Consider for a moment, hypothetically that the recent spike in oil brought just enough investment to solar and oil both, that combined with the supply side of oil, and solar R&D…could solar potentially be ready to breach a tipping point, towards grid parity?
Could expensive energy be behind us?
Look up the history, on how the internet got so cheap. Recall: an investment boom of people looking to catch the trend, without enough demand (at the time), sent many of the hard assets the investors put money into back to the banks. The banks sold assets off for $0.10 on the dollar, to new investors who gave away the service until economies of scale kicked in.
What if the ceiling is now $65, on the price of oil?
What will that do to the growth of civilization? Demand for commodities? Water? Technology? What if energy isn’t the bottled neck that stops our growth?
What if economies of scale make our planet more effecient, as the population doubles quicker and quicker?
What if space, physical square footage, is the finite resource we one day value the highest?
If we hit 200 people / Km squared, assuming that’s where space will start to become a problem, that will mean ~30B people. 80 years of 1.9% population growth and we’re there.
So, what will it be, energy? water? both? or space?
Update: I started playing with the world usage stats, from 1993…from Wikipedia:
| Arable land: |
13.13%[6] |
| Permanent crops: |
4.71%[6] |
| Permanent pastures: |
26% |
| Forests and woodland: |
32% |
| Urban areas: |
1.5% |
| Other: |
30% |
I don’t know how it totals to 107%, so for argument sake, lets just say Other is 26%, because the data doesn’t show a “rural” area, and lets set permanent pastures to 23%. Both of these assumptions, are likely more conservative…for my argument I’m about to make. So, we have:
| Arable land: |
13.13%[6] |
| Permanent crops: |
4.71%[6] |
| Permanent pastures: |
23% |
| Forests and woodland: |
32% |
| Urban areas: |
1.5% |
| Other: |
26% |
Redefining the 26% and 32% (58% total) as “free and ready to turn into effecient crops or efficient cities at the drop of a hat”, then 58% of the planet left to violate, and turn into crops. So, if we did that, it would take 2.4x the current population to use up all the land, using the ratios we currently use. That means 3.6% of the land will need to house 16.3B people, or living conditions of 3000 people per Km squared of urban land or ~109 people per square Km of land, footprint wise.
50 years, at 1.8% population growth, and we’re there. Huh. And, I’d say, my asumptions were very conservative. 100% of the land, isn’t livable nor farmable…sooo…shit, should I be buying farm land instead of oil? Screw dollars, gold, education…real stores of wealth will be in memories and real-estate.
