You must be either mentally handicapped or purposely ignorant.

There are no shortages of food due to population ANYWHERE in the world. The food shortages that do exist, tragic as they are, all have in common transportation and corruption issues, not an inability to produce sufficient quantities of food.

I also stated quite clearly (for those who do not have mental capacity issues) that indeed there are energy resource issues looming. However, to quote myself, I have the same confidence it will happen again, even if I cannot point to WHAT the solution will be at this point in time.

Keep avoiding those sharp objects.

I was talking about previous predictions of food shortages, water shortages, various other natural resource shortages predicted in the past. None of them came to fruition.

Which is why hundreds of thousands of people are starving in the Sudan, hundreds of thousands have died of starvation in Ethiopia & Somalia in the last couple of decades and why many more are likely to starve in Kenya. It's also why millions are slaughtering each other in the Congo. Not to mention the massive decline of the Russian population in the last couple of decades.

An estimated 30,000 die of starvation globally every day.

But like you said, there are no food, or resource shortages anywhere in sight…

Haiti’s poor resort to eating mud as prices rise

4800 Starvation Deaths in India in Last 4 Years: Naqvi (If they are reporting 4800, it's probably a lot more).
India: Tribes, living in stigma and starvation
Trapped Sri Lankans face starvation

Bleak warning that UK fish face extinction

The report said the rate of loss of fish in British seas was accelerating, with formerly abundant species such as the common skate appearing on lists of endangered species. Only eight of the total of 47 fish stocks found around the British Isles remain in a healthy state, the report says, adding that the size and quality of the fish is falling as younger fish are taken out of the sea: “A hundred years ago a large plaice had to be 50-60cm long and weigh 1.5-2kg to be considered big. Today plaice fillets are sold as 'large' when they weigh just 125g. Fish this size have never had a chance to breed.”

Mexico oil exports plummet

antarell, which was pumping more than 2 million bpd in 2004, yielded only 713,000 bpd in April, down more than 35% from a year ago, according to energy ministry data.

The latest fall at Cantarell was partially offset by increased output at the nearby Ku Maloob Zaap offshore heavy oil field.

Ku Maloob Zaap, which recently overtook Cantarell as Mexico's biggest producer, yielded a record 814,000 bpd in April, near the maximum 820,000 bpd Pemex thinks it can produce.

Output at Ku Maloob Zaap is expected to begin to decline to 810,000 next year, however.

Not to far in the future, it's very likely that Malthus is going to laugh his ass off as the world runs out of oil…

But remember there are no food, or resource shortages anywhere in sight…

Julian Simon had a great time winning the debates about these things. He is gone, but not the “Malthusians” (and others turning climate science into PC Lysenkoism as well as a form of religion), who have seized for years now on global warming as their new problem threatening hyped catastrophe (beyond alarmism at times, to catastrophism) and “crisis” [sic] requiring prompt Usual Solutions (same as for the other “crises” in nature and intent).

* * *

“DLS: “green jobs” in practice, in reality, are often found in China and Mexico rather than in the USA, which left Dems like Waxman have not failed to notice.

This is just plain wrong.”

Well, Waxman does act frequently as if he doesn't notice or know things, admittedly, as well as act in ways to induce industry to relocate overseas.

But it's true that production (not installation, which can't be outsourced) in China or Mexico rather than in the USA is well-known already, and was the subject of ads for a while here in Michigan.

Installation cannot obviously be exported, though beware of more foreign workers, with green cards for green jobs.

Related:

http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/pdf/gjfgreenjobsrp…

http://www.greenmomentum.com/wb3/wb/gm/gm_conte…

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/…

Etc.

“It is still our choice if we want to be a leader in green tech or just buy it from Asia and Mexico.”

At what cost? Is this neglected, as is the fabrication of the components you have neglected when you concentrate only on the last step before grid connection when you say with wind,”The wind plant can be up [in] a week”?

* * *

“If we spent every dollar on wind energy that we currently spend on drilling for oil we would NEVER need another oil well.

Wind is intermittent. It's not a base load supply source for electricity; it can't compete seriously with coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro where we have hydro. (Where we can do more hydro, we should.) And what about transportation and space heating, the principal uses of oil, not for electricity generation?

“Transmission and storage problems are not as daunting as you suggest but they'll damn sure be harder if we wait until copper is critically short in supply.”

Storage is prohibitively daunting right now and will remain so for ages. This is what has always killed the electric vehicle, and what keeps battery-powered electric vehicles (rather than ground-level or overhead power supply-using vehicles) a distant future item, still largely a dream.

* * *

“Swapping an incandescent bulb for a compact fluorescent amounts to less than 4 cents a kWh”

Conservation can help (I thought of the compact fluorescent bulb when touring an old submarine last year, and considering how long and well it could last submerged during combat operations), but never has been the magic solution so many believe it is (we will grow and need more power in our future, not less), much less a legitimate excuse for deliberate deprivation or lowering of our standard of living.

* * *

“Your love of nuclear is surprising as I generally consider you a skeptic of talking points “

Does not follow. But yes, I support nuclear power, of course, though it's too expensive now often to compete with coal, the other, cheaper, primary electrical power source. Nuke start-up costs are great, and don't forget the decommissioning. The newest designs need to be tried (if Uncle Sam is to do R&D, this deserves priority, along with things like converting coal into liquid fuels for transportation to satisfy our needs in the short to medium term), and of course tort reform is overdue, as the costs of an accident are wrongly elevated. Even with all this, nuclear can make sense. It does here in Michigan, but it and coal plants (which also make so much sense still and which are sought here) are fought by crazies and by a governor enamored of PC over sensibility. Business and residential power customers aren't so enamored, to say the least.

We know it's popular among some…

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/dis…

This is just plain wrong. Installation of solar panels, insulation, windows and doors, lighter colored roofing, more efficient water heaters, space heaters, etc. All of these are American green jobs and furthermore CANNOT be outsourced to China or Mexico. They are local installations in all 50 states. The green economy touches every single community with local jobs and better sustainability.

The installed products can be domestic, as most insulation, roofing, windows and doors are. The fact that many of the other products, such as solar panels (Japan, China) and appliances are not American made is due to YOUR love of globalization and disregard for maintaining our own manufacturing sector. We CHOSE to give up those industries so we could buy cheaper stuff abroad. It is still our choice if we want to be a leader in green tech or just buy it from Asia and Mexico.

If we spent every dollar on wind energy that we currently spend on drilling for oil we would NEVER need another oil well. Long after that oil well is dry, the wind generator will still be cranking out power (From NREL). Transmission and storage problems are not as daunting as you suggest but they'll damn sure be harder if we wait until copper is critically short in supply. Your love of nuclear is surprising as I generally consider you a skeptic of talking points (maybe only “leftie” talking points.)

Let me dispossess you of this one. Nuclear energy from a new plant will cost 8-11 cents a kWh. Wind energy costs 5 cents per kWh. Swapping an incandescent bulb for a compact fluorescent amounts to less than 4 cents a kWh. Plus, it takes 10 years -minimum- to get a nuclear plant online. The wind plant can be up an a week. DLS, it seems to me you are ideologically opposed to something that is obviously the more practical solution.

Furthermore, unless we use taxpayer dollars to insure the nuclear industry (Price Anderson Act), not a single nuclear plant will ever be built here. None has been built without the government “insuring” against loss and liability in over 40 years. As one who curses people for shirking personal responsibility, as one who deplores government intervention and handouts, as one who argues for the private market model of health care insurance, how can you blithely go along with an industry that can't pay its own way, needs big daddy to make it profitable and shield it from loss and liability and is economically nonviable compared to available alternatives?

Look at American oil as an example. We've used 80%. No more has been found. The last 10% is horribly expensive to get (tar sands, oil shale etc). You want to just use up the rest right now? How selfish, in my opinion. If US Oil was a 6 pack, we've finished 4 cans and opened the fifth. Do you really want to finish that one and open the last can before your kids can even drink?

I think that is the very definition of selfishness and poor planning.

“The resource de jour was going to run out, population growth was unsustainable, and mass death and plague were just around the corner.”

NOTE: This Malthusian mentality has been applied to (as an excuse for the Usual Solutions for) the current “crisis,” global warming, climate change, or whatever it will be called next.

One thing that will brighten our future (even if all the electricity to power it indirectly were from coal) will be electric vehicles (and all kinds of new uses for new batteries) and fuel cells (for vehicles, for portable power, for “off-grid” power supplies for buildings, which means even space heating can be electric, and thus cleaner than nowadays with gas, as most space heating uses).

But when it comes to Instant Miracles, the regurgitation of unrealistic belief in Wind and Solar (the change from Hard Power to Soft Power as lib activists called it in earlier decades) along with Instant Electric Cars, what we definitely see is:

“Green tech is another feel-good crunchy-granola term that has no basis in actual business facts or models, except to detach money from the federal government and stupid liberals with cash.”

We see all of this currently in Michigan, with Governor Granholm's breathy (and vapid) gushing about the electric car and New Batteries (the $40,000, 40-mile-range Miracle Chevy Volt has already been admitted by Government Motors officials that it will lose money) and “green jobs,” “green industry,” and “green” everything. Meanwhile, she joins the stupid crusaders mindlessly against both coal now and nuclear now and later for baseline power production, and joins the wacky Obamaniacs in support of legislation that requires imposed, arbitrary proportions of generation that must be “alternative” or “green” sourced as the years go along — which makes us informed people as well as businesses deeply concerned.

So far, there's no progress on any uprating or new transmission construction to support 765 KV (we have 345 KV from the Sixties — like the auto makers — currently, here). Nor is there widespread understanding of the correct role of wind energy, the favored pet right now (even though winds are good in some places but troublesome in others, and the NIMBY problem is due to happen in parts of this state near communities, developed lakeshore areas, and state parks), while the “green jobs” in practice, in reality, are often found in China and Mexico rather than in the USA, which left Dems like Waxman have not failed to notice.

This “green” silliness in Michigan as well as in Washington, DC with the Obamaniacs (play-pen stuff!) adds to the lyrics of a foreign band's song that already describes the shift of center of modern auto industry in the USA from Detroit to Nashville. And what of other businesses and people in Michigan, and elsewhere there is silliness or deliberately business-unfriendly choices made by government?

The boom time it is over
A ghost town is all that's left here
The gold rush it is over
And depression days draw near

Tonight after sundown
I'm going to pack my case
I leave without a sound
Disappear without a trace

I'm going southbound

Drifting like a drover
Chasing my career
From the ships docked in the harbour
New horizons will appear

Tumbling with the tumbleweed
Down the open road
Taking only what I need
Before my head explodes

I'm going southbound

Hey, you're not getting any younger
The wild west has already been won
Northern lights are growing colder
And the old eastern ways are gone

So tonight after sundown
You must go from this place
Without a tear, without a frown
Disappear without a trace

I'm going southbound

That is the exact type of ongoing gloom and doom that I reject. Making such predictions is the way to become the darling of academia and the press, but when the predictions fail to come true, and those who argued that currently unforeseen market forces would prevail over temporary current shortages are proven right, time after time, the doom and gloomers maintain a pristine reputation, and the correct predictors are shuffled off the stage. Inconvenient truths are not liked one little bit by the Left, which makes its stock in trade false crisis that they and only they can save us from, and almost always by claiming the need to ration.

As for my children, they have just prepared themselves for the future, having acquired valuable skills in the case of my son, and in the process of acquiring a new set of valuable skills for my daughter. They are also adaptive self-starters who feel it is their responsibility to take control of their life, not sit on their asses crying and waiting for for the government to take care of them and make it all better.

We also don't see the sky falling as you do, Chicken Little (you really need to change your avatar and name. You do not tilt at windmills; you run from their shadows in ignorance and fear).

We are not blind to the coming troubles. Both of my children have been raised to expect exactly $0 from Social Security and other such government programs, as they are unsustainable. I am one who has been saying non-stop at TMV and elsewhere that the worst of the recession has not hit, as commercial real estate, high interest rates and hyper-inflation all are on the horizon.

But you don't curl up into a fetal position and whine like a baby about the unfairness and nastiness of life. You plan for it, you deal with it, you overcome it, and if plan A doesn't work, you go on to plan B, then plan C and so on. But you don't give up, you don't wallow in self-pity, and you don't look for someone else to rescue you. It is called self-reliance and resilience.

Hope you have done as good a job preparing your children, but it seems from your comments you are preparing them to live in a post-apocalyptic world in a cave. Good luck with that.

And there is no doubt in my mind that in 10 years, my son and daughter, both of whom have just entered the work force (my daughter of course has a temporary setback), will be making at least 2 times, and very likely more than 4 times more than their starting salaries.

They are either ridiculously underpaid at the present time, or they have rare and exceptional skills that are difficult to acquire. Far more likely, you are in for a nasty surprise when they move in with you permanently ten years from now.

Here is a good comparison list, btw:

Cents Per Kilowatt-Hour

It is currently less expensive to generate electricity with wind than nuclear or fossil fuels, and conservation is more cost-effective than any of these. Why demean those who are working to help your children have a better life?

HA HA HA HA HA!

Green tech, A.K.A. as Liberal Mortgage Backed Securities, Collateralized Debt Obligations, and Enron Energy Swaps.

Green tech is another feel-good crunchy-granola term that has no basis in actual business facts or models, except to detach money from the federal government and stupid liberals with cash.

I'm not sure if you're implying that I believe the world owes me anything. I don't and have succeeded entirely on my own initiative. I also think we have a duty to our children to have a little concern about their futures. Passing on to them a degraded planet and a mountain of debt doesn't satisfy my ethical standards. How about yours?

And there is no doubt in my mind that in 10 years, my son and daughter, both of whom have just entered the work force (my daughter of course has a temporary setback), will be making at least 2 times, and very likely more than 4 times more than their starting salaries.

The point I have been making is even older people than I, like say you, go around grousing about the rotten state of the world, and how the good times are behind us.

The young instead see the opportunities that you are too hide-bound to notice, and are willing to make the effort to position themselves to both take advantage of and help drive to the next version of the economy.

At least the ones that are not raised to think the world owes them some pre-determined standard of living with no effort on their part.

Looking at rising health care costs between countries, ours increased as a % of GDP from 7% to 15.4% 1970-2004. In the same period Canada's increased from 7% to 9.9%. Germany 6.2% to 10.6. UK 4.5 to 8.1.

(note for those who think insurance rate increases are due to increased health care cost. Insurance rates doubled in 8 years, health care costs doubled in over 30 years)

DLS, let me acknowledge that I do know entitlement spending is a problem, or will be within a few decades. I am confident we will find a way to afford it, and I fervently hope it will be by deep cuts in military spending and increasing GDP by becoming world leaders in green tech, the growth industry of the 21st century.

No, just revised, downward. There are no guarantees or “rights” for people to expect things to be as they were in the “Golden Era,” as Roger Bootle named it (1950 to 1973, from recovery after World War II and putting the USA into high gear domestically, to the oil embargo and oil shock, of increasing ambition and expectations about living standards and capability of people and government to achieve anything, only a matter of time before goal X would be achieved). Moreover, in addition to environmental problems (and also crowding and costs in higher-demand Southwestern and Southeastern locations where people have been migrating and will continue to migrate), there will be an increasing need for education and problems for those who don't have it, as low- and unskilled labor becomes revalued as the rest of the world continues to develop and to be opened to trade (labor being repriced to its correct, truly global, level).

Environmental, cost, crowding problems? Some of these will be met as they must, by increased development and exploitation of natural resources (including large water transfer projects, tapping the Great Lakes to be more seriously considered later than now, and so on, in addition to more power plants of all kinds and continued imports of petroleum even as we finally better exploit our own). Some of these will be met by going elsewhere, other than south and west to the most desireable locations, meaning a welcome trickle into the Midwest and even back into northern and Northeastern Blue Nation ghost states for year-round in addition to summer-vacation living. The reckoning of too much government size and cost will be resolved some way — I still say it will be an attempt to spread the pain evenly among retirees (the government beneficaries of obvious note) and the taxpayers. No telling how labor shortages will transpire. (Replacement migration to the levels needed for today's retiree-taxpayer ratios is impossible.)

* * *

“I DO look at the exponential function with respect to government programs, as well as private ones.”

I hope you look at this, too.

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html