Rwanda had a lot to do with people getting swept up in mass hysteria. And, of course, there was that cowardly reaction from the UN. Not to mention the deciding part of the Clinton duo, you know the one who couldn’t keep his pants up.

Notice that Rwanda is actually doing pretty well, at present. The economy has been growing at about 10% per year in recent years. Perhaps Rwandans realized that they can’t wait for outsiders to solve their problems. Let’s hope the rest of Africa is watching.

Darfur is about ethnic cleansing by the Arab government. Nothing that proves Malthus right. This time we get the Decider at his most indecisive, and, of course, the UN is ready for another debate on the issue…

Neither Rwanda or Darfur had/has anything to do with limited resources. It is about brave but evil leadership, and it’s ability to overpower well intentioned cowards. It’s political, nothing else.

Actually Malthus has never been proven wrong since his theory was put forward.
LOL! What 200 years isn’t long enough to conclude that he was an idiot? Remember, we were supposed to run out of food within a decade of his predictions. What do you want? Another 200 years? A thousand? Will anything convince you?

I talked to a guy from the Phillipines this weekend who said his family was like mine. He is close your age I suspect. He said his parents grew out of it as well, but that in the Phillipines there are lots of staples they still do it in many ways. He thinks it’s just a matter of poverty.

My parents never did the fat added thing, at least as far back as I can remember meals (1957). But now that you mention it, I do remember that other people did this sort of thing. In fact, members of the tribes (Jews, of which I am one) had their own version of this sort of thing, around chicken, but this (and anything of this genre) was definitely not part of my mother’s repertoire.

Darfur and Rwanda are basically examples of where Malthus was absolutely tragically right.

Actually Malthus has never been proven wrong since his theory was put forward.
In fact it is because his theory is so politically incorrect that it has always been decried and ridiculed even if everybody deep inside them know that he was cruelly right.

The argument that technology can forever keep Malthusian forces at bay is wishful thinking at best…suicidal at worst.
The near future will certainly test your assumptions.

Blessed (Cursed?) is the one that lives in interesting times.

Bringing up Malthus is popular, but usually irrelevant. Marx was wrong about a lot of things, too, but we don’t throw out all of economics because he made incorrect observations on economics.

You need to check your calender. 50 years ago was closer to the Korean conflict than WWII. I know the feeling, the years just move faster and faster don’t they?

A lot of the traditional foods we ate were full of added fats. No one eats them anymore, at least not as staples, and they prepare them differently. Biscuits were made with added fats, they were then topped with gravy made from the grease collected during the week (we did not throw out grease, we ate it one way or another). My mother never makes the gravy anymore, but by the time I was a teenager she had radically changed the ingredients to reduce the fats. Most everything used to be cooked in the fry pan so that the animal fat would get in the food. My parents cooked that way until the late seventies.

Outside of this country it is still common for people to use lard as an additive. They will put the stuff on toast like it was butter. Now butter may be added for taste, but lard?

A proper diet without meat is tough to have without a lot of infrastructure unless you live in the right place. Lot’s of the world still doesn’t have a good diet. I always enjoy seeing second and third generation asians who are a foot taller than their parents or grandparents.

The way I see it, more people force us to develop better technology. But then more people means that there are more brains available to develop new technologies. Earth could not support 6.5 billion hunter-gatherers. But it can support us, because we have agriculture, industries and we have developed rudimentary ways of cleaning up our wastes. Not ideal, but good enough, for now.

As more people keep arriving, we will need to keep doing better. And we will.

I truly don’t understand how so many of the greens can avoid addressing the popultion problem. It’s madness. But they act like it’s radioactive. Even ZPG changed its name to Population Connection (and lost my support).

The problem is especially bad if you try to point that the US population is a problem. There, the radioative third rail is immigration. That’s — as yo uprobably know — where the biggest increases are, and if yoiu say we need ot limit immigration, you get branded a racist.

Actually, I think a lot of greens have gotten so politically correct that they feel uncomfortable about even hinting that other countries shoiuld stabilize their populations. Although to be sure, not all of them have a problem with this. But it is so fundamental that it should be tops on the agenda. The notion that the world population is going to increase by another 50% is downright scary.

Regarding ag, my impression is that it was only after wwii that the amoiunt of fertilizer and pesticides in ag went way up. And fertilizer is where dino juice makes its biggest contribution. So, presumably, you had mostly solar feeding 2.5 billion.

Your parents adding fats to the calories? How so? What decade? I was born in ‘53, and no-one was adding fats. In fact, in the early ’60s they began avoiding them after a friend’s brother, probably in his 30s or 40s, died of a heart attack. (The friend was a doc, and already suspected fats were a problem, and lived at least into his 70s, but that’s another story).

If you really want to get called names, point out that endless population growth is a problem. The S— storm is amazing. You would think the greens would be the first to agree, but instead they always disagree or distance themselves from the idea.

I am not sure what you mean about feeding the world on solar power, but I would say that 50 years ago in the US you had lots of petro in the mix, and the diet was less than ideal. My parents grew up adding fats to their diets to increase the calories, and were still doing this after I was born.

I want solar and wind and all the rest. I want many solutions so we don’t have the problems we have now again in 50 years when we decide the solution has it’s own problems. However, solar and wind are likely limited without population reduction or a reduction in standard of living.

And aside from getting off the planet, I don’t see why solar and related technologies can’t fuel the world, unless you’re imagining truly endless ambitions, including endless population growth. We won’t be able to feed that world, fusion or not.

We fed the world of 50 years ago when it was 1/3 the current population pretty much with solar energy. On a per land basis, solar and wind are much more efficient methods of capturing the sun’s rays than plants.

Fuel cells are not hopeless – for starters, they already exist. They’re just not as useful as some claim them to be. They certainly won’t solve the transportation problem.

As for fusion, sure, it requires enormous investments. So does everything of that caliber. It’s just that the long-term gains are even greater. And there’s no way in the world that we can get enough power to fuel humanity’s endless ambitions simply by scavenging sun’s rays.

BTW, IIRC JT-60 Tokamak almost doubled it’s record of holding plasma for 16 seconds a couple year ago, bringing it to ~28, and also managed to get more energy out of fusion than the amount of energy inserted. Still not economically viable, but making good progress. Now, wouldn’t it be funny if the Japanese were to beat us AGAIN, because of their (apparently superhuman) ability to plan beyond the next quarter?…

Yes – I’ve never been able to look at Biofuels as anything but a poor excuse to keep farming, because it has nothing to do with environmental energy efficiency. It’s a harebrained scheeme.

@engineer
You write:
And let’s not even begin to outline the effect of growing fuel on the water table …
Stein,
That problem has been solved – let’s just say you shouldn’t be eating while reading this.

Sorry, I don’t share your enthusiasm. While “grey” water is becoming a staple around the world, in urban areas – I’m speaking of something entirely different.
The fact that farmers in Windhoek have been able to work around evaporation doesn’t mean the solution is being implemented. And water tables are sinking precipitously – a tip, in case you’re worried about the market price of your house: check the status of the water table. That’s going to be a dealbreaker in a few years.

Regarding fusion, if you think fuel cells are hopeless, but that fusion is not, you don’t realize the technological difficulty of fusion. Furthermore, the notion that it would be gobs of cheap energy is nonsense. It wouild be hugely capital intensive. Solar PV, and wind costs are dropping as we speak; and fusion has yet to produce any energy for more than fractions of a second, and it has yet to produce anywhere near as much energy as is put into the reactor to make it happen. If you email me your address to motorlegnds@aol.com, I’ll be happy to mail you something I wrote years ago that will give you some idea of the complexity of fusion.

Bottom line: fusion is A LOT MORE UNLIKELY THAN FUEL CELLS. The difference in complexity is like the difference between sending a horse and carriage across town and sending a rocket to the moon.

Agree about the importance of CFLs and LEDs, and conservation and efficiency measures generally.

This is a stupid plan.

If the fertilizer was organic, it wouldn’t be as much of an issue. But we all know that won’t happen.

Also, we shouldn’t be using corn to do this. Hemp yields 10 times the biofuel per acre that corn does.

Just because we can meet our demands with current technology doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go for better stuff. An advanced civilization needs retardedly cheap energy, otherwise we’re just going to overpopulate ourselves to the point of stagnation, and stall. You can’t build million-ton spaceships when all your energy (=production output) is being put into sustaining your increasingly uneducated, self-loathing population.

As for redirecting funds, I think more funds should be put into all areas, including conservation.

Get this: if 10% of the upcoming tax rebate were to be put into buying CFL’s, EVERY US HOUSEHOLD would have nothing but CFL light bulbs. That’s at least 5% cut out of each household’s electricity consumption. Which is equivalent to giving an average household a $50 tax cut. EVERY YEAR. Solar panels take 10-30 years to break even; those little buggers take several months, tops. IMO, they give better-looking light, too, as long as you pick the right kind.

But no, we’re gonna pour a couple billion into fuel cells that will never ever be viable, and call it a day. Unbelievable.

And, of course, it’s been going on all over the place: thought you knew where that tap water came from? Knew that Las Vegas discharges treated wastewater to Lake Mead – the same Lake Mead that’s a source of drinking water?

Gotta love technology…

Engineer mentioned making gasoline renewably. Its being done. Not ready for prime time yet, but promising.

Counting on fusion is like waiting for Godot.

Furthermore, fusion is not even necessarily clean. Anyone interested in some of the details can email me your address and I’ll snail you an article I wrote about that years ago. (email motorlegends@aol.com) Bottom line: the reactor vessel would become radioactive over time in most fusion schemes. It is, to be sure, not as difficult a problem as fission wastes.

The billions of dollars some posters seem to want to go into fusion research would be much better spent buying existing photovoltaic and wind technology to generate electricity now. The resulting mass production would bring down the capital cost. You can throw money at a pie in the sky or you can thrown it at something that actually works now, even if it’s more expensive than coal.

I would counter the cereal argument quite strongly, even though I agree with the idea that the corn ethanol subsidy is harmful.

The shortage of food is presently due to the lack of private property rights, personal liberties, and capitalism unfettered by government and judicial corruption.

Any society which has those things will learn to feed itself in a only a couple generations. OTOH, we have poured billions worth of resources at peoples without those things, and it only prolongs the suffering.

Thanks, Engineer. Interesting input. In Denmark there’s a city where they’ve placed their municipal recycling plant next to their power generation and heated water distribution plants, and where fuel is being recovered as you indicate.
And the Germans must have sat down and taken a long term look at things about 30 years ago – their green recovery and recycling program is outstanding, with the number of zero energy houses going up increasing every year. (Houses that generate as much energy as they consume, with some actually contributing to the power grid.)

And yes – fusion is not a joke, the science is pretty clear, but getting it to work in a manageable way is hard, no doubt about that. Impossible? I’m not the one to answer that one.

My two bits:

Fusion is a joke, a pipe dream, a job-creation scheme for physicists, always just 20 years from fruition, no matter which year it is.

On ethanol, the UK’s Economist magazine points out the amazing statistic that “the demands of America’s ethanol program alone account for over half the world’s unmet need for cereals.” So, the magazine editorializes that food price rises are “the self-inflicted result of America’s reckless ethanol subsidies.”

Yes, reckless. And this is coming from a magazine that (originally) supported GWB’s war in Iraq. No lefties, they.

And BTW, the ethanol (and all other fuels) will flow to the highest bidder, as it always has. Wanna bet who’s going to outbid who?