"jerry" <electrician@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:3a9e0e63-724e-4f76-bc99-a33c1e1e9e59@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Apr 6, 5:30 pm, JSM <ekrub...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> Biofuel Farming Looks to Be an Environmental Disaster
>> Growing corn for ethanol may increase greenhouse gases for over a
>> century.
>The bottom line is
>there are too many people on this planet and it is time for the
>Malthusian Principle to kick in. That means some form of control has
>to happen such as mass starvation, a global epidemic, a global war, or
>some catastrophic event to curb the over population. There are too
>many people on this planet for all of them to have the same standard
>of living as we have in the USA, and that is a fact. The Internet and
>global communications have educated the m***** so they are no longer
>happy living in the bottom third of humanity. They are not going to
>take it any longer. Something has got to give
There are a lot more people per square foot in China than most of the
rest of the world, so I think we are a long way away from true
overpopulation.
The real problem isn't overpopulation, the real problem is lifestyle.
That is what really is going to have to "give"
If you think about it you will realize the majority of the Earth's
resources
that the average human consumes in the United States are used for
things unrelated to that human's survival. For most people if they
were to simply move to within a half mile of their workplace they
could walk to work, and their needs for vehicle fuel to shuttle
them around might be confined to a few trips to the grocery store.
However, their problem is that their lifestyle would likely take a nose
dive. In most cities in the country, they are not organized to where
you have desirable housing mixed in with desirable office space. In
most cities you have the highest paying jobs and nice offices concentrated
in one section of the city, and the most desirable housing concentrated
10-20 miles away in another section of the city.
And, on the bottom end of the spectrum, you have the crappy ****
jobs miles and miles away from the crappy **** housing.
All of this creates a huge need to shuttle people around many miles
in the average day. It is not uncommon for the average person
to physically move 40-50 miles in a single day. This is insane,
and it is tremendously wasteful. It costs far, far more in energy
costs to simply move the person around to the places they need
to go during the day than to feed them.
It literally would be cheaper to the society for the government to
deliver food to anyone with a job that requires them to commute
more than 30 miles a day, than for them to actually make the 30
mile commute.
When you start thinking about the enormous amount of wastage
inherent in US society caused simply by the society being what
it is today, and you understand that this has been enabled by nearly
a century of almost free gasoline, you will realize how incredibly
large an amount of fat there is that can be simply sliced out of
US society, if a real crunch happened.
We are a long, long way from not having enough resources to
sup****t a larger population. But we have nearly run out of
resources to sup****t the current US lifestyle.
It is going to take at least 4-5 years of gasoline running at the $4
a gallon mark for people to be forced to actually change their
lifestyle. And even then, the only changes they will likely be
willing to make are to buy more fuel efficient cars. That will
not result in any significant decrease in fuel consumption, it will
just stunt the growth of fuel consumption.
Ultimately, your going to have to see gasoline go to the $6 a
gallon price point in today's dollars to actually force people to
make the kinds of drastic lifestyle changes - like moving - that
will result in a true decrease in energy consumption. But that likely
will not happen in our lifetimes because every time that gasoline
prices rise, it makes it economically possible to bring oil reserves
on to the market (like tar sands for example) that would previously
have been uneconomical to exploit. And, there are a far, FAR
larger amount of those more expensive oil reserves in the world
that nobody has bothered to go digging for until the prices got
higher.
It really is going to take another century of demand from the
public for living and working environments that are less
resource consumptive than what we have today, for there to
be any real change. But, it will come. One day historians will
look back at the fabled 2 hour per day job commute that many
people make today, and wonder how people managed to live.
Just as we look back at the old washboards and wonder how
people used to manage to do a full load of laundry.
Ted
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