Good news, bad news

I'm reading Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories with a great deal of fascination. Assuming (which I believe) that he is right, the good news is that it is possible -- for those who can afford it -- to lose their fat, or not gain it in the first place, and become much more healthy.

The bad news is that (unless there is some rabbit up a sleeve that I know nothing about), only a fraction, notably less than one (that is, less than 100%), of the worlds population can possibly use this solution. The rest are condemned to ill health and hidden malnutrition.

The very short summary is that carbohydrates (in particular refined carbohydrates) cause the fat cells to take the calories that are provided to the body and store them away as fat. This storage and/or the high insulin levels that are involved, cause heart disease, diabetes and possibly cancer and Alzheimer's also.

The way to not eat a diet high in carbs (and according to the low carb people, low is very low) is to eat a diet high in fat and protein. So far, so good -- but the way to eat a low carb diet is to eat meat -- lots of meat. If one eats mostly meat, supplemented with some eggs and aged cheese, one can eat very few carbs.

Of course, it takes a lot of grain to make meat. I read Diet for a Small Planet when I was in my 20s and for a number of years I was a vegetarian. However, she believed that as long as the diet provides enough protein, it is healthy. If anything, she probably believes that a low fat diet is more healthy than a high fat one and so being a vegetarian is more healthy than being a meat eater. It is surely counter-intuitive to think that a high fat diet will make a person thin, but such is the claim.

In the last several years, the world has grown less grain than it has eaten. If the best way to engender health in people is to feed the grain to animals and then eat the animals, the carrying capacity of the world (in terms of healthy people, not ones that are either starving outright, or starving at a cellular level) is even lower than the level we have now, not including the effects of environmental destruction. Thus, the bad news is that if he is right, then the resource crisis is much worse than I had imagined.

Prisoner's dilemma

A friend sent me a link to an article about peak oil, which said:

.. it is not hard to figure out what would happen when the government gets around to prioritizing uses.

Food production and distribution would come first, then public health (clean water, sewage, sanitation, medical services), then public safety including the armed forces, and finally some level of economic activity that uses petroleum products.

Suppose there are two countries (call them, say, China and Russia). One has lots of people, one has lots of oil resources. Suppose that if they pool their resources, only 20% of the people in both countries die, but if they fight then 25% of the people in both countries die. However, if they fight, let us say that one wins, the other loses and 10% of the people of the winning country die, with the rest in the losing country.

This is the Prisoner's dilemma at the country level -- they are both better off if they cooperate, but each better off if they defect first. The individuals in the country though, have a much better chance of surviving if their countries defect.

Of course, the political situation isn't that simple: if China were to attack Russia, Europe would perhaps get involved, for example. Also, the first targets would not be the industralized countries (which have armies with teeth), but the African ones that have oil, but not big armies. In any case, the US would get involved and sooner rather than later. The military needs oil to fight, so we would need to lock up a supply for ourselves early on or be rendered a toothless tiger (a motivation for invading Iraq that no one has suggested).

I suspect the order of priorities would (will?) be 1. military 2. food 3. vital services (e.g. water) and then everything else.

Competition

Today on the Krugman blog, I read this quotes:

“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor [Mike Huckabee] said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”

Given (as I and various others believe) that there are too many people around for the earth to support, adding more that are not wanted is a prescription for disaster. Even if there is enough, having children that aren't wanted doesn't strike me as doing anyone -- the children, the parents or society -- any favors.

What mainly strikes me though, is that we should expect a clash of civilizations of some kind, as each group tries to save itself. In that context, having more (unwanted) children makes some kind of sense, because we will "need" the cannon fodder.

I do care about my culture and do want (parts of) it to survive. There are certainly parts I hope we grow out of, but on the whole, I think life for the average person is better today than it has been or is in most places and times and that this is the best hope for a future that is best for people and for the earth. I still shudder at the price we are likely to pay, win or lose.

Powerdowner vs doomer

I read a post the other day that was commenting on the difference between a powerdowner and a doomer. These were new terms to me, but I think I can figure them out from context -- powerdowners think we need to figure out how to live on less energy, so we can all get along and doomers think ... well, that we're doomed.

One powerdowner remarks:

Even though I understand the reasoning, my mind just won't accept the scenario in which billions die. And I would add that I think some people toss those scenarios around pretty casually, without really reflecting on the horror of what it would mean if a billion plus people died of starvation. Look at your family, imagine them starving, and then imagine this playing out on a horrific scale. Then maybe we can get past the casual talk of billions dying off.

I surely hope people aren't casual about billions dying off. It isn't a question of how we feel about it though -- the question is, will it happen?

I don't think it is impossible or even unlikely (given a high tech society) that in the long run we can figure out a source of energy that is both more abundant and less expensive than oil and fossil fuels. In the short run, the next 10 to 20 years, I think the odds are that we'll see serious energy shortages.

The big question for me is, will we have a high tech society? I personally think that it is something that is very much worth striving for. I think the benefits of the world we have made, the science, the knowledge, the opportunities that are available to people, are worth having and very much worth preserving.

On the subject of die-off -- I think it is obvious, but worth saying, that without a high tech society, we will have a die-off in the billions. Before we had our present technology the world population was much lower than it is now. This wasn't because there hadn't been enough generations since the advent of modern humans to produce a population of 6 billion and counting. It is because until recently, the combination of hunger and disease ensured a high death rate and capped the population. It is modern technology that eased those limits, without it we should expect to return to the previous state and the population limits that went with it.

I'm expecting serious disruptions of the systems we work with now. The question is, will the entire structure come totally unglued and leave only scattered human settlements here and there, or none at all? Or will our technology survive and we'll come to a new Renaissance, a new beginning? I'm hoping for the latter, not because I think it is the likely possibility, but because I don't see much point in working or hoping for anything else.

Given a new Renaissance, one that has room for change, the imperative then becomes to find a way to build a society that is able to grow in wisdom, knowledge and real quality of life in a sustainable way? How do we build a world where each child really is wanted and needed, one where the overall population stays within a bound that lets us live in harmony with the rest of the world and future generations?

This is a Utopian goal, I'll admit, but it is mine. It is this goal that I am interested in. Ending hunger, world peace, saving the environment -- all of these are good, all are important and none can be met without finding a way to live in balance.

I guess that makes me an optimist, a starry eyed optimist, in fact. :-)

Population & Malthus

I was wandering around the web the other day and came across a post on why people won't run out of food. Unfortunately, I didn't save the link, but the gist of the argument seemed to be that it hasn't happened in the last 50 years and therefore, it won't. The added feature was that if there seemed to be a problem, technology would fix it.

In and of itself, this argument doesn't seem even remotely compelling. It is obvious that there is a limit to the number of people that can be supported on the resources of the earth, no matter how good our technology is. The science fiction books that suppose an ever increasing human population also suppose space travel to give those people resources to live on.

In the more short term, there is a limit to the number of people that can be supported by the resources and technology we have available or are likely to have in the next 50 years or so.

In this vein, it is perhaps worth noticing that most of the technology we use today rests on fundamental discoveries that were made before the 1920s. These discoveries still have legs (there is a whole world of insight still to be learned in biology), but expecting wholesale magic may be not the thing to bank upon. I do think that a future of hope does depend on science and technology, but that doesn't mean it can solve all problems instantly.

At any rate, a compelling argument against running out of food in the next century would rest on showing on the one hand, where the needed food would come from and on the other hand, why we should seriously expect that the population will voluntarily stop expanding before we reach the limits.

It is worth noticing, I think, that it is the high consumption economies that don't have population growth. Unless there is some reason to expect otherwise, it is reasonable to think that slowing growth requires increasing per capita consumption -- including food consumption. This means that the kind and gentle future people imagine requires coming up with much more energy, food, fresh water and the various other accouterments of a modern high quality life, including, I will claim, hope for further improvements.

Finding the land and the fresh water to come up with food, much less food stuffs higher on the food chain (meat instead of potatoes) for the people around today is a challenge. Adding 1/2 again that many people, plus raising their consumption levels by 10 times or so seems, to say the least, a huge challenge. Until and unless I see detailed calculations that show how it can be done at all, I shall remain more than doubtful. When I add in the ways that people (reasonably, imho) fight over the available resources, rather than cooperating, I truly doubt we will actually avoid hitting a Malthusian event in the next 50 years.

Future population

I read articles sometimes that talk about how there will be 9 to 10 billion people on the planet by 2050 and what the consequences of that will be. I also hear that the UN is projecting that the rate of population growth will go to zero about then and the world population will stabilize.

I don't actually believe all this. "People" are saying there will be half again as many people on the planet in some 40 years and all will be pretty peachy. In the meantime, the rate of increase in food production has slowed and in fact, in the last several years, the grain harvest was less than was eaten.

I listed several potential problems recently:

- lack of arable land
- lack of fresh water
- lack of energy (in particular oil)
- warfare due to desperation, from the people suffering from the lack of food and opportunities (e.g. Darfur, Zimbabwae)
- infrastructure destruction from warfare


What I think is likely to happen is that people who are on the edge, not so far from viability that they simply starve, but people that have some small degree of power, will attack whoever they need to in order to get (or try to get) the resources they need.

These attacks will reduce the effective carrying capacity of the region, increasing the population of those on the edge. That will in turn increase the number and destructiveness of attacks. It's easy to see how this acts as a positive feedback loop with the result that the carrying capacity drops, and thus, the population drops.

I expect that the troubles will generate their own momentum, spreading in space beyond the local areas with the most stress around the world and spreading in time beyond the population drop that would bring the population within the level that could be sustained by a regions resources.

As an example, the New York Times had an article recently on cholera in Iraq. Cholera is spread via contaminated water. Water in Baghdad is becoming hard to get and clean water even harder, as a result of infrastructure destruction. In particular, the chlorine that is used to purify water was held up because it can also be used to make bombs. This is a perhaps somewhat subtle form of infrastructure destruction, that of trust that the material would get to its destination.