First of all, can we feed that many people?
Right now 50% of the habitable surface area of the earth is dedicated to agriculture.
There is no way we can afford to cut down any more forest, which will just accelerate climate change -- but we're doing it anyway. Nevertheless, there's hardly any room left.
Actually, we would have run out of food a long time ago, except for a development called the Green Revolution, which greatly increased crop yields using technology. Unfortunately a big part of that technology is based on fossil fuels, for making nitrogen fertilizer, traction and so on.
Blogger won't let me show you any more graphics today, so we'll leave the story here and pick it up tomorrow. There's a problem of water, which is synergistic with climate change, and a great many more complications.
1 comment:
I was astounded to learn recently that about 2.5% (total) of the Earth's water is fresh water; and only 1% of the fresh water on Earth is accessible to humans.
Makes it easy to understand why water, which seems ubiquitous and bountiful, is actually our most precious, and rapidly disappearing, resource.
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