance to stupid Malthusian ideas, is what qualifies you as a prime candidate for grade-A idiot.
That's not vitriol, it's a valid assessment -- you don't have any idea at all what you are talking about. None. Nada. Zip.
You're not always an idiot. Sometimes you actually show a clue, like grasping what a putz Krugman is, and even WHY -- but it's like you have to work at not being one, and you're all too often lazy about it.
Go read F***ing Julian Simon.
> of trying to equate the consumption of electrical power and fossil fuels - finite resources or produced by same - with the infinitely reuseable bits of media.
No, it isn't and I gave you a prime example of how those BITS changed that problem in the past, but, once more, you have the attention span of a 3yo, so you figure you don't have to actually read anything that's more than a paragraph long, making you incapable of actually carrying on a literate discussion.
> Had Faraday, Edison, and Tesla kept their thoughts to themselves, they would have counted for nothing until somebody else had them and acted on them.
Not at all. There are plenty of cases where what someone thought has had massive ramifications on historical events as a result, without them ever expressing those thoughts. Because those thoughts can influence the actions, of both themselves and indirectly, others.
Like I said above in a previous comment, bob, about liberals in general -- I don't think you're evil. I know you're merely clueless. Your actual understanding of many things is far below your self-rated grasp of how little you understand them.
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Population paradox: Europe's time bomb
The article you quote states that woman are having 2.7 children, but that the the replacement rate is 2.1. So the population is still growing exponentially, although the exponent is lower than previously (but still positive and greater than 1). To use one of your favorite expressions, which of course "only" implies cluelessness: "Which are you, stupid or lying?"
I think that the case for peak oil is pretty good. In the face of that, even a merely linear increase in demand will suffice to cause catastrophe if some action is not taken. And action is not being taken, though you rightly chastise liberals for much of that - we do need nuclear and we do need more exploration until we can get the nuclear in place.
Not at all. There are plenty of cases where what someone thought has had massive ramifications on historical events as a result, without them ever expressing those thoughts.
Name 3. (Good luck on that. ;) ) Since we *know* about Faraday, Edison, and Tesla, I trust they won't be in the list.
Oh, boy, bobn -- you say they can't afford this "staggering college debt"
That was simply one example of the problems facing today's oh-so-lucky 20-somethings that Perry just glosses over completely. Add in the ongoing out-sourcing of much of the job-space that allowed the middle-class to exist, the many different debt bomb (entitlements, public-worker pensions, etc.) waiting for them and I can't see the next 20 years looking anything as nice as the last 20 were.
I think that peak oil is probably real. I think we (especially in the U.S. thanks to the more brainless liberals (and their appeasers)), are doing a really bad job of getting ready for it. That is one more reason I am pessimistic.
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