Nine Billion Little Feet On the Highway of the Damned, Are We There Yet, Pa?

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/02/nine-billion-li.html

Joe Bageant (1946-2011) is my favorite essayist of recent times. IMO he was in the same league as Mark Twain.

This is one of my favorites of his.

He cuts to the chase and tells it like it is, in plain language.

read it all here

 

I guess he missed the part where the Europeans just shifted their carbon to India and China with their feel good carbon acts

http://science.house.gov/sites/repu...ts/HHRG-113-SY18-WState-BLomborg-20130425.pdf

not surprisingly he also seemed to have missed this

http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/aabirthrate.htm

seems as if he misses a lot of facts

http://www.forbes.com/global/2012/0...ation-declining-birth-rates-lee-kuan-yew.html

just opinions, and false assumptions. why is it in this forum ?

 

It never takes long before I start to pick up a following of right wing trolls that follow me around trying to (*)(*)(*)(*) on my threads.

That's because they fear me.

 

rofl, post BS and I will expose it as BS. Seems I peed all over your opinion thread with stats and facts

notice all you had as a comeback was a personal insult.

 

Civilization as we know it will collapse.

Why?

Because in highly scientific terms we humans have been (*)(*)(*)(*)ing ourselves out of a place at the table and (*)(*)(*)(*)ting in our own mess kits for way too long.

And Mother Nature is going to rear up and (*)(*)(*)(*)(*) slap us big time.

And when you and I meet in some Post Apocalyptic Wasteland and face off over the last can of dog food I'm going to say "I told you so"

Then I'm gonna whoop your ass and take that dog food for myself.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZTGppUiV38

 

uh sure - ten characters

 

I've read Joe Bageant before, he is indeed a great writer who can suck you right in to the page.


Americans do consume an oversized portion of the worlds resources. That will probably change as the wealth of America and it's population growth slows. With 10% of the population holding 60% of the wealth, a proportion that grows ever larger, the American lifestyle will have to adjust down. In fact it already has started that decline. No matter what "they" say, there is only so much wealth and if it's all being horded by scrooge McDuck...well, there'll be lots of hungry folks around.

And JackDog does have a point, average population growth is slowing, but we're still projected to add another 2.5 billion by the end of the century. (about 10 billion).

And with climate change and pollution, I think its pretty optimistic thinking that we will continue to grow much past the next 20 years. We're already killing off the honey bees. How will we pollinate our crops? And the weather has gotten extreme and it's done it quickly, much quicker than we've been lead to believe it would happen. And a major source of protein for the world, our oceans and being poisoned pretty much as fast as we can do it. Sooner or later it'll no longer be a source of food for the world.

Man's short sightedness, greed and ignorance will be his demise.

 

Yep, you can watch it grow right here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua9DN8ZXmOw

We are over 7 Billion right now.

I can remember when it was 3 Billion.

So in my lifetime we've added more people that were added in the millions of years of human history that preceded me.

 

I'm being a bit anal here but shouldn't it be 18 billion feet as we have 14 billion now...

 

Not if we all hop around on one foot.

 

population growth rate by country

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_growth_rate

for the record the world is at 1.17, US is at .9. maybe we should just drop condom bombs on some of the third world coubtries

 

If we get the whole world down to 9/10 of one percent per year that will bring us from 7 billion to 10 billion in 40 years. An increase of 3 more billion. The number that it took to human race from a millions of years BC to 1960 AD to get to. Do you remember 1960?

I do.

[video=youtube;75Q-ZE_Y6es]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75Q-ZE_Y6es[/video]

 

ah...I never thought of that...

I agree by the way, imo we have far more people on the planet already with a billion people going to bed hungry every day, absolutely impossible for 7 billion to aspire to live as westerners do now, 9 or 11 billion attempting to have the same quality of life is insane...

 

china foresaw the population crunch coming long ago hence it's one child policy...education is slowing population growth everywhere but it's in direct conflict with governments that promote perpetual growth to support free market economic systems...there will be potential for the perfect storm from the middle to end of this century when 9-11 billion people are scrambling for the same resources and climate change altering food production...

 

well if the maunder minimum that some predict occurs we will see a thinning of the herd, as much as the AGW people screech about global warming it is those nasty cold spells that do a number on population. Global pandemic would do it also. Earth has a nasty habit of regulating the population on it's own it seems

 

So you agree a thinning of the herd is going to happen.

You just want to be argumentative as to the details.

Those details won't matter to the thinees.

They will be just as dead no matter what.

 

there is nothing in nature that is static but I don't pretend to be a soothsayer or a tea leaf reader. But then I don't see doom and gloom on every corner, or pretend know what is best for everyone like the progressives seem to. Maybe that is why I am a very content person

 

In the 1960s, they claimed that by the 1980s, we'd be overpopulated and starving. The percentage of starving people in the world is lower than it was in the 1960s, despite having double the world population. Overpopulation is a myth. Read "The Population Bomb" by Ehrlich, and note how wrong he was.

 

The number of hungry people in the world is less than it was in 1960. In 1960, they estimated that 1.3 out of 3.3 billion people in the world were hungry. Now, that number is down to 868 million out of about 6 billion people. Or, in terms that are easier to understand, the number of hungry has gone down from 1.3 billion to 868 million, despite the fact that the population has more than doubled. Overpopulation is a myth.


http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-10-09/un-says-world-hungry-not-1-billion

http://www.agweb.com/farmersfeedingtheworld/world_hunger/

 

You are the kind of denialist who sates himself by repeating "No problem" to every aspect of the Earth's natural limits. When you really get in a bind, you anti-government types resort to government data in order to buttress your argument. That's what makes you "content." And you don't even get the irony.

Anyhow, we'll never get to 10 billion people. That's because by 2015, there won't be enough fossil fuels to power the great engine the same. And make no mistake about it: It's hydrocarbon energy that has provided the population boom the past 140 years.

If we keep abusing our only home the way waste-addicted, "burn-everything" faux capitalists prefer, this planet will flick us off like fleas. It's already getting set.