EnviroLink Forum

"Energy slave" is an expression I first heard from famed engineer-futurist Buckminster Fuller. It defines energy production in terms of average human energy input units. It allows us to appreciate in human terms how much energy we actually have backing us up. It of course is enormous.

This video employs "energy slave" analysis to determine our EROEI (Energy return on energy investment), in this case both mechanical and social, now and well on into the future for a whole range of energy sources. He concludes that we are headed for a major drop in population just on this declining basis without even much help from environmental breakdown. I don't know how much of his analysis I buy but I certainly think it is a provocative thought piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfYCrLq ... e=youtu.be

It is a lot more complicated than that. However, Goodchild also puts population decline with declining fossil fuels.
As a population scientist since 1967, I say that it is both coincidental and triggering in action. I saw it then.
With the latest data, it looks far more grim. The 2050 crash of yore would be far too late to save the entire biosphere.
The only real hope of lowering emissions enough in time to prevent the tundra methane self release, to oceanic self release, to deep heat in rock deposits to release them, then everything gives up its sequestered CO2, too, is to have the human population go down 95% within 8 years.
Let us hope for a bunch of huge disasters that are due to happen, very soon.

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"With every decision, think seven generations ahead of the consequences of your actions" Ute rule of life.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”― Chief Seattle
“Those Who Have the Privilege to Know Have the Duty to Act”…Albert Einstein

I think Jack Alpert would be a little more up-to-date if instead of talking about running out of fossil fuel, which we have more than enough of, he would talk about its eventual prohibitive cost of extraction after removing the low hanging fruit.The present dramatic drop in oil price would seem to be quite temporary based on new NG finds and part political based on glutting the market to hurt say Iran and Russia. And of course the on going loss of worker benefits despite rising GDP is a cost required to keep the energy flowing. Efficiencies are picking up some of the slack but of course that is translated into a growing population which continually squeezes out the benefits.

One thing about developing an overpopulation perspective is it helps you see a principal driver behind so many areas of breakdown around the world whether it be hunger, war, environmental disasters, infrastructure breakdown, resource depletion and degradation, loss of border integrity, poorer education or a kind of growing political insanity. That doesn't keep technological sophistication from becoming greater and greater but it doesn't seem to make us wiser or our condition less perilous. I mean how many end game scenarios were there in the 19th century?