A book well worth reading
"As a particular resource becomes more scarce, its price rises; this rise of price creates an incentive for people to discover more of the resource, ration it and, eventually, develop substitutes."
Capitalism is the solution for resource shortages!! WOOT!
8 comments:
you should make your sarcasm a little more obvious, lee.
the "book" is well worth reading. the author's conclusion is that people produce natural resources. anyone who puts their faith in this good book should go live in africa. i explain: africa's abundance of population and scarcity of resources disproves the hypothesis by demonstration of a counter example.
he says "hold on to your hats" often. he should say "hold on to your tinfoil hats". common sense says x. but historically the opposite has happened. true enough. why? too bad the author didn't figure that one out. all of the wonderful things he cites can be atrtributed to people consuming more oil.
oil is a wonderful thing. and we're running out. we do indeed need to ration it and develop substitutes. the problem with his rosy prediction is that the possible substitutes are not as good as oil. we'd need a technological and/or divine miracle to stay on the happiness curve we've been on for the past century.
humanity is going to feel some pain during the oil bust. we'll be forced to develop substitutes. after that happens we'll get on a different happiness curve. a slower smaller one.
Africa hmmm, places like Algeria,
Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia and Western Sahara?
Oh wait, they have economies close to Europe. So why would thier neighbors have such a disparity?
Hmmmmmm.
Africa hmmm, places like Algeria,
Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia and Western Sahara?
Oh wait, they have economies close to Europe. So why would thier neighbors have such a disparity?
Hmmmmmm.
um... you weren't being sarcastic? oh. huh.
okay. as for africa i was thinking more of the countries whose population outstripped their resources. ethiopia and somalia come to mind. according to the author these countries should have vast quantities of natural resources because they have so many people. hrm.
by his argument they have the most economic incentive to find the oil that's gotta be out there if only someone would look. all they have to do is drill the wells. they should be building nuclear power plants. fusion based power. not that silly fission stuff. but they're not. they can't. they don't have the resources.
he's a crackpot, lee. well, not entirely. his analysis of the past is pretty good. and his energy policies are pretty agreeable. his predictions for the future will be spot on ***IF*** some unknown source of energy appears real soon that's as much better than oil as oil is better than coal.
sounds like he's placed his bet on nuclear. if only those darn environmentalists and regulators would get out of the way. and we broke up the uranium cartel.
I'd like to see our trains being used like they do in Europe. They are already there, and if more people used them, they wouldn't cost so much.
Right now it's not worth the cost tho. You can drive more cheaply at this point, but that's not gonna last forever ;)
As long as the government isnt running the trains you got a good chance of doing just that. I know if there was a faster train to one of the bigger cities I would head there more often.
Likewise, Big city folk wanting to escape would be a good trend as well.
Lets take Ethiopia. There has been nothing stable about the government there in over 100 years.
Add to it the stifling effects of communisiom and the fact that there are over 80 different languages.
It's hard to have any progress when someone takes it away from you or blows it up. Between Italy, USSR and UN. They have been messed with big time.
excellent point. increasing population is not by itself sufficient to have increasing resources. as you point out you also need a stable peaceful government. my thinking is that's still not sufficient.
people switched from timber to coal before they ran out of trees because coal was better. people switched from coal to oil before they ran out of coal because oil was better. we're nearing the end of oil. in order to maintain the author's premise we should be switching to something better. but we haven't. and there's nothing on the horizon that's obviously the next thing. why not?
it's possible the next thing is staring me in the face and i'm too stupid to recognize it. it's also possible that the next thing isn't going to be better than oil. i'd actually prefer the former. if the latter turns out to be the case then we won't be able to sustain the technological pressure that's been forcing down the price of energy and the author's whole theory goes down the tubes.
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