Do we have enough resources?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Do we have enough resources?

stone cold: Feb 15, 2014

Dead Reckoning posted:

But everyone in the world wants to live like people in the first world, now that such a lifestyle is possible. A billion Chinese bootstrapping themselves from an agrarian economy to an early 21st century consumer one was one of the greatest ecological disasters of the last century, and we're due to see it repeated several times in this one. Our options are either to convince the wealthiest nations in the world to deliberately reduce themselves to a 3rd world standard of living, to forcibly keep the 3rd world from developing (because they aren't going to do it voluntarily) while improving efficiency in the first world, hope like hell that massive, unheard of improvements in efficiency & energy tech bail us out, or other, more odious options.

If you assume that growing populations & resource demands are unsustainable, technology won't bail us out, and we're heading towards the edge of a cliff, and we act on that, it means that we have to make some really awful choices that we might not have to have made otherwise.

If you assume that technology will bail us out, and that isn't correct, billions of people die and society as we know it collapses in an unguided fall.

This post is so pre-1988.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 03:20

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stone cold: Feb 15, 2014

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Fertilizer is made from ammonia. Modern fertilizer is made from natural gas in the west and coal in china. Not oil. Pesticide isn't particularly a fossil fuel thing at all.

Like yeah, if a magic wizard comes and makes oil disappear in a day then it'll be bad. But the idea that oil is vital to human civilization is absurd. The human race had invented fax machines before it had oil wells.

Hope you don't use anything made of plastic!

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 05:20

stone cold: Feb 15, 2014

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Like I said, if a wizard comes and casts a spooky magic spell that makes oil cease to exist all at once then yeah, we are screwed.

I don't even know though? Is there any products that are vital to human civilization's survival that require plastic be as cheap as it is? If the price of plastic rose 10x because it became so valuable that doesn't even seem like it'd increase the price of most things more than a few cents. The cost of materials in anything plastic so tiny.

I hope you literally never need a medical procedure, lol

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 05:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Do we have enough resources?