The Population Problem

Take a look at this chart.


It represents human population growth for the last thousand years. You will notice that in the last forty years our population has doubled. For the forty odd thousand years prior to the Year 1000 our population was steady at about three hundred thousand. As technology improved our population grew and grew and grew. This is unsustainable growth.

In nature it is not unusual for animal populations to explode when environmental conditions are good, inevitably though what the environment giveth the environment taketh away. A good example of this is mice plagues in Australia. When conditions are good the mice breed like crazy. Mice are everywhere. They eat everything in site and then when drought inevitable returns they starve to death.

Hence our population has exploded because conditions are good. The main thing that has made things so good is oil. We are totally reliant on oil. It is the base of all our plastics, all our fertilisers and the thing we run all of our machines son. It is estimated that ten calories of oil energy is used for every one calorie of food produced in the western world.

Oil is running out. It is my opinion that we are currently at the plateau of oil production. That is peak oil. Canadian oil sands and unconventional oil are not the answer as the energy put into extraction is more than the energy that you get out. When we get to the point of having to rely on them then oil will be too expensive anyway. Many will tout alternate energy as the answer but that is just bullshit. It is not just about energy and BTW electricity is not an energy source, electricity is created from some other energy source and if we don’t have oil how they going to make your electric car? How will they make the plastic for your car? The tyres?

Ethanol. Some say ethanol is an alternate energy source. I pity them. There is not enough arable land to grow enough corn to produce enough ethanol to even power one country like the USA, at least not if you want to grow food too.

There is no alternative energy source that can do for us what oil has. It is fantasy to think there is. When the oil runs out or becomes prohibitively expensive so our good time ends and people start starving until eventually we are back to that sustainable population of less than one billion.

Nothing can prevent the inevitable collapse. Our population will double again within thirty years and speed up the depletion of oil exponentially. Even if we kill off five billion people today then it only delays the inevitable. The collapse will be slow and painful and it has already started. Open your eyes and you’ll see.