The Real Energy Crisis

ANewStart

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Much has been already said about humanity's energy crisis, but there is a much bigger problem that has been suggested; not just the depletion of our natural resources. If we are truly to deal with the problem, we must first know what it is, and right now the bigger and whole picture is appreciated in our society.

Recently, I experienced a blackout, as much of the United States population has. This one was especially big in my life, because for the first time in my life I realized how vulnerable much of the "modern" population is to a severe energy shortage. Everything that we know and trust around us is basically useless without energy, our cell phones, refrigerator, freezer, t.v., radio, lights, the list just goes on and on. There is almost nothing that is not affected by a severe energy shortage. Hospitals, fire stations, and police would be knocked out; our entire infrastructure. Food and medicine would spoil, and starvation and crimes would skyrocket.

Everything that we know is centered around technology and the use of energy. From our birth to our death we all rely on technology and energy to aid us in simple tasks, big or small. Nature adapts to its environment, and we have adapted to our environment, only in the process we have broken the cycle of life that have been running for billions of years. The food chain is breaking up, the water cycle is collapsing under pollution; humanity will soon have to bear the price of our neglects.

There is no short term solution for the energy crisis; we must start now so that the future generations will also have future generations. Humanity is addicted to energy, and can't stop using it, because it doesn't know how. The solution is either stop using energy altogether or use it very sparsely, or turn to renewable energy sources. Much of the world's populations won't give up their ability to generate energy, and in order to achieve not using energy at all would require most, if not all of us to live like Native Americans, hunting and gathering. This is not a very realistic solution to anyone, but with the second option of converting to renewable energy, we can achieve a much more realistic way of saving our world. Our world is like a gem in the universe, harboring many different kinds of life, to save it should be our dream.
 
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I understand what you are saying, but perhaps you might want to look even larger... global problems are starting to show up everywhere. Global warming, global pollution of the oceans, pandemic diseases (AIDS), wide-spread food shortages, progressive deforestation, water pollution, etc.

To my mind the problem here is obvious - too many people! The world has over 6 billion people now. Looking backward we had 3 billion in the early 1960's. Projecting ahead, we will double our population by mid-century. Check out this link for more grizzly facts.

Now couple this problem with the absolute impotence of the world to effect any change. Think about it... the number one priority for the United Nations was to stop war. Yet, today war rages in all corners of the world. If you think about it, most wars are caused because the population is getting more and more dense. People want to protect the turf they already have or take somebody else's turf. The Muslims don't want Western civilization beaming down ideas into their turf via television, hand phones and through the internet.

If the world governments will not fix our global overpopulation and attendant shortages / conflicts, who will? It would be nice to think like Al Gore that the world will simply stop growing - similar to what is happening in North America today. I don't believe it.

Quite honestly, I see where massive shortages and massive pollution will increasingly promote unrest and conflict in the world. Will the population finally reach equilibrium and start growing when more people die in conflicts, starvation, and illness? The gruesome fact is that is how the world existed until well into the second millennium - sometime around 1700.
550px-Population_curve.svg.png


We are already overpopulated if you look at the evidence of the current problems cropping up on a global scale. We as Americans and also as global citizens have a lot to think about. Maybe we should not be trying so hard to stop poverty, the spread of AIDS, and the our knowledge of advanced medical technology.

Perhaps we should just live and let die. The first place I would start is by setting different treatment regimens for people who are over age 65 or 70. Do we really need these people living off medication and utilizing hospital resources when death is inevitable? I say that as a man who is 62. I retired in Indonesia and I have doctors tell me - go home, love your wife, your children, enjoy life to the fullest. He said, "You are not getting older, you are old!" I think that was good advise. Save the world for your children and our grand-children by dying when it is your time to die. That is good advise for the whole world.
 
To my mind the problem here is obvious - too many people!
On this we couldn't agree more.

We are reaching infestation levels in South America that is destroying the Amazon rain forest, we are polluting in industrial nations that's enlarging the polar hole in the ozone layer, we're crowding Borg-like into cities across the globe to the matrix degree there's no room to move about, we're thus covering every inch of available hospitable land with concrete to the degree the earth can't even breathe ... ... and unless we can begin to practice effective population management, it's obvious we're going to kill our planet, and make our children and their children ever more miserably neurotic during the process.

This energy crisis is less about available energy and more about impossible demand.


Maybe we should not be trying so hard to stop poverty, the spread of AIDS, and the our knowledge of advanced medical technology.
But, as usual, we immediately part ways with regard to solution.

There is no argument that justifies withholding or reducing the quality of life.


Perhaps we should just live and let die.
Your use of the phrase "let die" may begin seemingly innocent enough, but without letting the "let" part be each individual person's choice, there is a draconian implication that the "we" in your statement need to withhold human services in order to, in effect, cause such death.

I don't hold to anything that causes one group to thusly kill another for the delusional sake of planetary survival.

We all live together or we die together ... hopefully the former.

But we simply aren't at that dire emergency point yet.

There are other things we've yet to try, and there's still time to try them.


The first place I would start is by setting different treatment regimens for people who are over age 65 or 70.
Draconian liberalism, to be sure.

You might want to consult these individuals on an, yes, individual basis, as many of them may be far from ready to give up the ghost for you.

Since they're not threatening your foundational right to life or your security of person, they have every right to choose the freedom of action to strive to live to a length of their heart's desire.


I say that as a man who is 62.
I say what I say as a man of 56, not far behind you.

And I still play hard competitive American football with guys decades younger and am likely genetically scheduled to live well into my nineties.

I would greatly prefer not to be forced to enter a hospice if I get the flu in my seventies.

And, considering the heretofore unheard of that happened in NAZI Germany a mere 65 years ago, I also don't wish to passively acquiesce to anything that would likely lead to my mandatory entry into a gas chamber at 79.

There are better ways.


I retired in Indonesia and I have doctors tell me - go home, love your wife, your children, enjoy life to the fullest. He said, "You are not getting older, you are old!" I think that was good advise.
If what he is saying is that you are dying and need to let die, that's one thing, sadly.

But if what he is saying is that he'd rather treat younger people, or that you're in the way and you should just die and make room for the younger generation, I'd tell him to go to blazes.

It is not anyone elses business how long I live ... or when I should die.


Save the world for your children and our grand-children by dying when it is your time to die.
Fine ... just let me be the one to determine if it has reached my time to die.

Until then, let me choose my effort of health care.


That is good advise for the whole world.
Typical liberal. :rolleyes:

They exclaim "freedom for all!" when they complain vehemently about the extreme right-wing groups advising control of population segements against their will ...

... But then they turn right around and advocate from extreme left-wing positions how the whole world should relenquish their individual freedom of action rights and be controlled by the liberal group mind-set "advice" which they'd obviously put into mandatory power if they were in charge.


***

We are still at a point where we are far from the need for draconian measures.

We don't need wars and pestulance and disease and disasters to slaughter billions ... and hopefully we never do.

What we need is to communicate the need to stop creating so many people.

By simply not creating more people than we can sustain and manage, we will reduce our energy and resource problems without creating any form of mass murdering.

We need to begin by bringing new state-of-the-art conception prevention pharmaceuticals to market, despite cries of "too easily permissive" from the right and despite cries of "too indicting that abortion is murder" from the left.

We need to make these products free and readily available to all, subsidized by all, for the benefit of all. By preventing unwanted conceptions, this will eliminate the murder of the newly conceived that rightly troubles so many and it will also prevent the birth of unwanted children when the mother (et all) does the right thing by letting her newly conceived child live.

Preventing conception is a win-win for everyone.

We need to present to people the dire consequences of population growth at the current rate.

We need to greatly encourage people to have no more than one child per person for everyone who wants to have children. The fact that many people, likely around a billion, either don't want to have children or can't, will couple with the one-child per person advice to create significant negative population growth.

We need to tell the Pope that his "go into all the world and populate it" mantra is deadly advice to the entire human race, and that until the new state-of-the-art conception prevention technology is available that yes, Catholics are right to use condoms.

We need to provide birthcontrol to over-populated African nations where newborns routinely starve to death.

We need to tell Mexico, home to the world's largest city of abject poverty, that there will be no more subsidies for your elite industrials of any nature until you courageously implement a non-murderous policy of negative population growth and your actual figures do indeed hit the negative.

Indeed, there's much we can do now to effectively solve the over-population/population management problems that do not involve any form of killing anyone, young (newly conceived) or old (senior cititizens).

Education with the truth, no matter how difficult it may be for you personally to ask your children to limit their procreation, and freely providing the right technology, no matter how expensive, can have tremendous desired effects.

But, above all, after all of our campaigning to do the right thing in the right way of creating negative population growth, we must let people each make their own choices ... and we must live with their choices ... even if we all die as a natural result.

But I am hopeful that we can act rightly, with respect for the human rights of all, and be greatly successful.

And I am hopeful that we can do so ... before we pollute ourselves to death ... or before some liberal Hitler again convinces his underlings that we should do otherwise. :eek:
 
Horrible to contemplate, isn't it? It's amazing how wide the range is on the theoretical human carrying capacity of Earth but even that number has to be adjusted per the IPAT equation:

http://www.sustainablescale.org/Con...dingScale/MeasuringScale/TheIPATEquation.aspx

Our use of energy is the only reason we've managed to populate to our current level. Ironically, mankind has used warfare as a means of balancing population with resource for thousands of years. It's not difficult to figure out though... "make love, not war":D is a helluva' lot funner than "make war, not love"!:eek:
 
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Fine ... just let me be the one to determine if it has reached my time to die.

Until then, let me choose my effort of health care.

Whether you are philosophically correct on this issue is beside the point. When the earth reaches the point of overpopulation and some must die, who lives and who dies will ultimately come down to who has the money or the power to stay alive. If you are the one able to access health care plus food and shelter, then you can be the one to watch as food riots, and pandemics destroy a huge number of people.



Typical liberal. :rolleyes:

They exclaim "freedom for all!" when they complain vehemently about the extreme right-wing groups advising control of population segements against their will ...

... But then they turn right around and advocate from extreme left-wing positions how the whole world should relinquish their individual freedom of action rights and be controlled by the liberal group mind-set "advice" which they'd obviously put into mandatory power if they were in charge.

No, I am not a liberal, and I am a conservative looking for reasonable/ workable solutions to the earth's problems. The health system in the US now actually forces someone to stay alive as long as possible. I cannot go into a hospital and asked for assisted suicide - its not an option.

I cannot go into an health care facility and choose my level of treatment. I must accept the "legal standard of practice" for my illness - thanks to our legal system. My father had Alzheimer's Disease and he lived for 7 years in a county nursing home, sleeping on a cot. He couldn't talk coherently, he had to be hand fed, etc. That's not right. His quality of life was gone - didn't recognize anyone. Do you really think that is living? Personally, I would rather have the law say, "We let this man die."




We are still at a point where we are far from the need for draconian measures.

We don't need wars and pestulance and disease and disasters to slaughter billions ... and hopefully we never do.

What we need is to communicate the need to stop creating so many people.

By simply not creating more people than we can sustain and manage, we will reduce our energy and resource problems without creating any form of mass murdering.

We need to begin by bringing new state-of-the-art conception prevention pharmaceuticals to market, despite cries of "too easily permissive" from the right and despite cries of "too indicting that abortion is murder" from the left.

We need to make these products free and readily available to all, subsidized by all, for the benefit of all. By preventing unwanted conceptions, this will eliminate the murder of the newly conceived that rightly troubles so many and it will also prevent the birth of unwanted children when the mother (et all) does the right thing by letting her newly conceived child live.

Preventing conception is a win-win for everyone.

We need to present to people the dire consequences of population growth at the current rate.

We need to greatly encourage people to have no more than one child per person for everyone who wants to have children. The fact that many people, likely around a billion, either don't want to have children or can't, will couple with the one-child per person advice to create significant negative population growth.

We need to tell the Pope that his "go into all the world and populate it" mantra is deadly advice to the entire human race, and that until the new state-of-the-art conception prevention technology is available that yes, Catholics are right to use condoms.

We need to provide birthcontrol to over-populated African nations where newborns routinely starve to death.

We need to tell Mexico, home to the world's largest city of abject poverty, that there will be no more subsidies for your elite industrials of any nature until you courageously implement a non-murderous policy of negative population growth and your actual figures do indeed hit the negative.

Indeed, there's much we can do now to effectively solve the over-population/population management problems that do not involve any form of killing anyone, young (newly conceived) or old (senior cititizens).

Education with the truth, no matter how difficult it may be for you personally to ask your children to limit their procreation, and freely providing the right technology, no matter how expensive, can have tremendous desired effects.

But, above all, after all of our campaigning to do the right thing in the right way of creating negative population growth, we must let people each make their own choices ... and we must live with their choices ... even if we all die as a natural result.

But I am hopeful that we can act rightly, with respect for the human rights of all, and be greatly successful.

And I am hopeful that we can do so ... before we pollute ourselves to death ... or before some liberal Hitler again convinces his underlings that we should do otherwise. :eek:

You are far more optimistic than I am. If your view of the world is as an American standing in a country of opulent wealth and comforts, then it is easy to pontificate about education programs and birth control programs.

Through my eyes, living in an undeveloped country in Asia, there is not a chance in world that any of these programs will work. Every undeveloped country in the world (except war-torn countries) has free birth control and in emergency food supply courtesy of the United Nations and other charitable groups. Community workers as assigned to try and educate the poor but very fertile women.

None of that works because poor people believe they can survive if they have more children to care for them. The proof of that statement is you cannot point out one place where outside help has solved any of these fundamental symptoms of poverty and overpopulation. A country must develop itself to the point where it can solve its problems internally (such as China and India).

Sub-Saharan Africa is having both a population boom and a rapid increase in the death rate at the same time. The developed nations have been talking about the problems caused by over-population as long as I can remember, but nothing has improved.

Global warming, destruction of the rain forests, pollution of the oceans - the list of potential global problems is a long one... and none of these trends are turning around. The solutions you suggest have been tried and failed.

The asymptotic population curve we have been following is getting steeper every year. We are already seeing signs of global stress as reflected in the unstable price of commodities. I don't know how long we have until the system reaches meltdown. From my point of view, it is going to happen sooner than most American's believe.

I fear for the safety of my children in the time of impending chaos.
 
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