R
Ridgerunner
Guest
It’s polarizing, in my opinion, because so many of those who concern themselves with it ignore so much, giving rise to the suspicion, at least, that it’s more an ideology than it is a reality-based conclusion. As with Paul Ehrlich decades ago, all the “population bomb” people predict dire results that are always imminent but never seem to happen.
Perhaps the most irritating part of it, to me, is the fact that most of the world is inexorably set on a course for population implosion, not explosion. We don’t really know what that will mean, but we’re starting to get inklings of it in places like Greece, Japan and, indeed, in this country, where the population gets older and older, with fewer and fewer young workers to support the aged and the social welfare systems. But for immigration, we would already be massively short of capable labor. At the extreme margin, we could consider the consequences of the European plagues, in which the populations suddenly (granted, the present decline is not sudden) decreased. Instead of bringing about some kind of better world, it brought conflict, social and political chaos and the massive wasting of infrastructure resources.
As to oil, of course it’s limited. Thing is, we don’t know how limited because there are ideologues who seem bent on preventing exploration and utilization. So we end up with (instead of real knowledge) premature “solutions” in the form of massive subsidies to support things like grain-based fuels, wind and solar programs; subsidies the populace is less and less able to afford as the number of wage-earners dwindles.
People like me who don’t buy into the “population bomb” thing are tempted to suspect that population reduction for its own sake, is the real objective. More suspiciously yet, is it perhaps simply a bug-bear with which to critique the Catholic Church and other religious groups, which stand against birth control and abortion? One can suspect such things because population reduction advocates assume so much and take so little into account.
How much oil will Italy really need in 2040 when, as predicted, its population is half what it is now? Nobody knows. Will Italians be paying $200/gallon to fill their Lamborghinis or will they be huddled in half-deserted cities burning the remains of the houses of long-gone residents in their fireplaces, afraid to travel anywhere because wolves roam the streets and the countryside just as they did after the plagues? We don’t know.
But what we do know is that all of Eurasia, all of North America, probably all of Latin America will suffer a drastic population reduction well before the oil runs out. We can reasonably suspect that premature “solutions” costing astronomical amounts of money will additionally burden those remaining. I recently read that the much-touted German “wind power” schemes cost over a hundred thousand dollars per year per worker served by it. It’s grotesquely cost-ineffective. In thirty years, one might reasonably expect, those expensive machines will be idle, but the remaining Germans will still be paying for them. One might very legitimately suspect there won’t be enough coal miners to dig the coal for power either.
