From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Tue Jun 25 2002 - 08:58:53 MDT
J Corbally wrote:
>
> Another one from the "run to the hills, the end is nigh" dept.
>
> >Human use exhausts Earth
> >http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_2062000/2062729.stm
> >Their analysis suggests that by 1999 the human economy was absorbing 120%
> >of the Earth's productive capacity.
>
> >Their paper, Tracking The Ecological Overshoot Of The Human Economy, uses
> >existing data to translate human demand on the environment into the area
> >needed for producing food and other goods, and for absorbing wastes.
>
> Eeeeer, doesn't that title _presuppose_ an overshoot?
Of course, but it's not hard to expect, especially if you start off by
counting the consumption of fossil fuels, which are a vast bank of past
surplus energy sequestration. ANY industrial economy dependent upon
fossil fuels will rack up an apparent burden on the 'ecology' in excess
of its productive capacity. This doesn't necessarily mean that the
actual ecology of the present is overburdened. Ah, the lies you can tell
with statistics.
For example, lets create a world, Sim-Earth, which has an ecology
producing approximately 10 trillion dollars worth of net resources (i.e.
over and above what is necessary to maintain itself), which would
normally decay away and radiate to space as heat, or else is sequestered
as fossil fuels. Over the last 200 million years, there has accumulated
over 100 quintillion dollars worth of fossil fuels.
There is sentient species Homo Simpians which has developed an
industrial economy that is dependent upon organic chemical technology,
both in energy and materials production, and utilizes 8 trillion worth
of fossil fuels each year, while also exploiting 40% of the annual
ecological production, another 4 trillion, for a global economy of 12
trillion dollars, thus apparently 'burdening' the ecology by 120%.
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