The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh - October 1 , 2008
[...] The Peak Oil debate boils down, essentially, to natural versus social limits, or naturally-determined versus socially-determined limits. A similar debate erupted more than 200 hundred years ago over the limits of population growth, on the one hand, and the growth of food supplies, on the other. The debate was prompted largely by a 1978 essay written by the British economist Thomas R. Malthus, titled “An Essay on the Principle of Population.”
Malthus projected an alarming specter of food shortages, hardship, and even starvation “because of faster population growth than food supply.” According to his theory, poverty and distress are unavoidable because, if unchecked, population increases at a geometrical rate (i.e. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.), whereas the means of subsistence grow at an arithmetical rate (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.), thereby leading to inevitable shortages of foodstuff.
As Malthus thus blamed misery and poverty on the poor and the miserable (for giving birth to too many mouths to be fed), he also concluded (logically) that poverty alleviation depended on selective restriction of population growth, that is, curbing the number of the poor and working people.
As checks on population growth, Malthus accepted war, famine, and disease. He also recommended “moral restraint” (marrying late or not at all, coupled with sexual abstinence prior to, and outside of, marriage) as additional checks on the growth of population. His hostility toward the poor was expressed most vividly when he openly argued in favor of dismantling social safety net programs, called “poverty laws”: “We cannot, in the nature of things, assist the poor, in any way, without enabling them to rear up to manhood a greater number of their children.”
By blaming social ills and economic calamities on the poor and working people, Malthus’s views tended, willy-nilly, to exonerate the underlying socio-economic structure, and to prove the inevitability of privation and misery under any social system. [...]
Tags: Peak Oil, Population Control
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October 6th, 2008 at 1:11 am
Malthus’ views on population growth were entirely fallacious. Population size is a function of food availability - this is well known is ecology. Food production is a technology for increasing food availability, thus allowing a larger population to exist. Therefore, population growth is fueled by food production. Malthus seems to believe that the population increases by itself somehow, and that therefore, food production must “keep up” with population growth. This is one of the most pervasive myths of our culture. In fact, every attempt to “keep up” with population growth by increasing food production fails to feed the starving millions; instead, it simply fuels more population growth. In order to stop population growth and prevent all of the problems contingent on overpopulation, we need to stop trying to increase food production. We need to stop trying to support a population that may be larger than the carrying capacity of the planet we live on.
November 24th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
So basically you’re saying that because Malthus was wrong about the carrying capacity of the planet with regard to food, Peak Oil theorists are wrong now about the amount of oil left?
Hubbert’s Peak came and went 30 years ago. Peak oil is the same thing, except on a planetary scale.
December 31st, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Are you sure that peak oil occurred that long ago. I thought his prediction of peak was to be around now?
As I see it the problem with peak oil and population are a variant on Malthus. We have increased food production (from the Green Revolution onwards) using industrial methods (and oil) and complex technologies dependent on fossil fuels including chemical fertiliser. When oil begins to decline (just when pop. is pushing toward 7 billion) the green revolution reverses and we go back to 1900 in terms of agricultual capacity. Big deficit, big population drop. Add to this the problem that chemical fertilisers have facilitated excessive depletion of the other source of food security: the soil fecundity. The situation is neatly summed up in the ant nest analogy:
“A simple illustration of where the world stands today can be demonstrated with an ant nest and a bag of sugar. Place a kilo of sugar (Energy) beside an ants nest. When the ants discover it the ant nest population will explode, the area around the nest will be cleared bare by the activity of the newly increased ant numbers. At some point the ants will be using more sugar than they are discovering (that is where we are with oil - peak oil), and the supply of sugar will start to rapidly dwindle. Eventually the sugar will be gone, and there will be massive die-off in the nest from starvation. Because the ants were so efficient, using the sugar to power their ability to strip the surrounding area bare, ant numbers will undoubtedly drop far below the numbers that existed before the sugar was found. Not only has sugar run out, but the ants previous sources of food have now all but gone as well.”