Inasmuch as we live and have thrived on exploitation, it behooves us to consider what happens when people are hurt or our home is depleted when exploitation reaches its final solution. It is simply nonsense to assume the earth can hold our exploding population with its exploding appetites – the evidence is all around us.

Santorum was implicated in advantaging AccuWeather over the National Weather Service and receiving contributions from same (though dwarfed by our current levels of corruption). However, the model of bought legislators has firm hold of our process, to our great detriment.

I hate to admit it, but Eisenhower the egghead exploiter had some famous words on the subject:

“One core idea dominates every version: the first draft described “the conjunction of a large and permanent military establishment and a large and permanent arms industry.” Policing it would require “all the organizing genius we possess” to insure “that liberty and security are both well served.” It added, “We must be especially careful to avoid measures which would enable any segment of this vast military-industrial complex to sharpen the focus of its power.” Through scores of revisions, that idea persisted. As delivered, the speech memorably read, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/12/20/101220ta_talk_newton

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

You can no longer fill up your car with leaded gasoline, buy tiger pelts, build houses full of asbestos, or drink cyclamates in your sodas. As a proud supporter of those tyrannical laws, which have clearly succeeded in their hidden goal of turning us into preindustrial commune-dwellers with a life expectancy of 12, I wish more people would remember to complain about them.

That’s the thing about markets–they can adapt to changes in their environment, in this case the legal environment. Clearly the models that claim otherwise are flawed and need a Harry to read ‘em a bit closer to clean out the bugs.

Fortunately, there are enough people out there who understand, and it’s not going to happen. They’ll keep on digging the coal, drilling the oil, extracting the shale oils and tar sands to power the civilisation that feeds and clothes you and enables you to say this. They’ll ignore you and work around you and carry on.

As Daniel C. Dennet says, “Thank Goodness” for them.

We have looked at the evidence. I’ve got books stacked with hundreds of pages of statistics and references on the subject. But the easiest and most obvious piece of evidence is that according to exactly the same claims and considerations you mention, and with half the population we have now, we should have run out of everything two or three decades ago and all died.

Economists knew the claims were wrong then, and said so. (There’s an essay somewhere on the internet called “The Doomslayer” that tells the story.) But it didn’t make much of an impact on the public consciousness. “You’re all perfectly safe!” isn’t much of a newspaper headline.

For that matter, they’ve been saying the same thing at intervals since Malthus’s time. There’s an amusing story from about 1890 where they calculated that for civilisation to continue to expand at the current rate, they would run out of horses, (civilisation was horse powered back then,) and that if they did somehow manage it, the streets of London and New York would be 9 foot deep in dung by 1930.

They make the same mistake, the same basic misunderstanding, over and over again. Resources are not found, they are created. They are manufactured, by means of human ingenuity. Commenting on Malthus, Henry George summarised the basic issue pithily: “Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens; but the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens.”

The resources we use at any given time also keep on changing, as technology moves on, but the assumption keeps on being made that everything will stay the same, only with more of us, and then extrapolating in a straight line. It is like claiming that we cannot keep walking indefinitely, because we live on a finite continent and must eventually therefore fall into the ocean. We keep postponing the inevitable by turning corners, but unlimited progress on a finite continent is impossible, right?

Of course, there’s a way we can bring it all to an end, and it cuts to the heart of the conservationist paradox. We can stop using resources. The effect of which is obviously to make happen now exactly what people fear will happen when we run out of them. Famine. War. Ruin. The end of civilisation.

If we stop using our present resources before we have used them to create the next set, it will be Game Over. And it will be a lot harder to start all over again from the beginning.

Fortunately, there are enough people out there who understand, and it’s not going to happen. They’ll keep on digging the coal, drilling the oil, extracting the shale oils and tar sands to power the civilisation that feeds and clothes you and enables you to say this. They’ll ignore you and work around you and carry on.

I hope you live long enough to see it.

@18, @19: You can live in your fantasy world, or you can look at the evidence: oil reserves, fish stocks, endangered species, arable land, drinkable water, etc. They’re all diminishing. Maybe some technological advances will postpone it – as it undeniably has already – but unlimited growth is impossible. I don’t care how much misery that attitude might have engendered – it’s a paper cut compared with what it’s trying to prevent.

As for me, I may rail against the situation, but I’m pretty much resigned to it. By the numbers, Americans need to cut their resource usage to a third of what it is currently (or else some magical technology needs to triple the availability of all the resources we rely on). Considering the outrage over light bulbs and carbon taxes, that’s never going to happen.

Eventually it’s all going to fall apart. I just hope I’m dead and buried before it does.

Amen, comrade. I would just strengthen that by adding that population scares can be seen in the first century in China.

The number of people the Earth can support with current technology has been calculated by some to be up to a trillion people.

Others have been predicting imminent collapse since Malthus – the big population scare in the 1960s said the famines and resource shortages would start by the 1980s and global civilisation would collapse by 2000. We all remember that, don’t we?

The imminent end of the world has been an article of faith in many cults, and rituals to ward it off range from prayer to making sacrifices to buying twisty lightbulbs. And in all cults, when the appointed day arrives and passes without incident, the faithful do not doubt, but simply shift the date on the prediction.

I don’t have any particular “contempt” for those who follow such cults, but I’m not happy that as a non-believer I should get coerced into following their ineffective rituals, or giving up my own prosperity or hopes of similar prosperity for the poor of the world in the name of their dream. You can believe as you choose. But we should be able to too.

It is not a “simple fact”, and that mentality has been responsible for a great deal of misery and suffering. The idea that there are too many people leads to terminal plans for them.

I repeat, I have a very serious problem with gross caricatures of the working class in manner that is identical to racial bigotry. Do you get this or do you not?