It may not be polite to post this kind of downbeat musing, but I think that understanding the scope of the situation we face is important.
When I say "we" below, I mean all of us - global humanity, not just the USA.
- There are 6.5 billion of us.
- The excess birth rate is 75 million people per year. That's the number of extra deaths you'd need every year to stabilize the world population. WWII killed only 10 million per year.
- The fertility rate of the developed world is at or below 2. The rate in most of the the rest of the world is over 3. The high fertility populations are getting younger, the low fertility populations are aging.
- Humanity is in a 25% overshoot condition - we need 1.25 planets to keep going at this population and rate of consumption.
- Humanity's ecological niche has expanded to become the entire planet.
- This is possible because of cheap transportation.
- Cheap transportation is possible because of cheap oil.
- 75% of all oil is used for transportation, and 95% of all transportation is driven by oil.
- There are no substitutes for oil in its global role as a transportation fuel.
- We have used half the oil there is, and the rate of oil production is about to start declining.
- A calorie of food requires about 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce and transport to the consumer.
- During six of the last seven years the world has consumed more grain than it has produced.
- World per-capita grain production peaked in 1984, and is now down about 8% from its peak.
- Developing nations will pay very high energy prices to achieve a Western standard of living.
- Any oil the OECD nations do not use due to conservation, substitution or demand destruction will find ready buyers in other nations.
- Technological developments like electric cars will not reduce the global use of oil, they will merely displace that use to other economic sectors or countries.
- Because oil is the master resource of our civilization, we will consume all the oil we can produce, no matter what the price.
- If oil gets to be too expensive or scarce, we will turn increasingly to coal.
- China will in a new coal-fired power plant every week for the next ten years.
- Alternative energy sources will be added to our fossil fuel use, they will not replace it.
- We will use more nuclear power as time goes on.
- Only 20% of the original global forest cover remains.
- Large fish stocks are collapsing, and as a result the cost of fish protein is climbing.
- Water tables are dropping rapidly as we deplete the deep aquifers in places like the Australia, India and the midwestern USA.
- Species are going extinct at 1000 times the historic rate.
- We all know what's happening to the Arctic ice caps.
- When the Siberian permafrost starts to melt it will release enormous quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times as bad as CO2, potentially triggering a runaway positive feedback loop of global warming.
- There is nothing humane we can to to stop world population growth.
- There is nothing we can do to increase food production.
- There is no substitute for oil as our civilization's driving force.
- The people of the developing world will not agree to halt their development.
- The people of the developed world will not vote to make themselves voluntarily poorer.
- Even if the people of the developed world did vote to make themselves voluntarily poorer, it woiuld not change the final outcome. Humanity appears to have a built-in growth imperative, we have no predators, and we have filled our finite ecological niche to overflowing.
Folks, we are in enormous trouble.