LifeItself

 Five years ago, I described this very famous 1980 wager  here . Wikipedia has a good, understated description  of the wager.   Ehrlich-Simon wager according to the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan V. Last , August 30, 2013, more less when I started analyzing this wager. The fact that Ehrlich "lost" according to the omnipotent neoliberal economists was used broadly as a vindication of the power of economics in predicting what would happen in the physical world.  But were the economists mostly spouting nonsense, as is their long-standing tradition? Natural copper.  Copper is one of the most important metals in the global economy that gravitates towards the "low carbon solutions" (whatever this term may mean to you). Source: Wikipedia. In short, Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper (Cu), ch...

The essence of my unchanging argument is as follows: An exponential growth of human population can be supported for a while by a similarly exponential increase of production of power as primary energy per unit time and food we must eat each day. After a certain time interval , whose length depends on the rate of population growth and technology, both the population and the means of its survival must stabilize or collapse.  The elapsed time to collapse depends strongly on the rate of deterioration of environmental services of the Earth: abundance of clean air, water, good soil, large healthy forests, and biodiversity in general, as well as on the healthy oceans. Please note the two key phrases: "for a while" and "a certain time interval."  My argument is generally  rejected, because most people focus on the here and now, and forget that a few decades are less than a blink of an eye in history of humanity.  In the more sophisticated circles of "main-stream...