this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
162 points (88.2% liked)
Memes
45725 readers
707 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My point is that any meaningful capital is directly tied to resource usage. Our ability to produce energy directly depends on our ability to mine resources to build power plants and maintain them. Saying that we can increase energy production infinitely is reductive beyond any meaning, it's like a physics problem about a perfectly spherical cow.
And yes we absolutely are running out of easily accessible resources that have sustained the current growth. Getting further resources is becoming increasingly more difficult and energy intensive. We're also running out of things like fertilizer, dealing with topsoil erosion, and increasingly unstable climate that's threatening our food production. I don't think people appreciate just how fragile our whole civilization is.
Not at all! To use real examples to avoid spherical cows:
Used to be that you needed wood to generate energy. Then coal (which is an order of magnitude better). Then oil (another order of magnitude). Then solar. Then fission. Then (hopefully) fusion. Then who knows what. At each step, we've taken something which previously wasn't considered a resource at all and used it to generate exponentially more and more energy. There's no limit to how often we can do this-- things which were previously not resources become resources once we know how to use them.
Another example is food production. I saw a graph recently-- if I find it I'll edit this message to include it, but it showed how it used to be that we needed 100% of our population dedicated to food production. Now it's less than 1%. Meaning that 1 person is producing enough food for 100 people. Incredible.
These examples (and many more) show that our ability to produce things are not subject to limitations of natural resources, because natural resources aren't limited. There's enough energy coming out of the sun to be infinite, for all intents and purposes.
let me introduce you to the Jevons paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
And this is a pretty good read on the state of food production with lots of mainstream sources to what's currently happening, it's a pretty sobering read https://collapsesurvivalsite.com/reasons-theres-going-to-be-a-global-famine/