Too many people?

[bilby]

Or is the thread title just intended as an example of Betteridge's Law?

How have I never heard of Betteridge's law?

No.

 

[Merle]

Ever since Malthus first wrote about it, people have repeated his major error.

It starts with the understanding that exponential growth in any physical system inevitably and unavoidably exhausts all resources, surprisingly quickly, and with very little warning.

That terrifying and unavoidable fact then causes people to lose their minds, and to make the next two logical steps:

If exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely, then it won't.

The end of exponential growth will be a huge disaster.

The first is, of course, unavoidably true; But the second is just pure conjecture.

Exponential growth might terminate in disaster; Or it might end by non-disastrous means.

This latter possibility - the non-disastrous end of exponential growth - just gets completely ignored, despite the clear observational evidence that it is actually happening, at least in the case of population, which isn't growing exponentially anymore.

The mathematics is undeniable, and that seems to completely blind people to the fact that they stopped making a mathematical argument. In pure mathematics, exponential growth can go on forever, because you will never run out of numbers. In applied mathematics, there's inevitably a catastrophe; But a mathematical catastrophe need not be a disaster (despite the two words being synonymous in casual English).

The only thing that population alarmists can prove mathematically is that population won't grow indefinitely. But that's perfectly OK; Nobody needs, wants or (if they're paying attention) expects it to.

Straw man. As I have said before in this thread, population is no longer growing exponentially (e.g. https://iidb.org/threads/too-many-people.27312/page-18#post-1101445). Instead, we have been adding about 1 billion people every 12 years for the last 50 years. That is linear growth, not exponential.

We have seen approximately 140 million births per year for the last 40 years. ( https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths#how-many-babies-are-born-each-year). If that continues, and lifespans remain the same, we will level off at around 10 billion people.

Again, exponential growth is not the problem, population overshoot is the problem, as I have documented many times. See

Too many people?

The light being discussed here would be "grow lamps" for hydroponics. I suppose that's "lighting some stuff up" but not quite what I was talking about. Those don't make good load absorbers because they need to be run to a schedule. Greenhouses are already being used to balance loads in...

iidb.org

and

Too many people?

And only ONE preferring a planet of 2b. When it comes to civilization, to be or not to be, that is the question.

iidb.org

and

Ecological overshoot - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

and

Overshoot (population) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Are you reading anything I write?

 

[Merle]

Did you have an actual point to make?

Yes. See https://iidb.org/threads/too-many-people.27312/page-19#post-1101485.

Are you reading anything I write?

 

[Merle]

I already showed that your "top three" concerns are nothing to do with population - they could (and did) exist with much lower population than today's, and they can (and likely will) be solved without any reference to population at all.

Sure, they were always problems. But only in recent decades have organizations determined that these conditions (species loss, fertilizer runoff, climate change) are deteriorating far above sustainable limits.

And I wrote an evaluation of your solutions. (https://iidb.org/threads/too-many-people.27312/page-30#post-1105765) You simply ignore that and declare victory.

If we look at global warming, we find that fossil fuel consumption is barely correlated to population, and that even if it were precisely correlated with population, population reductions would just kick the can down the road

Not necessarily. If we had much more natural land, it could absorb much of the CO2 we emit. The Global Footprint Network says that conditions were still sustainable in the 60s. See the graph at the top of this page; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot.

we need humans to not burn fossil fuels; This can easily be achieved by fissioning uranium instead (and despite your woeful ignorance of how reserves are calculated, it remains true that the cheaply accessible uranium on Earth is enough to last for at least many millions of years).

Your argument that we haven't found more proven uranium reserves because we have no need to look for more was addressed at https://iidb.org/threads/too-many-people.27312/page-30#post-1105933 . You simply ignore it and claim victory.

Are you reading anything I write? See Betteridge's Law

 

[Merle]

It's not even remotely defined because they never show how the lower limit is sustainable in the long run.

The Global Footprint Network details their calculations. They calculate that things were sustainable in the 60's. See https://www.footprintnetwork.org/ .

Their calculations are based on current conditions with current levels of non-renewable resources. They acknowledge that things will get worse as non-renewable resources are depleted. That is not their immediate concern. Their concern is with how much we are overburdening the planet, even if we assumed non-renewable resources lasted forever.

 

[Bomb#20]

Your argument that we haven't found more proven uranium reserves because we have no need to look for more was addressed at https://iidb.org/threads/too-many-people.27312/page-30#post-1105933 . You simply ignore it and claim victory.

He's correct. We haven't found more because we have no need to look for more. The claim you were defending in that post, "We have uranium reserves to provide all our power requirements for six years. That's not much.", is incorrect. Six years is much. Six years is an enormous amount. Nobody is worried about what we're going to do in year 7 because nobody is trying to "provide all our power requirements" with uranium. Nuclear power is providing 5% of all our power requirements. Prospectors don't decide what to prospect for based on hypotheticals about how close we would be to running out if we were to hypothetically use the mineral twenty times faster than we use it. At current use rates we have 120 years of proven reserves. That's quite enough for the mining companies to put off worrying about increasing our reserves for another generation or three.

(And that's not even considering that we currently just throw away 99+% of the uranium we mine. If we ever collectively decide to finally start taking the greenhouse effect seriously and ramp up our reliance on nuclear power, pretty soon we'll need to switch to breeder reactors and stop throwing away the U-238. That will change six years of reserves into a thousand years of reserves in one fell swoop.)

This is all a side issue, though. Whether there are too many people depends on an awful lot of considerations; the possibility of running out of energy does not make the top ten list.

 

[Merle]

He's correct. We haven't found more because we have no need to look for more.

Then why has the amount of money invested in the search for uranium skyrocketed in the past 15 years? It sure looks to me like a lot of people are realizing that this stuff could be worth a lot of money in the coming decades. But they are finding limited reserves for all that investment, and most of it is very expensive to mine. See chart at https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx#:~:text= the total recoverable identified resources to $260/kg.

(And that's not even considering that we currently just throw away 99+% of the uranium we mine. If we ever collectively decide to finally start taking the greenhouse effect seriously and ramp up our reliance on nuclear power, pretty soon we'll need to switch to breeder reactors and stop throwing away the U-238. That will change six years of reserves into a thousand years of reserves in one fell swoop.)

That is the claim, and yes, I certainly hope it works out.

This is all a side issue, though. Whether there are too many people depends on an awful lot of considerations; the possibility of running out of energy does not make the top ten list.

Again, the main concern is the environment for now. My opinion is that we would be best with a population of less than 5 billion. However, that ship appears to have already sailed. Even if we get people to actively promote reduced birth rates, and find the annual birthrate half of the current rate, it still will take many decades to make a significant change. Had we reacted in the 70's, we could be maintaining more sustainable levels.

Yes, of course, we should be promoting technological gains that will make things better. And we should probably address affluence gains that are destructive to the environment. Helping people to understand the multiplier effect of population and affluence, and persuading people that it is good to have fewer children will also be helpful. We need to look at all three levers of the I=PAT equation.

In my opinion, the population level may be forced to drop under 5 billion by the environment (global warming, famine, etc.) in the next 50 years . The population level may be forced to drop below 2 billion when we run out of cheap renewable energy. Yes, let's certainly work on technological solutions to delay those limits as far into the future as possible.

 

[Merle]

To avoid fucking the atmosphere, we need humans to not burn fossil fuels; This can easily be achieved by fissioning uranium instead

Easy, perhaps, but can we afford it?

This morning an interesting blog post popped up in my infeed-- https://ourfiniteworld.com/2023/06/02/models-hide-the-shortcomings-of-wind-and-solar/ . Tverberg details how wind and solar are not nearly as attractive as people think they are when you consider all that is involved. I think you probably agree with her on that.

But she also includes a link to this article -- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the...to-keep-money-losing-nuclear-plants-open.html -- which says that the only way the nuclear industry can keep going in America is through government subsidies. If the market prevailed, we would be shutting them down and using cheaper fossil fuels.

Of course we could argue that nuclear will be there when fossil fuels get too expensive, but when it comes to that, will we be able to afford nukes? As Tverberg argues in that post, fossil fuels are kept low by the fact that people cannot afford to pay more. The oil industry would love to drill more wells for the expensive, hard to get, oil, but they doubt if people would be able to afford it. She says, " US drillers of oil from shale formations... have been reducing the number of drilling rigs because oil prices are not high enough to justify more investment."

If people cannot afford to buy oil at the drilling costs of today's oil, and the cost of today's nuclear without subsidies may be higher than that, who will be able to afford nuclear if we need to rely on it?

And what about the refinement technologies you refer to? I suspect that these are much more expensive then the processes we use to fuel reactors today. Else, people would be doing it. How will we afford nuclear that is obtained at a higher price?

 

[bigfield]

But she also includes a link to this article -- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the...to-keep-money-losing-nuclear-plants-open.html -- which says that the only way the nuclear industry can keep going in America is through government subsidies. If the market prevailed, we would be shutting them down and using cheaper fossil fuels.

This highlights a couple of reasons why private industry should not be providing electricity generation.

1. We need electricity whether or not some corporations can profit from its supply. Electricity generation needs to be publicly owned to guarantee supply to homes and businesses at a reasonable price and using low-emissions sources.
2. Some electricity markets do not price in the cost of externalities such as global warming and carcinogenic air pollution, which means that the price of generating electricity from "cheaper" fossil fuels doesn't reflect its total cost.

If people cannot afford to buy oil at the drilling costs of today's oil, and the cost of today's nuclear without subsidies may be higher than that, who will be able to afford nuclear if we need to rely on it?

This is only a problem if you expect private industry to be able to extract a profit from owning essential utilities.

 

[Bomb#20]

He's correct. We haven't found more because we have no need to look for more.

Then why has the amount of money invested in the search for uranium skyrocketed in the past 15 years? It sure looks to me like a lot of people are realizing that this stuff could be worth a lot of money in the coming decades. But they are finding limited reserves for all that investment, and most of it is very expensive to mine. See chart at https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx#:~:text= the total recoverable identified resources to $260/kg.

I don't know in detail why it's recently grown so much, but the basic answer appears to be that speculators are gambling that having more than we need right away is going to be profitable in the long run. I'm guessing the main reasons their calculation of the odds has changed lately are the perception that due to global warming the public and governmental obstacles to expanding nuclear power are going to die away, and the perception that the present supplement to the reactor fuel supply from converting the stockpile of highly enriched uranium in decommissioned bombs is going to peter out -- that the U.S. and Russia have already cut our arsenals about as much as we're willing to.

 

[Merle]

I don't know in detail why it's recently grown so much, but the basic answer appears to be that speculators are gambling that having more than we need right away is going to be profitable in the long run. I'm guessing the main reasons their calculation of the odds has changed lately are the perception that due to global warming the public and governmental obstacles to expanding nuclear power are going to die away, and the perception that the present supplement to the reactor fuel supply from converting the stockpile of highly enriched uranium in decommissioned bombs is going to peter out -- that the U.S. and Russia have already cut our arsenals about as much as we're willing to.

It doesn't surprise me that around 2008 lots of folks decided to start spending more money trying to find uranium. Oil and gas prices were soaring. It was obvious that people were going to be looking for other forms of energy. Huge reserves of high quality uranium would look really good on the company books.

But look what they found--limited supplies of expensive-to-mine uranium.

The high quality stuff is probably easiest to find. When people get desperate, they start looking for anything they can find. That's what it looks like to me.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope we find great supplies of easily processed uranium. But that doesn't appear to be what is left.

If you read down through that link, you will see endless joy in the abundant uranium out there. But that doesn't seem to be what the graph at the top of the page indicates.

 

[Bomb#20]

I don't know in detail why it's recently grown so much, but the basic answer appears to be that speculators are gambling that having more than we need right away is going to be profitable in the long run. I'm guessing the main reasons their calculation of the odds has changed lately are the perception that due to global warming the public and governmental obstacles to expanding nuclear power are going to die away, and the perception that the present supplement to the reactor fuel supply from converting the stockpile of highly enriched uranium in decommissioned bombs is going to peter out -- that the U.S. and Russia have already cut our arsenals about as much as we're willing to.

It doesn't surprise me that around 2008 lots of folks decided to start spending more money trying to find uranium. Oil and gas prices were soaring. It was obvious that people were going to be looking for other forms of energy. Huge reserves of high quality uranium would look really good on the company books.

But look what they found--limited supplies of expensive-to-mine uranium.

The high quality stuff is probably easiest to find. When people get desperate, they start looking for anything they can find. That's what it looks like to me.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope we find great supplies of easily processed uranium. But that doesn't appear to be what is left.

If you read down through that link, you will see endless joy in the abundant uranium out there. But that doesn't seem to be what the graph at the top of the page indicates.

"Google what fraction of nuclear power cost is uranium

About 5,520,000 results (0.51 seconds)

The cost of raw uranium contributes about $0.0015/kWh to the cost of nuclear electricity, while in breeder reactors the uranium cost falls to $0.000015/kWh. "​

Limited supplies of expensive-to-mine uranium will be just fine.

 

[bilby]

Easy, perhaps, but can we afford it?

Yes. Yes we can. Easily.

 

[Bomb#20]

Ever since Malthus first wrote about it, people have repeated his major error.

It starts with the understanding that exponential growth in any physical system inevitably and unavoidably exhausts all resources, surprisingly quickly, and with very little warning.
<more material unrelated to Malthus' major error snipped>
In pure mathematics, exponential growth can go on forever, because you will never run out of numbers. In applied mathematics, there's inevitably a catastrophe; But a mathematical catastrophe need not be a disaster (despite the two words being synonymous in casual English).

The only thing that population alarmists can prove mathematically is that population won't grow indefinitely. But that's perfectly OK; Nobody needs, wants or (if they're paying attention) expects it to.

Have you even read Malthus? His major error was implicitly taking for granted there's no such thing as a birth control pill. He described perfectly well the ongoing processes that kept population under control and prevented the fanciful conclusion you're imputing to him from happening. His essay wasn't a forecast of a catastrophic end to exponential growth; it was an explanation for why communism won't work.

 

[bilby]

the only way the nuclear industry can keep going in America is through government subsidies. If the market prevailed, we would be shutting them down

The only reason the nuclear industry in America is expensive is because of enormous governmental impositions; The largest cost for operating a nuclear plant in the US is regulatory compliance.

As for cheap fossil fuels, they're only cheap because fossil fuel plants are allowed to dump their waste into the atmosphere for free. If they had to completely contain and manage their entire waste stream (as nuclear plants are required to do), coal power plants would be completely unaffordable.

 

[Bomb#20]

That paper talks about overpopulation but it does not talk about solutions to overpopulation.

I suppose Bilby will tell you the authors are not adults.

As we have already discussed, there are no solutions to overpopulation other than genocide.

Why do you keep saying that? It isn't true, and other solutions have already been posted upthread, and you know it. You appear to be saying it as an ad hominem argument, a way of poisoning the well against the people who disagree with you so you can win a rhetorical victory without earning it.

Just for examples:

We could cut off government health care subsidies for fertility treatments.
We could pay people to sign up for sterilization.
We could pay people to sign up for long-term reversible birth control.
We could spread the meme that having more than two children is a selfish antisocial act rather than a cause for celebration, much the way we encouraged people to regard going on safari in Africa and bagging a lion as a selfish antisocial act rather than a cause for celebration.
​

None of that is compulsory. None of that kills people or even infringes their right to choose for themselves how many kids to have. So stop your disinformation campaign. Stop trying to equate overpopulation concerns with genocide advocacy as a method of character assassination. What you've been doing is dishonorable. Just stop.

 

[Merle]

That paper talks about overpopulation but it does not talk about solutions to overpopulation.

I suppose Bilby will tell you the authors are not adults.

As we have already discussed, there are no solutions to overpopulation other than genocide.

Why do you keep saying that? It isn't true, and other solutions have already been posted upthread, and you know it. You appear to be saying it as an ad hominem argument, a way of poisoning the well against the people who disagree with you so you can win a rhetorical victory without earning it.

Just for examples:

We could cut off government health care subsidies for fertility treatments.
We could pay people to sign up for sterilization.
We could pay people to sign up for long-term reversible birth control.
We could spread the meme that having more than two children is a selfish antisocial act rather than a cause for celebration, much the way we encouraged people to regard going on safari in Africa and bagging a lion as a selfish antisocial act rather than a cause for celebration.
​

None of that is compulsory. None of that kills people or even infringes their right to choose for themselves how many kids to have. So stop your disinformation campaign. Stop trying to equate overpopulation concerns with genocide advocacy as a method of character assassination. What you've been doing is dishonorable. Just stop.

Excellent post!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But she also includes a link to this article -- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the...to-keep-money-losing-nuclear-plants-open.html -- which says that the only way the nuclear industry can keep going in America is through government subsidies. If the market prevailed, we would be shutting them down and using cheaper fossil fuels.

This highlights a couple of reasons why private industry should not be providing electricity generation.

1. We need electricity whether or not some corporations can profit from its supply. Electricity generation needs to be publicly owned to guarantee supply to homes and businesses at a reasonable price and using low-emissions sources.
2. Some electricity markets do not price in the cost of externalities such as global warming and carcinogenic air pollution, which means that the price of generating electricity from "cheaper" fossil fuels doesn't reflect its total cost.

Government has a worse track record than private industry.

 

[bigfield]

But she also includes a link to this article -- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the...to-keep-money-losing-nuclear-plants-open.html -- which says that the only way the nuclear industry can keep going in America is through government subsidies. If the market prevailed, we would be shutting them down and using cheaper fossil fuels.

This highlights a couple of reasons why private industry should not be providing electricity generation.

1. We need electricity whether or not some corporations can profit from its supply. Electricity generation needs to be publicly owned to guarantee supply to homes and businesses at a reasonable price and using low-emissions sources.
2. Some electricity markets do not price in the cost of externalities such as global warming and carcinogenic air pollution, which means that the price of generating electricity from "cheaper" fossil fuels doesn't reflect its total cost.

Government has a worse track record than private industry.

Not where I'm from.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But she also includes a link to this article -- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the...to-keep-money-losing-nuclear-plants-open.html -- which says that the only way the nuclear industry can keep going in America is through government subsidies. If the market prevailed, we would be shutting them down and using cheaper fossil fuels.

This highlights a couple of reasons why private industry should not be providing electricity generation.

1. We need electricity whether or not some corporations can profit from its supply. Electricity generation needs to be publicly owned to guarantee supply to homes and businesses at a reasonable price and using low-emissions sources.
2. Some electricity markets do not price in the cost of externalities such as global warming and carcinogenic air pollution, which means that the price of generating electricity from "cheaper" fossil fuels doesn't reflect its total cost.

Government has a worse track record than private industry.

Not where I'm from.

I mean in terms of the environment.