Stephen Monrad

Yesterday I posted a link to a lecture on peak oil.

While I am concerned about peak oil and believe it is going to have a big impact on how we live and how the economy functions, finding replacement energy sources won’t let the economy keep growing for long. The problem is that lots of resources are being depleted. The two that are most worrying are fresh water and arable land.

While fresh water gets renewed through the hydrological cycle, many places rely on underground aquifers that are being drawn down faster than they recharge. When these aquifers are depleted, the amount of fresh water available will drop significantly. This will be a big problem for agriculture and other water intensive industries.

Agriculture is in trouble anyway because arable land is in decline. Soil is being lost through erosion and degradation due to bad farming practices. Irrigation in some areas leads to a build up of salt in the soil which eventually makes the soil unsuitable for most crops.

While economic growth would be nice, we are probably going to have trouble this century just feeding everyone.

The only long-term solution to our resource problems is to rein in population growth. Some people believe that to be sustainable, world population needs to be reduced to under 2 billion people. I don’t know if 2 billion is the right number. However, I do know that we have to find a way to manage the total world population if we want to live happy prosperous lives.