Sept 27, 2007: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2007-09-27-wheat_N.htm

Feb 13, 2008:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/business/13wheat.html

March 14, 2008:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/food/355118_costlywheat15.html

Note the steady trend in bad news...and this is on our big staple: wheat.

Furion,

You are inspiring... and not just because of your cool avatar. DF is also one of the few here who can "jump in".

I find a disturbing correlation that those of us who are concerned with peak oil/energy usage all have one thing in common: we are technically trained.

The ranking for this blog is depressingly low. I believe it's because you can't have an opinion on peak oil unless you actually know something.

It doesn't take much effort, but it's easy to argue who delegates should be divided. And you have to know much less and can be lazy to participate in that topic.

I think if we challenge TPM as a group to bust up people's comfy notions on what is going on, that is a good first step. Most people here are activists, they just need to be... as you put it... awakened.

Getting a child to open his mouth and accept the spoon is more effective to accomplishing the goal than trying to jam it in.

I think you know which candidate will do what.

Moreover, I don't see HRC as being an petroleum president. She has chosen to frame everything in universal health care -- and she is, in fact, the reason it's in the center of this campaign. But that issue pales before the first.

Also,

If there was any ironic sarcasm in parsing the population, I certainly missed it. In fact, there are a great many people who say just as you typed and are most sincere.

v popvli,

Wow - excellent response! There are some great thoughts in here, and some solid things to respond to:

Your advocacy of a switch to localized, communal/tribal lifestyles definitely has wheels. But you don't mention how clean, renewable energy sources fit neatly into this potential future.

Actually, I didn't mention clean energy on purpose - because in a localized economy, there's absolutely no need for environmentalism. Think about it - our ancestors burned wood for hundreds of thousands of years before we ever invented the coal burning stove. There's no evidence they caused any notable damage to their ecosystems, even local ones. The reason wasn't because they were "closer to the earth" or any of that mumbo jumbo - it was because there wasn't enough of them to do so.

That's not to say that even in such a situation, it's not a wonderful idea to use clean energy - particular when the forms of energy we use require such high output. Even localized usage of nuclear or coal-based power can have massive effect on the local ecosystem.

The most accessible forms of renewable energy like solar and wind are practically the opposite - off the grid, localized, self-contained, small capacity.

And that's a good point, although it's worth noting that it's difficult to think about running modern technology off things like solar and wind (solar less so, but wind is too unpredictable to be a reliable long-term solution).

Now, this isn't to say you're missing anything. One of the great things about local solutions is that in a world where power is generated locally, technology would immediately evolve to match it. The thinking would fundamentally change, and I suspect in a very short period of time we'd see many hundreds of different variations on technology arise, all suited to local power generation methods.

I say this based on analysis of artifacts from tribal cultures (and ones in cultures that remain today) - technologies such as the bow and arrow, the spear, canoe, things we think of as singular pieces of technology in fact had thousands of variations, all suited to the locality in which they were built.

The bow and arrow alone has several thousand technological variations.

We even see it in modern technology built ON the grid - Europeans drive cars that are 40% smaller than American cars, despite the fact that they have the same access to oil that we do. The Japanese spend a ridiculous amount of time building ever-more efficient batteries. Etc.

The population problem can really flush the whole thing down the drain. Even if we do have amazing breakthroughs in energy generation, Furion is essentially right that exponential population growth will lead to a crash. So controlling births is really the key after we've pinned down energy, and there's already a model for that - China.

Generally, direct birth control doesn't work. The only reason it works in China is through totalitarian control over every single human. While we like the outcome of that idea, I'm completely unwilling to sacrifice the idea of freedom for it.

Thankfully, it's not really necessary. The best and most efficient way to control population growth is through the food supply - there's a direct correlation between birth rate and the availability of food (although globalization makes this relationship very, very complicated).

Think about it - humans don't grow out of magic. Every cell, every protein, comes from food that is consumed. When faced with a food shortage, the first response of EVERY species on the planet is to eliminate or drastically reduce reproduction.

We don't need to eliminate large swaths of the population quickly; we simply need a steady but obvious negative population growth for several generations. So.. grow less food. One of the worst consequences of our technologically advanced agriculture is that we are able to grow FAR, FAR more food than the population our planet is capable of supporting can ever consume.

"What about Africa?" you ask. Short answer - we have to stop sending them our excess food. The African continent has been inundated with Western resources and technology and it has caused a population boom there that FAR outstrips that continent's carrying capacity.

Did you ever see the movie "The Matrix"? Do you remember when one of the Agents told Morpheus that when he tried to classify our species, he realized that the species on this planet we're most like is a virus? That we expand into an area, consume all of its resources, and move on.

Thing is, that's exactly what we do, and it's purely a function of the interplay between agriculture and population growth.

We grow far more food than our current population needs, causing it to grow very quickly. We run out of room, so we expand (usually through wars) so that we have more land to grow crops, and settle people. And then that population grows, and must move to a new area to grow more crops, and more people, ad infinitum. And so it has been for the last 12,000 years of our civilization's history.

But we've reached the logical conclusion of that cycle. There's nowhere left to go. Now, we'll battle it out between the efficiency of our technology, the land needed to grow our crops, the space needed to build our cities, and the remaining natural habitats necessary to maintain our planetary ecosystem. But this isn't a zero-sum game, and we're losing it very, very quickly.

Summary: Best way to reduce the population is to cut the food supply.

Wow this is a long post..

I didn't quite finish what I was saying. I'm not sure that the collapse of our society is quite as likely as Furion does.

If it's true that we've surpassed the earth's carrying capacity, nothing that we do will matter if we don't control our population. The Catholic chuch momentously issued a list of social sins this week, including the sin of pollution; in Africa, where the Church is, has been, and always will be deeply involved, many clergy have rolled over on condom use because they see, up close, what HIV/AIDS does to communities. How long will it be before major religions sanction serious population control, for the sake of us all? It will likely take a few clear-cut anthropogenic environmental disasters - a few tens of million dead - with signs that more are coming, for the wake up call to come to our major religions. I wouldn't be surprised if they figured it out in our lifetimes - most priests & clergy i've met have been wise, benevolent men in touch with the people and their suffering. Humans are pretty short-lived, and if enough of us were obeying something like China's birth control policy, we'd have our population cut to a s*st**n*bl* level in less than a hundred years. I mentioned that China's already dealing with demographic problems of lack just a few decades after the fact.

I still think that a farily oil-dry, resource-strapped world will be able to support several billion people. First of all, even if the oil is hard to get, we'll still be getting it, because we'll need it for plastics and every other petroleum product; we just won't be burning it for fuel any more. The other thing we'll be doing is mining landfills and recycling old petroleum products to get those chemical feedstocks back. There will be much different about our lifestyles in the future. Conservation will be a way of life. People will have to grow accustomed to getting places a little slower. I understand that, on average, if ships cut their speed by 20%, they'd cut fuel use by about half. Half! There's serious talk of bringing back sails and other wind-harnessed power (kites) to commercial ships, which can cut fuel use even further. People who can still drive will drive 55. I expect small plugin electric cars to take off. There'll be many more bikes, mopeds, and motorcycles. The zeppelin might even make a comeback. When the oil is $200 a barrel and the lights go out, everyone will be begging to pay whatever it takes to put solar panels on their houses and windmills in their backyards.

The quick and dirty approach to development adopted by China and to a lesser extent India probably represents the greatest potential for the disaster that Furion expects. It's tragic that this rapid industrialization is occurring with 19th century energy - coal. Our chances of success or failure in changing global patterns of consumption, energy use/generation, emissions, and demographics depends in large part upon the willingness of these nations to participate. If we want to avoid a mass dieback, barring a miraculous technological breakthrough, we have to stabilize and even reduce our population, and shift our energy dependence to clean, renewable sources. I think we might have a few generations to get these changes going, but not much more.