I’m happy for you as well

I had thought that Malthusian stupidity had peaked in the late 60’s/early 70’s with things like Famine ’75, The Late Great Planet Earth and of course the most famous, Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb.

All of them were absolutely certain that civilisation was going to destroy itself in the 1970’s as the population outraced food production, apparently having learned nothing from the complete failure of the original predictions on the subject by Thomas Robert Malthus at that end of the 18th century.

Failing to learn the lesson the first time is barely forgiveable, although the passage of almost two centuries could be granted. Failing to forget lessons from fifty years ago is less so, and it seems we have a new batch of doomsters, judging from this post over at The Standard (I rarely look at them, as even the Lefties of The Daily Blog complain about their one-eyed defence of Labour and ban hammers), Richard Heinberg: The Final Doubling. The focus of that article is actually on economic growth and the need to put an end to it:

Further, if the economy keeps growing at the recent rate, in the next 25 years we will approximately double the amount of energy and materials we use. And by 50 years from today our energy and materials usage will have doubled again, and will therefore be four times current levels. In a hundred years, we will be using 16 times as much.

This sort of doomster talk is even older than Malthus, with the following being from the 3rd century:

You must know that the world has grown old, and does not remain in its former vigour. It bears witness to its own decline. The rainfall and the sun’s warmth are both diminishing; the metals are nearly exhausted; the husbandman is failing in the fields, the sailor on the seas, the soldier in the camp, honesty in the market, justice in the courts, concord in friendships, skill in the arts, discipline in morals. This is the sentence passed upon the world, that everything which has a beginning should perish, that things which have reached maturity should grow old, the strong weak, the great small, and that after weakness and shrinkage should come dissolution.

I don’t know how many times this has been debunked, both in theory and in practice over thousands of years and especially since the start of the Industrial Revolution. One of the most famous debunkers was the economist Julian Simon, who won a famous victory in a 1980 wager with none other than Ehrlich over whether or not a bundle of five natural resources would become more scarce over the course of a decade. Had they been around at the time of Malthus people like Erlich would have predicted a collapse in wood supplies in the 18th century for construction and fuel – before people figured out how to find, extract and burn coal, followed by gas, oil and nuclear energy. That was actually Simon’s main point, as he tirelessly documented, and which is concisely summarised here:

The Earth’s resources are limited, but those limits are the limits of the Earth not of our abilities. And there are no known limits to our abilities — we humans are not merely gatherers of a fixed supply of resources; we are discoverers and creators of a potentially unlimited supply of resources. That was the economist Julian Simon’s still-under-appreciated point about the ultimate resource: intelligence.

The ultimate resource is the human mind. The fact that the human population has increased to eight billion while at the same we’ve got healthier and wealthier does not deter these doomsters. Only one person on that comment thread (and he’s a blogger there called “Advantage” pointed to the relentless productivity improvement in energy consumption as just one facet of this fact.

But I think the reason for the re-emergence of this theory is that the Greens and Environmental Left have finally begun to recognise that their beloved renewable energy does have limits, and they quote a source I chucked at some of them online a few months ago, Professor Simon Michaux of the Finnish Geological Survey, who shows that “Global reserves are not large enough to supply enough metals to build the renewable non-fossil fuels industrial system.”, which leads the Standard writer to conclude:

Even if Michaux’s resource estimates are too pessimistic, it is still probably unrealistic to imagine that a renewables-based energy system will be capable of doubling in size even once, much less every 25 years forever more.

So even they are already beginning to realise the problems with renewable energy – but their answer is to have Zero Economic Growth. I don’t think that’s going to work, even with a global population that will be shrinking and aging fast after 2050 – which brings me to this garbage from Heinberg:

If growth continues at the current rate, we’ll have about 18 billion people on Earth by the end of this century.

To be fair to the Standard folks there are a few who buried that bullshit, pointing to rapidly falling birth rates and already shrinking populations in places like Japan, with solid forecasts of the same about to happen in other developed nations, with the developing nations merely lagging. And there’s also good news for these Lefties on this front:

The Numbers of Liberal Men Getting Vasectomies Has Skyrocketed

I’m not sure if the following is real or a joke advertisement worthy of the Babylon Bee, but in our Clown World anything is possible.

And here’s its Antipodian precursor.