Is this an optimistic blog?

I was telling Ignacio the other day that I felt I was becoming a pessimist about society's fate because of the kind of stuff I'd been writing here and reading else where. And I'm naturally such an optimistic person... So he proposed the following illustration, imagine you're out for a walk on a beautiful day and then at one point you're standing in the middle of a road and you hear a noise coming from behind the corner which sounds like a truck coming your way at high speed, what do you do?

1 - You ignore it and hope it cannot possibly be a truck.

2 - You immediately assume it is a truck, panic and say that it's hopeless to do anything and stay where you are waiting for your doom.

3 - You assume it is a truck and decide to take it head on.

4 - You look for an alternative way and avoid the truck since it is such a beautiful day and you're looking forward to enjoying it

The first person is an optimist, but is also a fool. The second person is clearly a pessimist. The third person is a lunatic optimist, and we'd like to think we're more like the 4th person, trying to establish the case that there is a truck coming and discussing the alternative ways to avoid it, cause it is a beautiful day.

How do you measure up against the mold on your bread?

An interesting video I came upon in youtube, that links in nicely with our ongoing discussions. Basically, my take on it is that any economic system (like our global economy nowadays) attempting to achieve sustained growth is bound to fail, sooner or later. Resource depletion sets in at some point, and the system suffers a drastic correction from its state of overshoot to either a much lower equilibrium point. Given the news in the last few months (food prices, oil prices, economic crisis, raw material shortages...), I´m getting the feeling that we´re going to find out pretty soon where the ceiling is...

how much oil is left?

source: The Economist

The current known oil reserves are expressed in the above figure. I've added up roughly and came up with a value of 1.100 bn barrels (1 US bn = 1.000m) . If we keep spending at current rate, that is 90 m barrels a day, we have oil left for 12.200 days, that is about 34,5 years, assuming that the demand does not increase, which is unlikely since countries like China and India are demanding ever more. Of course somehow miraculously, it seems that every year, the reserves left tend to equal the ones of the previous year, which indicates that either they find them as quick as they deplete them or they can't do arithmetics very well... or they are just afraid to tell the truth.

The big challenges facing our society are securing energy, food and water for a 6 bn population (and growing). This is the main challenge that can bring about major catastrophe such as a war at a large scale, not Global Warming or Climate Change. There is no sensible measure we can take to correct climate. Any drastic measure will not bring about control of the situation, because such a system does not respond linearly. Whatever happens we'll just have to adapt to the new circumstances, with ingenuity, as we've done in the past. However securing energy, food and water, is something we can do, and should be doing harder.

We need and we must improve energy usage efficiency, develop further the renewable energy infrastructure, promote energy micro-generation and storage, develop desalination techniques and make them more accessible. We need to use more sustainable agriculture methods, that favor diversity of food species and rotation to prevent soil exhaustion and plant diseases, rather than usage in large scale of pesticides. We need to increase global population mobility such as not to exhaust local resources and allow people to go where the jobs are. And this is just the beginning.