There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me.
Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked. It won't be the end of the world, but we will all be poorer and there will be suffering while we adjust. I too hope for some near free energy and material source to appear somehow and prevent this, but I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in.
>Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked.
Not only are we picking the low-hanging fruit in energy production, but we're picking it at a temporarily discounted cost (with carbon emissions not being priced in) at the expense of our future selves and future generations.
What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve.
To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based on pure thermodynamics is somewhere around 1 trillion people.
> Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked.
This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.
Yeah, although the author is excited about new knowledge, he is ignoring our growing knowledge about toxicity and the costs of disrupting ecosystem resources, as well as the compounding expenses of maintaining a high standard of living at greater population density. You can be optimistic about the long arc of human progress and still realistic about our ability to take catastrophic steps backwards.
> I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in.
People believe what's convenient. It's inconvenient to be realistic and accept that we're heading in a bad direction (because then we all have to sacrifice comforts). Rome and its way of life fell, the British Empire and its way of life fell, and one day our global consumerist society and its way of life will fall too
Even the most optimistic projections put the world population peaking well before 2100. Growth has slowed considerably and will likely continue to slow even more as worldwide economic malaise puts further pressure on birth rates (especially since the developing world is urbanizing and urbanization is correlated with a decline in births per woman).
Population is projected to level out, so it's a moot point. We're facing a crucial need specifically for curbing emissions in the short-run, but we're unlikely to too rapidly exploit resources by virtue that growth in demand will stall and efficiency will continue to improve. Incidentally that can be a catalyst for change in the way society functions. The significant choice facing us is determining the path we take towards post-scarcity and nil GDP growth, because it's happening one way or another.
Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked. It won't be the end of the world, but we will all be poorer and there will be suffering while we adjust. I too hope for some near free energy and material source to appear somehow and prevent this, but I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in.
We'll heat ourselves to death before we'll run out of resources and energy, because humans are 100 watts space heater. The problem is not about the amount of energy but the side effect of pollution.
Perhaps we should petition the governance structure to create a maximum threshold of 10 million dollars per person.
Sure, billionares will lose much of their wealth, and will try to hide in off shore funds (even more so than they do at present) but we can legislate for this and de-anonymise the wealth. We would then collapse those off shore legal structures, allocate the wealth to individuals, and apply the 10m limit.
It wouldn't be that difficult, it would leave everyone with plenty of wealth, and is a simple answer.
PS - I don't think this is the right answer. But then how can the answer to the environmental issues be to socialise the risks and expenses across all the population, while allowing the owners of the corporations that have exploited the world's resources for profit get keep and hide their immorally-gained wealth?
> Everyone should be living much more like the most wealthy people in the most wealthy nations are living now. It should be considered a moral abomination that billions of people are not living in multiple story homes with robotic assistants to control their lights, security, doors, air-conditioning and the temperature of their pools.
As with the rest of the article, I'm really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If everybody had these conditions of living, we would either need a larger planet or a lot less people on it.
Not only that, but the conditions in the West are contingent on the work done in the rest of the world. There's a reason we're not all working in sweatshops making all the products we are constantly using, and it's because we have poor people in other countries doing it instead. For their living standards to rise, ours will have to lower (though the economy is not a zero sum game of course, and technology/automation can reduce the necessary labour).
I don't think it's malicious or anything - I just think that this perspective is a little ignorant of how the world really works.
The multistory rather than merely spacious homes and 'pool' with the implication of a private pool, which are both very space inefficient make this seem foolish to me, but I see no issue with billions of people living in cities with easy access to pools, parks, schooling, jobs, and comfortable safe, warm/cool housing and living standards that are science fiction to their immediate ancestors.
It's not that the planet is not enough, because maybe it is, but does the author really think that even people that can afford those comforts now really want them? My own data point: home, yes, multiple story no. No stairs, no elevators is best. Robotic assistants for lights, I don't care. Security: if that's a burglar alarm yes. Control doors? I'm happy and feel more secure with traditional locks. Air-conditioning, yes. Pool, I don't care.
>As with the rest of the article, I'm really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If everybody had these conditions of living, we would either need a larger planet or a lot less people on it.
If you had a lot less people on it, you wouldn't have the labor force needed to keep that standard of living functioning :)
"Should any particular resource begin to run short, our creativity will bring into being the knowledge of how to replace that resource from either some other source or by using some other means to accomplish what that resource did."
The track record on this appears to be 100%. Are there any examples of a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?
A good real-life parable is to read what happened on Easter Island [1]. In short, humans found a completely isolated island that could support a population of around 5000. Over a few centuries they damaged the environment (cut down all the trees, overfished the local waters, over-farmed the land, etc) to the point where it could only support a population of about 600; at which point their civilization descended into anarchy and cannibalism until "the market adjusted" the population to be equal to the available food.
Ten years before the collapse of Easter Island, someone could have made the same argument: When we cut down all the trees so we couldn't hunt dolphins any more, we replaced that with clams. When the clams were gone, we began hunting birds. When the soil became so poor that we couldn't grow one crop, we replaced it with another one. Our track record is 100%; there's no reason to believe we can't go on replacing one resource with another forever.
And then one day they couldn't.
Or listen to Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
"Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests,' as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief." [2]
So far we've been able to replace wood with coal, coal with oil, and so on; so far there hasn't been anything critical to civilization that we've run out of. But it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that something like that could happen.
Keep in mind that until about 200 years ago we didn't consume anything even close to the scale of what we're doing now.
So far we basically replaced everything with petrol derived products (whale oil, coal, natural fibers, fertiliser, insecticide, &c.) and good luck replacing that, virtually anything you have in direct line of sight contains petroleum products. The fact that we did it in the past at some lower scaler doesn't really tell us anything about the future.
I always found the "fuck it we'll figure it out later (when I'm dead)" argument to be extremely questionable. Burning your bed to stay warm once your sofa is done burning doesn't really sound like a smart plan, but it seems to be the one we're adopting
The only example I can think of is water. While it's not gone, the quality and cleanliness has decreased over time. There are many areas where you can no longer consume seafood due to high pollution levels. Same with swimming or drinking (boiling used to be sufficient to clean water, but it certainly isn't anymore).
Even "safe" seafood is only recommended to be consumed 2 times a week now due to the build up of heavy metals.
It's also true that we'll always been able to purify water for consumption/use, but there is a cost to that and I don't see that cost decreasing.
This perspective also assumes enough creativity and capital available to do this will always there. If you're going to need to develop potentially more complex and expensive technology it's going to need a certain level of complexity and population to support that complexity available. With birth rates being below replacement level it seems population of young people is heading down generation after generation. So... I'm not so convinced this assumption will always hold. In fact, it's a concrete example of a negative feedback loop kicking in and correcting the status quo for us as in order to have a society capable of such a level of innovation it has to be structured such that it's population refuses to reproduce in sufficient numbers.
> a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?
If we were to have depleted something we need without finding a replacement, humans would be extinct by now, or at least on a path towards it.
We’re alive and, on average, extremely safe (life expectancy is higher than ever, despite obesity, opioids, etc)
So, if we assume that we’re better of than ever in history, I don’t think there can be any way the answer to that could be “yes”.
Of course, one can claim that assumption doesn’t hold. for some, having all the modern stuff may not make up for not being able to see dodos, passenger pigeons or huge herds of bison.
Even a resolute “no” answer doesn’t say much, though. Past performance is no guarantee for future results.
There is an inherent contradiction in the article in that he argues that we can use a resource more efficiently or replace it while simultaneously arguing for ever more wasteful uses of the very same resources. You can only choose one.
I don't think we should strive to remake the galaxy for human comfort and desires, but instead strive to remake ourselves, to be better suited to the environments we inhabit.
It was nice to read something optimistic again. Feels so rare these days. Seems like whenever optimism pokes its head out, everyone rushes to smash it back into its hole. There’s no room for your optimism in my reality! And so on.
edit: Hmm. I get a negative score for celebrating some optimism. How dare I step out of line.
This is something I learned about iron recently. We're not running out of it, thankfully. The planet is mostly iron, after all. But it perhaps helps drive home the sheer scale of modern industrial civilization.
More steel was manufactured per year [1] in the 2010s, than humanity produced in its entire history up to World War I. The whole century of the industrial revolution -- from the Eiffel Tower, to the steam ships, railways -- is but a drop in the ocean of material production by today's standards.
Most basic resources have a similar looking chart. And not everything is as abundant as iron.
Pet peeve: James Watt was the Bill Gates of his day, he held natural industrial progress made by thousands of talented individuals back with patents and connections to the wealthy, please stop crediting him personally with the steam engine.
- today "needed resources" might be different, at least partially, than tomorrow ones, as they are partially different than yesterday, but such differences are very hard to estimate since we know the past, but we can't really know the future, planning cover development with already or almost already known things, future scientific discovering are not predictable;
- resource estimate is done and sold as a "tangible number" however I'm not sure how approximate it can be. So saying on earth we can source X gazillion tons of a certain mineral for me is "probably near truth but until extracted we can't really know" and that's similar for agriculture production vs climate change;
- another issue is the meaning of "renewable" and "circular", wood is renewable at a certain rate of usage, recyclable one ore two time for different usage in a more or less significant percentage, Al is formally 100% renewable ad infinitum, glass the same, but the scale and the cost of such supply chains are not immediately measurable on scale etc.
Long story short my own personal opinion is: for actual technology, actual number of people, actual human development, we probably have significant resource issues witch does not means "we run out" in the broad sense, but we still are in a very bad situation. Planning moves to evolve is mandatory, but must be done at both scientific and social level, certainly not at economical level as is done today.
>>We can make all of the Earth rather like the best parts of New York, or Paris or Sydney: picturesque, clean and comfortable. We can then set about to make the rest of the solar system rather like the Earth.
If we make even 10% of the entire earth's surface at that density, it will be an environmental catastrophe that would likely collapse the food web.
Over half the world's population lives on less than 1% of the land [0]. Only 14% of the land has been modified in any way.
Long before we turn the whole thing into a cityscape, the natural world on which we depend, from the soil biology, to the pollinators, to the apex predators, will all collapse.
Sure the author has a point about the transformative ability of knowledge, but he's also basically an idiot about system dynamics.
The 19th & 20th centuries have taught us how transformative knowledge is. Prior to these centuries humanity more or less haphazardly acquired new knowledge. Now we're much more principled in our acquisition and management of knowledge - in fact we've come to see that knowledge itself is a resource. What do we know about knowledge resources? For starters we know they're finite. There's only so much knowledge available to any computing node (or person). Then there's the issue of it takes energy to store, transfer, and synthesize that knowledge and those energy costs are skyrocketing. Finally, there's the very real fact that knowledge synthesis is asymptotic - there's a finite amount of knowledge to be had in total, and while quick strides can be made in getting close to that totality to close the remaining knowledge gap will require increasing amounts of energy.
We closed a remarkable bit of that gap in the 19th and 20th centuries - the gaps remaining are getting really difficult to fill. This is the counterargument to innovation will solve all our problems.
You never just run out of something one day. Demand goes up, supply goes down, and as you realize that, prices go up. As prices go up, alternatives are used and adjustments are made.
As an example, I've heard people say that if Russia shut off the gas supply, Europe would freeze to death. Maybe that's true at first glance, but it ignores that gas is used because it is the best option. But it's not like freezing to death is the second best option. Heated blankets that run on a fraction of the electricity of electric heaters, still exist. Wood stoves exist in older homes. Adults moving back to their parents homes with wood stoves exists. On and on. Most people aren't just going to give up because one resource dies out. Theyll just move to the second best option, that's more expensive. And that's ignoring innovation even.
I would say no, we just need to change what we focus on. If you're worried about lithium-ion batteries running out, check out Aluminum ion batteries (AL is the mos t abundant metal in the Earth's crust).
Worried about farmland? Check out advances in vertical farming.
Worried about space to live? Just wait for a housing price correction.
Worried about energy? Check out the advances in Solar, Small modular reactors, and grid storage possibilities.
The better question isn't "are we running out of resources?" it's "should we be using different resources or the same resources differently?" to which the answer is yes and being explored by scientists and engineers
I think we know now that issue is not about lack of resources[1], it is more about the destruction of the environment[2]. If we want to keep coexisting with other forms of living.
[1] Once generation IV nuclear powered is mastered, that is.
This is really just CO2. Everything else is more easily controllable, recyclable, or avoidable.
If you look at the mass of material extracted from the Earth, fossil fuels > all mineral resources. To first order, the resource problem is the fossil fuel problem, and we're on a trajectory to get off fossil fuels.
I think we are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment - in a good way!
But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured. In the name of protecting us and the environment, the governance structure creates artificial rules on behalf of their stakeholders (corporations) that stops innovation and pushes the costs and risks on to the population at large.
I'd agree this one takes too long to get to its thrust, but I'd argue the majority of articles I read gloss over nuance in an attempt to capture Twitter-soaked brains.
Netlify deploys your site under such a URL when you hit "Preview", so you can check the modificatons before you deploy them on your live site. But these preview subdomains are seemingly not deletable (at least that's what I found a few years ago) so it feels like polluting the Internet, as well as leaving draft versions of your content permanently online.
Edit: To correct myself, the docs https://docs.netlify.com/site-deploys/deploy-previews/ do say the URLs of such preview sites are different (they begin with "deploy-preview"), so I'm not sure why the URL of this submission is like that.
[+] [-] volatilecarbon|4 years ago|reply
Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked. It won't be the end of the world, but we will all be poorer and there will be suffering while we adjust. I too hope for some near free energy and material source to appear somehow and prevent this, but I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in.
[+] [-] benstrumental|4 years ago|reply
Not only are we picking the low-hanging fruit in energy production, but we're picking it at a temporarily discounted cost (with carbon emissions not being priced in) at the expense of our future selves and future generations.
[+] [-] pfdietz|4 years ago|reply
To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based on pure thermodynamics is somewhere around 1 trillion people.
> Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked.
This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.
[+] [-] evrydayhustling|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silicon2401|4 years ago|reply
People believe what's convenient. It's inconvenient to be realistic and accept that we're heading in a bad direction (because then we all have to sacrifice comforts). Rome and its way of life fell, the British Empire and its way of life fell, and one day our global consumerist society and its way of life will fall too
[+] [-] Longlius|4 years ago|reply
Even the most optimistic projections put the world population peaking well before 2100. Growth has slowed considerably and will likely continue to slow even more as worldwide economic malaise puts further pressure on birth rates (especially since the developing world is urbanizing and urbanization is correlated with a decline in births per woman).
[+] [-] slothtrop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiba|4 years ago|reply
We'll heat ourselves to death before we'll run out of resources and energy, because humans are 100 watts space heater. The problem is not about the amount of energy but the side effect of pollution.
[+] [-] cupofpython|4 years ago|reply
We about to get some new entries
[+] [-] verisimi|4 years ago|reply
Sure, billionares will lose much of their wealth, and will try to hide in off shore funds (even more so than they do at present) but we can legislate for this and de-anonymise the wealth. We would then collapse those off shore legal structures, allocate the wealth to individuals, and apply the 10m limit.
It wouldn't be that difficult, it would leave everyone with plenty of wealth, and is a simple answer.
PS - I don't think this is the right answer. But then how can the answer to the environmental issues be to socialise the risks and expenses across all the population, while allowing the owners of the corporations that have exploited the world's resources for profit get keep and hide their immorally-gained wealth?
[+] [-] rob74|4 years ago|reply
As with the rest of the article, I'm really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If everybody had these conditions of living, we would either need a larger planet or a lot less people on it.
[+] [-] beaconstudios|4 years ago|reply
I don't think it's malicious or anything - I just think that this perspective is a little ignorant of how the world really works.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway6532|4 years ago|reply
If you had a lot less people on it, you wouldn't have the labor force needed to keep that standard of living functioning :)
It's hubris in the extreme.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
> But only because no resource has yet been discovered that is objectively better at producing electricity more cheaply.
Um, no. Only if you hide most of the deaths it causes off the balance sheet and pretend they don't exist.
[+] [-] standardUser|4 years ago|reply
The track record on this appears to be 100%. Are there any examples of a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?
[+] [-] gwd|4 years ago|reply
Ten years before the collapse of Easter Island, someone could have made the same argument: When we cut down all the trees so we couldn't hunt dolphins any more, we replaced that with clams. When the clams were gone, we began hunting birds. When the soil became so poor that we couldn't grow one crop, we replaced it with another one. Our track record is 100%; there's no reason to believe we can't go on replacing one resource with another forever.
And then one day they couldn't.
Or listen to Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
"Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests,' as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief." [2]
So far we've been able to replace wood with coal, coal with oil, and so on; so far there hasn't been anything critical to civilization that we've run out of. But it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that something like that could happen.
[1] http://employees.oneonta.edu/allenth/Class-Readings-Password...
[2] As quoted in https://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-talebs-black-swan-tha...
[+] [-] lm28469|4 years ago|reply
Keep in mind that until about 200 years ago we didn't consume anything even close to the scale of what we're doing now.
So far we basically replaced everything with petrol derived products (whale oil, coal, natural fibers, fertiliser, insecticide, &c.) and good luck replacing that, virtually anything you have in direct line of sight contains petroleum products. The fact that we did it in the past at some lower scaler doesn't really tell us anything about the future.
I always found the "fuck it we'll figure it out later (when I'm dead)" argument to be extremely questionable. Burning your bed to stay warm once your sofa is done burning doesn't really sound like a smart plan, but it seems to be the one we're adopting
[+] [-] volatilecarbon|4 years ago|reply
Even "safe" seafood is only recommended to be consumed 2 times a week now due to the build up of heavy metals.
It's also true that we'll always been able to purify water for consumption/use, but there is a cost to that and I don't see that cost decreasing.
[+] [-] throwaway6532|4 years ago|reply
This perspective also assumes enough creativity and capital available to do this will always there. If you're going to need to develop potentially more complex and expensive technology it's going to need a certain level of complexity and population to support that complexity available. With birth rates being below replacement level it seems population of young people is heading down generation after generation. So... I'm not so convinced this assumption will always hold. In fact, it's a concrete example of a negative feedback loop kicking in and correcting the status quo for us as in order to have a society capable of such a level of innovation it has to be structured such that it's population refuses to reproduce in sufficient numbers.
[+] [-] Someone|4 years ago|reply
If we were to have depleted something we need without finding a replacement, humans would be extinct by now, or at least on a path towards it.
We’re alive and, on average, extremely safe (life expectancy is higher than ever, despite obesity, opioids, etc)
So, if we assume that we’re better of than ever in history, I don’t think there can be any way the answer to that could be “yes”.
Of course, one can claim that assumption doesn’t hold. for some, having all the modern stuff may not make up for not being able to see dodos, passenger pigeons or huge herds of bison.
Even a resolute “no” answer doesn’t say much, though. Past performance is no guarantee for future results.
[+] [-] imtringued|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacknews|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wly_cdgr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheschire|4 years ago|reply
edit: Hmm. I get a negative score for celebrating some optimism. How dare I step out of line.
[+] [-] lm28469|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retrac|4 years ago|reply
More steel was manufactured per year [1] in the 2010s, than humanity produced in its entire history up to World War I. The whole century of the industrial revolution -- from the Eiffel Tower, to the steam ships, railways -- is but a drop in the ocean of material production by today's standards.
Most basic resources have a similar looking chart. And not everything is as abundant as iron.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/VBIN1RF.png
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kkfx|4 years ago|reply
- today "needed resources" might be different, at least partially, than tomorrow ones, as they are partially different than yesterday, but such differences are very hard to estimate since we know the past, but we can't really know the future, planning cover development with already or almost already known things, future scientific discovering are not predictable;
- resource estimate is done and sold as a "tangible number" however I'm not sure how approximate it can be. So saying on earth we can source X gazillion tons of a certain mineral for me is "probably near truth but until extracted we can't really know" and that's similar for agriculture production vs climate change;
- another issue is the meaning of "renewable" and "circular", wood is renewable at a certain rate of usage, recyclable one ore two time for different usage in a more or less significant percentage, Al is formally 100% renewable ad infinitum, glass the same, but the scale and the cost of such supply chains are not immediately measurable on scale etc.
Long story short my own personal opinion is: for actual technology, actual number of people, actual human development, we probably have significant resource issues witch does not means "we run out" in the broad sense, but we still are in a very bad situation. Planning moves to evolve is mandatory, but must be done at both scientific and social level, certainly not at economical level as is done today.
[+] [-] toss1|4 years ago|reply
If we make even 10% of the entire earth's surface at that density, it will be an environmental catastrophe that would likely collapse the food web.
Over half the world's population lives on less than 1% of the land [0]. Only 14% of the land has been modified in any way.
Long before we turn the whole thing into a cityscape, the natural world on which we depend, from the soil biology, to the pollinators, to the apex predators, will all collapse.
Sure the author has a point about the transformative ability of knowledge, but he's also basically an idiot about system dynamics.
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3389041/Wher... [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/human-impact-earth-pl...
[+] [-] taylodl|4 years ago|reply
We closed a remarkable bit of that gap in the 19th and 20th centuries - the gaps remaining are getting really difficult to fill. This is the counterargument to innovation will solve all our problems.
[+] [-] anemoiac|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namecheapTA|4 years ago|reply
As an example, I've heard people say that if Russia shut off the gas supply, Europe would freeze to death. Maybe that's true at first glance, but it ignores that gas is used because it is the best option. But it's not like freezing to death is the second best option. Heated blankets that run on a fraction of the electricity of electric heaters, still exist. Wood stoves exist in older homes. Adults moving back to their parents homes with wood stoves exists. On and on. Most people aren't just going to give up because one resource dies out. Theyll just move to the second best option, that's more expensive. And that's ignoring innovation even.
[+] [-] nuvious|4 years ago|reply
Worried about farmland? Check out advances in vertical farming.
Worried about space to live? Just wait for a housing price correction.
Worried about energy? Check out the advances in Solar, Small modular reactors, and grid storage possibilities.
The better question isn't "are we running out of resources?" it's "should we be using different resources or the same resources differently?" to which the answer is yes and being explored by scientists and engineers
[+] [-] fold3|4 years ago|reply
[1] Once generation IV nuclear powered is mastered, that is.
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/04/ipcc-rep...
[+] [-] femto|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|4 years ago|reply
If you look at the mass of material extracted from the Earth, fossil fuels > all mineral resources. To first order, the resource problem is the fossil fuel problem, and we're on a trajectory to get off fossil fuels.
[+] [-] wishawa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verisimi|4 years ago|reply
I think we are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment - in a good way!
But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured. In the name of protecting us and the environment, the governance structure creates artificial rules on behalf of their stakeholders (corporations) that stops innovation and pushes the costs and risks on to the population at large.
[+] [-] TuringTest|4 years ago|reply
> But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured.
The second sentence contradicts the first one.
[+] [-] rmbyrro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdefore|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k8sToGo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netsharc|4 years ago|reply
Edit: To correct myself, the docs https://docs.netlify.com/site-deploys/deploy-previews/ do say the URLs of such preview sites are different (they begin with "deploy-preview"), so I'm not sure why the URL of this submission is like that.
[+] [-] 0des|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shadonototra|4 years ago|reply
Are we wasting resources? yes