Nextbigfuture offers good answers to New Scientists article about revisiting the prophecies of Boom and Doom from the book Limits to Growth
Ugo Bardi has a book The Limits to Growth Revisited.Nextbigfuture has refuted Ugo Bardi's claim that uranium cannot be extracted from Seawater for net energy gain.Ugo looks at the Strait of Gibraltar which carries an ocean current of about 1 Sverdrup.Japan has proposed various scaling up plans for uranium from seawater They look at the Black Current (42 Sverdrup, 42 times stronger than the current Ugo looked at) in the ocean off of Japan and how much materials it is moving.Ugo considers a process where membranes for uranium extraction are carried at sea, submerged for a while, raised, brought back to land for processing, and then the cycle is repeated.Japan is looking at offshore processing, which would save the fuel costs of bringing the absorbent from the ocean to a land based facility.Japan has lab scale work for extraction of uranium from seawater that is about twice the current cost of traditionally mined uranium using cotton dipped in juice with a lot of tannins. Ugo also bases his calculations on once through reactors. Switching to advanced breeder reactors or extensive reprocessing can increase the efficiency of uranium usage by 60 times.Bottom Line - Ugo is over 100 times too pessimistic in the near term and over 10,000 times too pessimistic in the longer term on uranium from seawater.The Limits to Growth Revisited claims are :1. Limits to Growth did not predict that the collapse would happen at 2000 or before.
2. Limits to Growth included technological fix scenariosThey did not and do not have a full set of the technological fixes that are happening today.They do not consider how large the buffers are against collapse. World War 2 level rationing can be used to reduce energy and food requirements by over 90%.
Nextbigfuture has gone over various steps that can be taken to avert collapse in an article in 2009. Sorry Collapsitarians, Doomers and Dystopians a Full Collapse Will Not Happen.One thing of note is that most people usually think that Hitler and Stalin were bad guys for killing or causing the death of about 100 million people. Most of the civilization die off scenarios are that level of death each and every year for 70 years. 1000 times the number of deaths in the holocaust. Why is there the belief that significant mitigation efforts would not be made ?Why it Won't Happen1. Efficiency, conservation and an energy plans can be enhanced beyond current levels with minimal strain. There has been partially voluntary reductions in energy demand during the credit crisis. 10% reductions with minimal effort and 20% reductions with more austerity. 2. Rationing of food, fuel and clothes was successfully maintained in many countries during World War 2. Any resource decline or environmental situation can have governments use rationing to buy time for a transition. The UK had stricter rationing than the USA during and after the war.Thus it shows that oil and food supplies can be greatly reduced while maintaining a war-level mobilization.90% reductions can be handled in this way and possibly more.
Limits to Growth used the MIT World3 computer model to predict that boom would be followed by bust: a sharp decline in industrial output, food production and population. In other words, the collapse of global civilisation.World3 was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The team took what was known about the global population, industry and resources from 1900 to 1972 and used it to develop a set of equations describing how these parameters affected each other. Based on various adjustable assumptions, such as the amount of non-renewable resources, the model projected what would happen over the next century.
Ugo Bardi has a book The Limits to Growth Revisited.Nextbigfuture has refuted Ugo Bardi's claim that uranium cannot be extracted from Seawater for net energy gain.Ugo looks at the Strait of Gibraltar which carries an ocean current of about 1 Sverdrup.Japan has proposed various scaling up plans for uranium from seawater They look at the Black Current (42 Sverdrup, 42 times stronger than the current Ugo looked at) in the ocean off of Japan and how much materials it is moving.Ugo considers a process where membranes for uranium extraction are carried at sea, submerged for a while, raised, brought back to land for processing, and then the cycle is repeated.Japan is looking at offshore processing, which would save the fuel costs of bringing the absorbent from the ocean to a land based facility.Japan has lab scale work for extraction of uranium from seawater that is about twice the current cost of traditionally mined uranium using cotton dipped in juice with a lot of tannins. Ugo also bases his calculations on once through reactors. Switching to advanced breeder reactors or extensive reprocessing can increase the efficiency of uranium usage by 60 times.Bottom Line - Ugo is over 100 times too pessimistic in the near term and over 10,000 times too pessimistic in the longer term on uranium from seawater.The Limits to Growth Revisited claims are :1. Limits to Growth did not predict that the collapse would happen at 2000 or before.
2. Limits to Growth included technological fix scenariosThey did not and do not have a full set of the technological fixes that are happening today.They do not consider how large the buffers are against collapse. World War 2 level rationing can be used to reduce energy and food requirements by over 90%.
Nextbigfuture has gone over various steps that can be taken to avert collapse in an article in 2009. Sorry Collapsitarians, Doomers and Dystopians a Full Collapse Will Not Happen.One thing of note is that most people usually think that Hitler and Stalin were bad guys for killing or causing the death of about 100 million people. Most of the civilization die off scenarios are that level of death each and every year for 70 years. 1000 times the number of deaths in the holocaust. Why is there the belief that significant mitigation efforts would not be made ?Why it Won't Happen1. Efficiency, conservation and an energy plans can be enhanced beyond current levels with minimal strain. There has been partially voluntary reductions in energy demand during the credit crisis. 10% reductions with minimal effort and 20% reductions with more austerity. 2. Rationing of food, fuel and clothes was successfully maintained in many countries during World War 2. Any resource decline or environmental situation can have governments use rationing to buy time for a transition. The UK had stricter rationing than the USA during and after the war.Thus it shows that oil and food supplies can be greatly reduced while maintaining a war-level mobilization.90% reductions can be handled in this way and possibly more.
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