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So why are there starving children in Africa? It's almost always because of distribution problems throughout war-torn regions with poor infrastructure.

Not even problems, those could easily be fixed. We in the West know a lot about logistics. The underlying cause is that people like Mugabe find it politically useful that their opponents starve. The "fix" for that is regime change, something we used to be able to do (Germany, Japan) but those skills are long since lost.

As others have stated the status quo requires us to maintain current oil production not only to power farm machinery but also for fertiliser production, packaging etc and food transportation. We here in England are now net importers of oil, gas, coal, food and we have an ever increasing trade deficit. Hardly reassuring. Oh and oil production is set to continue declining..

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5177

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5241

As food gets more expensive, people will have less children. Birth rates are below replacement rates in a lot of countries that keep their population growing mostly by immigration. Or am I missing something?

> As food gets more expensive, people will have less children.

Food has to get really expensive before birth rates decline. Survival rates get hit first by lack of food.

> Birth rates are below replacement rates in a lot of countries that keep their population growing mostly by immigration.

The countries that have low birth rates are rich, not poor. To be crude, TV is one of the most effective better birth control devices. (The poor countries with low/shrinking population have man-made disasters.)

>Right now, per capita world food production is roughly 3000 calories/day/person.

This is because petrochemical fertilizers, tractors powered by internal combustion, etc. are still going strong.

The decreased birth rate we're experiencing is quite an amazing biological anomaly. People who have many children (say 5) will reproduce much faster than people who don't (1 child). 5^n faster, where n is is the number of generations that has passed. This is a huge evolutionary pressure. If "having many children" has any genetic basis at all, the phenomenom of small families is likely to die out in the short term... at the evolutionary time scale, anyway. Centuries, maybe.

The cause of reduced birth rates is the availability of contraception, of course. It used to be that even if a man didn't like to have children, he couldn't help it as long as he wanted to have sex. Now that this is no longer true, it's quite likely that the average man will be increasingly fond of children, or increasingly averse to contraception. Evolution, much like progress, won't be stopped.

Human evolution is over. I predict that in less than a century, having genetically unedited children will be viewed as an act near in its savageness to cannibalism or at the very least public defecation. At any rate, the necessary technology will appear long before the glacially slow natural evolution has a chance to substantially change us. Assuming the familiar nuclear/bioengineered plaugue apocalypse doesn't get us first.

Why? There is nothing to suggest people will become increasingly adverse to contraception; they already are. And you can't evolve out (or legislate away) abortion. I don't understand your points.

I think he's talking about the ~100 generation time-scale; i.e., Darwinian evolution rather than Lamarckian evolution. If anybody has a "desire to have a large family gene", then that gene will come to dominate the human gene pool in a few hundred generations, because people with it will produce, on average, many times as many children as people without it. The two biggest assumptions here are:

1. This gene exists (and is the main factor in determining how many children people have.)

2. Other genes won't become more important.

I would bet on both of these assumptions being false, but it's certainly possible that they hold.

The doomer theory is that modern agriculture is merely an inefficient means of turning oil into food. I don't know how much credence to give this; I'm not an expert.

That part's real: modern agriculture requires fairly large fossil-fuel inputs in the form of fertilizer to yield anything. "Inefficient" is relative, of course: photosynthesis itself is only 3% efficient, so any biological process is already wasting massive amounts of energy.

However, the amount of oil used for fertilizer is a drop in the bucket compared to that used for transportation. So if we reach (or have reached) peak oil and the price of oil starts jumping, we'd feel it in our gas bill a lot sooner than we'd feel it in our food bill. And that'd spur people to get fuel efficient cars: if everyone switched from an SUV to a Prius or Fit, the amount of oil saved is several times the amount used in agriculture.

It's still nowhere near as wasteful as turning half of U.S. cropland into corn plantations to grow ethanol. You want an inefficient means of turning food into oil, try ethanol subsidies.

> And that'd spur people to get fuel efficient cars: if everyone switched from an SUV to a Prius or Fit, the amount of oil saved is several times the amount used in agriculture.

Not so fast. Building cars costs significant energy. The result can easily be more energy consumption.

Not to mention that switching doesn't necessarily work. In most cases, the only realistic alternative to "big car" is multiple vehicle even if the big vehicle's capacity goes unused most of the time. Owning two vehicles, one big for "those days" and a small one for the rest of the time is usually more expensive than owning just the big one unless the small one is very cheap.

I've posted the arithmetic. If the big car gets 15-20mpg, the small one has to cost less than $4k even if it gets 50mpg. (My arithmetic was conservative because I just looked at purchase and gas, which ignore many of the costs associated with a second car.) If the big car gets 25, it's almost impossible to save money with an additional vehicle.

And no, renting doesn't work out significantly better.

An interesting read on some of this would be The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I have yet to finish it, but I learned a tremendous amount about corn and petroleum just from the first seven chapters.

Ouch. I believe you misunderstood him (and took a quote out of context). He's saying if we all reduce our resource consumption, then everything would be fine, but such a reduction is not possible because then* we wouldn't be able to support everyone, which is true. He's not saying we can't support everyone now. He's talking about a hypothetical situation.

As for the article, I find it distasteful. Generalized, sweeping statements without hard evidence to back most of them. And here we are two years later (which is mighty close to a "few years" later, which he referred to in the article) and none of the predictions are even close to becoming huge problems. (The current economic problems are not related to his predictions.)

>The current economic problems are not related to his predictions.

Why are you so sure of that?

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-p...