One of my favorite bloggers, Crash-Watcher has continued his analysis of regional petroleum production and consumption trends, and, the implications this has for population growth. These are published in the last five installments of his large study. He concludes the population growth will continue for quite some time, though some regions could suffer die-off soon.
In Part 6 Predicting regional and global peak oil and total recoverable oil he engages in a fantasy by which the North American region continues and even increases its consumption of oil, until there simply is not any left, as soon as 2028 or as late as 2047. He concludes "The USA’s consumption rate must go down—it is time to grow up and deal with it." Rots of Ruck!
Part 7 The relationship between global population and global petroleum production examined the correlation between global population and petroleum consumption and considered the merits of two possible scenarios for population change in light of declining petroleum production. He considered both Jay Hanson's die-off scenario where 90% of the earth's population dies an untimely death, and Julian Cribb's conclusion that we need a new Green Revolution to feed the growing throngs. Cribbs sees the huge challenge facing farms is how to double the food supply with less water, less land, less petroleum, less petrochemical based fertilizers and pesticides, and less money being invested in new technologies.
CW searched for the relationship between population decline and declining petroleum consumption in Part 8: Searching for evidence of population decline during periods of declining petroleum consumption for various regions in the world and concluded that our ability to "grow" our way out of the dilemma was limited at best. Dropping consumption did not limit population growth. He proposed the hypothesis that The population will continue to grow in these seven different regions of the world, at least until the per capita petroleum production/consumption drops below a certain critical level that is needed to support a petroleum-driven Green Revolution. Once production per capita declines below that critical level, I expect to see a decline in the region’s population, in proportion to the per capita petroleum consumption rate decline. The question was, how much petroleum consumption is needed to sustain food production.
CW next looked into the issue of how much petroleum is required to produce the food required by the current population in his article Part 9: Estimating the critical levels of petroleum consumption necessary to sustain the modern food production system and concludes that he estimates that the critical, or limiting, petroleum inputs of the food system are in the form of diesel fuel used in food production on farms (about 1.1 b/yp) and diesel fuel for food transportation to markets (presently about 0.6 b/py). Together, these critical needs can be met by a total of about 1.7 barrels of petroleum per person per year. All of the other petroleum products involved in the food system (pesticides, fertilizers, packaging gasoline for the public to drive to the grocery store) can be made from the other petroleum products produced from this same 1.7 barrels.
Finally, in Part 10: Peak oil exports, peak oil and implications for population change he summarizes his analysis that he has written in 70 single-spaced pages, +50 figures and scores of tables produced over the course of two months. He reaches the conclusion that the world's population will necessarily drop because of a scarcity of food resulting from a scarcity of petroleum to produce that food. He projects that whether regions share their food or not, by 2050 the world's population will have dropped to between 3 and 5 billion, down from a potential maximum of 8.5B in the 2035 time zone.
CW is to be congratulated for completing a long and concise analysis of the future of both population and petroleum products available to the people of the earth. His results offer the basis for more study into this problem, and make it clear that there is a problem to study.
