Will Of The People - Chapter 1

The Danger of Our Present Calm

“With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.”

- H. G. Wells



Remember the Cold War. Remember how it felt to be living upon a world that could explode by accident at any moment – a ticking time bomb of a planet. Remember the tension between nations and the inflammatory rhetoric and posturing of the politicians. Remember how it felt to know that the total accumulated wisdom and beauty of humanity through all the ages could be erased by a single generation's momentary error. Such errors had been committed by many generations before as recently as 1914, and so our destruction loomed before us as an inevitable fate mandated by our own human weakness. How horrific the thought that all of the effort and struggle of your life, and the lives of everyone who has ever lived, could have been only the inconsequential scurrying of useless creatures in a futile race on a road to nowhere. How abominable the possibility that every piece of music, art, and beauty of all kinds could be permanently erased, as if they never had existed. How idiotic the possibility that our long existence and progress would ultimately lead only to mass suicide.

Thankfully, we avoided this oblivion by the courageous and wise actions of people on both sides of the conflict. The whole earth breathed a sigh of relief as the conflict ended. Yet today we have failed to recognize that we are still in just as much danger of extinction as we were in 1984, perhaps even more now than ever. We have been lulled into a false sense of safety by the recent end of our most visible peril. The dangers that we face are more subtle and faceless than an enemy empire, but are potentially more devastating and de-humanizing than any nuclear holocaust could ever be. Most importantly, these dangers will not be avoided by thoughtful restraint of our aggression, or by cool-headed diplomacy and discussion.

The Cold War was a time of intense activity, but the conflict was moderated by an understanding by both sides that it was not in their interests to escalate matters into all-out general war. This is remarkable, considering that the Cold War was born from the ashes of a completely unrestricted war where both sides were wielding every ounce of military might that they both possessed.

It might have been possible for the Cold War to continue for a century with both sides unable to achieve a significant advantage. Under these circumstances, a treaty could have been reached ending the arms race and establishing a stasis in political spheres of influence for both sides. Indeed, one can see that a century of futile military expenditures might have caused future leaders to abandon escalation in favor of more economically viable policies. In this way, the problem of global thermonuclear war would be solved by simply avoiding doing anything drastic. As it actually happened, the United States prevailed the same way it won WWII - by out-producing its enemies. War was avoided, even with the fall of the Soviet Union, simply by both sides doing nothing drastic during the transition of government in the East.

Unfortunately, we cannot follow the Cold War model of problem resolution to deal with our modern problems. We must take pre-emptive action, possibly decades or even centuries of consistent and focused action, to find and implement the solutions we need to avoid our extinction. We don't know how long we must work to find the answers to Earth’s problems and we don't know how soon we can correct the problems once we know the way. We may be near a crucial point where inaction now causes the problems to grow so large that they cannot ever be fixed in the future. And because of our recent success in surviving the Cold War through passivity and restraint, we have become too sure that these ways of behaving will correct any other lethal threats we face.



Our Current Placid Mindset

Humanity, as a whole, is living in a state of blissful ignorance about the future just as a herd of cattle grazing in a field. We eat and breathe and breed in unplanned and unfettered dreaminess, letting our natural impulses for happiness and comfort guide our actions. But we can see that if Man didn't control the feeding and breeding of the herd of cattle, the cattle would eventually destroy themselves. If the cattle live in a large fenced field, and there are no predators or Man to regulate the population of the herd, the cattle would simply eat and breed until their numbers would permanently destroy the fertility of their field. They would follow their biologically indicated desires to thrive until their own success exterminates them. By removing the natural restraints on their numbers (predators) and without a controlling force beyond their own individual impulse to thrive (Man) the cattle are naturally programmed to thrive until they cause their own extinction, because their basic genetic programming was originally coded to make them fit to survive in a world of danger and predation.

So is Humanity. We have advanced to the point where our numbers are no longer reduced by predators and even disease is only a pale shadow of its former self. Our technology has removed these natural restraints. Like the cattle without human control, we have no regulation or awareness of our actions other than each of us following our natural desires to thrive as an individual, regardless of the effects. If we do not develop the perception needed to see our danger, and the will to do whatever it takes to prevent our extinction, we will multiply and consume until we have drawn resources from the Earth faster than these resources can naturally be replenished and faster than our technology can continue to increase.[1] We will leave for our posterity only a wrecked planet full of corpses of victims of pandemic, famine, and wars to possess the last scraps of food, water, breathable air, and energy.

Imagine a world with almost no trees at all, and with vast new deserts covering large sections of the American Midwest, Eastern Europe, India and China. Imagine a world with huts and flimsy houses packed across the land as far as the eye can see; endless cramped continents of squalor and misery.

This is our fate if we do nothing. Technology alone cannot save us; we are out-breeding our own intellectual capacity and our technology is presently aimed at saving or extending individual lives instead of making overall human life sustainable.

The technologies we have employed throughout the 20th Century have not been beneficial overall to the human race. The technologies themselves are indeed useful tools that can be used for great good for humanity. But we have chosen to utilize these advancements in a way completely lacking in any long-term perspective or wisdom. By utilizing petroleum and all its enormous energy in our food-production systems, we have greatly expanded the total amount of food we can grow. But with every advancement in our capacity, we have allowed a similar growth in our population, thus requiring the endless continuance of these advancements and negating any spare capacity our technology has wrought. We haven’t actually advanced at all. Instead, we have simply increased our global needs just as fast as our power to fulfill needs has grown.

True advancement is the permanent elevation of humanity to a new plateau of quality of existence. But everything we have done in the past century has been founded upon reckless exploitation and consumption of resources which are intrinsically finite. Oil, soil, and fresh water cannot last forever when these very technologies are founded upon processes that erode or consume these resources. And though these have not been depleted enough yet to cause a breakdown in our food and energy systems, by the very nature of our activities we know this outcome in inevitable. Finite things eventually run out, and our technology has no solutions.





The above graphs show the rate of innovation in our society as presented in Huebner’s ‘A possible worldwide trend for declining innovation’. The first graph shows the number of major innovations[2] per 10-year period divided by population since the end of the Dark Ages. The second graph shows the number of United States Patents granted per 10-year period divided by population. Both of these graphs show a clear decline in innovation over the past century versus our growing population.

Our population is expanding faster than our intellectual growth, which is both the evolution in biological IQ of our brain and the pace of expansion in our understanding of science and technology. For most of human history, population was growing slower than intellectual growth. Human population is like the cargo of a ship and our intellect is the engine, making it possible to sustain and move the cargo forward. But we are rapidly overloading that engine until eventually it won’t be strong enough (even though it grows stronger) to manage such an expanding enormous cargo.

In addition to this downtrend in innovation, we are also rapidly approaching the upper limit of economically feasible technology discoveries. Indeed, a part of the reason why innovation is slowing is that most of the easily utilizable technologies have already been discovered. Huebner concludes that:

“We are at an estimated 85% of the economic limit of technology, and it is projected that we will reach 90% in 2018 and 95% in 2038.”

We need a new mindset to discover and enact the remedies necessary for our survival, regardless of how popular these actions may be. We can no longer ignore the problems gathering around us, having faith that new future technology alone will solve the problems before they become catastrophic. When thinking about our growing population, many people often fail to comprehend the true danger because they have an unshakable faith that the future will bring wondrous new technologies that will solve the problem without the need for us to limit or reduce our numbers. But this is quite unlikely, and we must act upon the assumption that few further significant technological solutions will appear. We must remember that we are talking about an issue that directly pertains to the survival of human civilization. We cannot afford to adopt an excessively optimistic view of future advancements and leave our survival to mere chance. Should these technologies actually appear, so much the better. But we cannot afford to blindly assume that they will appear (and be helpful) to save us from catastrophe.

Our beautiful Earth is a lifeboat for humanity, but every vessel possesses only finite seats. We can put extra people into the boat, but this will degrade the living conditions for everybody in the boat. Seats meant to support one person now have 3 or 4 cramped people in them, and the water rations meant to keep us alive for many days upon the sea, safely sustained until rescue comes, now will last just hours. Continue adding people to the boat and conditions worsen until the boat finally sinks from overloading.

Our benevolence to our fellow men, and sharing our safety and comfort in the boat with all, results in the death of every person and the permanent loss of the boat as well. Unless there are wise persons in the boat, possessing both compassion and perception, who lead all the rest and prohibit overloading with force if needed, the boat and its occupants are doomed.

True compassion and wisdom seeks the greatest good possible, even if many cannot partake of that good. The greatest good, by definition, cannot be expanded beyond its physical limitations even though it is morally easier to simply overload the lifeboat until it sinks. Nobody wants to deny some people of things they desperately need (and even deserve). But if nobody does this there is no hope for anyone, and our cowardice (masquerading as compassion) will bring about an outcome that the opposite of the greatest good.

This is NOT a call for genocide. This is a call for intelligent and humane management and reduction (not murder) of our numbers, of every race, executed over decades or centuries. An orderly retreat, conducted with discipline and courage, is always better than continuing to fight an impossible battle until your troops are destroyed, or until they break into chaotic flight. Shall we ignore our overpopulation until we have created a huge mass of billions of people who have no more food and whose only recourse is violence and destruction just to obtain a bare existence? Is the suffering of 12 billion in years to come, inhabiting a world that can only feed 8 billion, a reasonable price to pay because we are squeamish about paring down our numbers today? It is immoral, unintelligent, and cowardly to ignore this problem while we have time to do so.



World Population – Unlimited Growth in a Limited World

Consider this chart below:

Here we see the increase in world population since 1950, and when we look only at the recent past, things don’t seem so alarming to most people. Three billion, four billion, seven billion… What’s the difference? Indeed, this almost seems like business as usual on planet Earth, and we wrongly assume that recent times are nothing more than a continuation of the trend that has been in place since antiquity. But when we look at the big picture, the danger becomes much more obvious:



As we can see, even when we project population onto a log scale, and thereby compress the slope, we are clearly expanding our numbers at a dangerously unprecedented rate. Our population is currently more than 50 times greater than it has been for most of human history, and it continues to explosively expand like a virus growing in a Petri dish.

Since we know that the Earth has finite resources of arable land and fresh water, we can conclude that at some point it can no longer permanently support additional humans. Even if we assume that we have not yet passed that point (which is not at all certain), we can see that the more rapidly we approach that point of peak capacity, the more likely that the inertia of our growth will cause us to overshoot it, and to do so by a greater amount. Thus, the very velocity of our current population growth creates a danger above and beyond the actual impact of our absolute numbers. Even if we have not yet reached the capacity of the Earth, the breakneck speed of our approach virtually ensures that we won’t see the danger before it is too late, and that we will have hundreds of millions or billions of unsupportable people born into our world by the time we actually acknowledge the problem.

Unfortunately, there are signs that we may have already passed the maximum capacity of the Earth. In the latter half of the 20th century, great advances in agricultural technology, the so-called Green Revolution, enabled us to expand the scope of our agriculture to unprecedented levels. The use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides combined with advances in irrigation and mechanized farm equipment, roughly tripled crop yields. The explosion of food upon our world has lead to a corresponding explosion in our population.

But today, we can see that much of these improvements in crop yields were gained by unsustainable technologies that deplete the long-term fertility of the soil, or that rely upon water sources that are now drying up. Pests are mutating into variants that are resistant to our chemical pesticides, requiring ever more toxic chemicals to be sprayed upon our food. And in many cases, our expansion into poorer soil areas has exhausted these farmlands entirely. In addition to these dangers, modern agriculture is massively energy intensive, using vast quantities of petroleum products in both fuel for farm machinery and the fertilizers themselves. Any interruption in oil supplies, or erosion of land quality or water resources, has the potential to seriously impact world food production. And any significant or protracted reduction in food production would trigger a massive die-off of humans beyond any disaster we have ever encountered.

What we are left with today is the hangover following a binge of unsustainable abundance, and with a tired planet full of an excessive number of partygoers who are reluctant to admit that it is time to go home, and face the harsh new dawn approaching. And when we actually see what we have done to ourselves in the stark clarity of this bleak new day, our misery will be exceeded only by our astonishment.

An examination of this chart shows some distressing facts. From the 1960’s until the drought of 1988, notice how there was very few instances where production failed to keep up with demand. We see a problem in 1972 which reflects the crop failures in India and the USSR that occurred that year. But even with that, this period can be characterized as a time of plentiful supply, and only very few short-lived minor disruptions of that supply. From the mid ‘80s until the end of the century, we see that there is greater volatility in the spread between supply and demand, evidencing a system under stress or otherwise operating with less efficiency than before. As part of this volatility, there were greater production/consumption deficits during poor years than had existed before. And while we can still see a positive bias in the spread between production and consumption, the persistence of this bias is greatly reduced.

But from 1999 on, we see more troubling characteristics in this data. First of all, the overall positive bias in the spread became a negative bias instead. Additionally, for the first time we see an unbroken, multi-year deficit in production, exceeding even the drought of the late ‘80s in both duration and severity. Clearly, the possibility exists that conditions have fundamentally changed in our long summer of ample food supply. Winter may not be upon us quite as of yet, and it is possible that summer may again reemerge for a brief time. But still, my astute readers ought to be able to feel the first slight touches of an autumnal chill in the air.


A glance at this chart should make my point in even more frigid terms. When factoring in the effects of population instead of consumption (which doesn’t take into account starving or under-nourished people), we see an undeniable decline in our food supply over the past 20 years. Anybody who understands technical analysis of charts would call this a clear down trend starting from the time where we previously saw the onset of inefficiency and/or instability – the mid ‘80s. It has all the basic ingredients: Successively lower tops of major peaks, successively lower bottoms of major troughs, and a least-squares trendline with a negative slope. And when we consider that this is a long term phenomenon, and not just a transient blip in the data, the reliability of this conclusion is greatly enhanced.

We can see that the overall peak of this chart was indeed reached in the mid ‘80s, and that conditions have deteriorated since then. One might be tempted to think that perhaps food production has not degraded, but that our population growth has accelerated during this time, causing the rate of new food demand to increase. Unfortunately, this turns out to be untrue. Not only has the rate of population growth not increased during this time, but the facts show that it has actually declined during this exact period. The population growth rate today is approximately 30% below what it was in the mid ‘80s.[3]


So if we assume that grain production is having trouble keeping up with our population in recent years, we should likewise expect to see problems in the world grain stocks, as well. The stocks are the measure of ‘cushion’ we have, like savings in the bank, and are an excellent indicator of how well the system is performing. Looking at these next charts, we can clearly see that the world grain stocks are indeed deteriorating.

So we are left with an uncomfortable conclusion. Not only has our food supply system failed to just keep up with previous growth rates, but even in lower-growth modern decades it has failed to such an extent that it cannot even keep up with these easier conditions. When we also consider that the food supply situation was steadily improving from the mid ‘60s until the turning point in the mid ‘80s, and when we notice that the rate of population growth was much higher during these years; we must conclude that a vigorous food system that was able to thrive and improve in times of great growth challenges abruptly changed into a mode where it now cannot even hold its own, even though the growth challenges are far easier than before.

The Great Food Machine on planet Earth is beginning to break down.

Now certainly as of today, it is not seriously broken, if we define broken as being unable to feed us. But what we should be concerned about is that for the first time we have evidence that it will no longer be strong enough to meet our continual needs for more from it, even though we have relaxed the rate of our increasing demand. And we have begun a downward trend that, though not dangerous in itself today, bodes ill for our future. If these trends continue, we should begin seeing food demand perpetually exceeding supply – permanent famine.

Clearly, we have found a boundary of some kind – an inherent limitation of our finite Earth than cannot be crossed simply by utilizing our technology and skill. Indeed, much of the technology we have used to obtain such abundance has caused the accelerated erosion of our planet’s valuable resources. The candle that burns twice as brightly burns half as long. And so this recent decline in agricultural performance is likely the first evidences of the onset of planetary exhaustion.

If we think of any growth process, expanding within a finite environment and consuming finite resources, we inevitably come to a point where further expansion and consumption becomes limited. Throughout all history, we have thought of the Earth as something infinite – a space that we could never fill up and a resource we could never exhaust. But reason itself tells us that this thinking must inevitably change at some point. Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached that point, and it is time for us to begin to think differently.

So what shall we do to correct this downward trend? As we have seen, putting blind faith in technology as our savior who will solve any problems in the future is a vain hope. The god of Technology is a fading deity, and our minds in modern times have lost the communion with and revelations from this deity our ancestors once enjoyed.

Why don’t we just convert more land to farmland? Cut down some trees, clear away some rocks, and we can get our food system back to its 1970’s fighting form! That will work, right?

Well, kind of - for a while maybe. But overall, this really isn’t the answer either. You can’t get something for nothing. And in the world of today, that harsh lesson must be learned by all if we are to ever move forward. And sometimes, when you try to get something for nothing, it ends up costing you far more than nothing. It may cost you everything.


Looking at the ‘potential’ cropland, we can see that these consist of tropical forests and arid lands. The obstacles to developing these as farmlands, and the damage caused by doing so can be immense. First of all, developing the arid lands is not as easy as one might imagine. These lands require huge amounts of water to be turned into productive fields, and so developing them would put enormous additional stress upon our fresh water supply. In addition, many of these lands are found at great distances from rivers and lakes that could supply them, and in areas where no water delivery infrastructure exists. We would have to construct enormous aqueducts covering hundreds or even thousands of miles to bring a water supply large enough to enable economically viable crop production in these lands. And even if we did so, the amount of water we would take from source lakes and rivers in so doing would endanger the farmlands closer to these sources by depleting their water supply.

Trying to develop tropical forests into cropland is even more problematic. The destruction of these forests would be a disaster for humanity. These areas are already highly productive, though not in food. They are the primary carbon sequestration areas of the world, and can be thought of as the planet’s lungs. They also contain the richest diversity of life found upon our world. We would have to obliterate nearly half of the life forms on our world to make this land productive for food. And we would also lose the greatest treasure of biochemical compounds for science and medicine before we had even discovered everything that exists there.

And if all this is not reason enough to leave these forests in place, the soil in these areas is very poor for farming. It is productive for only a few years, and after that turns into a wasteland that can support neither farming nor its previous natural abundance. Deforesting these lands makes them extremely vulnerable to rapid and catastrophic soil erosion, especially in wet climates where most of these lands are found. Eventually, all the productive topsoil ends up in the ocean, and the land is rendered permanently useless thereafter.


The above satellite image shows this kind of soil erosion in Burma. When we look at the next image, we can see that the areas with superior soils (green and blue areas) are precisely those areas which are presently in agricultural use already. There may be some isolated patches where these soils are not presently cultivated, here and there, but overall we can see that this land is already being used for food production. Much the same can be seen for the marginal land (yellow and orange areas), though not so completely. We probably could expand production somewhat in these areas, though I tend to doubt that farming the central highlands of Madagascar or southern Alaska is really a very smart move. The rest of the world consists either of soil that won’t grow anything, or that which will be productive only on a limited basis and/or only for a few years until it is exhausted.


I have said that trying to farm Madagascar would not be a very smart idea. But it seems that people have given it a try anyway, and the results of this effort have been very destructive. Here too we see how our attempts to farm unsustainable soils have once again caused serious soil erosion problems.


It would seem that our efforts to push agriculture into lands that have not known it before are both destructive and yield only marginal gains for humanity. And as we can see, even these few gains we receive in food production won’t last long. Soon, all these additional lands’ topsoil will be at the bottom of the ocean, and the previously gorgeous (and useful) forested areas will be turned into sterile landscapes reminiscent of the moon. This is truly an unintelligent policy, and we can rightly conclude that we cannot fix our food problems by farming a significantly larger area on the planet.

But even if it were possible to farm more acreage without this kind of destruction, this still would not be the answer for humanity. If we assume that we could farm 25% more land in a sustainable manner, what do we do when our population grows another 25% in a few years? What next? At some point, expansion stops working as a policy simply because the Earth is finite. And it is surely better to deal with this problem now rather than wait for even more people to populate the planet, making any transition harder, and any failure more catastrophic.

Soil is not the only critical resource that is facing pressure from population. Our fresh water supplies are also not keeping up with our population growth. Only 2.5% of the water on Earth is fresh water, and it is therefore a very limited resource upon our world. Major aquifers that support fertile croplands, such as the Ogallala Aquifer in the American Midwest, are drying up and are forecast to be empty in 25-40 years.[4] Thus, the most productive farmland in the world may be rendered useless in a generation or two simply because we are pushing it to continuously produce more energetically than nature can give us for longer than just a brief sprint. But like methamphetamine-addled freaks, we keep pushing ourselves and our world to insane levels of hyper-productivity that cannot be sustained forever. Eventually, even after weeks of no wasted time sleeping and lots of productive work being done, we will finally crash as our body collapses from the stress of continuous stimulants. And so likewise eventually, after many decades of hyper-productivity being imposed upon it, the Earth will likewise collapse and need to rest up for a long while before it can do anything further productive for us.

We need to understand that the ‘good old days’ of the 60’s, 70’s, and ‘80s were not times of prudent, successful agriculture. Instead, these were times of lunatic hyper-production where we traded the long-term survival of our planet and species for the quick burst of abundance we then experienced. Like an army of self-defeating and unintelligent parasites, we sucked the life out of our host Earth faster and faster, neither noticing nor caring if our too-ravenous feeding was killing it. We cheated like a baseball player who uses steroids, shooting for higher glory today, and paying for it with an asterisk next to his record of achievements, and the loss of his health in his retirement. We juiced the Earth. And as we did, we let our needy numbers grow along with our hypertrophic agricultural muscles, in a display of Dionysian blindness and excess.

We are faced with the uneasy sense that now the wine flasks are running low, and the minstrels are starting to leave for their next gig – a funeral. This party is over, and soon all will know it. Soon, the multitude of revelers in the room will transform into a massive horde of drunken malcontents, far more than we originally intended to invite to this party, all seeking more music and more wine – and finding naught.

Looking at the above chart, we can see that land irrigation is clearly not keeping up with population growth. All over the world, lakes and rivers are drying up and endangering vast areas of cropland. We are sucking water out of them faster than nature can replenish them. It is as if we are drinking more than the sum total of all the rain over all the farmland on Earth. And as we can see in the chart below, our annual water consumption is now over 5000 cubic kilometers per year. That is an immense brick of water a kilometer high, and almost 71 kilometers in length and width. There are many asteroids and even moons smaller than that! And yet we slurp this down every year.


As I said before, all this consumption is draining rivers and lakes around the world. The following global water resource data are from earth-policy.org, and amply illustrate this point. And we should remember that we are not as yet at a point where crop production has been seriously undermined by water shortages. The decay in our water systems, thus far, has been limited to a decay in their original abundance only, with only a few instances of dried up farmlands. But as this process continues, soon we will see one water source after another completely dry up. And with this, one fertile agricultural region after another will go offline, lowering world food production. Instead of simply being unable to increase growth so abundantly as in the past, The Great Food Machine will actually start slowing down and making less and less food each year.

My heart shudders as I contemplate the tears that will flow all over our Earth, for want of a trickle of water for our crops, and this because of our present unsustainable consumption. With each passing year, concern will turn to hunger, which will turn to anger, which will turn to violent chaos. Noble Readers, such a condition would threaten human civilization just as much as the Nuclear War we feared only a few years ago.



Major Rivers Running Dry

Amu Darya
The Amu Darya is one of the two rivers that feed into the Aral Sea. Soaring demands on this river, largely to support irrigated agriculture, sometimes drain it dry before it reaches the sea. This, in combination with a reduced flow of the Syr Darya—the other river feeding into the sea—helps explain why the Aral Sea has shrunk by roughly 75 percent over the last 40 years and has split into two sections.

Colorado
All the water in the Colorado, the major river in southwestern United States, is allocated. As a result, this river, fed by the rainfall and snowmelt from the mountains of Colorado, now rarely makes it to the Gulf of California.

Fen
This river, which flows from the northern part of China’s Shanxi province and empties into the Yellow river at the province’s southern end, has essentially disappeared as water withdrawals upstream in the watershed have lowered the water table, drying up springs that once fed the river.

Ganges
The Gangetic basin is home to some 450 million people. Flowing through Bangladesh en route to the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges has little water left when it reaches the bay.

Indus
The Indus, originating in the Himalayas and flowing southwest to the Arabian Sea, feeds Pakistan’s irrigated agriculture. It now barely reaches the ocean during much of the year. Pakistan, with a population of 161 million projected to reach 305 million by 2050, is facing trouble.

Nile
In Egypt, a country where it rarely ever rains, the Nile is vitally important. Already drastically reduced by the time it reaches the Mediterranean, it may go dry further upstream in the decades ahead if the populations of Sudan and Ethiopia double by 2050, as projected.

Yellow
The cradle of Chinese civilization, the Yellow River has frequently run dry before reaching the sea over the past three decades. In 1997, the lower reaches saw no flow for 226 days. While better management practices have enabled the river to reach its mouth year round during the past several years, flow levels are still extremely low during the dry season.

Source: From “Stabilizing Water Tables,” Chapter 6 in Lester R. Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), pp. 106-107. Updated by Elizabeth Mygatt, Earth Policy Institute, July 2006.



Disappearing Lakes and Shrinking Seas

Aral Sea (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan)
Excessive diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, largely for irrigation, has shrunk the 5 million year old lake to about 25 percent of its 1960s size of 66,000 square kilometers. It now holds less than one fifth of its previous volume and has split into two sections. The larger South Aral Sea is unlikely to be restored, but the construction of a dam between the two sections, slated to be completed in September 2006, has already led to a rise in water level in the smaller North Aral Sea.

Lake Baikal (Russia)
Lake Baikal, the world's oldest and deepest lake, contains nearly one fifth of the world's unfrozen freshwater. Over the past century the amount of soil flushed into the lake increased by two and half times due to regional agricultural and industrial development.

Lake Chad (Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon)
Lake Chad has shrunk from 23,000 to 900 square kilometers over the past 40 years, a result of increased irrigation and decades of depressed rainfall. The Lake, which once covered part of Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon, is now contained entirely within Chad's borders.

Lake Chapala (Mexico)
Mexico's largest lake is the main water source for Guadalajara's 5 million people. Its long-term decline began in the late 1970s corresponding with expanded agricultural development in the Río Lerma watershed. Since then, the lake has lost more than 80 percent of its water. Between 1986 and 2001, Chapala shrank from 1,048 to 812 square kilometers and its level dropped by up to 4 meters.

Dal Lake (India)
Lake Dal has shrunk from 75 square kilometers in 1200 AD to 25 square kilometers in the 1980s, to smaller than 12 square kilometers today. Over the last decade the lake has dropped 2.4 meters in height. All the untreated sewage of Srinagar city and some 1,400 houseboats are deposited directly into the lake. Other lakes in the Kashmir Valley are facing similar problems.

Dead Sea (Jordan, Israel, and Palestine)
At 417 meters below sea level, the Dead Sea is the lowest place on earth, and is falling by up to 1 meter per year. The Sea has shrunk in length since the early 1900s, from over 75 to 55 kilometers long, and has split in two, with the southern basin turned into evaporation ponds for potash extraction. The salty lake could disappear entirely by 2050, along with the 90 species of birds, 25 species of reptiles and amphibians, 24 species of mammals, and 400 plant species that live on its shores.

Dojran Lake (Macedonia and Greece)
More than 50 islands have appeared in the middle of the lake as overuse has dropped the water level by up to 3.48 meters below the minimal water level established in a 1956 bilateral agreement between Greece and Macedonia. Now with an average depth of 1.5 meters, the lake is turning into a swamp to the detriment of local plants and animals, especially fish.

Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberius) (Israel)
The Sea of Galilee is Israel's largest freshwater lake, with a total area of 170 square kilometers and a maximum depth of approximately 43 meters. At 209 meters below sea level, it is the lowest freshwater lake on Earth and is expected to drop even lower as the lake shrinks and becomes saltier due to excessive water withdrawals, drought, and evaporation.

Lake Manchar (Pakistan)
Diversion of the Indus River, largely for irrigation schemes, has deprived Manchar, Pakistan's largest lake, of fresh water. Salt content has increased dramatically in recent years and the polluted water fosters diseases previously absent from the region. The lake had been a source of fish for at least 1,000 years, but due to its deterioration some 60,000 fishers have left the area.

Lake Nakuru (Kenya)
The lake has shrunk in area since the 1970s from 48 to less than 37 square kilometers today. Nearby forests are being cleared for farmland to feed a fast growing population, causing soils to erode and wash into the lake. Failed urban sewage systems and unregulated industrial effluent have polluted the lake.

Owens Lake (United States, California)
This perennial lake in southeastern California held water continuously for at least 800,000 years, spanning 518 square kilometers at its peak, but since the mid-1920s, after a decade of diverting water from the Owens River to Los Angeles, the lake has been completely drained. The dry lake bed, which contains carcinogens including nickel, cadmium, and arsenic, became the single largest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, elevating air pollution in surrounding areas to up to 25 times the acceptable level under national clean air standards. Since 1998, Los Angeles has tried to abate these toxic dust storms by shallowly flooding a portion of the lake, reclaiming saline soils, and cultivating fields of salt tolerant grass.

Tonle Sap (Cambodia)
Tonle Sap performs the important function of holding excess water during flood season, yet siltation from eroding farmland and deforested areas has reduced the lake's capacity and has destroyed aquatic habitat.

Source: From Janet Larsen, “Disappearing Lakes, Shrinking Seas,” Eco-Economy Update (Washington, DC: Earth Policy Institute, 7 April 2005). Updated by Elizabeth Mygatt, Earth Policy Institute, July 2006.



Underground Water Depletion in Key Countries

Mexico
In Mexico, where a third of all the water used comes from underground, aquifers are being depleted throughout the northern arid and semiarid regions. In a country where irrigated land is more than three times as productive as rain-fed land, the coming loss of irrigation water will be costly.

United States
Overpumping is widespread, and the overdrafting of the vast Ogallala or High Plains aquifer—essentially a fossil aquifer that underlies eight states, from southern South Dakota to Texas—is a matter of national concern. Water levels have fallen, sometimes by as much as 30 meters, since irrigation began in the 1940s.

Spain
More than half of Spain’s 99 aquifers are overexploited. In some of Spain’s smaller aquifers water tables have fallen by 40-170 meters in the last two decades of the 20th century.

Saudi Arabia
When the Saudis turned to their large fossil aquifer for irrigation, wheat production climbed from 141,000 tons in 1980 to 4.1 million tons in 1992. But with rapid depletion of the aquifer, production dropped to 2.2 million tons in 2005. It is only a matter of time until irrigated wheat production ends.

Iran
The overpumping of aquifers is estimated at 5 billion tons per year. When aquifers are depleted, Iran’s grain harvest could drop by 5 million tons, or one third of the current harvest.

Yemen
This country of 22 million people is unique in that it has both one of the world’s fastest-growing populations and the fastest-falling water tables. Under most of the country the water table is falling by 2 meters or more a year.

Israel
Both the coastal aquifer and the mountain aquifer it shares with Palestinians are being depleted. The continuous tightening of water supplies is likely to further raise tensions in the region.

India
Water tables are falling in most states in India as irrigation demands soar—there are now 12 million wells in western and southern India, compared with 100,000 in 1960. With thousands of wells going dry each year, India’s farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to feed 16 million new Indians each year.

China
Water tables are falling throughout northern China, including under the North China Plain, which produces half of China’s wheat and a third of its corn. China’s harvest of wheat, grown mostly in the north, has fallen sharply in recent years as irrigation wells have dried up.

Source: From “Stabilizing Water Tables,” Chapter 6 in Lester R. Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), pp. 101-102. Updated by Elizabeth Mygatt, Earth Policy Institute, July 2006.











Peak Oil – The End of Limitless Cheap Energy

Whether you say the glass is half full or half empty, when it comes to oil production, it is bad news either way. Oil fields produce oil at a rate described by a bell curve, with the highest rate of production occurring when the field is half depleted. From then on, oil will flow less abundantly from the field, until it finally goes dry. When you add together the production of all the oil fields in the world, we can see that some will peak earlier than others. But there is a point, when all economically obtainable oil sources have been tapped, when the cumulative production from all fields everywhere will peak, and thereafter decline. That time is known as Peak Oil, and there is much evidence to say that it is happening now, or that it will come within the next decade.

Looking at the above figure, we see an idealized representation of a normal oilfield and how the outputs of each individual well within that field combines over time to create an overall bell-curve production rate for the entire region. When we consider the whole world, we must add together all these curves from various regions to get a sum that describes world oil production. Unfortunately this is complicated by the fact that nations will frequently produce oil at less that 100% capacity due to market or political conditions. In addition, advances is applied geology in recent decades have added new sources to the mix that were unavailable before. But even with these newer oilfields added to our production, we must understand that oil, just like water and soil, is a finite resource that cannot forever continue to grow in production to keep up with our population. Eventually, we will find less and less new oil to make up for all the old oilfields we have depleted. Unfortunately, that time is upon us.


As we can see, new oil discoveries are indeed declining, even though our technology has greatly enhanced our ability to find it. And as we have seen in much of the data presented here, this is a long-term trend, not just a momentary aberration.

Given this data, we would expect to see declines in production from the older oil producing areas of the world, since these would be the ones most likely to have been fully exploited, and would have the fewest new discoveries to add to their output. This is indeed occurring.



We can clearly see that oil production in the United States (upper chart) and in the North Sea (lower chart) has declined. This is not the wild assumption of an alarmist, or a hypothetical scenario of doom. It is reality. Given the importance of oil to the economies of North America and Europe, and the economic and political problems caused by relying on foreign oil imports, we can only conclude that these drops in production are the result of declining supplies. In other words, all of the US and North Sea must be more than half empty of oil.

This hypothesis is strengthened when we see in the above chart that imports of foreign oil have greatly increased, and the years of greatest increase in importation have occurred exactly when domestic production has waned. We can even see the reverse. When US production increased for about a decade starting in the mid ‘70s, imports fell. But when this burst of domestic production dried up, imports rose once again.

Clearly, the only reason why America imports this much oil is because we have to, and because our domestic supply can no longer match our demand. This is the basic premise of the Peak Oil hypothesis – that supply is finite and cannot stretch forever to match present and future demand. If we can see that this hypothesis is correct when applied to America or the North Sea only, can we not then extrapolate that this situation will eventually overcome the entire world? And when it does, from where will we ‘import’ additional supplies of oil? From the Moon? From Mars?

My wise readers can clearly see that there will be no other sources for us to use. When world oil production starts to decline, each passing year we will have a greater and greater gap between the amount of oil we need, and the amount we can produce. Prices will skyrocket, and we will simply not have enough to power all the cars, farm equipment, power plants, and other machinery that our modern world relies upon just to keep anarchy at bay.

In 1999, a research paper was written for the US Army by Captain Marc Lawton and Captain Tacildayus Andrews describing the coming downturn in world oil production, and what impact that would have on the Army. In their report, the authors included this forecast for world oil production:


In their report, they indicate that Oil Company estimates that oil supply will outlast demand for more than 20 years are unlikely, and instead they forecast a downturn early in the 21st century. The authors point out that:

“Many oil industry experts see no reason for concern about a lack of oil in the near term. They report 1,020 billion barrels of oil in 'proved' reserves as of the beginning of 1998. The current production rate is 23.6 billion barrels of oil per year. This suggests that crude oil may remain abundant and inexpensive for the next 43 years. This report, however, rests on three poor assumptions. First, it relies on a distorted estimate of the remaining oil; second, it assumes that oil production will remain constant; and third, it presumes that the last barrel drawn from a well is as easy and cheap to extract as the first.”

“Many conservative estimates indicate that conventional oil supplies will not be able to keep up with production demands through the next decade, and certainly not past the year 2020.”[5]

As we can see, the notion of the imminent onset of Peak Oil is not a fringe belief held only by extremist wackos. It is a mainstream belief among informed people with a serious interest in business, politics, and the military. This subject has been thoroughly discussed in the United States Congress in 2005 by Representative Bartlett of Maryland, and I direct the reader to that post to see a full transcript of his comments to the House.

“By some estimates, there will be an average of two-percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a three-percent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day.”

- Dick Cheney (CEO Halliburton, 1999)


“The most significant difference between now and a decade ago is the extraordinarily rapid erosion of spare capacities at critical segments of energy chains. Today, shortfalls appear to be endemic. Among the most extraordinary of these losses of spare capacity is in the oil arena.”

- Dick Cheney (Vice President, 2001)


"What people need to hear loud and clear is that we’re running out of energy in America."

- President George W. Bush (May 2001)


“The end-of-the-fossil-hydrocarbons scenario is not therefore a doom-and gloom picture painted by pessimistic end-of-the world prophets, but a view of scarcity in the coming years and decades that must be taken seriously. Forward-looking politicians, company chiefs and economists should prepare for this in good time, to effect the necessary transition as smoothly as possible.”

- Deutsche Bank Research (2 December 2004)


Mr. Sadad al-Huseini, former head of exploration and production for Saudi Aramco was interviewed in October 2007 by David Strahan of lastoilshock.com. In this interview, he reveals some significant facts:

The world’s proved reserves have been have been falsely puffed up by the inclusion of 300 billion barrels of speculative resources, according to the former head of exploration and production at Saudi Aramco, and this explains the industry’s inability to raise output despite soaring prices.

Mr. al-Huseini began by noting the obvious inconvenient truth of the oil market of recent years: that production has barely increased despite a soaring crude price and massive investment by the industry. 'It’s telling us something. We should be listening to what the numbers are telling us, not what the politicians say… It’s not about economics alone, you can increase prices, but you will not necessarily drive production up'.

He also noted that 400 billion barrels of reserve replacement has been reported over the last decade, and asked why this had not been translated into new capacity. The answer, he suggested, was that a quarter of the world’s claimed proved reserves are no such thing: not production-ready oil, but speculative resources. 'Reserves are confused and in fact inflated. Many of the so called reserves are in fact resources. They’re not delineated, they’re not accessible, they’re not available for production'. By his estimate 300 billion of the world’s 1200 billion barrels of proved reserves should be re-categorized as speculative resources.

He did go on to question the production potential of some Gulf states, pointing out that 75% of Iranian production comes from mature fields that are more than 50% depleted. That is not sustainable. When you hear officials saying production is going back up to up to over 5 million barrels [per day], that is not do-able'. He also noted that the 38 giant fields in the Arabian Gulf with reserves of over billion barrels each are on average 41% depleted.[6] 'These are the fields that in many forecasts are supposed to crank up and double production from the Gulf – again, very questionable'.

Sadad al-Huseini says that global production has reached its maximum sustainable plateau and that output will start to fall within 15 years, by which time the world’s oil resources will be 'very severely depleted'. In a world where spare capacity has evaporated, he concluded, the technical floor for oil prices would continue to rise at about $12 per year. 'Prices can only go up'.

According to al-Huseini the technical floor - the basic cost of producing oil excluding factors such as geopolitical risk and hedge fund speculation - is currently about $70 per barrel, meaning the minimum oil price could hit $106 in 2010 and $130 by 2012. Actual crude prices, including financial market factors, could be as much as $125 by as early as 2010. [Please note that this interview was before the price increases in 2008]

In 2004, The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas did their own forecast of future oil production. The ASPO is an organization of past and present Petroleum Industry geologists, and so their forecast is not mere uneducated speculation.

The above chart shows that even with the new deepwater production currently being touted, oil production overall is forecasted to decline in the immediate future. And it would appear that this is likely to be true, as Mr. al-Huseini rightly points out that production is not increasing despite the fact that oil prices have exploded.

So, enough with the forecasts. Let us take a look at current oil production to see if it is matching these expectations:

The top chart above shows production in recent times. And here we can clearly see how production has hit a plateau. This is the expected outcome of a peak. The actual peak scenario indicates that as new oil supplies run low, oil producers will maximize production from their existing sources which had previously not been producing at 100% capacity. And as they do so, the 'peak' gets flattened out into a broad plateau. After these sources begin to diminish in output, production will start to decline.

Looking at the second of the above charts, we can see a sharp increase in production from 1965 through the latter part of the ‘70s. The early ‘80s were a time of war between Iran and Iraq, and oil production suffered accordingly. But notice what happens when the production starts increasing again. The rate of increase from the mid ‘80s until 2004 is a much lower slope than that which existed during the previous times. Indeed, the rate of increase in oil production has been slowing, even in good times.

When we notice that the least-squares trendline has now hit the 0% growth figure, we get an explanation for why we cannot increase production. In recent years, oil production has topped out, even though prices have risen dramatically. This would not be such a problem except for one little inconvenient fact: World oil demand keeps rising because population keeps rising.

Let us assume for a moment that oil production does once again move upwards. Even if it does this, we have no assurance that the rate of increase in oil production will match demand, or that the upward motion will last. Indeed, we can see that the long-term trend is downward, and so any increase in production at this point would likely be only a short-term anomaly. Unless we discover some huge, previously unseen supply of oil somewhere (yet also extractable), there is no reason whatever to think that production will increase by any amount sufficient to keep up with demand. When top level Saudi oil executives, US Army officers, and Oil Industry geologists come to the same conclusion, that of imminent Peak Oil; we can hardly come to any other conclusion without some significant opposing evidence.

And yet there is none. Instead, the evidence supports a hypothesis of resource depletion, with a period of flat or marginally advancing production for a few years followed by a decline. And so we must come to another uncomfortable realization:

The Great Energy Machine on planet Earth is beginning to break down.

It is important to understand that this has been caused, almost entirely, by expanding our population beyond sustainable levels. We can look at wasteful consumption and other causes as well. But in the end, if we had less that 1 billion people on this planet today, and had never exceeded that level in the past, we would have enough oil to last us for hundreds of years before production would decline. No increases in efficiency or reductions in waste can ameliorate this problem as long as our population increases, and the problem itself would not even exist without our high population. The same is true of our food, pollution, and climate problems.

Overpopulation is the common cause of ALL major problems on Earth, including poverty, pollution, war, hunger, climate change, cultural decay, resource depletion, and is the primary cause of the recent trends whereby governments are encroaching upon our privacy and liberty. Until we can correct our overpopulation, and get our numbers down to sustainability, we have no hope whatever of moving humanity forward, or even of ensuring our survival. And the longer it takes us to face up to the truth, the more suffering we shall endure and the lesser the likelihood of any successful remediation of the problems.



The Problems with Alternate Energy Sources

Many will suggest that alternate fuels and energy sources are the solution to our oil problem. Unfortunately, few people understand how unenergetic most other sources are compared to oil. And development of these energy sources is decades too late to be of any help in avoiding the upcoming energy shock. Appendix 2 provides some startling facts that describe much of the little-known problems with alternate energy sources. When we consider the viability of alternate forms of energy, two factors are often overlooked:

- The Energy Density of the source in question
- The amount of Energy Input required to obtain any Output

The Energy Density of an energy source is the amount of work it can do versus its mass and/or volume. Gasoline, Diesel, and other Petroleum-based fuels have a high energy density. So even if we could create some other source to replace it, if this new source has only half the energy density of oil we would have to create twice as much of the replacement energy source to accomplish all the work that oil presently does.

The above table lists the amount of energy, in megajoules per kilogram and megajoules per liter, that are found in a variety of energy sources. And from this data we can see some of the obstacles we face in finding an energy source to replace fossil fuels. Current battery technology is nowhere nearly efficient enough to be a practical solution for motor vehicles, and there is no way that these electric systems can be used for aircraft, ships, or railroad vehicles. Even the electric motors of the modern locomotive are powered by an on-board diesel engine that produces the needed electricity. It is similarly unlikely that purely electrically-powered trucks could be constructed with enough towing capacity and range between recharges so as to make these a viable option.

So even if we were to make a large shift to electric passenger cars, this does nothing to address the far greater issue of how we will power our worldwide freight systems upon which our very lives and economy are dependant. We must remember that most of the food that we eat is grown hundreds or thousands of miles away from where we live. Without these freight systems, all of the great cities would simply run out of food within a few days.

The gasoline-electric hybrid car is very much in vogue today, but even this is not a significant improvement in the situation, nor can we hope to mass produce these cars in enough quantity to replace our standard cars. Hybrid vehicles have so much additional equipment within them that it takes far more energy to produce these vehicles than it does to make a regular car. Thus, the energy savings one reaps in the increase in fuel economy is offset by the additional energy investiture consumed in their manufacture. These cars do not ‘break-even’ versus regular cars in their energy consumption until they are many years old, and they are of no positive value to our energy situation until after they reach this break-even point.

In addition to this, the equipment they use requires scarce minerals such as platinum which are entering permanent conditions of scarcity. As time goes by, the energy required to mine these minerals will increase, thus negating any seeming reduction in energy consumption by the vehicles themselves. Also, there are simply not enough of these minerals on Earth to build a fleet of hybrid vehicles to replace the worldwide fleet of cars existing today, to say nothing of future demands.

Hybrid cars are nothing more than a means of playing upon the altruistic sensibilities of people so as to get them to buy a more expensive car without any commensurate increase in the car’s actual value or capabilities. They do not represent any workable solution to our energy problems that could be applied to more than a small fraction of the total energy picture.

Similar problems occur with a strictly electric vehicle that you plug in to recharge. We need to remember that a battery is not a magic energy producing device. It is only a bag in which you can store electrons. You must first fill the bag up with energy produced elsewhere before you can get anything out of it. And so even these vehicles cause pollution and consume energy because they use the electricity of coal and natural gas burning power plants as their energy source.

Shifting the widely-distributed burning of gasoline for energy (regular cars) into a mode of centrally-producing energy by burning coal and natural gas at power plants to power our cars would make sense except for one huge problem. Batteries do not give back the same power as it takes to fill them up. And so every time you recharge, you are wasting all the efficiencies gained due to the centralization of power production.

In addition, because of their very low energy density, battery vehicles require a heavier vehicle than a similarly powerful regular car. This increases dead weight and so makes the vehicle even more energy inefficient. If we were to take a carbon-fiber bodied electric vehicle and replace its drive train with a small (perhaps 700-900cc) internal combustion motor, the vehicle weight would go down and the overall energy efficiency would go up, all without any drop in performance. Likewise, if we were to try to make an electric car with an adequate range and a power capacity of 200-300 horsepower, a common power range for many modern vehicles, the weight and size of the car would grow to monstrous proportions.

It is wise to also observe that even if these electric vehicles could be made to produce a net gain in efficiency over regular cars, say a 10-20% improvement, that even this would not constitute any real solution to our energy problems. The energy to power these cars comes from burning fossil fuels at power plants. Reducing our fossil fuel consumption by 10-20% does little to help the situation when we can expect all of these gains to be wiped out within 20 years due to our population growth.

Many people believe that hydrogen technology is the answer, but here too problems abound. First of all, the energy density of hydrogen is very low on a volume basis. We cannot really apply the mass basis because nobody deals with hydrogen in kilogram measurements other than rocket scientists who are rightly concerned about the total weight of the launch vehicle. Similar issues do not exist as urgently when powering terrestrial motor vehicles. Here, we are concerned with liters and not kilograms, especially since our cars cannot be equipped to carry enormous external tanks of hydrogen like the Space Shuttle.

In the confined space of an automobile, the only way to carry enough hydrogen to power the vehicle is to keep it highly compressed. As we can see from the data, even doing so results in a fuel with a far lower energy density than gasoline. To carry an equivalent amount of energy, the hydrogen fuel tank would have to be over 100 gallons even for a compact car. And this would not be a simple lightweight tank like we find in our present cars. No, to keep the hydrogen pressurized at 700 bars we would need a massive steel tank with industrial-gauge valves and fuel lines, and with a compressor to keep the tank fully pressurized. The compressor would be needed because hydrogen, being the smallest and lightest element, is virtually impossible to contain and leaks very easily. Even in industrial systems, hydrogen tanks can leak 1-2% of their contents every day.

The prospect of millions of people driving around with huge tanks of highly-pressurized hydrogen is impossible from a safety standpoint. Common accidents that occur without serious injury everyday would be transformed into a horrific daily replaying of the Hindenburg disaster. All it would take is a broken fuel line and the entire crash scene would be instantly flooded with a cloud of hydrogen than would often ignite and explode, killing or burning drivers, passengers, and nearby pedestrians. In addition, such a condition creates greater opportunities for terrorism, as every common Toyota would have the potential to kill scores of people without any additional explosives. And if such an explosion could be made in close proximity to many other such vehicles, like in a parking garage, a chain reaction of explosions could be set off that could cause massive damage.

More than these technical issues, hydrogen has an even greater flaw. It is not a source of energy. Rather, it is an energy storage device just like a battery. Unlike interstellar space, there are no pools of hydrogen lying around on planet Earth. We have to create it by using an outside energy source first. We lose energy during electrolysis and then in storage, so just like a battery, hydrogen is an energy sink, not a source.

Just like hybrid cars, biofuels are presently being hyped far beyond their actual ability to help our energy situation. World Ethanol production has skyrocketed in recent years.

Despite this huge increase in supply, it should be noted that the entire world Ethanol production is still only about 1% the amount of current world oil production. For this to become even a partial practical alternative to oil, we would have to increase Ethanol production at least 30 times above even today’s elevated levels. This is unlikely to occur, since we have already determined that world food production cannot be expanded into larger land areas, and we are unlikely to have an increase in corn crop yields sufficient to keep up with our food demands and simultaneously increase Ethanol production by such a large amount.

This simply isn’t going to happen. Even getting 20% of this increased production would be a Herculean task that would cause significant food shortages and a sharp increase in corn prices. Plus, even if we could get this additional corn production, it is not sustainable. We have already seen the stresses that beset our food production capacity, and adding new demands of our food system to also provide us energy is simply a recipe for accelerated disaster.


As we can see from the top figure above, the recent increase in corn production for Ethanol has caused a simultaneous drop in the ending stocks, which represent the spare capacity of the system. But an even more telling statistic is seen in the lower figure above where the actual spare capacity of the system versus all the demands of the population is shown. In the last 45 years, only for a single 2-year event during and following a drought and crop failure was the world spare capacity of corn in a more precarious position.

There is no way that we can continue to aggressively increase Ethanol production without beginning to experience corn shortages for food and feed. And with only 13.1% of the supply left over at year end, and with this statistic likely declining as Ethanol production increases; we increasingly expose ourselves to a great risk of famine when then next bad crop year occurs due to inclement weather or other factors.

Along with these pressures on maintaining our corn supply, all the recent ballyhoo about Ethanol has driven corn prices very high, and they seem to be going even higher still.

Here in the above chart we see how the normally sleepy corn market has exploded with activity since the end of 2003. Not only have the prices risen sharply, but the Open Interest, which is the measure of the total positions held in the market, has been greatly expanding since that time. This has occurred without any droughts, crop failures, or other problems that usually cause this kind of market excitement.

These increases in both price and Open Interest are most likely solely caused by all the recent increases in Ethanol production. If such increases occur when corn is used to make current levels of Ethanol, how much will corn prices rise should we attempt to make even a 10-fold increase in production? Such an increase would still yield us only a slight percentage of our energy needs, but it is quite clear that corn prices would rise to above double or triple the level we see today. When these corn prices rise, how much will Ethanol cost? And with such a large increase in corn prices, other commodity prices such as soybeans, wheat, cattle, and hogs would rise as well. This would create some significant inflationary pressures for our economy which could also end up increasing oil and other energy prices as well.

In addition to these agricultural limitations, Ethanol must be manufactured using outside energy sources. The fertilizers and pesticides for the crops use petroleum, as does the farm machinery used in corn production. As of today, corn-based Ethanol produces only about 1.3 units of energy for every 1 unit of energy used in its creation. This means that only 1.3 BTUs are created for every 1 BTU input. So for every 1 BTU created 0.77 BTUs are needed, giving us a net energy efficiency of only 23%. When we compare this with gasoline, which is 80% energy efficient, we see the huge problem that exists.

No Ethanol is produced in America without government subsidies simply because it is not truly an economically viable product. As such, corn-based Ethanol and its subsidies represent little more than a pork barrel project used to buy votes from Midwesterners and Major Agricultural Companies such as ConAgra and ADM. Corn Ethanol is useful as a gasoline additive to reduce emissions, but it in no way can be thought of as a practical alternate fuel. Ethanol has much better efficiency characteristics when made from sugar cane, but we can hardly expect to grow enough of this tropical crop all around the temperate regions of the Earth so as to provide us with a significant world energy source. And in tropical regions, the sugar crops grown for Ethanol have displaced huge areas of forests that we simply cannot live without. Planting in these tropical soils also is often not sustainable, as the soils themselves when deprived of the wastefall of the forest cannot support life for long. And so even in the tropics, Ethanol causes more harm than good.

The situation with Biodiesel is similar to Ethanol. According to the US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, total US consumption of diesel and heating oil is about 50 billion gallons annually. When we compare this to the fact that the entire production of all vegetable oils is only about 3 billion gallons, we can see that farm-raised options to petroleum are nothing close to anything we could call a solution, regardless of what crop we choose to grow from soybeans to canola to sunflowers. Unless these fuels can be derived from large scale algae factories[7], which do not exist at all today, there is little hope of reaping any significant benefit from them. Agriculture already has enough trouble just with feeding us; it cannot be expected to also be our main provider of energy.

Methanol is made from Natural Gas, and so it is not actually an alternative non-petroleum fuel. It can be synthesized from biomass as well, but this is less efficient than the standard creation from Natural Gas. And just as with Ethanol and Biodiesel, the limitations of our agricultural production adversely affect any wide-scale implementation of this route of Methanol production.

When we consider the other sources of energy such as solar, wind, nuclear and hydro, we leave the realm of liquid fuels and move into the world of electricity production. It is helpful for us to get a clearer understanding of the present picture in electricity production before we discuss these options.

Looking at the above chart, we can see that if we total all the electricity produced from oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydro power; that the remaining sources provided only 2.5% of the nation’s electricity. Other than hydro power, renewable sources of energy provide only incidental fractions of our total energy picture.

Looking at the world picture in the above chart, we see a similar situation. Clearly, the much hyped green technologies are not even close to providing the same energy as older methods, and this fact is even more striking when looking at our electricity production.

For many people, this is a source of outrage and suspicion. Many will say that the oil companies are quashing new technologies in order to maintain their preeminence, and that corrupt politicians fail to promote newer technologies as well. They feel that these newer technologies could completely replace our dependence on fossil fuels, and that the reason we are not doing so now is entirely the fault of these evil powers that control the situation.

But I would like to suggest an alternate hypothesis: What if these other energy sources simply don’t work well enough, or produce abundantly enough so as to ever actually replace fossil fuels and nuclear? What if these green technologies just don’t have as high energy efficiency or energy density as these older sources? Putting it simply, what if they just won’t work? Maybe that is why they haven’t been the solution thus far, and not some grand conspiracy?

At this point, many of you are probably thinking that I am in the employ of the oil companies or that I favor our dependence on fossil fuels. The answer to both issues is ‘no’. But let’s get serious folks. How are we going to create this huge worldwide amount of electricity from solar panels and windmills? Surely we can create some power this way, and in more rural areas these sources make more sense and are appropriate aims to pursue. But there is simply no consistent and reliable supply of either bright sunshine or energetic winds in most places of the world that use the most electricity (see Appendix 2).

Even in Germany, where wind power has been strongly developed, problems exist. These wind farms cannot provide all the required energy of the area all the time, and so Germany has built ‘Shadow Stations’ to provide a power backup for times when the wind is not blowing. These Shadow Stations are traditional gas-powered powerplants, which end up providing a large portion of the total ‘wind’ energy. Also, these powerplants cannot be switched on and off quickly, and so they must be kept running all the time so that the power grid can maintain its integrity. So by installing all these windmills, Germany has also been forced to build more gas powerplants to make wind power even partially practical.

Solar power is even further from being a practical solution. Photovoltaic cell technology is nowhere near close to providing sufficient power to replace fossil fuels, and we have no indication that it ever will be even though there have been recent advancements. Solar makes sense in rural areas and for small-scale implementations, but it is of little use in powering all the factories and cities that consume the majority of the world’s power. Even with significant additional technological improvements to the power generated by the solar cells, where other than desert regions can we set aside enough land so as to make a solar farm practical? These farms would require hundreds of acres, and even many square kilometers of land set aside to be big enough to create economically feasible power outputs. Of course we can do this here and there. But this is simply not enough to power the whole world!

Solar apologists often say that we could simply put solar cells on all the roofs of a city’s buildings, and that this would make its implementation broader. This is a fine idea, but only as a supplement to assist the main (non-solar) source of energy. Solar simply can’t produce close to all the power that the average commercial or industrial building needs. Additionally, solar cells require energy to manufacture and many more factories to make them would be needed to produce any significant amount. Who is going to invest in such factories before solar technology shows that it can pack any real punch? And why should the government strongly invest in this technology when it holds no real promise of being the main solution to our energy problems?

Just because sunlight is free and abundant in no way means that photovoltaic cells are a smart option. The presence of free photons is irrelevant if we cannot convert enough of them into electrons. And we cannot just hold to the blind faith which claims that future technology will solve this problem for us, just because we want free unlimited green power. Wanting is not having.

When thinking about solar, wind, and other such green energy sources, we need to remember that all of these sources are simply less energetic and/or harder to harvest than digging or pumping fossil fuel out of the ground that contains such an extremely high amount of energy. And just because we can power an entire house from solar cells or a small town from windmills in no way indicates that these things are able to power the entire world. The world demand for electricity is almost incomprehensibly huge, and the miniscule examples of ‘successful green energy’ that are touted by their promoters are actually little more than distractions that keep us from looking realistically at the big picture.

We must remember that a single barrel of oil has the energy to do work almost equal to 25,000 man-hours of human labor. This equates to about 2,000,000,000,000 man-hours of work accomplished each day by oil alone. That is about 300 hours of labor each day for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Where can we get that much energy as cheaply and abundantly as we do from coal, oil, and gas? Any realistic solution to our dependency on fossil fuels must provide a similarly huge amount of energy as they do. We must understand the scope of the problem we face, and not allow ourselves to be distracted by technologies that are novel and elegant, but which lack the brute force we need to power the whole planet.

One source that has enough brute force is nuclear power. And when we consider that this option also produces no significant carbon emissions, we have clearly found the power source we need to expand in the immediate future. It is true that radioactive waste disposal is a serious problem. But we are left with three choices for the near-term:

1) Go Nuclear – gives us plenty of power and no carbon emissions, but waste is a problem and safer reactors must be built. RISK – Plant meltdowns and/or waste leaks will occur occasionally harming perhaps 1,000 – 10,000 people per year.

2) Go Coal/Gas/Oil – gives us plenty of power but carbon emissions escalate. RISK – Finite supply running out soon, climate change will escalate, causing coastal land loss and weather disruption harming perhaps 100,000 – 1,000,000 people per year.

3) Go Green – no emissions or waste problems, but cannot provide enough power to run the world even close to half of today’s energy levels. RISK – Worldwide economic collapse and ensuing famine and anarchy will harm perhaps 100,000,000 – 1,000,000,000 people per year.

This is a simple choice. We must go nuclear if we are to protect the people, and we must do this now. Whatever choice we make will take many years to implement, and our time is running short.

A rapid increase in construction of nuclear power plants is the short-term solution to our energy problems. But unfortunately, it is not the long-term answer. It turns out that, just like oil, we are running out of uranium. In recent years, the price of Uranium has spiked as well.

This huge price increase reflects a profoundly imbalanced supply/demand situation. Looking at this next chart from the IAEA, we can see the severity of the problem and the reasons why nuclear fission power cannot be our long-term power solution.

There are ways around the problem of increasing uranium scarcity if we are willing to build breeder reactors. But doing so will mean a great increase in weapons-grade fissionable materials and the many security problems this would cause.

In my view, the only long-term solution to mankind’s energy needs is the development of Nuclear Fusion power. It is the only power source that meets all the following needed criteria:

1) It can create as much electricity as humanity could ever use
2) It does not consume a resource that could become scarce
3) It does not produce any significant quantity of pollution or waste
4) It has no potential to alter the climate
5) It does not require large amounts of land to implement
6) It does not compete with any resources needed for agriculture
7) It can be located in any area of the world which has basic domestic security
8) It is based on technologies that have shown a real chance for implementation
9) It does not require a whole new physical structure or paradigm for power production – Fission plants can simply be modified to run on fusion power once the technology is available, unlike wind or solar which need entirely new facilities everywhere

Unfortunately, it would seem that political forces are pushing for other options, either due to lack of knowledge or simply to appeal to populist agendas that favor green technologies. There are votes to be gained and lots of money to be made for politicians who funnel public funds into popular green technologies, despite the fact that these efforts will never amount to anywhere near enough power to satisfy world demand.

It is illustrative to note that these budget allocations show a decidedly European slant, and that nuclear research in America is not this highly promoted. France gets most of its electrical power from nuclear reactors. But overall, we can see that fusion technology gets less funding even than conservation technologies, which are virtually useless to pursue if we do not also simultaneously restrict or reduce population as well. And how is it that we are still doing more research in fossil fuels than we are in fusion? What could we possible hope to solve by further developing this dirty and increasingly-scare energy source?

And so our energy problems remain, and it appears that we are not pursuing the right solutions in time to avert serious worldwide problems. The only choice among these technologies that could power our world in 2050 is Nuclear Fusion, but we are choosing instead to pretend to solve the problem by putting solar panels on our roofs and windmills in our mountain passes. These techniques can assist fusion in providing the world’s energy, but they could never become the main remedy like fusion could. Let us start working in earnest upon the main remedy to our problems, and cease dabbling with lesser technologies simply because they look so harmless, simple, and environmentally friendly.

The astute reader should notice that we seem to be running out of all kinds of things that we never imagined were even finite. We are running out of fresh water in our lakes and rivers. We are running out of oil in our oil wells. We are running out of uranium – something we only started using 65 years ago. My friends, this is not wastefulness as it is understood by those who incessantly advocate the panacea of conservation and tell us all to make do with less. This is, instead, simply a symptom that there are far too many people on this planet. There are nearly 7 billion humans here. If you stop a moment and consider that number (7,000,000,000) the profundity of it all is striking. Can you assemble in one place 7 billion of anything? Aren’t 7 billion toothpicks or sheets of paper an impossibly large quantity, even of things as small and innocuous as these? Can you fit 7 billion sheets of paper in your house, or even in your office?

Human beings are neither small nor innocuous and we have an inevitable and profound impact on the world around us. We consume vast quantities of food, water, energy, minerals, and everything else all around us. We reproduce, again and again and again. This is why all of the Earth’s resources are running low. If you can imagine 7 billion people all drawing water from a single lake, it is not hard to imagine that lake drying up within a few hours or days. And when that lake is dry we would move on to the next lake and deplete it as well, using up lakes faster than nature can replenish them. This is what we are doing now, except we are spread out around the world and depleting everywhere more slowly and evenly. But in due time, the outcome is the same even though the danger creeps up on us less obviously.

It is time for us to face up to the fact that our population is the single greatest cause of every major problem on this planet, and that controlling population cannot remain the taboo subject that it heretofore has been. There is simply no valid reason why our population should be this high, and there are many valid reasons why it should be much lower. Stating this clear logic in no way should be extrapolated unreasonably so as to make it seem like I am advocating murder as a solution. I am not. But clearly, we must begin long-term efforts at reducing our population down to a sustainable level. In my view, this can be done both humanely and efficiently. But we must begin this process immediately for it will take about 100-200 years to complete.

Either we can address the problem intelligently or nature will handle it for us more harshly. We simply cannot continue to feed multiple billions of people on this planet much longer – period. And so if we fail to act, the immutable laws of nature and reality will cause a sudden, violent, and catastrophic die-off among our population. It seems to me that a gradual reduction in our numbers executed over a long period of time is a far better approach to the problem than just blindly reproducing until the Earth can no longer give us all the food and energy that everybody needs. World population is inevitably going to go down, one way or the other. All I’m saying is that we should manage the process – not let it run savagely amok.



Population Control Preserves Human Freedom Instead of Threatening It

Humanity is like a herd of cattle grazing in a planet-sized closed field. There are no longer any predators to keep our numbers in check and we have no Overseer controlling our grazing and breeding. Unless some of us perceive that we need oversight to control and preserve our species, and are willing to discover and implement ways of governance over our herd like Man controlling the cattle, we will eventually go extinct or suffer a cataclysm that virtually destroys civilization. In years past, our field was very large compared to our numbers and we could live and thrive without such controls. But now our numbers are vast and they are increasing at an unsustainable rate. We cannot continue our 'live and let live' attitude any more.

Our species has passed its childhood phase of innocence and careless freedom. Now we are young adults and we must face harsh realities and embrace constructs of power over each other or we will never move forward. Humanity's childhood is gone; it is time for us to finally grow up and live as we were born to do. Unless we grow up and embrace an adult balance of freedom and responsibility, we have no chance of retaining any of the freedoms we have enjoyed as children, or moving forward into those greater adult freedoms that await us.

This does not mean that we need to create a dark Orwellian World, where humanity is reduced to feckless automatons. On the contrary, that is precisely our fate in the near future if we fail to act! Government cannot operate with populations so huge unless they create a state that restricts individual liberty and closely monitors the people. Indeed, one can already see the strong modern cultural trend in our society where ‘Security’ is so highly valued, which is one of the harbingers of an Orwellian State. Security for our children from molesters, Security in our cars to withstand accidents[8], Security in our homes to repel intruders, Security in our nation to stop terrorists, and Security in our pensions so that we can continue to live and consume far past the sunset of our lives; these are all cultural trends that would be most completely addressed by putting a telescreen in every home, office, vehicle, and public place in the nation. Once the technology is available (soon), and the paranoia is whipped up sufficiently (soon), this will likely occur in some fashion.

Security is the polite word used when we refer to tyranny permitted to expand due to fear. And yet security itself is a far more nebulous thing than people realize. As the masses understand the word, security doesn’t even really exist at all.

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”

- Helen Keller


"There is no security on this Earth; there is only opportunity."

- Douglas MacArthur


And if this worship of security was not enough, we already have “Thought Crime” laws in force. The Federal and State “Hate Crime” laws are precisely that. While no one can support violent racism or violence against homosexuals, surely our laws should only address overt criminal actions and not punish people for thoughts we dislike. Indeed, is it worse for a criminal to shoot their victim because they are a different race or to do so just to rob them? Both are murder and both should be the same in the eyes of the law. Actions are the proper purview of government – not thoughts. Freedom to have private thought is the most sacred human right.

These current conditions show how close we are to an Orwellian World where thoughts and actions are monitored around the clock (for our own safety and security), and where prohibited thoughts and opinions are quickly removed by force of law.

We should do everything possible to stop these conditions from getting worse, and addressing population is fundamental to this effort. Mankind cannot live with freedom and independence if we are closely crowded together and if our resources are scarce versus our needs. The only way to get people to live in tightly confined and resource-restricted conditions is to savagely curtail their personal freedom and to police them perpetually. The mere societal friction that occurs from individuals living in such proximity and competition creates violence and chaos that can only be stopped by Draconian measures.

So instead of creating a dark future where freedom is extinguished, population control and reduction is essential for maintaining personal liberty and the flame of human expression. Just because we need to control one aspect of human freedom, that of reproductive frequency, this in now way indicates a desire or necessity of controlling the remaining attributes of human choice. We should strive to preserve the liberty of our thoughts and expression, the quality of our lives, and the brilliance of our civilization. Let us not choose the lesser freedom to breed uncontrollably instead of these more useful and beautiful freedoms. Shall we each have 3 or 4 starving children instead of 1 healthy child? What is the value of our freedom to breed, if it only breeds death and misery for our posterity? The time has come when we can no longer have all of these freedoms we have always possessed, and so we must choose the ones we wish to keep before events make the choice for us. Let us choose quality of life over quantity of living.

The problems from overpopulation are not the only lethal threat we face. There are other significant, even inevitable dangers that will devastate us if we don't act decisively and with global unity. While overpopulation contributes to some of these problems, others exist entirely independently and rely on other factors that we must address as well.



Threat - Our Oasis in Space is Vulnerable

In some distant moment, a large asteroid will be observed hurtling along a path bringing it into a fatal collision with the Earth. Astronomers agree that it will happen eventually. It has happened before countless times. Indeed, one current theory of the origin of our oceans is that all of the earth's water was brought to earth by asteroids far enough from the sun to contain ice. Fewer asteroids remain today than in times past, but the massive gravitational influence of Jupiter continues to agitate and deflect any asteroid that approaches closely enough to it. There are thousands of these bodies large enough to cause our extinction should their paths be deflected into ours.

Not only are we are not ready to defend ourselves from this danger, but we do not even know the orbits of all the asteroids and comets that could impact us. There are fewer people worldwide who work on this problem full-time than the staff of a single shift at your local McDonalds. Most of the work being done here is accomplished by amateurs, and not by any government-sponsored program or official effort.

Apparently, under our current mode of thought, making burgers is a more valuable activity than preserving the future of our civilization. We are more than happy to tax each of our citizens hundreds or thousands of dollars each year for various wealth-transfer entitlement programs, but we can’t possibly spare a fraction of 1% of this money to pay a hundred astronomers to work to keep our entire planet and civilization alive into the future. A more enlightened, powerful, and cohesive mode of human organization must exist before we can become strong enough to protect ourselves.



Threat - Our Own Planet is Powerful and Dangerous

At some future moment, a massive supervolcano will erupt. A gaping mouth will open upon the face of the Earth, spewing heat and rock and death onto the face of our world.[9] The air will be filled with billions of tons of ash, blocking out the sun across much of the globe for months. Poisonous sulfur dioxide will billow into our air, befouling the air across hundreds of miles downwind. Crops around the world will be suffocated by the ash, and the lack of sunlight will prevent any new harvest for months or years. Those who survive the lava and the massive firestorms will be starved in the global famine or frozen in the following multi-year winter.

Our present approach to dealing with this danger is the Ostrich Approach, and unless we start actually facing up to reality we may not survive to see how it all unfolds. We should develop better monitoring techniques and facilities in areas overlying large hot spots. And in time, we should develop ways to mitigate or avoid any supereruption. But here too, nobody wants to pay for any concerted effort until it is too late. Senators in South Dakota don’t curry many votes by spending money on geologists in Wyoming and Idaho to monitor Yellowstone. But South Dakota could be buried under lava someday unless we change our thinking.



Threat – Climate Change Affects More Than Climate

Global Warming is far more dangerous than most people realize.[10] Most people think only of hotter summers and maybe a few flooded coastlines in Florida or Venice. Mankind will just adapt to the warming changes and move inland, right? Wrong.

In a day not far distant, the cumulative melt of the northern ice cap and Greenland Ice Shelf will flood the northwest Atlantic Ocean with a torrent of fresh water (ice has no salt). This river of fresh water will gush into the Atlantic Ocean exactly at the point in the Gulf Stream where the accumulated warmth of the coast of North America flows into the frigid North of Europe, easing the severity of their chill. The fresh water changes the normal salinity of the water, causing it to lose its capacity to form distinct layers and currents of liquid. The water is transformed from a free-flowing highway of convection into a discordant chaos of diffusion, destroying the flow of the Gulf Stream that keeps Northern Europe from freezing. Soon, temperatures around the northern hemisphere begin to drop as ice accumulates further south each year. The added ice upon the land reflects more sunlight back into space, cooling the Earth further still. A new Ice Age begins.

With 50-70% of their arable land frozen, the nations of Europe, North America, and Russia, will be forced to find new land and food in lands further south for their populations. Since these nations possess 90% of the military power of the world, military force will inevitably be used to take these lands.[11]

The United States and Canada will combine and rapidly annex Central America, South America, and the majority of the Middle East. The Nations of Europe will probably obtain lands, temporarily, in Africa through diplomacy or technology transfer. Russia will move south, attempting to obtain lands in China, India, and adjacent countries. China and India will combine for mutual defense, and will attempt to obtain other allies such as Australia, Japan, Korea, and America. Since these nations already are allied (except for North Korea) in a loose Pan-Pacific defensive structure, and since Russia will inevitably encroach upon American occupation zones in the Middle East in Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan, it is likely that this grand alliance will occur against Russia.

As this massive war escalates, both sides will attempt to convince European forces to join their side. Pacifistic Europe will probably equivocate and debate endlessly, ultimately declaring neutrality. They have a long history of alliance with America, but with the collapse of communism in Russia, they now have more in common with their neighbor than with the American Empire they fear. If they join with America and defeat Russia, what would stop America from ultimately conquering Europe? Russia ensures their security simply by opposing American expansionism. But they cannot oppose America because they cannot project power anymore into the Atlantic to support European forces. American Allied forces would easily strike European forces from the West and Middle East. Also, Russia will be in the midst of an offensive war, which is impossible for Europeans to support.

In the end, neutral European forces will be conquered by whichever side wins the war, having failed to demonstrate any power commensurate with the lands they control.

It is highly likely that nuclear weapons will not be used until the final chapter of the war. Both sides will have a strong interest in preserving those lands they seek to conquer. But as defeat approaches, the losing side could make a final attempt at victory with a nuclear attack. The resulting massive counterattack will end the war. But as massive quantities of particulates fill the air from the explosions and subsequent fires, the climate cools yet further. The combination of a Nuclear Winter event in the midst of an Ice Age is an exterminating event.

While the exact scenario presented is rather extreme and probably will not actually occur, the astute reader can easily see how the combination of land loss, reduced worldwide food production, and reduction in fresh water supplies (due to accelerated glacier melting or alternatively, increased Ice Age glaciation) will likely result in some type of mass migrations and lethal events that could cause additional dangers impacting the whole world. Even without a new Ice Age, global warming will likely lead to widespread famine in poorer countries, and these pressures may trigger a general war that is felt far beyond the famine zone.

It does not matter whether Global Warming is manmade or not. Many people say that it is only a natural climactic variation that man did not cause. But this is completely beside the point. Lethal events cannot be ignored simply because man did not cause them. Shall we ignore an approaching asteroid on a collision course just because we didn’t cause the problem?

“If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.”

- Thomas Jefferson




Christians Misunderstand the Situation

Many Christians ignore Global Warming. They do this for two reasons:

1) They are Anti-Humanists, so they cannot believe that man has the power or capacity to modify an entire planet. This power, even if it is destructive, puts man nearly on a par with the power of God. Furthermore, because mankind’s power grows with time, it can be seen that we could eventually possess all of the powers we presently ascribe to God alone. This would mean that maybe God is not supernatural, merely highly evolved, which would mean he is not truly God.

2) They think that Global Warming, even if it is catastrophic and will kill the entire Earth, is part of God’s divine plan of bringing about the End of the World and the Return of Jesus Christ. As such, this means that Global Warming is both a good thing and that it is unstoppable because God is intentionally doing it to the Earth. After all, the Bible says that the future End of the Earth will be brought about by fire. What good Christian would fight against God’s plan? And why would they oppose a process that brings about the end of this sinful world and ushers in the rule of Jesus Christ?

This attitude is enormously destructive and contributes to the otherwise inexplicable reluctance of some Conservatives to acknowledging the reality of Global Warming.

Christians, please be aware: The End of Days has been described within the Bible itself as starting immediately following the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ. The Last Days have been going on for 2000 years! There have been even greater woes and calamities that have occurred within Christendom that have not indicated the end of the world. Consider the Black Plague that killed about 1/3 of Europe.[12] Do not let yourselves believe that Global Warming will burn up the Earth and then the Millennium will immediately follow. It is more likely that we will simply have to live with the tarnished planet we have allowed to die.

Remember that the Bible gives us the charge to preserve all the blessings the Lord has given us, and to be good stewards of the Talents entrusted to us. If you recall the Parable of the Talents, the steward who does not take an active interest in growing and preserving his charge is not accepted, but is punished sternly. Let us not just bury our Earth, hiding it from view and ignoring its changing needs, and later present to our Lord a planet withered and feeble – an offering wholly unacceptable in the eyes of God.

When has sloth and irresponsibility ever been an attitude that is acceptable before God? Perhaps as our power to affect our world grows, so too does the Lord’s expectations of us to use these powers for good. Perhaps our growing strength is not an affront to God, but a reason for Him to feel pleased with his maturing children. Let us not behave like stubborn children, ignoring the problems gathering around us, when this crisis may be part of God’s plan in making us face up to our mature responsibilities like young adults must.

Christians also will often complain that those of us who are warning everybody about these troubling global trends are just crackpots and doomsayers. They say that since the days of Malthus people have been predicting these kinds of dangers from overpopulation and yet no real problem has materialized. This is an incredibly hypocritical argument from these people, since these same people have been warning us about Judgment Day and the return of Christ for some 2000 years now, and yet these things have not happened yet. Does foresight imply falsehood? If they can believe so fervently in the return of Christ, how can they then belittle yet unfulfilled overpopulation predictions which are more than 1600 years more recent than their predictions?

We cannot go about these dangerous paths and just blindly believe that ‘God will sort it all out’ before the problems become too great to bear.

Another reason Conservatives are opposed to acknowledging and acting on Global Warming is their justifiable suspicion of some of its proponents. There is, indeed, an intention by Socialists to use Global Warming as a means of furthering their agenda and grabbing more comprehensive power. After all, any effective remedy for this problem will require global cooperation. Socialists are using this fact to further the establishment of a World Socialist Government, and also as a means of harming capitalist interests – without any real intention of solving the problem.

Indeed, the worse this problem gets, the greater to popular impetus to promote Socialist causes will become.[13] We must be mindful of the intentions of Socialists, as well as the reluctance of Conservatives, as we take steps to address this major problem. But let us not allow either extreme view to prevent us from taking action to preserve our world.

Most of all, let us remember that population controls and reductions are an integral part of any solution to these problems. Limiting carbon emissions without limiting population is an exercise in futility.



Threat - We Have Competition Beyond Our World

Imagine if Columbus had arrived in the New World to find a people with similar military and engineering capabilities as Europeans.[14] How would he have dealt with them? Certainly, there would have been no possibility of enslaving them and seizing their lands. He would have likely formed political and trading bonds with them, and left them otherwise unmolested. Cortez and De Soto would never have traveled in search of plunder to these lands, or they would have been destroyed in the attempt.

Imagine that our world becomes very crowded and short on resources in the future. Suppose that we develop the ability to travel through our region of the galaxy, exploring the stars and planets nearby our solar system. The Americans, Russians, Chinese and Europeans each build spacecraft and send infrequent expeditions to different stars, looking for new worlds for their people to colonize. Every planet we discover cannot support our life, and resources grow ever scarcer back on Earth.

Then a miracle happens. A fast American vessel explores further out than any has yet gone and discovers a beautiful planet, fresh and unspoiled and full of life. Fresh water and trees are abundant, and the atmosphere is plentiful in oxygen and carbon dioxide for human habitation and farming.

But this planet is not empty. A humanoid species, similar to us, has built cities and a society upon their world. They live and work and think in a way roughly analogous to the Ancient Greeks or Persians of Earth. They obviously have intelligence and culture, but their military and engineering abilities are far behind ours. They are quite numerous, and they occupy the majority of the land we would like to colonize.

With trillions of dollars of resources instantly available in crops and mineral resources, a new hope for survival and prosperity for billions of our citizens, and political advantage from new territory all at stake; how can one possibly believe that we wouldn't displace, conquer, or even enslave the alien people in the following expeditions? If the Americans would be unwilling to displace the aliens, and fail to set up a military presence upon the planet, what would stop the Chinese or Russians from conquering and claiming this world for themselves? And even if the Earth is governed by a single World Government, how could we possibly ignore a treasure so bountiful when so many of our people are lacking land, food, and energy? It would be imperative, even morally essential, that we establish control of this planet's resources and people. We may choose a gentler approach than that of Cortez and Columbus, but we would still obtain control.

Seeing the necessity of expanding our control into the cosmos as our species grows, it is reasonable to assume that other alien species in distant regions are doing the same. It is true that many people do not believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life, and that there is no publicly-available physical proof of their existence. Indeed, it is possible that there is no proof whatever anywhere. But the lack of proof in no way invalidates the likelihood of their existence. Just because Eskimos have never seen bananas doesn't mean that bananas don't exist. I believe that if obvious proof of alien beings were available, such as an alien vessel appearing at a major sports event, almost everyone would believe they exist even though they had previously not. The idea of alien beings isn't irrational, just unproven.

Even without proof, we can rightly assume that there is other intelligent life throughout the galaxy. The more we learn about the formation of the planets and the Earth, the more we discover that our world was not made in an unusual or uncommon manner. While the specific characteristics of our planet are wonderful and rare, the process of its creation shows that similar worlds could likely exist scattered here and there throughout the galaxy. It would be a statistical miracle if no other planet was similar to Earth and no other similarly capable life existed. Knowing this, it is reasonable to conclude that there are 10 - 1000 alien civilizations in our galaxy that either presently or soon will travel in space. Unless evidence is found changing our understanding of the universe, it is reasonable to conclude that they are out there.

The Earth has existed for less than half the lifetime of the universe. This means that other worlds were created billions of years before us. It is reasonable to conclude that at least 25% of alien civilizations are older than ours, and that their science and technology has been progressing longer than ours.



Are We Ready to Meet Our Galactic Neighbors?

What will we do when they land upon our shore, like Columbus on Hispaniola? What will they do when they discover us? Regardless of how civilized or humane they are, and regardless of how civilized or humane we are, their reaction to us will be based upon our military and engineering capacity. When two civilizations meet, the nature of their relationship is determined primarily by the parity, or lack of parity, of their respective military and engineering capacities. You cannot form a bond of respect with another if the other is powerless compared to you. Unless we can believe that advanced aliens would visit the Earth on a charity project, seeking nothing for themselves, we must believe that they want or need something. Since we can see that humanity will eventually venture into space to find and obtain resources for our people, that would also be one of the most likely purposes for aliens to visit us.

Since we see that alien life will eventually visit Earth on a mission to find resources for their people, how will we prevent them from seizing our world and enslaving or exterminating us? Military and engineering parity. If we are strong and advanced, they will trade valuable goods and technologies with us for the materials they desire. If they are looking for land, they will purchase it from us. And if we decline to sell any land, they will not feel free to attack us and take it because we present a credible potential opposition. If we are weak they will take what they want and we will serve them or die.

We are in a technological race with the rest of the galaxy. Even if all alien civilizations are noble and honorable beings, they will enslave or destroy us if we do not keep up with them technologically. We don't have to be as advanced as the aliens who come. We just need to be close enough to them to give them pause in dealing with us. But we must move quickly ahead to avoid extinction. Doing nothing will ensure our destruction. If we do not have a credible military force that can project power into space when aliens arrive in large numbers, they will have no reason to respect us.

It is also quite possible that alien reconnaissance is already being conducted on us. A large number of alleged UFO sightings, from reasonably reliable military and law enforcement personnel, claim that these sightings have occurred at nuclear storage facilities, nuclear weapons tests, manned spacecraft while in orbit (and even on the moon), and other events and places that demonstrate our military and/or engineering capacity. Perhaps an alien civilization has sent unmanned or lightly manned missions to us to obtain information about us and our planet. Perhaps future missions will bring larger numbers of their kind.



Moving Humanity Forward

It is not my intention to be a prophet of doom and it is entirely possible that none of these natural or extraterrestrial perils will occur within our times. But we are conducting our affairs as a species, completely oblivious to ANY dangers and without any thought for our future. We are living, intellectually and philosophically, exactly the same as animals – not enlightened beings. As long as there is no war and we have food for most of our kind, all is well. But this is the short-sighted complacency of The Herd, not proper principles for governance of a wise species. This basic complacency is not really different from gorillas or lions or any other intelligent species. They too want peace and food for all of their kind. But their simple desires cannot prevent their eventual extermination by climate change or habitat loss or the intrusions of a more powerful species. They are all at the mercy of the brutal luck of life on a geologic timescale and they will all eventually go extinct, even if humans had never existed, unless another species saves them from a future cataclysm.

And so I proclaim to Humanity: The time has come when we must evolve as a species. We cannot continue to exist virtually as animals when we are so numerous and possess such power to consume and destroy. We are in possession of an entire living planet. Let us behave like we deserve to own it! Let us not allow ourselves to exist as locusts, breeding and eating until the whole world is forever blighted. We must run our planet and our species in a much more focused, intelligent, and comprehensive manner; not pandering to the short-sighted intentions and cries of the unenlightened majority. We must seek great power over the affairs of humanity, not out of vanity or greed, but as an adult must learn to govern himself and those around him when the duties of leadership are needed. Casting humanity into a more orderly and potent form is the only way we can accomplish our survival and prosperity. And just because many tyrants in the past have used similar language to serve their devious purposes, this in no way invalidates the logic that order is superior to chaos. We simply must ensure that the order we establish serves humanity, and not the base intentions of charismatic demagogues like Hitler, Lenin, or Stalin.

All of us are riding in a moving bus without any single, capable driver. It is my belief that somebody who cares about mankind must see that danger and seize the driver's seat.[15] The bus of humanity, like any vehicle or other purposeful activity, requires a single driver who is more concerned about getting us safely to our destination than showing off or impressing all the passengers. It is not for the vanity of the driver that this control exists, it is for the safety and success of all on board. Passengers who complain about the driver's exalted status and the unfairness of the system are missing the point. As long as the bus safely moves the passengers forward on their journey, the driver is entirely justified in his control over the rest. Indeed, it is the essential point of the entire enterprise: to move humanity forward to the point where we are safe from the vagaries of chance and where we will not be exterminated by ourselves, our neighbors, or acts of nature.

Instead of everybody claiming to have an inherent right to drive, or complaining about why somebody else gets to drive, why don’t we just reason together and find among us those who are innately best suited for this duty? Why don’t we understand that we don’t want a whole bus full of back-seat drivers? We will never get anywhere that way. Why don’t we acknowledge that some of us actually are better drivers than the rest of us? People are born with a wide variety of talents and natural skills. We can clearly see that some of us are better singers or athletes than the rest of us. Why are we so reluctant to likewise admit that leadership ability is similarly found in few of us, and that most of us are not as good at it as the best of us? Instead of everybody constantly grasping at the steering wheel, or fending off the attempts of others to do so, why don’t we all just sit in our seats and focus on where our journey should take us, and what kind of people would be best to lead us to our destination?



Human Progress Requires a New Type of Government

To accomplish this goal, we must create a form of government superior to all those that have come before. History shows us Monarchies, Republics, Democracies, Theocracies, Dictatorships, Communist states, Oligarchies, and all the other loose tribal forms that preceded these. Can we be so arrogant as to believe that our modern governmental forms are the ultimate development of human government? Has the chain of advancements ended with our time?

It can be hard for us to see anything greater than we now possess. Those who lived in an ancient theocracy would not perceive democracy as an advancement. On the contrary, they would be appalled that the wisdom and justice of God would have no bearing or weight in the laws and governance of the people. Those living in a monarchy would consider a modern republic to be a silly confederation of shopkeepers pretending to be nobles.

Likewise, our modern democratic sensibilities color our perception of government and make us improperly fond of the supposed virtues of consensus and inclusion. But if we would advance beyond this modern level, we must find and implement a form of government that has the unfettered potency of a dictatorship without permitting the horrible abandonment of the common good and human rights. This is our challenge, and we must be successful or we will never tap into the collective genius and glory of humanity. Without this, we will never be sufficiently organized and potent enough to ensure our survival.

When embarking upon a voyage as important as discovering a superior form of government, it is essential to approach the problem in an objective and rational manner. To accomplish this, we must first take a long hard look at our present governments, and at the philosophies that spawn them, to see the flaws in their construction. Once we see what is wrong with these philosophies and governments, we can then take steps to construct new modes of thought and control that do not possess these same weaknesses. If we approach the problem in a scientific manner, seeking those goals I outlined at the beginning of this work, we may discover the way forward that makes our species both stronger and more humane.

Popular Representative Democracies and Socialist States are considered to be the most advanced forms of human government by most of the world at this time. So it is these that we must analyze if we are to see past the bias that prevents our minds from seeing the next phase in human governmental evolution. And if we can do this with an open mind, we can rapidly notice that neither democracy nor socialism are as humane and progressive as we have heretofore believed. We will also find that both of these governmental forms have extremely high potentials to quickly and unexpectedly evolve into totalitarian forms that do not serve the interests of the people.

In addition to this, both democracy and socialism promote unrestrained population growth. For democracy, each competitive faction wants its people to breed abundantly so that they can control ever larger shares of the votes. Rival factions in a democracy are in a kind of reproduction arms race with each other. For socialism, the entire power of the government is derived from the size (and resultant individual anonymity and impotence) of the masses. Thus, both of these forms will never adopt population controls and are increasingly empowered by rampant population growth. And as their grip of power over the people increases, they progressively erode the people’s rights, prosperity, and indeed their very humanity.

"Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears."

- Isaac Azimov


This is a very dangerous situation. Therefore, we must find a new form of government that is compatible with static or reducing population if our government is to be an agent of protection, and not a major cause of our destruction. And beyond simply remedying the problems we face, we should expect our government to foster civility and to shine as a worthy token of the nobility of our species.

If alien races look at our world today, they see a cacophony of different competing control structures and beliefs across the globe, each founded upon their own unique variations of irrationality. Humanity looks foolish and quite inept. We need a philosophy and government that not only works well and is humane, but is founded upon clear Reason and which looks respectable and impressive to our galactic neighbors. Let us create a government that no longer is the bane of human existence, and the object of constant derision and scorn, but is the crowning glory of our kind. Let us all feel, finally, a justifiable pride in our planet and in the ways our people conduct themselves.

In addition to these changes in government, we must also begin to limit and then reduce our population. We cannot continue to pretend that our problems can be solved without this step. And we should not let the magnitude of the problem before us deter us from this task. Many people will say that it is impossible to reduce our population, and so they look for other remedies because they are unwilling to address so difficult and unpopular a task. But this is a profoundly illogical attitude. Of course we can accomplish this if will but face up to the problem honestly, and then use our brilliance to get to work correcting it.

“Our problems are man-made; therefore they may be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”

- John F. Kennedy


I have found a way that we can do all these things. And so I shall present my thinking in two stages. In the first, I shall primarily describe the problems with the many philosophies that abound upon our world today, showing how these ways of thinking influence our governments and the dangers this creates. But unlike most critics who are content to merely snipe at the thinking of others, offering nothing but disillusionment in their wake, I go beyond the destruction of the status quo.

The second stage of this work will describe the means whereby these problems can be corrected. I offer a comprehensive description of a workable government, including reforms in the bureaucracy needed to implement such ideas. I describe plans for efficiently and humanely lowering our population – without violating people’s rights or taking barbaric steps.

The final section of this work describes proposed ways in which we can implement these ideas. Implementation is the hardest step. But I believe that there are completely legal and nonviolent ways in which these reforms can be enacted. I do not advocate any kind of treason or insurrection. Indeed, we should consider ourselves above such ignoble deeds. But with the proper use of intelligence and wisdom, it is amazing what powers of transformation we may indeed possess.

ENDNOTES

[1] This condition most likely has already been reached. The Earth does not have enough food, fuel, and fresh water to sustain 6.5 billion people and their offspring in a condition other than 3rd world squalor.
[2] These are 7198 major innovations since the end of the Dark Ages compiled by Bunch and Hellemans in their book The History of Science and Technology.
[3] Even though the population growth rate has declined, this does not indicate that the problem is going away. The rate has declined, but the overall net additions to our population are greater than ever. Each and every day 200,000 more people are born than die, and so we are creating an entire New York City’s worth of additional people on this planet every couple of months or so. I scarcely think that we can build housing and infrastructure (an entirely new city the size of New York) several times per year, or that we can possibly hope to feed all these additional people for long.
[4] This is from: Hartz, Marlena. “Conservationists Believe Ogallala Aquifer Recharged Through Playa Lakes.” Clovis News Journal 12 August 2006.
[5] Captains Lawton & Andrews: ‘Fueling the Force in the Army After Next – Revolution or Evolution?’ Site: www.almc.army.mil/alog/issues/JulAug99/MS406.htm
[6] Please keep in mind that when an oilfield is more than 50% depleted, its production declines. So saying these oilfields are 41% depleted doesn’t mean that they have plenty more oil in them. It actually means they are very close to peaking and then slowing down forever.
[7] This is actually an interesting technology and may indeed be useful. But we are still much further from large-scale implementation of this idea than from the impending decline in oil production.
[8] The ‘On-Star’ GPS/Radio system in many cars is another evidence of this desire for security and portends great dangers for our future. Soon, for ‘safety reasons’, this system could become mandatory in every car just like seat belts. Once this is done, the next step the government will take is the constant monitoring of every car using this same system. This will be done for ‘Security’ reasons, to help solve crimes and fight terrorism. On-Star is simply a precursor to the telescreen. This is an Orwellian outcome, where the government keeps track of everybody’s location and/or conversations so as to preserve order and security.
[9] The volcanic explosion of the island of Santorini in the Mediterranean is thought to have wiped out the Minoan civilization on Crete (possibly the most advanced in the world) across miles of open sea. Other regions in North America (such as Yellowstone) have even greater potential for volcanic destruction.
[10] Despite what you may have heard, there is virtually no controversy in the scientific community that Climate Change is occurring and that human activity is contributing to it. There are only a few who dissent, and these are quite similar to those scientists of the past who worked for tobacco companies and once claimed that cigarettes are harmless and nicotine is not addictive.
[11] Starving people who possess plenty of weapons invariably will use them even if they don’t want to hurt anybody.
[12] Also, consider the fall of the Roman Empire and the centuries of chaos and anarchy that followed. This was a time that looked much more like the End of the World than today does.
[13] This is also a primary reason why Socialists oppose any population controls and always make allegations of racism or genocide when they are proposed in any form. Their power is directly proportional to the suffering of the masses, and so they seek greater numbers of greatly suffering people, all the while claiming to be on their side.
[14] The voyage of Columbus to the New World is very similar to a voyage to New Worlds. The story of what happened with that encounter in 1492 is instructive in understanding the first contact of two cultures. It should be remembered that the Taino people who once inhabited Hispaniola, who had numbered in the millions in 1492, are now virtually extinct. Also, we should remember that this land has been home to nothing but poverty and misery ever since Columbus arrived. Rather than moralistically revile against the “evil white man”, let us instead simply consider the effects of first contact between two cultures and learn from this example.
[15] This is not a call for a one-person World Dictatorship. Rather, the single driver is a metaphor for a new type of government that is comprised of a very small number of powerful people who function as a single unit, and whose actions are guided entirely by the needs of the people. This government (Sophiarchy) will be fully described in a later chapter.