[ExI] English-speaking Google News and Myanmar (Burma)

[hkhenson]

At 05:12 PM 5/16/2008, you wrote:
>Spike:
> >It isn't clear to me what was the not-so-subtle point you had in mind.
>
>The point is that this horrific tragedy is barely in the 'normal'
>English-speaking media (well.. business as usual). At least the Google
>folks are giving it some weight at their news page.
>
>Amara

Amara, some time ago I pointed this mailing list to 
<http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm>http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm

If the coupling between energy and food is as modeled then the ride 
down the back side of peak oil/energy is going to reduce the world's 
human population to a small fraction of the current level.  Going 
"over the top" means the death rate rises to the rate of population 
growth and increasing well beyond that.  In the worse decades, the 
population might fall at a hundred million a year.

The problems are going to vastly exceed our ability to do anything 
about them, even in cases where you don't have a government like 
North Korea or Myanmar.

The rational thing would be to develop replacement energy, and space 
based solar power seems to be the best bet.  But you have seen how 
little interest there is--even on this list.  The next most rational 
thing might be to ignore the bad news since without long lead time 
mega engineering projects we will lack the ability to do anything about it.

It's a bad situation, no doubt about it.

I wonder how many on this list have read either Clark's book or his 
research paper here: 
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf

It describes how the world got to the situation we are in today, 
particularly the great divergence.  It might help provide insights 
about how to get out.  Or might not.

Of course, the singularity will put an end to the suffering, in the 
worst case snuffing out the remaining population.

Keith