BTW I think the Polywell Fusion Reactor is a very good near term prospect for fusion. If they do produce energy as cheaply as predicted they can be used in tertiary oil field recovery. That alone increases current oil resources by 30% or so with no change in prices.

M. Simon

Find real world problem solvers and learn synergistic problem solving. If you have to secede from the loser mass majority eventually, be prepared to do so. Most people would rather whine than solve problems. Monkey brains in human bodies. If you want to live, never leave my side … Heh! Actually if you want to live, learn to solve problems so you don’t end up eating dead bodies as in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”

And calling nanotech religious is just plain ignorant, so I won’t comment further. But nanotech and AI will eliminate these problems, if people are so concerned about peak this and running out of that, they would be wise to, I dunno, spend a little money on nanotech/AI. Nanotech and AI get a few million dollars in research dollars every year, how many billions do we spend investigating environmental issues and worrying about polar bears, when nanotech/AI is the only sure fix?

Yeah, right. This is the old “if cars had developed like computers, they would go 1000 mph and get 2,000 miles per gallon” argument. To which the response is “yes – and they would seat 100 people and be the size of a matchbox.”

The analogy is misleading, at best. It would be better to compare nuclear reactors to passenger jets.

LtG wasn’t predicting anything. Let me say that again. “Limits to Growth” was not a forecast. It was an attempt to provoke reasoned debate about planned responses to foreseeable problems by describing highly simplified scenarios. Using simplified scenarios is a well-accepted methodology in policy and strategy studies. The book is entirely open about its assumptions and invites people to scrutinise them and modify them, and to assess the issues raised. It pointed out that relatively cheap actions, taken early enough, could circumvent the problems, and invited debate about that. Instead of which, we got 37 years of mischaracterisation and demonisation.

What is it about LtG that is so threatening? Its basic premises are 1) that the quantity of physical matter we can use is finite, 2) that growth tends to be exponential unless checked by some restraint., and 3) harvesting a renewable resource at a rate greater than it is replenished means that it will eventually run out.

Let’s look at these. Premise 1 seems to be the one that everyone chokes on.. But think about it. A simple calculation (first done publicly by Isaac Asimov, as far as I know) shows you that if population grows just one percent per year without constraint, all the matter in the known universe will be in human bodies before 11,000 AD. So there is a limit to the resources available to us. Your “null hypothesis” of continued exponential growth is rejected. If you accept that, it’s just a matter of finding better approximations to the least upper bound.

Premise 2, that growth is exponential unless checked, is more or less universally accepted. There is a large literature on the various checks, and the nature of responses of populations to them. This was controversial at first, but it is now generally accepted and forms the basis of successful management of renewable resources.

Many people attempt to counter premise 3, that overdrawing a stock exhausts it, with substitutability arguments. But substitution cannot be carried out forever – see premise 1. This is why susbstitution was ignored in the model – it adds complexity without providing insight. Remember, LtG was not a forecast, but a set of simplified scenarios..

So, instead of huffing and puffing and beating straw men, how about having a sceptical (in the sense of “seeking the truth”) look at LtG?