Demographic Winter in Japan . . . And Beyond

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Again, you did not prove any of your arguments. All you did was refer to technology and technological advances for which you cannot explain how they can ensure high energy returns to meet the demands of a growing global population and of a growing middle class. And your reference to Europe only makes matters worse because these regions have higher ecological footprints compared to most, which means even more energy and material resources needed per capita.

It’s only by answering my questions will you be able to do so.
 
The catch is that robots aren’t customers. That is, the people who are expected to pay for banking services and buy things that robots manufacture are the same people who will be replaced by automation!
 
ralfyman said:
The catch is that robots aren’t customers. That is, the people who are expected to pay for banking services and buy things that robots manufacture are the same people who will be replaced by automation!
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Sounds like an economic system problem, not a lack of resources.
 
Yes, population momentum will cause population to increase even as fertility rates decrease below replacement level. But then, global population peaks sometime around 2060 and then begins to decline, with momentum in the opposite direction. That plays havoc with such things as social security, pensions, and other programs, and could slide economies into a near permanent deflationary depression.
 
A old and wise coworker literally told me when I was working a summer job, your generation won’t know what a pension is.

Next off, with prior observations about automation. Despite a population bust, their can be a surplus of workers as automation takes over jobs.

The population shrinkage means I can afford to buy a house, thanks to supply remaining the same and the demand (people) shrinking (dying off).
 
They are tied to each other. For example, because of physical limitations, we are now resorting to shale to maintain oil production because according to the IEA conventional production reached a plateau after 2005. But the cost for shale production is higher due to higher decline rates, which is why the EIA reports that production for that will peak soon. At the same time, investors who funded it want better returns, which is why the oil industry had to borrow, with something like 70 pct of loans involving junk bonds. That’s why the oil industry hopes that oil price will increase to $100 a barrel or better so that they can pay back their debts (according to the BIS, around $2.5 trillion) and borrow more (because of diminishing returns, they have to borrow more money and expend more energy each time for declining rates of new oil produced). But consumers suffer when the price is too high because global disposable income is too low, which is what happened during the last decade. To deal with that issue, banks extended more loans, which has led to another global debt crisis.
 
The catch is how the decline will take place. If it’s due to a global demographic winter, then that can be achieved through increased prosperity, which is what is happening in Japan, Europe, and other affluent regions. But that prosperity involves incredible amounts of energy and material resources, which is why the ecological footprint in these affluent regions is many times higher than that of the global average or even of biocapacity. For most of the world to achieve similar and experience a demographic winter, we will need the equivalent of one more earth, if not more.
 
When depopulation threatens human extinction, not many people will worry about resources. I’ve seen ghost towns in Kansas where nobody worries about the town’s ecological footprint because all the people are gone.
 
Please note the bolded parts:
ATraveller said:
Whatever. You’ve just ignored a lot of what’s been referenced. Technology has changed. Europeans will no longer use fossil fuels to heat their homes. It’s a waste of time having a discussion with someone who doesn’t care about all of the technological advances that have taken place and go off on a tangent on matters that have little to do with this.

You can promote whatever you want and I’ll continue to have faith in God’s provision. And I’ll now advise married couples to have at least 6 kids.

Have a good day.
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In other words, I’m bored and I have better things to do than to engage in a discussion with someone who doesn’t bother listening to others.
 
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Some industries always suffer during major changes. We will always need oil, but in smaller proportions once electric cars become halfway viable and most homes produce ministry of their own power. At such a time oil use may actually decline especially if there’s fewer people to use the oil.
 
The fact that I addressed each of your points and raised questions about them means that I heard you. The problem, then, isn’t that you’re bored but that you can’t answer my questions. That’s why you keep repeating yourself.
 
That’s because overpopulation issues do not deal with space but with resource availability on a global scale. Connected to that are energy and resource costs to transport goods and services. For example, it takes a thousand tons of fresh water to produce one ton of grain, with similar numbers for everything from white T-shirts to computer chips, and similar proportions for various minerals and fossil fuels for almost all manufactured goods.

That’s why even with over four centuries’ worth of oil underground, we are now resorting to shale in order to make up for a peak in conventional production. And even with ghost towns not only in the U.S. but in places like NZ, there are booms in much of the world, especially in cities that are closest to ports where many goods are shipped.

Given the high energy and material costs for meeting not only middle class conveniences but also basic needs, then depopulation may take place, but likely not through a demographic winter.
 
Electric cars have lower energy returns, and thus require more resources than diesel-powered ones. That’s why they can barely travel along rough roads, those with steep inclines, and carry heavy loads.

Thus, fossil fuels in general (including diesel from oil) are needed to manufacture not just electric cars but even things like wind turbines and solar panels, 70 pct of mining equipment to obtain the minerals needed to make these goods, a substantial chunk of manufacturing, and a large proportion of container ships across supply chains spanning thousands of km and dozens of countries. And we need not just fossil fuels and various minerals that also face diminishing returns but even fresh water for manufacturing. And all these not just for manufacturing but for infrastructure, from paved roads to electric grids to tens of thousands of consumer goods and applications.

That’s why even in a world where we are making electric cars we still need around 100 million barrels of oil daily to support industrial civilization. Countries that face demographic winter require a larger proportion of oil and anything else compared to the rest of the world, as in the case of the U.S., which has less than 5 pct of the world’s population but needs up to 20 million barrels of oil daily to power up, among other things, 250 million passenger vehicles, or around a quarter of the total worldwide. For other countries to copy the U.S., with electric cars to wit, and to travel leisurely along paved roads and using infrastructure that is lacking in much of the world, all of which are part of prosperity that’s causing a demographic winter, we will need several more earths.
 
ralfyman said:
The fact that I addressed each of your points and raised questions about them means that I heard you. The problem, then, isn’t that you’re bored but that you can’t answer my questions. That’s why you keep repeating yourself.
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Nope. I repeated myself telling you I’m not interested in a person who blatantly ignores key points.
Instead of just ending the discussion, you kept “talking” with me. I guess you’ll get to be on my very exclusive muted list.
 
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ralfyman said:
Electric cars have lower energy returns, and thus require more resources than diesel-powered ones. That’s why they can barely travel along rough roads, those with steep inclines, and carry heavy loads.
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Viability will depend on good energy storage techniques. Currently, we lose a lot of potential electricity when wind farms, solar, and other sources are able to produce power but it isn’t needed.

Also, gas is pretty much the apex of energy density short of nuclear or excessively dangerous materials. Anything else we come up with will be less energy dense. In fact the model of “fuel” will need to reconsidered for more of an energy storage/transfer model.
 
Not just energy storage techniques but the material resources needed to manufacture and maintain them, the point that they will have to scale up considerably because wind, solar, and other sources have low returns, the point that they will have to scale up again to meet growing middle class demands worldwide, and the point that they will scale up once more to reverse diminishing returns affecting resource extraction, from oil to copper to uranium.

According to one study mentioned here, there is assurance that they will be able to meet a doubling in energy demand by 2050. But given the conditions of a capitalist global economy, especially with a demographic winter coupled to high per capita ecological footprints (e.g., Japan, which is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, has a footprint twice that of the global average and almost four times what global biocapacity allows), then it is very likely that at best all sources of energy combined may meet only basic needs, and that’s assuming that the world population is decoupled from that economy and works only on basic needs.

Finally, overall nuclear has the highest, then natural gas, and below that diesel and gasoline. But for various applications involving off-site equipment and transport, it’s diesel and gasoline:

www.eia.gov

Few transportation fuels surpass the energy densities of gasoline and diesel - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

www.eia.gov www.eia.gov

That’s why they’ve been critical for industrial civilization during the past century, especially in a world where much of infrastructure needed for electric cars, electric grids, and mining and manufacturing sites are sorely lacking.

Put simply, in order to transition to fossil-free resources plus maintain high resource consumption in developed economies plus ensure the same for developing ones, all of which will create the concern that a global demographic winter will be our greatest threat, the amount of oil and material resources (not just minerals but even fresh water needed also for mechanized agriculture and manufacturing) we need will be equivalent to at least one more earth.
 
ralfy has been consistently a naysayer. He completely discounts that oil hasn’t been priced over $100 per barrel since July, 2014 and has not even been over $80 since November that same year.

Similar picture with natural gas: natural gas has traded at over $6 per mmBTU just twice since 2008. Today, this resource that once traded in the US as high as $15 per mmBTU (way way back in 2005) is now trading around $2.64 per mmBTU.

World population in 2014: 7.2bn. World population in 2019: 7.8bn. An increase of about 8%, give or take a few points. It is likely safe to say that the middle class portion of that population has increased faster than that in percentage terms.

So that should have followed up with higher prices for fossil fuels, but they didn’t. We can point to a number of factors. Increased production. Increased use of alternative sources, if only at the margins. Increased efficiencies. Not only in the automotive world, but also in businesses and residences. Those solar panels still carry a high cost of energy over their complete life cycles, but the efficiency return on that investment has improved greatly and there is still much more room for that.

That is supply and demand in the real world. The commodities markets tend to speak truthfully in this regard even with the attempted manipulations by OPEC and other actors. One thing to remember is that the oil and gas companies themselves have to make their own forecasts months to years in advance when considering investments in exploration, production and transportation. I’m not seeing signs that these companies are panicking as ralfy seems to think they should be doing. Hence I’ll take what real people and real businesses are doing over ivory tower prognostications.

The technologies for efficiency in all areas of energy sourcing and storage will continue to improve. By leaps and bounds in some cases. Let me offer another scenario: if anyone has been watching the fires in California lately along with the accompanying power blackouts, the long term effect is that this will stoke the demand for technologies that reduce our reliance on aging electrical grids and you can be certain these technologies will be exported from here. Or created in other countries and brought here.

Slight change of subject:
Another factor in the explosion of world population in the last century: look at the child mortality rates and their decline. First in the developed countries and then in the developing countries. In other words, there have been a lot of children becoming adults who might not have made it in past centuries. If in the past, a couple might have needed 8 children just to have at least 2 to 4 survive to adulthood, now consider that most of those children are surviving and have been for awhile now. This explains a good part of the explosion in developing countries.
 
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