space habitats

On 6/13/13 10:27 AM, brooksn wrote:

> > http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/aqtrends.html#comparison
>
> This only the US levels for 6 air pollutants. As the graph shows CO2 is
> still increasing from the US. And the graph doesn't show non air
> pollution from US sources. As well the rest of the developing world is
> well, developing, so their output of pollution is on the rise.

All true. Yet it's been a long time since London smog was so thick you
could almost cut it with a knife, or since any busy road in the U.S. had
a more or less constant cloud of blue smoke hovering over it.

It seems to me that early industrialization caused the worst pollution,
and in developed nations, it's been getting steadily better since then.
On a global scale, the big problem is the developing nations, which
(quite naturally) want to industrialize just as we have; the sheer size
of those populations makes their pollution a global issue. However, I
don't think they're as dirty as we were at the start of the Industrial
Revolution, because they have newer, cleaner technologies available to
them then we had back then.

Of course I still don't want to chew the air in Beijing if I can help it.

> > http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Gasoline_Inflation.asp
> >
> > Of course I do believe oil is getting harder (and more expensive) to
> > obtain, but demand for gas is also starting to slip as cars become more
> > efficient, and face competition from electric vehicles. So both supply
> > and demand are going down. How exactly the balance of those will tip is
> > hard to predict.
>
> Well with the Chinese and Indian middle class buying cars and supply
> pretty much stagnant it isn't hard to see that near record prices from
> the graph above are eventually heading up.

Probably. But maybe not -- electric cars are on the early part of a
very rapid growth curve
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/pikeresearch/2013/02/06/dying-ev-industry-set-for-growth/).
Rising gas prices will naturally feed demand for EVs, and it doesn't
seem to me that we've really hit the economies of scale that will be
possible when EVs really catch on. So I expect EVs to get a lot better
and cheaper in the next decade or two, which will apply downward
pressure to gas prices. The net effect is complex.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_price_crisis
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%9311_global_food_crisis
> Here's two food price crisis in the past few years leading to political
> instability.

Fair enough; prices certainly did spike a couple of times. But how bad
was it? Did anyone here notice it at the grocery store? (I didn't.)

As it happens, IEEE Spectrum this month included a special section
called "The Age of Plenty" that dives more deeply into these issues.
The articles appear to be available online:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/the-age-of-plenty

It's great reading, and I highly recommend it. The take-home messages I
got out of it were (1) there's plenty of food; (2) there will continue
to be plenty of food, assuming we continue to invest in agricultural
research; and (3) the Big Ag companies (a handful of companies that
control a disturbingly large portion of the food supply) are a bit
worrisome.

Of course it will help if we can get people to stop fighting GMOs. I
can't believe that golden rice hasn't been widely adopted by now!

> Mining is a carbon intensive process, mining creates lots of heavy
> metals pollution (tailings).

Often true.

> Productivity is mostly to remove expensive
> humans not to reduce pollution or CO2 emmissions.

Probably also often (but not always) true. There certainly is a need
for government regulation here to encourage companies to do the right
thing when it comes to such externalities.

> > True. But neither does inventing or exaggerating problems.
>
> I'll go where the facts take me.

Me too. Yay facts!

> Reducing the population can be done pretty easily, it's shrinking in
> many first world nations right now. Education (in particular girls),
> access to birth control, gender inequality, etc. have been shown to
> reduce birth rates and don't involve force.

Right, and an excellent point too (assuming you meant to write "gender
equality" above). I doubt it would ever dwindle to the point where most
of the Earth is a nature preserve, though, without some outside
incentive. (This doesn't have to imply use of force -- it could be
economic incentives, such as a government or NPO simply buying up land
at prices the owners are willing to accept.)

Best,
- Joe