Interesting post, Dayo. Mohan Munasingh has a Soylent Green view of the future. I have never gone in much for the dystopian and it is facile to project current trends forward without taking into account countervailing tendencies. Recall that Paul Ehrlich predicted mass famine in the 20 century and a population count that far exceeded the actual numbers by 2000. Having said that, the future is more than a little worrisome. Global warming is going to bring hardship and worse to many countries. A few countries like Canada and Russia will probably benefit. I have been alarmed about increasing desertification in Africa for many years and have worried about the coming shortage of water on a wide scale.

The mass famine we avoided was at least partially due to using oil and natural gas based products to fertilize and increase crop yield.  Today, we're seeing major food issues in 3rd and 2nd world countries because of our incentives for farmers to grow corn for ethanol.  Even a slice of pizza in NYC is getting dear because of the increases in costs of flour, cheese and everything else.  Food is and will continue to be more and more expensive - and what will that mean?  I think Paul Ehrlich wasn't wrong save in his timing.  What Munasinghe brings up is the simple result of major increases in energy costs and the resulting equally simple result of increasing food prices and famine.  "Children of Men" had very little about the increasing costs for everything else, including clothing.  Everyone was fairly well dressed - that won't be the norm.

Overpopulation a major threat? Good lord, not again. Didn't these people learn anything fromt he Club of Rome embarrassment?

Even a non-specialist can see that everywhere outside of sub-saharan Africa, the major trend is toward leveling of population growth or even depopulation. Even the most fertile muslim nations have seen their fertility rates decline sharply in the last couple of decades, and they're continuing to decline due to greater urbanization.

One of the great things about an "energy  & environment* blog is the extraordinary inventory of bullshit on the subject. Never a shortage of fatuosities to be skewered.

Tep - they aren't really talking about over population. Where did you get that  idea? How about debating the point at hand, instead of a straw man. The point of the post was that with the elimination of cheap oil and gas, combined with the dislocations you will see with climate change will cause some pretty massive problems. The food riots we saw in the Egypt this year are a perfect example of some of the coming problems.

tep, it's nice that your so optimistic.  I do, however, think you're showing a little lack of imagination here, taking a ten-year view, not a hundred year view.  Cheap energy is going away both because climate change will make use of fossil fuels increasingly costly and simply because oil is running out.  Soil loss is degrading our capacity to produce food (see yesterday's "Watch the Dirt"), and it's possible--plausible?--that climate change induced droughts and desertification will lead to further declines in food production.  

But before I go any further I think I'll just be lazy and repost what I wrote after "Watch the Dirt."

zaiquiri, I don't disagree with much--really anything--that you've said, EXCEPT that I don't think "making do with less" is really a realistic option for the human race as a whole.

Nevertheless, it's good to keep talking about these issues.  Humanity is out on a limb ecologically speaking, WAY out, and the only thing keeping us from crashing down in the most painful way is technology.  The trouble is, as this post highlights, our current technology is nonsustainable.  But as rational and humble and, to me, personally appealing as your neo-Luddite, do-with-less prescription might be, I just don't see the human race getting it together to make the required sacrifices.  We haven't evolved for renunciation.  For every Icelandic vegetarian prepared to forgo child bearing and car ownership and to live in a one bedroom high rise flat heated with geothermal steam, there are thirty-five Indians saying "Please to have my Land Rover now, and my air con, and my steak dinner, and my giant screen LCD tv so I may watch this new Indian Premiere League cricket."  And honestly, who can blame them?

So I see only two possible futures:

Either

We make some new large scale technological breakthroughs that solve our fundamental problems of material existence--sustainable food production, carbon-free energy production--in such a way that most of the world's population can be brought up to a high enough standard of living that birthrates decline and the human population stabilizes or even declines a bit.

Or

We make no such changes, food production collapses, there is famine and secondary war, the human population shrinks precipitously (i.e. people die in large numbers), civilization collapses and the best we can hope for is that no one gets so crazy from hunger that he initiates a nuclear exchange.

Barring a full bore nuclear war, future number 2 would actually be better for the non-human world, but being the happy Homo sapiens that I am, I'm angling for future number one.  

Code 46 was a good flick related to the similar subject. I lived in China a long time so my fear is that the China model will be writ world wide.

And tep, it ain't population as much as it is what the population wants and expects. Previously, 1 billion subsistence farmers in China ain't anywhere near as bad as 300 million Americans, but now you have the 1.3 billion chinese who want to live like Americans.

bdespain, blackie - "ccording to the substance of a talk Munasinghe gave recently at Cambridge, we are headed for an ugly, dystopian future driven by resource shortages and overpopulation"

Well, tep, go ahead and poo poo what the man is saying just because he's talking about "overpopulation" and answer him with slurs rather than numbers: "fatuous" "bullshit."  So what if that term was the root of what turned out to be much ado about nothing in the 1970s, does that mean that any expressed concern about the number of people vs the quantify of resources is forevermore to be labeled nonsense scare-mongering?

I just did a quick troll through the web and came up with a few numbers:

Increase in global population between 1950 and 1999: 2.5 billion to 5.8 billion

Increase in average crop yield (grain) between 1950 and 1992: 1.1 ton/hectare to 2.8 ton/hectare

Now, most people recognize that the observed growth in human population is contingent upon the observed growth in agriculture efficiency, but fewer people seem to recognize that the growth in agricultural efficiency is itself a highly contingent fact.  It is contingent upon technology, and it is by no means certain, tep, that the technology is robust enough to hold up under the massed assaults by climate change, soil loss, pesticide resistance, and peak oil.

So go ahead and dismiss such worries as lunatic ranting and raving if it makes you feel better, but do so at your (and our) peril.

Why do you assume that

a) the hindu middle class will consume large amounts of beef; or

b) that beef will remain fashionable and desirable even in the non-hindu cultures, or

c) that even if global beef consumption rises, that it cannot be accommodated with cultivation of currently fallow or unused land (cf the slowly depopulating upper midwestern US states, depopulating Ukraine, and the rapidly depopulating enormous expanse of asian Russia, which will sooner or later be taken over by settlers and farmers from China)?

The Club of Rome and other futurists in 1970 made all sorts of predictions that in hindsight were ludicrous, based on incomplete or bad data, and not cognizant of the importance of technology in driving changes in not just productive capacity but also lifestyles and values. There is nothing to suggest that affluent societies will ever find large families fashionable again. Children are extremely demanding and expensive. As societies become more wealthy and accustomed to individual convenience and individual choice, fertility rates decline. There are little baby boomlets here and there due to demographic bubbles, but the long-term trend remains, which is why fertility rates are plunging even in the most reactionary and hidebound of all the non-african demographics: the muslim nations.

If even Iran and Saudi now have fertility rates lower than France, why on earth do you expect Asia, Europe and Latin America to not also level off or decline?

tep, this isn't like you.  I threw in the steak dinner bit as a joke.  I know that Hindus don't eat beef.  Please.  And if you think that by highlighting this little inconsistency you negate my general point, I'd say you're mistaken.

As for point about affluent societies lowering their birthrates, reread my original post.  Possible future number one I had as:

"We make some new large scale technological breakthroughs that solve our fundamental problems of material existence--sustainable food production, carbon-free energy production--in such a way that most of the world's population can be brought up to a high enough standard of living that birthrates decline and the human population stabilizes or even declines a bit"

But my point was never that we're going to face a further human population explosion that will somehow outstrip our capacity to support it.  Don't put words in my mouth, please.  My point was that the agricultural output required to support our CURRENT population is technologically juiced, and there is reason to think that those techno fixes may not be as durable as we'd like to believe.  Current crop yields are highly contingent upon mechanized agriculture and petrochemicals.  Even more importantly, they are dependent upon fertile topsoil and the maintainance of historical patterns of rainfall.  Mechanized agriculture has accelerated topsoil loss, and anthropogenic climate change makes longterm predictions of rainfall highly uncertain.  MIGHT everything turn out a-okay foodwise?  For sure.  And I allowed as much in my original post.  But I stand by my original assertion that without major shifts in core technologies--mainly in energy and transportation, I'm thinking--civilization will fall on its face.  

As for your comments under bullet point (c) about fallow land in Eurasia, I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at.  Do you really think there's enough unused land on the Asian steppe to accomodate a big uptake in food consumption much less beef consumption?  Please show me the numbers.  I just don't know.  I tried to do a Google search on the proportion of arable land currently under cultivation worldwide and came up empty handed.  My guess though is that its high.  It's particularly hard for me to believe that any sizeable proportion of land in Ukraine or Russia capable of producing wheat is not currently being used for that purpose, given wheat's value as an export crop.  

Well, I partially answered my own question, looking in the exectuive summary of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization from 2002.

ftp.fao.org/.../y3557e01.pdf

The estimate it that as much as 2.8 billion hectares of currently unused land would be suitable for the "rainfed production of arable and permanent crops."  This is more than twice the quantity of land currently under cultivation.  However there are a few caviats.

-Only a fraction of this land can practicably be farmed, as much of it is tropical rain forest that we don't want to lose from a greenhouse gas perspective or is otherwise required for cities and other forms of infrastructure.

-More than half this extra land is in just seven countries in tropical Latin American and sub-Saharan Africa.

-In North Africa and the Near East 87% of arable land is already under cultivation

-In the Indian subcontinent 94% is already under cultivation.

The report estimates that global food production will be adequate to feed the population through 2030.  It makes no comment about the time thereafter.  And I couldn't see that it addresses climate change impacts at all.

And this is different from the dozens of failed millenarian predictions of eco doom because?

Cthulhu2008: Your posts are really obnoxious. Someone took you down for your flippant remark on guns earlier today here at TNR online.  Now you have burrowed aboveground on this thread with another flip comment. You are at the antipodes to the Club of Rome. I can just see you 65 million years ago, if somehow you could be transported back in time. You would be shouting "there is no way an asteroid will hit the earth and take out a huge percentage of the flora and fauna of the earth, including the dinosaurs. Doomsayers, doomsayers, it's ridic" ,,,, BOOM!

chtulhu, have there really been "dozens of failed millenarian predictions of eco doom?"

Look, the following facts are established:

-> Petroleum reserves will be exhausted within 100 years.

-> Our current pattern of fossil fuel utilization will lead to a massive change in global climate of a magnitude and rapidity unprecedented on a geologic time scale.

-> The specific consequences of such climate change are essentially impossible to predict, though it is probable that they will not be subtle.

-> Our ability to produce enough food to feed the current human population is contingent both upon the maintenance of current systems of industrialized agriculture and upon maintenance of current patterns of rainfall.

-> Even a partial failure to meet food requirements, even something in the range of a 10% shortfall, could be expected to lead to violence and political instability.

Do I think that a collapse of civilization is inevitable?  By no means.  I'm not even sure that it's probable.  I actually think it more likely that we humans will muddle through.  But I stand by my assertion that we will not muddle through without a major shift in the technology we use to generate energy and move things around.  And I do believe that it is smart rather than foolish to acknowledge that what's at stake in solving the energy problem is human civilization, firstly because such a recognition will tend to wake people up more than talking about species loss or even sea level rise, and secondly because it's true.

aeromonas...

about the question of how much arable land in the Asian steppe is capable of producing and sustaining any level of crop or livestock output will depend on where you're putting these crops and livestock (without adequate irrigation supplies) and whether or not the capacity of the soils is even there to begin with. Right now China is actually fighting desertification west of Beijing by planting hectares of forest to act as a shield against sands that blow in from the west on a seasonal basis. These storms have increased in intensity and contribute to the loss of arable land for crop and livestock support.

www.worldchanging.com/.../000252.html

www.asla.org/.../index.cfm

Tep likes to be the devil's advocate but I sometimes suspect an over-willingness to accept the notion that we'll (humanity) can technologically save ourselves from all the problems of the world by applying more engineered solutions to the issue. Higher yield crops are wonderful but there are all sorts of negative aspects that go along with those if the technology is controlled by corporations, etc. Those issues have been discussed previously in earlier E&E threads. Not only do we have to address the petrochemical inputs required to achieve high yields out of high yield crops we also have to deal with the increased soil salinity levels, depleted top soil conditions, and the negatives of monocrop production of crops that are used for non-food and processed food items.

Be that as it may, I'm not a doomsday fellow myself and I do have tepid faith in humanity to reach beyond the petty and do great things but that usually comes after the shit has hit the proverbial fan. And by that I mean that humans always have a tendency to not see the problems they cause until it's gotten so bad that they finally get their shit together and figure out how to address the problem. Instead of realizing, upfront, that there are negatives to what we do and mitigate those as best we can upfront, even if it means a higher upfront cost to begin with, in the end these measures can and usually end up saving more and reduce the negatives than ignoring it until it's too late. We tend to design our way out of problems instead of thinking how we design ourselves around the problems - designing, developing and implementing solutions that already eliminate inefficiencies and negatives by thinking about those at the beginning. Thinking holistically instead of intrinsically.  

aero, come on.  Petroleum will be exhausted in 100 years IF PRESENT TRENDS CONTINUE.  They never do.  From the 70s on, we've been told that the end is near, if not by Paul Erlich, then by the Club of Rome.  Maybe it is, but maybe not, too.

Tep is not totally off base.  I find it passing strange that the people most engaged in the problems of global warming, etc., rarely if ever propose anything but government-run, top-down solutions.  trouble is, we know markets are much better able to deal with most problems than government is.  The best the government can do is write a check and stand aside.

sorry, walto/aero - hit a very rough patch in my offline (real) life, sense o humo(u)r's not what it used to be

"Petroleum will be exhausted in 100 years IF PRESENT TRENDS CONTINUE.  They never do."

Okay.  But what sort of change in trend would prevent us from exhausting our petroleum?   The only one I can think of is that we might shift away from petroleum as our major transport fuel.  But then that's just the sort of big technological shift I'm saying will have to take place if we are to avert disaster.  The point remains that petroleum cannot remain the foundation of our transport and agricultural economy.  Whether or not we do in fact burn up every last drop of crude within the next century is fairly well irrelevant.

I recently read that agricultrual research was underfunded. The argument was that if such research were sufficiently funded, the result would enable an increase in drought and insect resentent rice and other crops.  Unfortunately, continued population growth resulated from the green revolution, which required an increase in fertiizers and water.  An increase in agricultural capability would just allow futher population increase leady to more people to starve at the next crises, with which tehcnology may not be able to cope.  

Where have I heard this crap about overpopulation and lack of resources before? Early and late 90's? Give me an effing break.  While you chicken littles are twiddling their thumbs, engineers and scientists are devising ways to generate more food and more efficient machinery for the new millenia.  Faith, hope, and human ingenuity will always prevail over doomsayers.  Am I the only one here rolling his eyes at the idiot with the "End is Near" sign?