How many people here want a country of low energy, low tech farms?

[Ready4Change]

121. People who want that tend to forget/ignore something.

Estimates vary, but most put the Earths non-technological carrying capacity at about 2 billion people. In other words, if we remove the use of fossil fuels and industrial electric power sources (ie, what I think of as 'the grid') right now, 5 billion people must die.

Right now, we are consuming those resources (fossil fuels, fissionables, etc...) at a rate which will have them depleted in about 150 years. But our rate of consumption is growing fast, particularly with the modernization of many eastern nations. I give us 100 years, tops.

And also consider human tendencies. Humanity, as a single mass organism, has proven incapable of reacting preemptively to upcoming disasters. That means we, as a whole species, won't start reducing our population voluntarily before the depletion of our resources. Instead, we are more likely to keep expanding our population, up to the maximum technological carrying capacity of the Earth, estimated at about 10 billion.

That means, 100 years or so in the future, 8 billion people are all going to die in a VERY short time period. There will be famines, riots, social break downs in many areas, probably wars, and if nature does what nature tends to do when a species population overshoots, plagues. Add to that the effects we suspect will come with the Global warming, that will be exacerbated by our likely use of very dirty tar sands and oil bearing shales, and I think it's very likely that the end of the grid will cause our population to plummet well below 2 billion people.

So, in the long term, I think we will have low energy, low tech farms, whether we want them or not. But none of us will survive the hell on Earth that will usher in that future.

(Ok, enough grimness for today!)