Better Regulation of Business Will Be Necessary as Population Explodes and Energy Prices Rise

Big corporations are like big sharks.  They’re not evil.  They’re just eating. I read this clever observation several years ago on CDBaby, and had the immediate realization that WE have to swim with those sharks, and our shark cage (government) just isn’t protecting us like it once did.  On this, the eve of release of Michael Moore’s new movie “Capitalism: A Love Story“, I just have to write about the impact of capitalism on our future, and how we might possibly avoid sliding into an almost feudal state where a tiny upper class of owners dominates a huge but painfully poor mass of wage slaves. 

The Future of Energy: Things Never Change So Much …

Things never change so much as they stay the same. That’s the saying, anyway, and I figure I’ll see how things balance out if I stick around long enough.  I expect that there will be surprises, and some advances people expect won’t happen, or will be disappointing, while other inventions will become mainstays of our civilization.  Inevitably, the deciding factor behind the decision to discard or keep something involves money, and I believe that will extend to our energy infrastructure.

Whose Lives Will Change Most as Fossil Fuel Prices Rise?

Fossil fuel prices will rise. There’s no doubting that, in the absence of any other supply of cheap, high volume energy, fossil fuel supplies will decline, and prices will rise as population continues to explode.  It is interesting to examine who is most likely to feel the effects of the change, as I don’t think many people, at least in North America where I live, are thinking about it.  In the end, it appears that the middle classes in the most developed countries and in the temperate climates will feel the effects the most.

The Shark Cage is Rusty – How Capitalism and Government Might Change for the Better

Corporations, by their nature, are focused on profits. Unfortunately, this causes them to sub-optimize the overall results for society. This is one of the shortcomings of the current capitalist system. Corporations, in their soulless drive for profits, will take your last dollar if they can, and will influence governments and drive them away from their original purpose, to ensure the common good and the positive evolution of society in ways that reflect the principle that, as they say in business school, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”  I found an interesting and pointed expression of this last year.

The Lights of the City Aren’t the Same to Me Any More

As a young man I sometimes drove to a high spot in town after dark, a park from which you could look out over the city, and parked my car to enjoy the twinkling of the city lights spread out before me.  It was a beautiful sight, and I could only marvel at what humanity had created.  I’ve learned a lot and thought a lot since then, however, and it all looks different to me now, or least, it provokes different thoughts and perceptions. 

“The Bomb” is Here, But It’s the Population Bomb

My childhood fears of nuclear war have come to pass, but not the way I expected. When I was a kid I had a great fear of nuclear war.  At school we drilled, hiding under our desks, in case Russian missiles with nuclear warheads should wreak terrible, radioactive firestorms on us.  One winter night around the age of 6 I woke up from a dream and looked out the window to see the sky glowing yellow – I was immediately convinced that either a nuclear attack was creating the incredible light in the sky, or that the nearby Fermi nuclear power plant had blown up, and in either case the radiation would soon get us.  As it turned out, it was just a full moon illuminating a light snowfall, but I will never forget the terror of those moments.  These days, with nuclear war seeming to be a much more remote possibility, I don’t even think about it.  The other night, however, I noticed the sky glowing orange most of the way around the horizon, and realized that, if I didn’t know it was street lights illuminating the falling snow, I would have thought a nuclear war had broken out.  The lights were like those of an explosion frozen in time.  Then I realized that this IS an explosion – a population explosion.  This extremely long, slow-motion explosion started over a century ago and the echoes won’t die out for decades, or maybe centuries, to come.  Unfortunately this explosion has consequences potentially more devastating than even a global nuclear war.  So what are we doing about it?  How can we mitigate the effects of this very-slow, long term explosion on ourselves and our descendants?

Will the New U.S. Administration Make Sustainability a Theme?

The president-elect made hope and change key planks in his platform. Since past U.S. presidencies have failed to recognize sustainability as being of key importance to our future, let alone made it a consideration in the setting of policy, will this change in the new administration? There is certainly no single topic that is more important in the intermediate and long term pictures, and we need to be both planning and acting today to ensure the most comfortable glidepath possible through the coming period of population boom-and-bust as well as energy shortages and pollution problems. Does the new administration recognize our current and future issues, and will they take action to create and act on the kind of plans we will need to avoid major economic upheavals in the coming decades?

Civilizations Rise and Fall Due to “Global Warming”-like Problems

If We Must Fall, Can We Manage to Do It Gradually? Every civilization in history has fallen except the current one. That is simple truth, and we have no reason to think that we can carry on indefinitely as we have been. In fact, there are many indications that we are headed into a decline of our own: population exceeding the global capacity in more and more aspects, significant signs of negative impact on the ecology, the accelerating extinction of many species in our highly interdependent environment, overuse of important resources leading to exhaustion. All this brings up the important questions: Are we any smarter than our predecessors, and can we understand what is happening and work together effectively to control the decline and mitigate the suffering involved?

Will We Ever Know For Sure If Humans Are Causing Climate Change (and Does It Matter)?

I am overwhelmed with the data and analyses of global warming and climate change. A quick search on Google reveals over 74 million articles on global warming. While that is certainly overstated due to multiple “finds”, even if I could find the most authoritative 1000 of them, and spend as little as 5 minutes skimming each one, it would take me 83 hours, and I am lucky to have a few hours in the week for any activity like this. At this rate, in the 6 months or more it would take me to do that, there would be … how many more articles? I hate to guess, but I expect I would never catch up. I have learned what I think I know now from a diverse mix of news, scientific articles, the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, and blogs like Anthony Watts’ “Watts Up With That?“. I am recognizing my limitations, however. Will we ever have a definitive answer as to whether and how much human activity is affecting the climate? And isn’t it more important that we retain the ability to respond to climate change, since nature will inevitably change the climate anyway, sooner or later?

Global Warming and Our Responsibility to the Future – A Call to Action

Global warming and climate change are only pieces of the puzzle. The storm of media coverage and conflicting scientific data around global warming is overwhelming, but it is concealing very real problems we need to face if we are to ensure ourselves and our descendants can continue anything like the kind of lifestyles we have today. Climate change will happen, whether we cause it or not, and when it does, how prepared will we be? Energy supplies are a key factor, not only for our current relative comfort but as an enabler to our ability to deal with issues we will face in the short and long term. Where does this all lead, and what are our responsibilities as individuals? What can we do to ensure a better future?

Global Warming Article Leaves the Population/Energy Crisis as Our First Priority

Evidence mounts that carbon dioxide emissions are not our biggest problem. An article titled “Climate Change – The Real Causes” on the New Zealand Climate Science website by professor Geoffrey G. Duffy (link) strongly makes the point that carbon dioxide is not going to produce the kind of global climate change scenarios being trumpeted by many, including many celebrities and government climatologists. I was scared to death by the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, but I have seen and read many articles and studies throwing it into question or directly debunking it since then. As a result I have come to wonder why so many continue to raise alarms about global warming when the more obvious problems before us are our dependence on massive amounts of fossil fuels and their inevitable exhaustion, and the huge population growth we have achieved as a result of cheap energy. Why global warming persists as a news item I will leave to others, as it is a political issue that must be addressed in the short term, though it is nonetheless worrisome. Has the global warming flap helped us? What should we really be working on?

Price of Rice Reflects Overpopulation Problem

The scale of problems from overpopulation will increase as the population grows. The Christian Science Monitor, long a bastion of sound journalism that has never followed the corporate main stream media (one of few), ran an article recently (link) explaining how a lack of agricultural development in the Philippines is combining with their rapidly growing population (and that of other less-developed nations) to create food shortages. The clearest evidence of the shortages is in the doubling of rice prices in the past year (2007-2008). While most people in North America, for instance, won’t think that is a very big deal, there are hundreds of millions of people in other parts of the planet who depend on rice as a staple – a major part of their diet – and for whom any price increase is seriously bad news. I remember reading in the news a month or two ago that the price rise has caused people who used to get two bowls of rice per day to cut back to one. (Try living on that diet, you in the developed countries, if you want a dose of reality.) The important realization is that, as energy shortages and population growth exacerbate food shortages, there will be more food riots and unrest in the fastest growing and least-developed countries. In response, the developed countries need to put more family planning, education, and economic aid, all proven to reduce birthrates, into the poorest areas of the globe for the good of all. Here’s a more detailed analysis.

Undocumented Children, Enabled by Technology, May Challenge Nationalism in Coming Decades

One third of the world’s children have no birth certificate or other proof of citizenship.  I was shocked by an NPR interview this morning that made this statement.  Unicef has a lot more specific information on the vast numbers of children without papers, citizenship, or any benefits at all (link)(link).  Someday those children will be adults, probably a quarter or more of the world’s adults, and will represent a lot of power and influence, a lot of potential voters and customers, an army just waiting for a way to organize and some leaders to organize it.  The implications are staggering, and intriguing.

Can the Media Change Minds World-Wide Quickly Enough?

It is obvious to me that the great majority of humans will need to have a significant change in thinking, an epiphany, around the global environmental situation and the part humans play in it, before we can make serious progress towards sustainability. Trying to figure out how that might occur, or be caused to occur is a daunting task. The trick to making large scale predictions on the future seems to mostly be in separating what may change from what will probably not. Some things, like basic human nature and form, change quite slowly, while some things, like human ideas and feelings, can change in minutes. This capacity for rapid change is only increasing with the continual development of electronic media, and without it, I don’t think humanity would be able to avoid serious, large scale problems in the next few decades.

Currently, 20% of the global population are thought to be on the Internet (link). That number has grown by 265% overall from 2000-2007, and by rates between 600% and 1000% in the developing countries. I can’t find any good figures from a Google search, but I have to believe that other electronic media (TV and radio) have a much greater penetration, perhaps to as much as 80% of world population. (Though a 2005 estimate indicated 2 billion humans did not have electricity, I believe that number is dropping rapidly in China and India.) Thus, I believe rapid changes of direction can be achieved in our pursuit of sustainability, as long as they don’t require changes in human nature (or form … but this item is not intended to go in a science fiction-y direction – “shape shifting” is not going to help us). What can bring about rapid change, though?

Not With a Bang, But With a Whimper

I fully believe that the world will find a new, sustainable situation within the next century or two, as we get over our big “high” on fossil fuels and things settle down again, possibly with a new energy source (fusion looks possible, eventually).  I have read so many predictions of cataclysms, the poisoning of the environment, worldwide epidemics, world wars, drought and famine … They all sound dire, and I can’t discount the possibility that some of them will occur to some extent, but, short of a major asteroid collision or similar cosmic-scale event, I have to believe change will generally come not with a bang, but a whimper.  Still, the challenges before us are many, and important.