The Population Bomb

The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich, came out in 1968.

 

It predicted world famines due to uncontrolled population growth. Ehrlich took from several sources, but most of them were fundamentally based on Malthusianism, which came, unsurprisingly, from Thomas Malthus. Malthus noticed that the increasing farming production was linear because it was predicated on increasing the area upon which the farming had to operate. Doubling the yield requires doubling the area farmed. He further noted that population growth is exponential. Since exponential growth outpaces linear growth, there would inevitably be a point where demand outpaced construction, resulting in famine or war.

 

Malthus wrote this up in 1798, before the Industrial Revolution. Often, critics of Malthus and his adherents point to the impact industrialization would have on farming, changing the linear increase to a more own exponential one. Mechanized agriculture really got going after World War II. In addition, the scientific explosion in the same period culminated in the Green Revolution, a movement beginning at the dawn of the 20^th century and continuing through the eighties. 

 

This did involve mechanized agriculture. It also included developing new varieties of cereals, increased use of artificial fertilizer, and new farming techniques. This pushed up yields to keep pace with the continuing growth of population. 

 

Thus, the big criticism of Ehrlich’s work was that it seemed to ignore progress that had already been made and was ongoing. Instead, he painted an alarming collection of scenarios. These days, there are famines, but they are more a consequence of war and political unrest rather than causing it. There is enough food grown to keep people from starving. The issues of getting food to people without wasting it have not yet been completely solved. Still, it is getting there—at least, on the technical side. 

 

So, anyone who takes TPB, and Ehrlich himself, seriously is a fool. There’s no problem with population increase. If something gets in the way, infinite human ingenuity will solve it. We can feed everybody, so everything Ehrlich said is wrong.

 

Far be it from me to discount human innovation, but I don’t think this is exactly correct.

 

Years ago, I was in a lunchtime conversation with a co-worker. He said that since the caribou were thriving in the Arctic, all of the efforts to help the caribou—the extra construction to preserve their migration patterns, etc.—were unnecessary. My position was that if the caribou were thriving, it was because of those extra efforts rather than despite them. We agreed to disagree.

 

In 2026, we have 8.3 billion people.

 

I believe we can probably feed 10 billion people. But I don’t think that is a complete metric. Right now, we produce 450 million tonnes of plastic/year—up from 2 million tonnes of plastic/year in 1950. One tonne equals 1000 kilograms. So that is 450 billion kilograms/year. There are 8.3 billion people right now, so that results in 54 kilograms/year/person. If we had 1 billion people, that could result in a decrease to 6.5 kg/person or 6.5 billion tonnes/year. That is just one metric.

 

Scale matters.

 

(Note: Of course, the production of plastic consumption is even across the world. Given how the developing world is advancing, it might well become so. That would make the problem worse.)

 

There has been a lot of discussion over the last few years about the decrease in reproductive rate. China is worried about it. Japan is facing it. That said, even with the worldwide reduction of population, we are locked into having over ten billion people by 2061. That peak won’t be reached until 2085, after which it will start to drop. (See here.) Essentially, the currently large, adult cohorts have to grow older and die while the smaller, younger cohorts have to grow up under them. The corporate state wants that expanding market and those young purchasers. 

 

The proposed solution is to increase the birth rate to keep up the size of that younger cohort. Most of the publicity seems to be around the need for productive, younger workers. My feeling is more cynical: we need to keep up that younger buying power to prop up corporate sales. However, according to some sources, jobs are on the decline in the near term. Some of this is likely due to AI, but not all. Productivity per unit person has been rising steadily for a long time. Jobs are a reflection of supply and demand. As demand for a product goes up, supply has to meet it. Jobs have to create that supply.

 

However, as workers become more productive (add in here AI and automation), the number of jobs required for that supply is either smaller or may be reduced. This creates a strange disconnect: a larger number of people to demand product, fewer people to create product, fewer people with the purchasing power to buy product, reduction in demand. 

 

It is, of course, not that simple in the real world, but the trends are still there.

 

The idea behind Malthus original idea—that resource supply and resource demand are governed by different paradigms—is still valid. There’s a finite amount of oil in the world and the cost to extract that oil increases over time. Thus, there may be an infinite demand for oil, but there cannot be an infinite supply. This is true for any finite resource. Only the slopes of the curves are different.

 

Right now, a substantial percentage of the supply of habitable land is dedicated to the production of food. This has been estimated from 32% to over 50%. It has been increasing in correspondence with the population this whole time. The numbers Malthus (and Ehrlich) predicted have not come to pass, but the fact of that disconnect has happened. 

 

We have even developed a conceptual language to describe the problem: sustainable agriculture. Renewable agriculture. The underlying problem—the increase in the number of people—is out of fashion these days, but people still see the consequence: loss of land. Loss of wild areas. Air and water pollution. Crowded cities. 

 

Imagine a world where we had a tenth of the population—800 million people. Finite resources would last longer. Pollution would be considerably reduced. 

 

But we don’t. We have 8.3 billion people now and over 10 billion soon.

 

As Musk and others have said, the sky is falling. The question is, what do we do about it?

 

Increasing the birth rate is a non-starter. I don’t know about you, but I’m not enthused about the Asimov world in The Caves of Steel, where we all live in some megalopolis surrounded by vast hills and plains dedicated to farming.

 

The next century is going to require careful planning, a lot of automation, and probably robots—lots of robots—to get us over the hump and our numbers down to a manageable level. China is going gangbusters toward automation. So is Japan. Japan and Korea are hitting this problem right now. They are trying to find solutions right now. We should be following them closely, helping them towards a solution, and then adapting their ideas to our own dilemma. We need to find a new way to handle economies—ever-expanding revenue based on a new generation of people is just not going to work.

 

We’re smart. We can do this. Just like we handled global warming.

 

Oh. Right.

 

And, in that vein, the Federal Judicial Center puts together analytical papers to help judges adjudicate complex technical and scientific cases. Republican criticism caused them to pull the entire climate section from their new “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence.” See here and here.

 

Oh, and EPA enforcement of environmental laws has pretty much collapsed over the last year.

 

As an added bonus, RFJ Jr’s top vaccine advisor questions whether we should get polio shots.

 

Consideration of Works Past: The Broken Sword

 

I had trouble with Lord of the Rings.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Fantasy often just escapes me. I rarely find it compelling. This is my own character flaw, and I don’t suggest it’s any kind of literary judgment. Everybody’s different. 

 

I was in college, and my friends (both of them) were all saying how I had to read Lord of the Rings. It would make me grow three inches taller, improve my love life, and allow me to reach enlightenment. I went to the bookstore, looked on the shelves, bought The Two Towers, went home, and read it.

 

I know The Two Towers is the middle section in what was intended to be one, very large book. It’s like starting King Lear with Act II. Surprise: I didn’t find it compelling. In my own defense, you have to read Lord of the Rings and Appendix B all the way through to understand the scale of the work. I was in college. Hm. Read Lord of the Rings or study thermodynamics. Every week a quiz, every week a chance to fail. Or read three hundred thousand words of fantasy. 

 

Thermodynamics, every time.

 

Then, I happened on Henry Beard and Douglas Kinney’s very fine parody, Bored of the Rings, which I very much enjoyed. But, as I hadn’t read Lord of the Rings, I didn’t get it in depth. So, I went back to Lord of the Rings and read it using BOTR as a reader’s guide. Okay, now I understood what people were trying to tell me. I still wasn’t a Lord of the Rings fundamentalist. (I never finished The Silmarillion, for example. I’ve read the Bible, thanks. I don’t need to read it twice.) 

 

That said, Lord of the Rings had all of the things about fantasy I have trouble with: angelic elves, noble princes, valiant peasants, and a dark evil lord. I really liked the dwarves and how Legolas and Gimli became close friends despite the long antagonism between elves and dwarves. There’s a novel I’d like to read.

 

That’s not a problem with The Broken Sword. (See? This is a post about The Broken Sword.)

 

Note: I’m going to discuss some essential spoilers.

 

The Broken Sword is a fantasy by Poul Anderson that is, at minimum, inspired by Norse mythology. It is the story of Skafloc, a human child taken by Imric the elf lord before he can be christened. He is replaced by a half-elf, half-troll changeling who is named Valgard. The broken sword of the title is a mythic weapon delivered by the Aesir (Possibly Odin. It’s not so clear.) as a birth gift to Imric for Skafloc. Imric is not keen on this. The gifts of the gods are often two-edged.

 

First, the morality of the elves is not even close to angelic. Leea, Imric’s wife, nurses Skafloc as a baby and later is his lover. In a magical ritual, Imric rapes a troll woman he has kept prisoner for close to a thousand years, creating Valgard. 

 

There are three main characters in the novel. Skafloc, the foster child of the elves. Valgard, the changeling son foisted on Orm and his family. And Freda, one of the daughters of Orm. 

 

The story resembles a Greek tragedy in that by the end of it, no one is left standing. The hint is that the entire tale is a product of the Aesir plotting to get the broken sword remade. The destruction of the three main characters and all of the elf and troll kingdoms is just collateral damage to their machinations. 

 

And they are so destroyed. Valgard finds out his heritage and throws in with the trolls in their long enmity with the elves, sacrificing his family in the process. Skafloc leads a raiding party against the trolls that proves disastrous, but he manages to escape with some of his troops and Freda. The two of them fall in love. (Yes. They are brother and sister. Which doesn’t mean much in elf culture.) 

 

The trolls attack the elves and win. Valgard becomes a lord in the very same kingdom that Imric had ruled. But his own knowledge of who he is eats away at him.

 

Skafloc and Freda discover who they are and it breaks their relationships. In despair, Skafloc manages to get the broken sword reforged and uses it with great success against the occupying trolls. The sword kills anyone nearby whenever it is drawn. Freda goes back to her village and, now pregnant with Skafloc’s child, manages to begin a new life. Then, Skafloc shows up and his sword kills her new possible husband. Freda throws him out of the house and subsequently gives birth to Skafloc’s child. Odin comes and takes it away.

 

With nothing left, Freda decides to seek Skafloc out after all. Skafloc, meanwhile, is locked in mortal combat with Valgard when Freda finds him and calls out his name. Distracted, Valgard kills him. But the sword, tossed from Skafloc’s dying hand, kills Valgard. Freda is left alive but mad.

 

There is nothing left of these people’s lives but ground glass.

 

Now, remember, I read this right after I read Lord of the Rings.

 

Anderson, here, was the anti-Tolkien. 

 

The Broken Sword was considerably shorter than Lord of the Rings. It was also nasty, brutal, and bloody. For all the bloodshed in Lord of the Rings, it’s an astonishingly clean fantasy. The Broken Sword is filled with disembowelments and the cleaving of skulls. The deaths of your brother troops are unfortunate but expected—there’s little mourning. There is also no redemption. People do bad things, enjoy bad things, and often succeed because of those bad things. 

 

Let us recall the setting of this, as far as I was concerned. The Broken Sword was first published in 1954—the same year that Lord of the Rings started being published. Anderson rewrote The Broken Sword in 1971. 

 

I read Lord of the Rings in 1972. Subsequently, I read The Broken Sword. The Vietnam War (US version) had been going on for years. (1972 was, coincidentally, my year for the draft. I was not drafted.) The accounts of the My Lai Massacre were published in 1969. The Pentagon Papers were published in 1971. Every night, Walter Cronkite reported the events of the war on the news. (Nixon’s reelection also happened in 1972, but that was after I read these two books.)

 

Is it really such a surprise in that particular context that I wasn’t quite so interested in Lord of the Rings but gravitated to The Broken Sword? In The Broken Sword, war was portrayed graphically. There was nothing noble about it on either side. This was not the forces of right against the forces of darkness. These were brutal grabs for power from both sides. There was no moral high ground anywhere to be found. 

 

I have rarely written of any sort of war. For one reason, I don’t feel qualified. 

 

For another, I think it’s hard to write about war without romanticizing it, either for the good—see Lord of the Rings—or the bad—see The Broken Sword. 

 

We’re seeing that right now. Orange Voldemort and his ilk are describing utterly brutal acts as if the perpetrators were merely defending themselves against evil, paid agitators. I like what Stephen Colbert said about them. The Nazis weren’t afraid to show their faces.

 

Cheese Ends, 20260113, Depression Edition

*Sigh.*

 

Normally, I try to put up optimistic, interesting science up. Things that show how important the human brain is to understanding, medicine, health, food, shelter. Good things, you know?

 

But so much bad stuff has been coming across my desk that I haven't had the heart to represent it.

 

Until now.

 

After all, we need to understand the bad stuff right along with the good, right?

 

It's no secret that Orange Voldemort doesn't like wind projects. Maybe he was scared by a whirligig as a child. Regardless, he's been going after wind projects ever since his first term. 

 

At the beginning of his second term, he tried to stop wind projects. Courts reversed him. He declared them a menace to national security. One of them, Revolution Wind, was run by a Danish company, Ørsted. They took OV to court and as of early January, won in court. Cheers all around. However, it's not clear if the Ørsted's court victory supersedes the Department of Defense shutdown. So, yay? Oh, no? 

 

Going on in that vein, it's been pretty clear the big pollution offender in power generation is coal. How forty thousand coal workers manage to over balance close to 300,000 jobs in solar and a comparable number of jobs in wind (both are the fastest growing part of the jobs economy) is beyond me. Maybe we don't have enough lead and mercury in our diet. 

 

But, OV said he'd bring back coal power whether or not we needed it. It's pretty clear we don't. But facts don't sway this administration and the OV has ordered a Washington plant and a Colorado plant to remain open. Both were scheduled to be retired. They don't have to even burn coal. They're just there for emergencies. After all, just because coal is the second most expensive source of power (right after nuclear) and by far the dirtiest, that's no reason to not to keep them open. Right?

 

But OV wasn't done yet.

 

Probably the most important single organization trying to address the climatastrophe is the IPCC. It has its flaws—not as many as its most ardent critics seem to think but it is a human run organization in the semblance of a democracy, so it has flaws. But the OV is withdrawing from it. Along with a whole bunch of other similar organizations. 

 

It's amazing how that Chinese hoax keeps making the ocean hotter.

 

The OV has his allies both in Washington and elsewhere. Recently, Utah is trying its darndest to limit solar farms. Utah has been estimated to require a lot more energy in the next five years. Solar has been shone to be the most economical and battery cost keeps going down. But the Utah legislature (aided by the governor) has decided to make using solar more difficult. I have some coal plants to sell them. But the customer has to pick them up.

 

A good portion of the new power requirements are coming from data centers who are supplying powers to LLMs. LLMs are trained on relatively good data. They're not trained on the entire internet with all its lies, misinformation, bigotry, and hatred. (What a surprise we get LLM hallucination.)

 

Well, more good news. Big uptick in publications. No increase in quality of material.

 

I have my own ideas about how effective LLMs can be and how they are being used. I haven't talked about them here because the subject is incredibly polarizing. If I'm going to get pilloried, I want to get pilloried for something important.

 

But putting out slop in science is everybody's problem.

 

I can hear my two readers say: enough, already. There must be some good news.

 

Yes, there is.

 

When the OV tried to break the backs of university research by cutting back NIH overhead fees, it was taken to court. An appeals court just agreed that he couldn't do that. See here. The OV had tried to restrict grant applications from anything that hinted of diversity. (E.g., research into prostate cancer for African Americans.) The ACLU has announced a settlement has been reached. The grant applications have not been approved but they must be reviewed a bit better. 

 

And, finally, a sulfur-sodium batter has been demonstrated in the lab that has a good repeat rate and high charge density using incredibly cheap materials. The downside? It's in China.

 

I really liked the country we used to have.