Peak oil will be severe problem and it may cause some problems if cold fusion is not going to come into rescue. It is no secret that current transportation systems are too heavily based on oil and there are no viable alternatives for oil.
On resource consumption, agriculture consumes more than 95 % of non-renewable resources (i.e. top soil) and it could be fully replaced by vertical farming. Therefore any malthusian scenarios are false because they do not consider that what vertical farming has to offer. Vertical urban farming would also offset somewhat the dependency on oil, because agriculture consumes 20 percent on oil and in addition to that there is food transportation costs, that are eliminated if food is produced mostly on local vertical farms. However what is a problem is that the economic structure is based more and more on supply of debt rather than increasing demand on the market. This may cause severe economic crisis in near future. Economic policy should be aimed on increasing demand, if we want to ensure the growth of purchasing power, that people has enough money to buy vertically cultivated food and have purchasing power to buy goods that are produced on recycled materials. If we optimise the purchasing power of consumers, we effectively have the Star Trek economy. It is good to read Dan Pink's book Drive, then it will make very much of sense how much more effective Star Trek economy is where everyone has plenty, but not too much, indifferently on what they do. —Jouni Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html On 6 Apr 2012, at 22:14, Alain Sepeda <[email protected]> wrote: > another malthusianst reasoning that will be proved false once again... > I was convinced in 85 that it will hard to have transistor below 1µm... I > laugh today of my lack of imagination. > > 2012/4/6 <[email protected]> > http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-04/new-research-tracks-40-year-old-prediction-world-economy-will-collapse-2030 >
