Re: Are Biofuels the Answer?

Hi Jeff,

  I like the 'carrying capacity' argument, it's got lots of nooks & crannies to explore.

  One thing to note is that the food that goes into the US population today, could easily support  >3B+ more people at a considerable lower standard of living.  So we're not really in imminent danger... But... (there had to be a but)

  I for one don't want to be crowded in by a factor of 10!  I believe that the powers that be will execute a planned and orchestrated genocide long before the population reaches the danger point.  Sobering thought: No?

  It's a basic law of chemistry & biology that the one factor that is in the shortest supply will be the "limiting factor".  Unfortunately, pointing af food, or land or water, one is far more likely to miss the limiting factor.  Truth no one really knows what it is right now.  Chances are we won't know until it really is too late.

  That's the *event* that is really going to trigger the downfall.  So what can we do in the mean time?  That's easy!  Conserve.  Conserve everything.  Conserve land, air, water, fuel, energy, soil, nutrients, forests, oceans... It's really not difficult, if folks just cut *waste* by 10% per year, we could potentially push the date of the event off for a very long time, but not indefinitely...

  Call me silly, but I truly hope that in a thousand years my descendants will say; "Let's vacation on Earth next year.  I hear it's beautiful since the planetary population was stabilized at 1.97 billion people back in 2208.  Oops, did I say I think we've got about 200 years to go before doomsday?

  Yup.  That's my considered opinion.  I may be wrong... but I'd say the odds are likely to tip strongly towards catastrophe in less than 2 centuries; we're gonna run out of something in that time.

   I also will state that if things are not improved in the next 2 centuries the crash will be long and severe.  We've picked all the low fruit; there won't be  enough resources available to keep anyone around for a thousand years to contemplate the issue.  Think "Planet of the Apes" without the simians.

  That means that a second industrial revolution is about as likely as finding the remains of an earlier technical society in the middle of the Australian outback!  Those rocks are 3.8 B years old, so unless the previous re-terraformed the entire planet to make it easy for another civilization to develop...  Well, I like Sci-Fi.