When will we ever stop running out of resources?

Michael, you are about right in the timing. You may have meant only irony, in which case your post is doubly ironic. Malthus got three things wrong.
1. Resource extent. He did not know about the US Ogallalla aquifer. By know, we more or less do for all basic resources like oil, gas, coal, arable land, water aquifers…
2. Innovation. He did not imagine center pivot Ogallalla irrigation nor hybrid corn.
3. Substitution. In his day, transportation meant horses, NOT iron horses…
All that can be accounted for inconsiderable (admittedly hard slog) detail. And was in Gaia’s Limits. You might check it out before posting further.

You are right its not governments who will solve our problems.. Right now its governments that are standing in the way of the solution.
Damn right I am pessimistic, when I read rubbish that’s being posted here by individuals. Because governments pander to the idiocies and prejudices of people who write on blogs like these.
If people believe in stuff that simply ain’t true, then governments will act to get into power by pandering to those illusions, and the people will suffer.
I’ll veer off topic and explain the reasoning that lies behind the way I think.
There is, in a Western democracy, a system of social and psychological feedback: What people believe (right or wrong) becomes the basis on which products are marketed, and governments are elected. Profit and political power does not come from challenging peoples beliefs, but from reinforcing their prejudices.
People who challenge beliefs such as myself, are universally derided and make no profits at all. Fortunately I don’t have to.
To make the point still further, what we have in operation therefore, is a system of bigotry, prejudice and self deception that is self reinforcing.
Once an Idea becomes fashionable, its is taken up and used to sell products and political power, and becomes ‘the way it is’ . Social stability is achieved when everyone believes in the same bullshit. E.g. . Christianity as a good example.
The acid test is however whether the particular suite of bigotry prejudice and bullshit is in fact self sustaining not just within the sphere of societal beliefs, but in the sphere if the real world of physics and energy and so on.
Let’s take the raison d’etre of this blog site. Climate change. Would we actually give a damn about climate change and renewable energy being thrust down our throats if it wasn’t actually costing us real money and a reduced quality of life to maintain the Green Faith?
Nope. If 100 windmills did the job of one nuclear power station at the same cost – who cares ? If it makes the greens happy, its not worth worrying about. The problem is that they dont. 100,000 windmills still dont do the job that one nuclear power station does and they are far more expensive.
So we have a situation on which widely held and cherished beliefs are not just wrong. Wrong doesn’t matter really. Humanity has survived believing in all manner of stuff that was ultimately shown to be wrong or illogical, because it was also irrelevant. It didn’t actually do any harm, and sometimes – religion is a case in point, it probably did some good, in the strict sense of ensuring a societies survival.
But when its wrong AND relevant, we have a problem.
Societies that cling to false gods when they should be directing their attention to realities go down, and they go down HARD. Where are the Aztecs and the Mayans now? serving food in Spanish restaurants in Meso America. Or creeping over the border into Texas to cut your grass.
That’s what is facing us. Servants to the Chinese overlords, who happen to be a bit more ruthless and a bit more pragmatic and haven’t been infected with quite such stupidity?
You say ‘the greens are always wrong’ As a bit of short handed bigotry and prejudice, its an effective rule of thumb. Mostly Greens are wrong. Mostly.
However that does not mean they are always wrong, nor does it mean that anyone who takes a different point of view is right.
Just because limits to growth hasn’t been proved right (yet) doesn’t mean there are no limits to growth, as any oak tree can tell any sapling.
And in fact every civilisation that has collapsed did so because in some sense it reached a limit to its growth. Either because it failed to find an alternative to the resources it had exhausted (“the deserts of the middle east are the result of 10,000 years of organic farming”) or because another civilisation came along with something that trumped it (“Your god versus my rifles: No contest”).
The longest lived civilisations are the most static. And the most authoritarian. China is the example. NO innovations please, we are Chinese. Until innovation was forced upon them.
However I digress. The point is this. My enemy’s enemy is not always my friend, the world runs on stripped down ideas that are simple to grasp and inevitably too simplified to be right, but that doesn’t matter until and unless society faces an existential crisis.
The question is, is Western society facing an existential crisis? My belief is that it is. If you think otherwise, good luck with that.
The greens are vaguely aware that we are in a crisis – its the one thing they actually have got right, but have simply allowed themselves to be subverted into a global marketing and politics exercise which itself does not recognise that there is an existential crisis, and doesn’t actually care if there is, so long as they come out on top.
However they got the WRONG crisis. And in any case are now bought body and soul by Big Marketing.
The real crisis is exponential growth meets hard limits. And the financial near-collapse, and the debt crisis and al lot of nasty little wars are all symptoms of that. As is a generally falling standard of living in the West, and all the vicious infighting within it, and the general distrust of politics, corporations and authority in general.
And the hardest limit we are reaching is energy cost. But fortunately its is the easiest one to solve. Technically. But politically we have a situation where at least 50% of the population dont realise that they need it far far more than they don’t want it. Nuclear power is the only game in town and we need it desperately. But we wont get it until and unless people realise they have no alternative.
What will happen if we are to survive, is that we will learn that there is no such thing as sustainable growth, and that we came very very close to having unsustainable collapse, and that we cannot construct a society on the belief and the assumption that we will always have more next year than we had last year, At least not in gross material terms. And consumerism will die, because that is a symptom of exponential growth. At some point we will realise that actually you only need 3 or4 pairs of shoes. And you dont need a new hairdo every week. Or a new TV every 3 years.
But you do need new energy every day, just to stay where you are.
Almost everything (material) that we are short of or, is expensive can be solved technologically if we are not short of energy. ALMOST everything. We cannot manufacture elements (Yet) , but we can arrange the ones we have into any chemical compounds we like and construct anything we know how to.
So in theory we can sustain a much larger population than we have now. But is that really all we want to do? Is a world living in a single super global city run on nuclear power with hydroponic farms and no ‘natural spaces’ actually a world we want to live in?
I say that personally it isn’t, and that a world managed down to about 10% of its current human populations over a few generations is actually a better world to live in. I consider that urbanisation and its weird morality has made a very dangerous society, one in which we are so geared to meeting the artificial challenges of an artificial life, that if a real world event – like say an asteroid impact – comes along, we would be utterly unable to deal with it.
The Kalahari bushman will survive without electricity. The urban Londoner would die.
Which is why I say that we should manage down to less people, and be more aware of the non-human world.
So no techno-cities for me.
What we need is a lot of nuclear power, and a way to run everything we need off it, and less people and a better life and a lower population density life for those that remain. And stay close to nature, as well as being technically more sophisticated.
There is no reason really to have cities and towns. With decent transport and communications, and a moving away from heavy industry, they have no economic value.
Decentralised suburbs, or rural life beckons. The only reason to keep towns is simply to house a lot of people cheaply, and that takes massive amounts of energy. If energy prices rise much more, towns will die. They are already. Detroit.
In the end you have to ask yourself ‘Can we go on as we are?’ and i think that if that question was put to the people of the West the answer would be for a hundred different reasons, ‘No’. Therefore we need a new future. The question is of course what should it be and how do we get to it?
WE can reject the ‘Green’ vision as hopelessly impractical and in fact dangerously inhumane and stupid.
But that doesn’t mean that any given other is the right one either.
What I am peddling, because its seems to me to be as good as is practically achievable, is a post modern post industrial lower population nicer lifestyle run on nuclear power, in which things that we take for grantd now are more expensive, but still just about affordable, and we can afford to educate people properly, because there are less of them, and machines are doing the basic work.
The Green vision is a neo feudalist society of slave labour and grinding poverty, In which probably some group like radical Islam will introduce a nasty repressive morality on us all and we will simply be the slaves of some warlord.
Those who think there is no crisis at all, are in the end leading us to the same situation, just even nastier, as the position of a society that cannot feed itself or dispose of its waste, because suddenly there ain’t any power, is no different from the green one. Two weeks without ANY electricity or hydrocarbon fuel would see about half the population of the average modern city dead.
Adapt or die. We need a new morality, a new set of prejudices and bigotry to survive the 21st century. So far all we have really established is that the Green vision is fatally flawed.
We have yet to come up with an alternative beyond ‘business as usual’ though. And that isn’t working, either.
And we better had come up with something, before the old bigotries and prejudices re-emerge and push us back to a new Dark Age. If you have a religion designed to adjust to driving camels across a desert, well what is more natural than to make the rest of the world a desert, and drive camels across it?