inkbluesky

grand tetons and barn

Jeffrey D. Sachs says that Thomas Robert Malthus has taken quite a beating from economists over the years, Are Malthus’s Predicted 1798 Food Shortages Coming True? From what I’ve read, he takes a fair amount of abuse from sociologists too. Tom famously predicted the human population would increase faster then the ability to provide food for them. So far, as Sachs says, and we all know science and technology have combined to delay Malthus’s dire warnings. One might also add family planning, wars, disease and despite some despots here and there better governance. The problem we’re facing with a world population pushing seven billion is we’ve somewhat hit the wall on cheap resources. Everything you can reach out and touch, everything within your view comes from the earth -plastics are produced from petro-chemicals, i.e. fossil fuels. Peak Oil, in this case interpreted as the amount of oil that can be extracted cheaply, not the total amount of oil available, is near at hand. Forests per se are not renewable. Clear cuts are usually replanted with monoculture hybrids that grow faster then average, but the ecosystem is then gone and the new trees will takes years to reach harvest size.

If we indeed run out of inexpensive oil and fall short of food, deplete our fossil groundwater and destroy remaining rainforests, and gut the oceans and fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases that tip the earth’s climate into a runaway hothouse with rising ocean levels, we might yet confirm the Malthusian curse.  Yet none of this is inevitable The idea that improved know-how and voluntary fertility reduction can sustain a high, indeed rising, level of incomes for the world remains correct, but only if future technology enables us to economize on natural capital rather than finding ever more clever ways to deplete it more cheaply and rapidly.

Thankfully Sachs doesn’t put all our eggs in the science and technology will save us basket. In short we need to to a better job of planning and changing some of our cultural attitudes about consumption. It seems to be a choise between never learning the difference between want and need, or learning about sustainable growth. if we don’t, a hundred years from now students might not be having a laugh at Malthus expense.

Babylon A.D. plot: “Veteran-turned-mercenary Thoorop takes the high-risk job of escorting a woman from Russia to America. Little does he know that she is host to an organism that a cult wants to harvest in order to produce a genetically modified Messiah.” A nice safe fictional speculation about the end of the world. In the end you get to go home.

Babylon A.D.

John McCain Lives In Subsidized Housing, by way of tax beaks.