This goes against the folk-wisdom and fear-mongering present in a lot of popular culture, but it isn't true.
In the developed world fertility rates are below unity. Oil, at it's recent peak was competitive with solar. Resources aren't going to run out, the prices are just going to change – some resources will have to be more aggressively recycled, others will have to be replaced. Billionaires are thinking about asteroid mining. Nobody in the developed world is going to start wars over shortages.
There's a huge amount of arable land which is either unused or grown with only the most primitive techniques. Modern agriculture requires a fairly advanced economy, but it is orders of magnitude more productive.
"Resources are scarce" is a very believable lie, and it's easy to misuse statistics to prove it's true.
Remember "peak oil"? It wasn't true before and now nobody really cares that much.
The best car in the world is American and electric. In a few years they'll be selling one suitable for the middle class. We don't _need_ oil for energy, but we're going to use it until the economies of developing technology overtake the increasingly more costly fossil fuels.
In a generation or two people will stop fearing nuclear, and fusion will become economically viable.
we are no different than then, sure we think nowadays technology seems able to change everything, but before it was the same. Humans have always been innovating and increasing efficiency, yet they have always been fighting.
Modern resource worries would only be made worse through armed conflict over those resources, for basically all parties.
"Most people in both politics and general society think that we need to innovate our way out of the sustainability problems that we're having. What we forget in saying this is that we innovated our way into this problem in the first place."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0101mkOuGE
Transcript/discussion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3efobv/sander_...
... and then you wake up.
Note this is explicitly excluding people living in or watering the desert (or situations where this is an apt metaphor).
MAD has worked pretty well so far. It seems almost certain that there would have been a massive third World War by now if nuclear weapons hadn't been invented. But that doesn't mean it can't ever happen, especially since MAD is a lot harder to work with in a multi-polar world (there are currently nine countries with nuclear weapons).
https://medium.com/bull-market/violent-warfare-is-on-the-wan...