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Originally Posted by Willravel
You're certainly right about food, but what about energy for growing the food and moving it to people?
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roachboy has a
thread about this.
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Still, there will eventually be a point where humans have gone beyond our geo-homeostasis if the population continues on it's present path.
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This is true, but I don't think we'll continue on our present path for much longer. Just ten years ago, if you were to tell someone people would be driving electric cars by choice, they'd think you were mad. "What, you mean like in the future?" they'd ask coincidentally.
Economics will be the key. It will become too expensive to "keep up" with the middle and upper classes and their lifestyles. A computer in every household was once a dream. Only wealthy households had a computer back in the day. Now we carry them in our pockets. Some people have more than one on them at a time. I own two actual "computers" and I am by no means rich. But what will happen when it gets more expensive to pay Chinese or Taiwanese workers to make them? But that's just computers. Do you realize how many goods come from Asia these days? It's quite astounding. If oil breaks $200 by 2010 as they're predicting, the cost of shipping virtually anything will spike as well.
Globalization was cool when you had cheap job markets, cheap resources, and cheap oil. With current forecasts? Not so cool. Ideas like
Diet for a Small Planet and the
100-Mile Diet are just the tip of the iceberg.
To tell you the truth, I'm not so concerned about global warming. We have more immediate threats, I think. They have already begun to surface. Are we overpopulated? Yes, but only if you look at our activities. If we lived differently, we might be able to support 10 billion or more without concern. The problem is we all want to live like Americans.