Resource Depletion

Can Earth survive another billion people? An interview with Robert Walker

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Happy Birthday humans! At the end of October 2011, the 7th billion person will be born on Earth. With over a billion humans already going to bed hungry every night, this may not be a blessed event.

Just twelve years after we hit the 6 billion mark in 1999, it’s going to a be a lot harder to look after the new arrivals. The extra billion people will find an unstable climate, declining energy and resources, and a host of other challenges.

Revisiting population growth: The impact of ecological limits

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Demographers are predicting that world population will climb to 10 billion later this century. But with the planet heating up and growing numbers of people putting increasing pressure on water and food supplies and on life-sustaining ecosystems, will this projected population boom turn into a bust?

Should cheap phosphorus be first on an elemental ‘Red List’?

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Phosphorus is already out of reach for poor farmers in many countries, and, as history’s economic lessons have shown, the costs of any monopolized resource can skyrocket. Dr. Elser is also concerned about the institutional vacuum regarding governance: “Who will establish regulations and incentive structures with regard to phosphorus use and waste given its impacts on food security?”

“Humans control the global phosphorus cycle, more than carbon, more than nitrogen,” says Elser. “Looking at how we’re doing with P, I’d have to say: this is no way to run a biogeochemical cycle.”

Chemical low

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The Bou Craa mine in occupied Western Sahara is one of the world’s largest sources of phosphorus, a vital component of the fertilisers on which much of the world’s agriculture, and global food production and food security, depends. For some time there has been concern about our reliance on a finite supply of phosphorus, and the implications of this for agricultural productivity, food prices and nutrition, particularly in developing countries. The term “peak phosphorus” has joined the term “peak oil” in the lexicon of 21st century scarcity. An article in this week’s Nature journal (Elser and Bennett, 2011) addresses the phosphorus problem …

The new recession

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We’re at the end of growth. Growth of the economy, of consumption, of wealth. That this would happen isn’t news to those who’ve followed the writings of Meadows, Heinberg, and many others. What’s different now is that it may have actually arrived. I’d like to briefly look at our current situation in this context and synthesize the various ideas we explored in previous posts.

Why end of growth means more happiness

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Heinberg believes our decades-long era of growth was based on aberrant set of conditions- namely cheap oil, but also cheap minerals, cheap food, etc- and that looking ahead, we need to prepare for a “new normal”. This is not all theoretical. In the backyard of the home Heinberg shares with his wife, Janet Barocco, the couple grow most of their food during the summer months (i.e. 25 fruit & nut trees, veggies, potatoes.. they’re just lack grains), raise chickens for eggs, capture rainwater, bake with solar cookers and a solar food drier and secure energy with photovoltaic and solar hot water panels.

Their backyard reflects Heinberg’s vision for our “new normal” and it’s full of experiments.

Review: The Global Warming Reader, edited and introduced by Bill McKibben

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Bill McKibben’s latest book is a well-chosen and arranged collection of climate-related writings by the likes of James Hansen, Al Gore and George Monbiot, which McKibben edits and introduces. Significantly, the book contains writings by Inhofe and his ilk as well, the better to understand “the lines of attack climate deniers have used over and over,” in McKibben’s words,