Neo-Malthusians Haunt the Modern Zeitgeist -- Again

During the 1970s, the Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth projected that, assuming consumption remained flat, all known oil reserves would be entirely consumed in just 31 years. With exponential growth in consumption, it added, all the known oil reserves would be consumed in 20 years. _Reason

Malthus was Wrong?
The spirit of Thomas Malthus roams the modern thought-ways just like back in the 1970s. Although global warming doom may be falling out of favour among more intelligent and scrupulous observers, there are plenty of other Malthusian nightmares hovering above the modern consciousness.

Once more, we are warned of a great worldwide famine approaching. Social collapse from peak oil doom appears inevitable, to large numbers. All of the multiple crises -- food, water, energy, climate, population, pollution etc -- are converging upon Earth's population like a flock of dark dementors, dooming us all to deep deprivation, disease, and impoverished misery -- unto death.

If all of this sounds somewhat familiar to those who lived through the 1970s, it is because the arguments behind this round of neo-Malthusianism are virtually identical to the arguments of the neo-Malthusianism of the 70s. Whereas the 70s Malthusians predicted that doom would fall in the 1980s and 1990s, the 2010s Malthusians are predicting doom sometime by the 2020s, 2030s -- and absolutely no later than 2050 -- or 2100 at the very latest!

You see, there is no penalty for predicting peak oil doom, overpopulation doom, scarcity doom, or doom of any kind. Any given event in the daily news can be turned to fit the theory. As long as the predicted doom is far enough into the future to give one time to adapt the theory in a plausibly retrograde manner, there is no risk.

Take Colin Campbell, one of the mythical giants of peak oil doom. Mr. Campbell is belatedly recognising -- after the 2008 oil bubble burst -- that demand for oil may be a lot more flexible than he once believed.

"I have changed my point of view about future prices," said Campbell, who used to think the peak in conventional oil production, which he believes happened in 2005, would lead to a relentless price surge.

Instead, the record rally led to a peak in demand in the developed world.

"Peak oil drives prices up in the first place. It has its own mechanism. We're sort of at peak demand right now," Campbell told Reuters from his home in the village of Ballydehob, West Cork. "I think presently the price limit is about $100."

For those who have painted alarming pictures of civil unrest as the world economy is forced to move away from conventional fuel and pay high prices for it in the interim, an inbuilt price mechanism to limit demand and move the world to other forms of energy should be a good thing. _Reuters

Not that Cambell is admitting any error, no. He is merely inserting a "fudge factor" just in case his claimed 2005 peak in oil production fails to result in a collapse of world civilisation anytime soon.

For those who are unaware of the saga of Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon, read this to get up to speed. And for those who have not read Julian Simon's free online ebook The Ultimate Resource, you really need to do so ASAP.

The threat of doom hanging over our heads should certainly get our attention. But we need to be careful to distinguish true doom from faux doom. Otherwise we are likely to spend all our time and resources defending against a faux doom that never would have occurred regardless of all our efforts. In the meantime, true doom has been gathering its forces for the final assault upon our unprepared flanks.

Keep your dooms straight, so that you do not waste half your life fighting a doom that could never have been.

Source of animation via Astute Bloggers

Resource Scarcity vs. Human Ingenuity

Humans have been quite adept at finding solutions to the problem of scarce natural resources: finding more abundant substitutes for various natural resources, exploration for and discovery of new reserves, recovery and recycling of materials, and, perhaps most importantly, the development of new technologies that economize on scarce natural resources or that allow the use of resources that were previously uneconomical. _Krautkraemer2005PDF

Predictions of resource scarcity and accompanying doom have become common among late 20th and early 21st century pseudo-intelligentsia. And yet predictions of doom with fixed due dates invariably fail.

In 1980, Julian Simon, the recently deceased economist and author of The Ultimate Resource, offered to environmentalists a wager based on his assertion that the price of any raw material would indefinitely decline on a future date. The wager was taken up by Paul Ehrlich, author of the best- selling 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," which predicted that during the 1970s "the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death...

"In October 1980, Ehrilch and Simon drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Ehrlich the same quantities which could be purchased for $1,000 of five metals (copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten) ten years later as 1980 prices," writes Ronald Bailey in his book EcoScam. "If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 in October 1990." During the 1980s the combined prices of the metals selected by Ehrlich declined by over 50 percent. Simon easily won because he knew that the supply for resources was not becoming more scarce but more abundant, since the economic history of predominantly free capitalist nations had demonstrated how the prices of most major commodities have declined over time.

While Simon was proven correct, Ehrlich went on to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant -- based on his career of fantastic apocalyptic predictions that never came true. _Capmag

Human ingenuity in the face of resource scarcity is an old story, dating back many tens of thousands of years, at least. A fascinating ongoing chapter in this story involves a fantastic new field of chemistry that is enticingly close to "alchemy":

According to the authors of the paper, it is possible to mimic certain properties of precious metals as platinum and palladium using combinations of far more mundane materials. And that opens up the prospect of replacing expensive strategic metals in many industrial applications by much cheaper alternatives.


...Now the team is working its way across the big central block of the Periodic Table, consisting of so-called transition metals from scandium – used in aerospace alloys – to gold. Their aim is to discover other superatoms, and to gauge the extent of their similarities to standard atoms.


Not surprisingly in view of the commercial implications of success, the Penn State team is not alone in its quest. Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University recently announced that a cluster of eight caesium atoms plus a vanadium atom mimic the magnetic strength of manganese. The research team has also predicted that superatoms of gold and manganese will be magnetic while not conducting electricity – a combination making them useful in some biomedical applications.


Such discoveries suggest we are witnessing the birth of a whole new branch of chemistry, and one that could not have arrived at a better time – for many critical technologies are crying out for a breakthrough in material science. _TheNational

Julian Simon's book, "The Ultimate Resource 2:People, Materials, and Environment" is free online and worth a look.

A look at "The Ingenuity Gap"

Doing More with Less -- No Limits

There are two dominant themes in the western world today: the limited world view that wants to slash energy use, slash human populations, and release most of the human world back into the wild -- and there is the theme of upward evolving, and growing into a peaceful world of abundance, without limits. Julian Simon represented the latter view, par excellence.

The ultimate embarrassment for the Malthusians was when Paul Ehrlich bet Simon $1,000 in 1980 that five resources (of Ehrlich’s choosing) would be more expensive in 10 years. Ehrlich lost: 10 years later every one of the resources had declined in price by an average of 40 percent.

Buckminster Fuller was another person who believed that human ingenuity would allow humans to continue to do more -- with less.

Doing "more with less" was Fuller's credo. He described himself as a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist," setting forth to solve the escalating challenges that faced humanity before they became insurmountable.

The key to humanity evolving (as opposed to devolving into a collectivist lifelong larval colony) is in learning to do more with less. Recent spikes in commodities prices convinced many superficial students of resource economics that Simon would finally be proven wrong. But scientists and engineers are beginning to catch the spirit of Fuller and Simon in their work. We may yet escape the collectivist larval farm.

Brian Westenhaus at New Energy and Fuel describes an Australian innovation that will allow the substitution of a cheap Teflon compound in place of ultra-expensive Platinum in fuel cell catalytic membranes. The cost savings will be immense, and should rapidly speed the transition to fuel cell applications for automobiles and stationary installations. It will also greatly extend the world's supply of platinum.

Brian Wang at Next Big Future presents several innovations that will make automobiles lighter and more fuel efficient. These include several new uses of carbon nano-fibers, ways of making titanium cheaper for use in cars, and the use of graphene enhanced plastics.

The ability to substitute cheaper, smaller gasoline engines for larger more expensive diesel engines, should introduce cost savings into many industrial applications.

Of course, the holy grail of "more with less" is molecular nano-assemblers that can manufacture an almost limitless array of products quickly, precisely, and relatively cheaply. Brian Wang presents an update on carbon nano-assemblers.

When confronted with a challenge, humans can either try to find workable solutions, or they can hide behind "limits." Whether "peak oil doom", "climate catastrophe", "overpopulation", the challenge of militant Islam to secular western ideals--a dominant refrain from modern left-limitists is "cut back!"

Instead of cutting back, however, ingenious and resourceful humans will substitute and innovate, and do more with less. The limits are in the mind. Think laterally, as well as logically.