I'm reading a new book, a departure from the many young-adult books I've read of late... Hot Flat and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman. I'm only two chapters in, but it's enough to know that EVERYBODY needs to read this book - or at least talk about it. What are we gonna do, people? We are pretty well F'd if we don't come up with something VERY clever, VERY soon. The book calls for a serious green revolution, to face the impending, disastrous effects of Climate Change, Overpopulation and Energy Famine. That's right, guys... we can't ignore the math any longer. Right now there's something like six or seven billion people on the planet. In the 50's it was three or four billion. In less than fifty years we'll have nine or ten billion people. What the heck are we gonna do with that? You think we have problems now, just wait.
Friedman points out a couple of trends that make our situation even scarier. First, we are still in the midst of the great flattening that he described in his last book, The World is Flat - the premise here is that the world is becoming more and more middle class all the time, and more and more connected globally. Increasingly more third-world populations are moving toward a more "American" way of life. Cell phones, cars, tv, etc... You, know, rampant consumerism. Gone are the days of quiet, rural ways of life for many many many peoples. Well, what's wrong with more middle-class people, you ask? As this transition continues and increasingly more people demand the "American" way of life, the resource-demand will spiral out of control. We already are looking at water shortages in many parts of the world. Do you know how much water it takes to make a pair of blue jeans? Computer chips? and these next three or so billion inhabitants of earth will be born into this culture right away. They will demand this lifestyle as a matter of course. So we cannot simply scale things up based on simple population increases over the next fifty years; we have to consider the increasing demands of our current population, and the fact that the next generations are going to want even more than that, purely as a matter of generational one upsmanship.
Btw, did you know that there are finite amounts of phosphorous on the planet? Just like peak oil, now we have to deal with peak fertilizer. Of course, there is some natural recycling of nutrients in the natural cycle of life, but we don't really have the natural cycles of anything anymore, do we? ...so we are going to run out of phosphorous, an essential nutrient in food production... in probably fifty years or so. YAY! We will have another three or four billion young people in the next fifty years, really pissed off that we have handed them such a shitty place. They'll be starving, and thirsty... and they will rightly kick our asses if we don't do something about it before then. You know how cutthroat bargain shoppers can be, on a big sale day? Imagine if we're all fighting for the same glass of water and piece of bread. Not a happy picture, my friends. Let's save our asses!
http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/hot-flat-and-crowded
