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Comment by Frozenlock | Hacker News Reader

> And then what?

And then the price of the scarce resource will go up, pushing us towards alternative energy sources. And as time passes, we should have more efficient ways of harnessing those.

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This line of logic says that it is impossible for us to come to any sort of "cliff" where we are unable to smoothly transition from one energy source to another (where the possible ensuing resource wars could prevent us from ever harnessing those alternative sources). It's basically a "nothing bad can happen because ECONOMICS!" answer.

It does, and to do so it presumes that there will always be some readily available alternatives with smooth supply curves, and neglects transition costs.

I've seen it referred to as the Adam's Law of Slow Moving Disasters

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102964934001/fact-checking-adam...

It also ignores the output (garbage, buildup of entropy that destroys ecosystems)

Scarce resource might be clean air and land in a place that doesnt hit 120f daily.

By that time we might have already destroyed an ecosystem. It's not just resources coming in, but the entropy that comes out of doing useful work with them. Whether pollution, or great pacific garbage patch, or overfishing, etc.

The invisible hand of the market hasn't been very great at solving externality problems. Neither has government, as an institution. What we should be doing is investing more in initiatives like the Virgin Earth Challenge to stave off collapse. But when it comes to overfishing, and other things ... I'm not sure we can do that.

The best we can advocate is using condoms...

Overpopulation isn't a problem. It's human desire for luxury, as is meat, as is 5 AC components for each room of your house. Problem is that the whole world cannot live as an average citizen of USA (when it comes to energy use, not the health care and the bad bits) but the whole world, when it realizes, wants exactly that.

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