How we produce that energy needs to change too, but the levels of wastage in the US and
Australia are verging on criminal. Cutting out waste isn't preaching a "need to
suffer".
What scientists are saying is that if we carry on with "business as usual" then
a lot of people will suffer.
If we don't solve the energy problem as many as 6 out of 7 people will
*die* in famines and resource wars.
Please, show your working. I don't disbelieve you but if you can point to work
on this I will read, ponder and digest. As always.
Not my work. Try here: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3091
Keith
Seriously? You put this much weight in a non-academic, purely
speculative and, by my reasoning bullshit article. For crying out loud,
the only cite in the whole article is from wikipedia. Alarmist
hypotheses about running out of resources has been going on for decades,
I remember growing up in the 80s and people saying that at the
consumption level at that time, the majority of the world's oil reserves
would be completely depleted by the year 2000. Strangely, our use of
oil have dramatically increased since that time, and we still have oil
now in the year 2010. And why would our Nuclear power resources be
falling in the coming years as the article claims? Decommissioning old
reactors? Sure, tear down an old reactor and put up a new one that is
twice as efficient and a hundred times safer.
I made the mistake of buying into hype all the time when I was younger.
Heck, 10 years ago I was convinced that 1/3 of the land in the world
would be consumed by rising oceans due to ice on Greenland and
Antarctica falling into the ocean within a few decades. At the time, I
could have pointed to numerous sources saying that this was going to
happen, and they actually have some data from NASA, the EPA, and other
credible sources to back their claims. Of course, the claims were
greatly exaggerated, but at least the people tried to back up their
claims with cold hard facts. This article doesn't back up anything it
claims. It just states it and expects the reader to accept it blindly.
Having a blog and making graphs in Microsoft Office doesn't make someone
an expert.
Here is a quote from the one "study" that the author referred to.
"I further claimed, based on some preliminary and overly general
calculations, that it would take on the order of three times our current
total primary energy output to stabilize the world population at around
10 billion people."
This is the author of that article you posted saying this. Their own
words state that their claims were based on "preliminary and overly
general calculations".
In other words: Bullshit.
Michael Harney
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