Buckminster Fuller explains this all very, very clearly. He also explains why peak oil will set off an economic boom, not a collapse. When Ehrlich and others were predicting a population explosion and mass starvation by the end of the century, he was predicting that larger populations would lead to mass affluence. And he was right. Check out his life work. "Ideas and Integrities" and "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" are good places to start.
The current problems aren't really due to a lack of food. Last year's rice harvest, for instance, was the largest in history. There's plenty of food, it's just not being distributed efficiently or equitably, or used efficiently. Hunger in some areas, but obesity epidemics in many others. The increase in food demand in many places (China in particular) isn't due to increased population but increased affluence, which means they're using much more grain to produce meat. The starvation in the world today isn't a biological problem. It's a social, economic and political problem. Those problems will remain until they're solved, no matter what size the population.
It's a social, economic and political problem. Those problems will remain until they're solved, no matter what size the population.
Isn't that somewhat in contradiction with what goes before? What happens if the population doubles and the social, economic and political problems remain the same? Mass hunger on the one hand, obesity and excessive meat-eating on the other?
But be on guard against the fallacy of general substitutability.
The central relationship for ecological economics is:
Sustainable + Unsustainable = Unsustainable
That is, if we have a sustainable transport system and an unsustainable agricultural production system, we do not have a sustainable way to feed urban populations.
If we have an unsustainable transport system and an sustainable agricultural production system, we do not have a sustainable way to feed urban populations.
Only if we have a sustainable transport system and a sustainable agricultural system, and that sustainable agricultural system yields a surplus that meets the needs of the urban population, do we have a sustainable way to feed urban populations.
And then, if we have that, but we do not have sustainable settlement systems, then we still do not have a sustainable way for people to live in cities.
Fortunately, there is no latch in place that holds prices for fossil fuel energy sources down until the fossil fuel energy runs out. Instead, prices start to climb starting from just around the peak amount that we can produce.
So the first fumbling, stumbling around to look for solutions to the fact that our abundant cheap energy is non-renewable and our renewable energy sources all have limits in their sustainable yield can take place in an environment of relative resource abundance, and we can begin the process by mining the substantial energy inefficiency built into the system that developed in the context of ultra-cheap energy. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
