graeme_b

Why would someone go well above and beyond mod duties for free anymore?

You've talked a lot about financial issues and health issues. You have touched on the environment, but not said much about energy use.

I see this as our greatest fragility. Currently, we largely use stored energy to power our society: oil, coal, natural gas. That took millions of years to accumulate, but we treat it as a renewable resource. We track annual oil output, etc.

We treat other resources this way as well. Much agriculture depends on fossil aquifers, or aquifers which are being pumped far above the replacement rate. Topsoil is disappearing above the replacement rate.

We've increased our population by dipping into capital resources. I view this as the greatest fragility of all. This new population depends on continued use of our capital stock of resources.

Do you agree with this analysis, and do you have any thoughts on how to address this fragility in our system?

Thanks. I actually wasn't referring to pollutants though. Rather, I'm concerned at the problem of supporting our future population when our current food production is heavily based on non-renewable inputs.

For decades food production has been growing. But once these inputs falter (fossil energy, fossil aquifers, artificial fertilizers, topsoil, etc), then there will likely be significant effects on our world system.

We will have more people and fewer resources to sustain them.

Why did you stop?