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simple talk that really scares me
In these videos (here and here), a Professor Bartlett discusses world population and energy usage, worried about continuations along the present path.
I really like the exponential function; it is so useful in many applications, but a key point the presenter is missing is that of the function of prices.
It is perfectly clear that as some resources become more scarce and difficult to acquire their costs increase. Increasing costs lead to reduced consumption and the search for alternatives. When those alternatives are cost competitive to the growingly scarce resource then they are substituted.
This transition happens gradually in as much as people are more or less sensitive to the changes in price. My expectation is that (air) transportation uses will be the long term hold outs for oil, simply because those uses place such a premium on high energy density. Even so, my observation is that alternative energy development researchers acknowledge that bio-fuels will dominate transportation, and Boeing (for one) has been showing that feasibility in aircraft application.
His points about ethanol production are well taken, of course. All that we can rest at the feet of the Agriculture lobby, the same guys who get subsidized to both grow and not grow food, and whose ag machinery businesses benefit by the push for higher capital investment.
Tying this to bad policy ... in as much as US foreign policy in the middle east tends to suppress prices, this adds further to the detrimental effects of those policies by sheltering consumers from the full cost (as if we needed more reason for a policy of non-intervention)
In a similar but perverse vein, my favorite podcaster Russ Roberts observed something about the prospects from projections of the unsustainable burden of unfunded liabilities surrounding social security and medicare and the like, leading to those accounts consuming the total federal budget. The observation is that of course the government won't let that happen; instead, the terms now considered commitments will be cut either officially or by means of inflationary federal spending. just a question of when.
Another point about costs is that they are not all monetary, and in as much as people appreciate non-monetary values then those will drive their actions. Those actions include ones surrounding the conditions in which they choose to live.
As for population, a somewhat less draconian approach than offered in another thread would be to stop subsidizing children.