This is a persistent myth that really needs to die. Right now, per capita world food production is roughly 3000 calories/day/person. This means that with present food production, even assuming we never get another ounce of efficiency, we could feed a world population up to 9-10 billion. At present growth trends, demographers expect world population to top out at about 10-12 billion and then start declining just because of lower birthrates in industrialized countries. We only need a slight increase to support that, and we're home free.

So why are there starving children in Africa? It's almost always because of distribution problems throughout war-torn regions with poor infrastructure. In the south of a country, they'll be famine and war, while in the north food rots in the fields.

The impediments to good nutrition for all are all social, not scientific. If we weren't such assholes, nobody would be dying of hunger.

Not even problems, those could easily be fixed. We in the West know a lot about logistics. The underlying cause is that people like Mugabe find it politically useful that their opponents starve. The "fix" for that is regime change, something we used to be able to do (Germany, Japan) but those skills are long since lost.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5177

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5241

Food has to get really expensive before birth rates decline. Survival rates get hit first by lack of food.

> Birth rates are below replacement rates in a lot of countries that keep their population growing mostly by immigration.

The countries that have low birth rates are rich, not poor. To be crude, TV is one of the most effective better birth control devices. (The poor countries with low/shrinking population have man-made disasters.)

This is because petrochemical fertilizers, tractors powered by internal combustion, etc. are still going strong.

The cause of reduced birth rates is the availability of contraception, of course. It used to be that even if a man didn't like to have children, he couldn't help it as long as he wanted to have sex. Now that this is no longer true, it's quite likely that the average man will be increasingly fond of children, or increasingly averse to contraception. Evolution, much like progress, won't be stopped.

1. This gene exists (and is the main factor in determining how many children people have.)

2. Other genes won't become more important.

I would bet on both of these assumptions being false, but it's certainly possible that they hold.

However, the amount of oil used for fertilizer is a drop in the bucket compared to that used for transportation. So if we reach (or have reached) peak oil and the price of oil starts jumping, we'd feel it in our gas bill a lot sooner than we'd feel it in our food bill. And that'd spur people to get fuel efficient cars: if everyone switched from an SUV to a Prius or Fit, the amount of oil saved is several times the amount used in agriculture.

It's still nowhere near as wasteful as turning half of U.S. cropland into corn plantations to grow ethanol. You want an inefficient means of turning food into oil, try ethanol subsidies.

Not so fast. Building cars costs significant energy. The result can easily be more energy consumption.

Not to mention that switching doesn't necessarily work. In most cases, the only realistic alternative to "big car" is multiple vehicle even if the big vehicle's capacity goes unused most of the time. Owning two vehicles, one big for "those days" and a small one for the rest of the time is usually more expensive than owning just the big one unless the small one is very cheap.

I've posted the arithmetic. If the big car gets 15-20mpg, the small one has to cost less than $4k even if it gets 50mpg. (My arithmetic was conservative because I just looked at purchase and gas, which ignore many of the costs associated with a second car.) If the big car gets 25, it's almost impossible to save money with an additional vehicle.

And no, renting doesn't work out significantly better.

As for the article, I find it distasteful. Generalized, sweeping statements without hard evidence to back most of them. And here we are two years later (which is mighty close to a "few years" later, which he referred to in the article) and none of the predictions are even close to becoming huge problems. (The current economic problems are not related to his predictions.)

Why are you so sure of that?

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-p...

He is not a "USSR survivor", he moved to the States in the age of 12 in 1980s, before shit really hit the fan. Wikipedia says he's been "on extended trips to Russia" in early 1990's. I reckon this sort of safari in late teen age is all of his acutal post-USSR experience and is the basis for all of his reasoning.

To many of his audience, his prose and predictions come off as something cool, sort of like Fallout, Escape from New York or a Gibson novel come live. Well, as someone who actually lived there at the time, I can assure you it wasn't nearly as cool or exciting. You couldn't "hire a couple of soldiers with AKs to follow you around", there were no barrels burning as improptu street lights, and one couldn't get a slice of Pu239 at a grocery market. There was, on the other hand, massive amount of financial and humanitarian aid coming from the USA and Western Europe, and a huge improvement in standards of living (it was that low to begin with).

I would say his factual parts are not entirely factual, he wasn't enough of insider to convey how it was for insider there, his vision is skewed and he has a fair anti-US bias. When I read him I visualize that excited, giggly expat teenager on a trip to former homeland, that's who he still is.

Of course, I doubt we would even have time to know it was happening to us in that case.