In a mere fifty years time, the kind of living that we have now will be vastly different whether we like it or not. Whilst most planners plan for what they regard as a better future using exponentially more energy, practically no planners plan for a future using a person's share of the amount of solar energy that falls on a person's share of the Earth
Another reality on which the growth-supporting planners fail to recognise, is that the most efficient converter of solar energy to fuel is chlorophyll - especially in grasses, and the most efficient converter of grass into usable energy is animal muscle.
Without the massive amounts of energy we take for granted will always be there, cities of more than a million people cannot possibly exist. And if you believe, as I do, that we should also care for every living and non-living beautiful and wild aspect of this tiny planet if, and if you believe that they all deserve a place on this planet, then the human population must be significantly reduced, not increased. I believe that every aspect of this tiny planet deserves the care that only we humans can provide, which means that we should planning to reduce the human population to a sustainable 500,000,000 humans! Even if this premise is not accepted, planners should be debating and planning for all contingencies - this one too - just in case.
After we have squandered all of our fossil fuels by about 2060, the Sun, chlorophyll and muscle, will be the portable energy and engines we will have to use sparingly and wisely. And soon after our metal machines and tools have worn out or oxidised to dust, the basic materials of wood and rock will be the only available materials for tools and for harnessing our energy sources.
The trouble with short-sighted and unethical planners
Many of today's planners accept the philosophy that given infinite resources and time, if something can be described, it will eventually be invented, and so plan in the expectation that by the time their schemes are put into effect, other problems that the scheme ignores will be solved by somebody else. This is a dangerous premise, because it presumes that known absolute and practical limitations can be ignored.
Such is the case of energy. All planners plan in the expectation that when fossil fuels are exhausted somebody will have found new energy sources, or have been able to "capture" and use solar energy.
It also presumes that the captured heat will have no Global Warming effect because the heat will be re-radiated at night. But the very act of capturing heat for warming insulated houses is preventing re-radiation, and the more people who attain our kind of warm housing in cool climates, the more heat must be retained and further Global Warming must occur. Compared with total solar radiation, such heat retention is minuscule, but it is perilously cumulative.
Planning should be based on known, absolute and practical limitations, combined with practical and realistic expectations. Fine to aspire to the ultimate luxury of the imagination, but not to nihilistically dismiss the probable or possible consequences as it being somebody else's problem.
Those who commission plans have a duty to commission a range of possible scenarios for a better future, not dump on us one 'take it, or we'll give it to you anyway' plan. Even if I am wrong about when we will run out of fossil fuels, planners should be planning NOW for a society with a good, sophisticated quality of life without the prodigious amounts of energy we use. If we did this, future generations could continue with the best attributes of a sophisticated society. If we don't, extinction of society as we know it, is probable. Are we not able to plan for a positive vision without fossil fuels? The Amish do.
The Earth already has far too many people
Scientists have been warning about the dire consequences of overpopulation for logical, responsible, environmental, humane and social reasons.
A most crucial problem that is not being addressed is that third-World families need many children because many of them die from accident, disease, starvation, and genocide, and to care for the parents in their old-age. So these people need many children to maintain a stable, two surviving children population. However, Western doctors save the people from disease, feed them in times of drought and disaster and protect them from genocidal wars, taking away the population regulators and not replacing them with real birth control. As well, many groups use the surplus people as their own armies to acquire wealth and power.
On the other hand, our Western societies have eliminated those five necessities for having large families, and socially responsible nations normally maintain a two-children style of sustainable population.
Aims for maintaining sustainable populations in third-World countries are being compromised by schemes to accommodate the exponentially growing amount of displaced people. For instance, to save excess people from overpopulated countries that refuse to maintain a sustainable population, our politicians devise schemes to bring them to Australia to live like we energy-gobblers in our style of energy-gobbling homes. That is the wrong way around. Excess people normally come from communities that have the kind of sustainable living that we fuel-squandering Western societies should be practising ourselves If any population of animals or plants exceed their sustainability, the excess die or are killed. By eliminating the population regulators within third-world countries and not replacing them with any other means of population control, we are surely killing all of us.
The push for overpopulation is mainly from selfish people who profit from it - they manipulate our culture and emotions, and ask us to provide "humanitarian" succor and use unselfish, caring people to implement their self interest.
The main reason why overpopulation is so well embraced is that businessmen, religious sects and immigration implementers profit from overpopulation, and blithely proclaim "The consequences of overpopulation's not our problem - let scientists or future generations fix it!"
Seizing on such opportunities for a quick dollar, compliant planners plan using unproven and unrealistic premises, proclaiming that they know that it is a problem, but it will fix itself when the World population reaches twelve or twenty billion people or some other figure they pluck without any serious rational.
How many people can Australia sustainably cope with?
To counter this onslaught of "Big Australia" propaganda, we must demand that our Government seek verifiable evidence about Australia's population limits.
To seek public opinion about how many immigrants the public decide is enough, authorities normally put on a pretense of 'Consultation' with the public. However, in fact, they discuss only ONE detailed plan, whose implementation, costings, tenderers, public spin and false propaganda have already been decided. Independent expertise and the public opinion is rarely ever given real regard. And, whilst the public cannot or will not tell you what they would accept, they can tell you what they don't want. If they are given the choice between real alternatives, they normally make good choices. On the other hand, if the Government was serious about finding out how many immigrants their constituents wanted, they would present alternative models and explain their pros and cons to allow the public to make informed choices*.
Normally, I am aghast at government plans and cry out for the government to consult the independent universities and institutions. But even in universities there are population-growth-supporters. Fortunately they are in the minority, if they weren't, we would be in real trouble, there would be good reason for pessimism.
"Big Australia" may be profitable for the incumbent political party and a few vested interests, but it is a perilous problem for most Australians.
The malevolent alliance between Parliament and business about population issues has many benefits for Parliament. It saves Parliament the effort of governing, it brings in much revenue, the government is very well rewarded and protected by its businessmen sponsors, and the task of governance is conveniently done by big business at no cost or effort by Parliament. Normally a small coterie of bureaucratic 'advisors' to government, simply relay the selective data supplied by Big Business. They feed Parliament with the spin of "bigger is better"- develop at any cost. The saved money can be then used for re-election campaigns. Try to govern without us businessmen and see how far you get?
The vested interests certainly make the task of researching data very easy for compliant public service advisors- who get "looked after" in many ways by the businessmen. We allow the government plan for our own demise! What a lot of lotus eaters we allow our politicians to become.
Fifty years is little time left to plan for living without electricity or any the other energy sources we take for granted.
There is an imperative need to plan for an alternative way of living that will protect our tiny planet. It is the obligation of academic planners to demand that the Government and the modern emperors of commerce to change their thinking and have them rethink the value of our resources to avoid the certain oblivion for all of us, and every other living creature including the businessmen themselves. If we don't, we have at the most another 600 months before worldwide catastrophe.
Not long, is it?
Without fuel for transport a city cannot contain more than a million people because its population limit depends on the walking distance between where somebody lives and where their food is produced.
In 1800, London was the most populous city in the World. It had grown to the maximum possible population of one million people. No city could grow bigger than one million because people had to live near to where their food was produced. To transport food further would have cost more fuel (which is of course is food) than there was energy in the food that was being transported. Then Mr Stephenson opened the Pandora's Box of fossil-fuel energy, and Mr Watt invented steam trains. Then, food and the very fuel for the transport (coal) could be got from farms and mines far from the city and transported into the city using fossil fuel. So London was able to grow to well over a million people. And ever cheaper transport allowed machines to be made in factories to extract the coal that allowed the machines to be made that would more-easily extract the fossil fuel. With fossil-fuelled transport spreading around the world, other cities followed and cities of multi-millions of people happened. Then they discovered oil which was easily extracted and more portable, and so it seemed there was no end to the size that cities could grow.
Inventions blossomed, and the mantra became that if you could describe it, somebody would inevitably invent it. Challenges to the Western style of unlimited "growth", limits were and are, for most people, unthinkable.
I challenge that premise because if one looks at history of all the epochs from Rameses to Caesar, from Elizabeth 1 to John Kennedy, popular planners also planned on the premise that their style of living would continue forever, and the only alternative was unthinkable. Where were the wise people who would advise the rulers of the day that the good times they were having would surely end? Where is Paul Ehrlich, what have they done to him?
Shoot the messenger, reward the carpet bagger
Governments never accept advice to take needed action if they thought that they couldn't sell the needed action, even if not taking action would result in catastrophe.
Complete changes to the way we live and our attitudes to sustainability are crucial for mankind to survive the next fifty years. Most governments do not have the wit or communications tools to present a better, simpler and more cultured society. That is because most Western governments leave the governance of the way live to the very people who are creating the problem - the business world! But it is the price we must pay, if we want to survive.
Each epoch has had resources that they thought would go on forever and that was considered to be the proper and progressive order for society. Rameses had religion and slaves, Caesar had tyrannical government and slaves, Elizabeth had law, organisation and commerce, and America had communications and abundant fossil fuels - coal, oil and uranium.
Abundant energy is our mighty servant who provides us such a luxurious lifestyle, but but soon he will be exhausted.
Ours is the energy epoch where our planners also plan with the premise that we will forever have abundant fuels and the consequential communications. They presume that even if fossil fuels become exhausted in some far distant time, by then we will have found new energy sources. Such premises are as flimsy as the premises of Rameses and Caesar. Then the wise people were pilloried as doomsday heretics. So when the end of the era came, the rulers and the people lost everything.
Our present lifestyle depends mainly on two elements, metals and plastics, and both of them depend on fossil energy. The start of civilisation coincided with the bronze age, where copper and tin that were at the surface were melted using wood or coal which was also at the surface. Later other minerals were found that created more effective tools and machines, but that required high melting temperatures, which in turn required digging for fuels and minerals from ever greater depths. These new metals and the new range of tools and machines determined the way in which villages and cities developed and grew. In turn, the new tools and machines allowed people to mine even deeper to retrieve oil and minerals, even to tap geo-thermal energy.
Indeed the machines that foreign companies have bought to Australia can remove as much coal or iron ore in one day from one mine, as every mine in the World used to extract in a whole year. That fact alone and its obvious consequences should frighten every Australian, but we are so comfortable with our lifestyle that we don't want to think too much about it, we prefer to believe the spin doctors of the people who are being enriched by our system.
There is no credible evidence that the most important portable energy source - oil - will be available after 2020, and that's only ten years away. Sure, there will always be oil in the ground and under the sea beds, but when it reaches the energy-equation barrier, that is, when it takes more energy to extract the oil than you can get usable energy from the extracted oil, so it must be left there.
Coal and uranium will suffer the same energy-equation barrier, and Australia's abundant amounts of these easily extracted fuels will soon be gobbled up cheaply by overseas businesses to finance Australians revelling in an unsustainable bath of energy wastage - until it has run out by about 2060. Some vested interests from energy companies or their subsidised academics in purchasable universities have estimated that we have another two hundred years of fossil fuel left. Their evidence for this is palpably optimistic. They are trying to sell a fools' paradise. The Western World consumes most of all the energy sources but China and India are rapidly attaining standard-of-living parity. That would at least halve the run-out dates. So it would be prudent to plan for an earlier run-out date.
Whichever date you believe, planners have an obligation to plan for alternative contingencies. In any case, Australia will eventually be left with a lot of holes in the ground in a mainly desert country that is incapable of maintaining a population of twenty million, let alone thirty. And the overseas companies will inevitably return to their home countries when the plunder is over.
What is so precious about human life?
Question: Isn't saving every human life a moral obligation for we privileged Western societies?
Answer: What is so precious about human life? There is an even greater moral obligation to save our small planet, humanity itself and every other living species!
What the planners are planning for Australia in 2060 will result in a desert with many big holes
Planners will tell you that a probable fuel-less desert for Australia is "not our problem", because the absence of fuels is not part of our brief, and we can only get funding to develop plans according to our brief which predicts endless energy for the foreseeable future.
Another problem is that politicians will never commission planners to devise plans for them unless they know that the planners will predict an easier, more comfortable and secure lifestyle that they can easily sell to their constituents. So although planners may want to plan for an energy and metal-free quality lifestyle - who will fund such reality? Dick Smith?
Wisdom is in an uneven battle with greed and lazy parliamentarians.
In a recent clip of the greatest environmental visionary of our epoch, Dr Paul Ehrlich, it showed him working away on an old computer in a modest room by himself. To counter Ehrlich's kind of wisdom and need for meagre resources, the energy emperors have virtually unlimited money, a veritable army of spin doctors and publishing house of propaganda mechanics to sell their produce for quick profit. What little chance do people like Ehrlich and truth stand?
The myth of "Clean" energies
Other energy-crisis deniers maintain that, after fossil fuels are exhausted, the so-called "natural" energy sources such as wind, solar panels, mirror solar collection, space sails, geo-thermal, wave, tidal, hydro, hydrogen and so on will then be "harnessed" to perpetuate our life-style. The illogicality of this premise is that all of the energy-gathering devices for capturing and converting the "natural" energies to usable energy and transmitting these energies, are dependent on massive amounts of the products of fossil energy.
Modern windmills and wave harnessing machines are made of plastic and steel and only last twenty years, solar panels are made of glass and plastic and also have a useful life of about twenty years, mirror solar collectors can last about 50 years, but they are normally situated far from where energy is needed and the getting of energy from where it is generated to where it is needed is not economical. Geo-thermal has problems such as mineralisation of pipelines and the cooling of the hot spot from whence the heat is drawn, which can cause seismic pressure buildup and again they present transmission problems. Tidal power and hydro power depend on building weirs and turbines built and maintained using vast amounts of fossil fuels and they vastly change the ecology and sedimentation of the area.
When coal and oil are exhausted, satellites and the promise of energy-gathering sails in space will be impossible without the massive amounts of fuel and high-tech equipment needed.
Fusion energy. The dreamers' dream of endless energy.
All generating and transmission mechanisms must eventually decay and disintegrate. And if you are thinking nuclear fusion energy, consider this - scientists have been trying to obtain useable energy from nuclear fusion for sixty years but despite virtually unlimited resources, nobody has done it. No learned body believes it will ever likely to be achieved because nobody believes that the temperature necessary to achieve fusion, that is 5800k, is possible to be contained let alone harnessed on Earth.
All of the available "natural" energy sources could not possibly supply even a fraction of that to which our present lifestyle is accustomed, and for an increased population the proposition is palpably ludicrous. When the end of fossil fuels happens in 2060, there will be a return to renewable material machines like wooden waterwheels, Dutch-style windmills, Amish-style horse driven transport and wooden sail ships, because we will be without metals and electric power.
Is a lifestyle as sophisticated as people like the Amish have not a better quality than ours? Do they not enjoy themselves as much or more than we do? We should study and learn from such good and cultured people's lifestyles.
Energy availability is inextricably linked to the problem of the population explosion, and all people wanting, demanding or seizing their share of fossil energy. The planners are not planning for those scenarios! They say it's not their problem, because it's not their brief, and it's not their responsibility to stand up and trumpet if and when they see that the end of our way of life is about to happen.
The richest, most powerful governments on Earth are the energy companies. OPEC for one, is far more powerful and influential than the United States or the EEC, and they are not obligated to any morality or electorate. Their product is energy, and challenges from people who voice rational concerns about their product are met a hundred times over by refutations, not from them, but from their compliant minions and scientists who drown out dissent. The energy companies offer an endless life of luxurious worldly riches using endless supplies of energy.
As I have said, each epoch's planners planned on the premise that an alternative kind of living to theirs was intolerable and unthinkable. As history has shown, they were wrong and failed to plan for the ends of the era with tragic consequences. If we ignore the lessons of the past, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. But this time, nuclear fusion may well be the ultimate energy source to quickly not only implement the mistakes but to end everything and all the wealth of learnings humanity has amassed.
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