Jared Diamond’s latest book Collapse

This one is the book I was thinking of.. It probably rates higher than Diamond`s tome. I cut and paste two Amazon reviews of the book below..

High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
by Jean-Francois Rischard

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Having read perhaps 20 of the best books on global issues and environmental sustainability, water scarcity, ocean problems, etc, over the past few years (most reviewed here on Amazon) I was prepared for a superficial summary, political posturing, and unrealistic claims. Not this book--this book is one of the finest, most intelligent, most easily understood programs for action I have ever seen. The book as a whole, and the 20 problem statements specifically, are concise, illustrated, and sensible.

The author breaks the 20 issues into 3 groups. Group one (sharing our planet) includes global warming; biodiversity and ecosystem losses, fisheries depletion, deforestation, water deficits, and maritime safety and pollution. Group two (sharing our humanity) includes massive step-up in the fight against poverty, peacekeeping-conflict prevention-combatting terrorism, education for all, global infectuous diseases, digital divide, and natural disaster prevention and mitigation. Group three (sharing our rule book) includes reinventing taxation for the 21st century, biotechnology rules, global financial architecture, illegal drugs, trade-investment-competition rules, intellectual property rights, e-commerce rules, and international labor and migration rules.

The author`s core concept for dealing with these complex issues intelligently, while recognizing that ``world government`` is not an option, lies with his appreciation of the Internet and how global issues networks could be created that would be a vertical complement to the existing horizontal elements of each national government.

The footnotes and index are professional, but vastly more important, the author`s vision is combined with practicality. This is a ``doable-do`` and this book is therefore my number one reading recommendation for any citizen buying just one book of the 360+ that I have recommended within Amazon. Superb.

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J.F. Rischard does a fabulous job of compiling his knowledge into a great introduction of twenty global issues that the world is currently facing. As the subtitle indicates, these issues are steadily becoming problems that we, as a global community, must reckon with. Rischard says that they must be solved in the coming twenty years.

Most of the twenty problems are not surprises, but some are. The author spends time mentioning that his list is not all-inclusive, and that certainly other issues could have been added (or taken off). But his list is all-encompassing and includes the following classifications and then the actual problems:

Sharing our planet: Issues involving the global commons
1. Global warming
2. Biodiversity and ecosystem losses
3. Fisheries depletion
4. Deforestation
5. Water deficits
6. Maritime safety and pollution

Sharing our humanity: Issues requiring a global commitment
7. Massive step-up in the fight against poverty
8. Peacekeeping, conflict prevention, combating terrorism
9. Education for all
10. Global infectious diseases
11. Digital Divide
12. Natural disaster prevention and mitigation

Sharing our rulebook: Issues needing a global regulatory approach
13. Reinventing taxation for the 21st century
14. Biotechnology rules
15. Global financial architecture
16. Illegal drugs
17. Trade, investment, and competition rules
18. Intellectual property rights
19. E-commerce rules
20. International labor and migration rules

Yes, this list is QUITE long and extensive! But Rischard does a wonderful job of giving a brief (3-5 pages) introduction on each issue. If you are looking for a more in depth study of these issues, then you should look elsewhere. But note that the footnotes are great places to look for sources on these issues!

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#5 sunlight
I don`t deny that we can postpone the eventuality of empty oil fields, but not indefinitely. If you look at the predictions of technophiles, such as new oil deposits will be found at twice the rate every decade and so on, they also have been quite wrong. In the 50s they thought every house would have its own nuclear power plant within 2 decades! Conservation and shifting to other sources does help but again resource depletion and environmental pollution are facts. Some of the technophiles are also against conservation believing it would set back economic progress. When you cite someone who says gloom and doom can do real damage, the obverse also is true. The mindless cheerfulness of the Bushies when confronted with environmental and resource problems throws a monkey wrench in long term planning for sustainable living.

there`s a really good book on the major problems and what to do about them (by a world bank exec writing in his personal capacity).. name escapes me..

of all the problems, the water problem seems to be really threatening. IF a renewable energy source is found/invented that might be the only hope.

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from lester brown`s 1997 speech someplace

And we are beginning to see that happen in some countries now. In Saudi Arabia, a country that was pumping a fossil aquifer, grain production dropped 62% between 1994 and 1996. After a gradual increase since 1979 we saw a dramatic fall, a classic overshoot and collapse situation. Now that`s much more dramatic than in most cases because that`s a fossil aquifer, it doesn`t recharge, once you pump it dry that`s it. But it is an example of what will be happening in the years ahead, as we begin to deplete more and more of the major aquifers on which we now depend for irrigation water.

I think one of the most underrated resource issues in the world today is water scarcity. Deforestation was easy. You could film the burning rain forest. You could have graphic photographs of clear-cuts in the northwest. Everyone understood deforestation. But falling water tables are not very photogenic. And so most people are just not aware of the extent to which the world is now depleting underground water supplies. We are postponing the difficult decision for the next generation ö when the over pumping will be even greater and the number of people will be even larger.

I was, over the weekend, making a list of postponed decisions that our generation is doing and leaving for the next generation. Once you begin to make that list, you have to start worrying. When water becomes scarce and the competition between cities and countryside intensifies ö as it is doing in China today, and throughout the Middle East and North Africa ö then cities pull water away from agriculture. The irrigated area is reduced and countries have to import grain to offset the loss of irrigation water. To import a ton of wheat is to import a thousand tons of water. Water scarcity is now beginning to shape international grain trade patterns in the same way that land scarcity did historically. So water is emerging as a major constraint. And in ways I don`t think most people realize. As a result of beginning to approach the maximum amount of photosynthate that can go to seed, the maximum amount of fertilizer that plants can use and of pushing against water limits, we find that the rise in land productivity that had been so rapid for most of this last half century is now beginning to slow. Now that`s not to say that we will not further raise land productivity. We will certainly in most of the world. But it is becoming much more difficult. This is why world grain stocks are now at the lowest level on record. It is why all the land that was idled under commodity programs in this country is back in production. We still have some land idled in the Conservation Reserve Program and some of that could be farmed sustainably with the right practices, but we are seeing a tightening of the world food situation and one that is likely to continue in the years ahead, for some of the reasons I have mentioned.

#4 by soysauce

There are two additional factors, which is why the doomsayers have been proved wrong again and again.

(1) Technological innovation: already, car manufacturers are able to build in research labs cars that are twice as fuel efficient as those on the roads - which means that per capita fuel consumption can be halved today.

(2) Substitution: New fuels (LPG, alcohol, even vegetable oil) are available. LPG run cars are actually 25-50% lower in fuel cost than petrol and cleaner.

sunlight,
Ehrlich and others who warn us of impending doom are like parents who warn kids against driving drunk. You`ll get killed if you keep this up they say. The kids respond - but I haven`t died yet!
The fact also is that per capita production of oil has been falling for the last two decades which means that as consumption in other parts of the world catches up to the consumption levels of affluent parts, we will quickly run out of oil. The only ways out are - find more oil so that per capita levels keep up (we have not been able to do this despite our best efforts), reduce consumption levels (hard to achieve under the current climate of artificially propped up support prices) or prevent others from getting to the oil. The last solution will lead to doom more quickly as growth of poor parts will become unsustainable.
The other fact is that ground water levels are falling everywhere as we pump it to satisfy increasing populations.

Another delicious comment from http://home.hiwaay.net/~craigg/g4c/economist-Doom.htm

``Is it not a good thing to exaggerate the potential ecological problems the world faces rather than underplay them? Not necessarily. A new book edited by Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns at the University of Sussex (``The Lie of the Land``, published by James Currey/Heinemann) documents just how damaging the myth of deforestation and population pressure has been in parts of the Sahel. Westerners have forced inappropriate measures on puzzled local inhabitants in order to meet activists` preconceived notions of environmental change. The myth that oil and gas will imminently run out, together with worries about the greenhouse effect, is responsible for the despoliation of wild landscapes in Wales and Denmark by ugly, subsidised and therefore ultimately job-destroying wind farms.``
...
``Environmentalists are quick to accuse their opponents in business of having vested interests. But their own incomes, their advancement, their fame and their very existence can depend on supporting the most alarming versions of every environmental scare. ``The whole aim of practical politics``, said H.L. Mencken, ``is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.`` Mencken`s forecast, at least, appears to have been correct. ``

This is such an easy article to bash I am almost feeling guilty. Gloom and doom predictions have been around for centuries without coming true. First an account of the famous Erhlich Simon bet:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/opinion/sustew.htm
``In 1980 two eminent professors, fierce critics of one another, made a bet regarding the real market price of five metal commodities over the next decade. Paul Ehrlich, a world-famous ecologist, bet that because the world was exceeding its carrying capacity, food and commodities would start to run out in the 1980s and prices in real terms would therefore rise. Julian Simon, an economist, said that resources were effectively so abundant, and becoming effectively more so, that prices would fall in real terms. He invited Ehrlich to nominate which commodities would be used to test the matter, and they settled on these (chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten). In 1990 Ehrlich paid up - all the prices had fallen.``

http://home.hiwaay.net/~craigg/g4c/economist-Doom.htm
``IN 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus inaugurated a grand tradition of environmentalism with his best-selling pamphlet on population. Malthus argued with impeccable logic but distinctly peccable premises that since population tended to increase geometrically (1,2,4,8 . . . ) and food supply to increase arithmetically (1,2,3,4 . . . ), the starvation of Great Britain was inevitable and imminent. Almost everybody thought he was right. He was wrong.

In 1865 an influential book by Stanley Jevons argued with equally good logic and equally flawed premises that Britain would run out of coal in a few short years` time. In 1914, the United States Bureau of Mines predicted that American oil reserves would last ten years. In 1939 and again in 1951, the Department of the Interior said American oil would last 13 years. Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. ``
...
``The 1983 edition of a British GCSE school textbook said zinc reserves would last ten years and natural gas 30 years. By 1993, the author had wisely removed references to zinc (rather than explain why it had not run out), and he gave natural gas 50 years, which mocked his forecast of ten years earlier. ``
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``The record of mispredicted food supplies is even worse. Consider ... quotations from Paul Ehrlich`s best-selling books in the 1970s.:`The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.```

``He was not alone. Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute began predicting in 1973 that population would soon outstrip food production, and he still does so every time there is a temporary increase in wheat prices. In 1994, after 21 years of being wrong, he said: ``After 40 years of record food production gains, output per person has reversed with unanticipated abruptness.`` Two bumper harvests followed and the price of wheat fell to record lows. Yet Mr Brown`s pessimism remains as impregnable to facts as his views are popular with newspapers. ``

``The facts on world food production are truly startling for those who have heard only the doomsayers` views. Since 1961, the population of the world has almost doubled, but food production has more than doubled. As a result, food production per head has risen by 20% since 1961 (see chart 2). Nor is this improvement confined to rich countries. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, calories consumed per capita per day are 27% higher in the third world than they were in 1963. Deaths from famine, starvation and malnutrition are fewer than ever before. ``

A more recent analysis of the facts: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DKI/is_1_2000/ai_62681826
``This essay examines whether the potential scarcity of nonrenewable natural resources is a reason for concern. Previous research (Barnett and Morse 1963, Jorgenson and Griliches 1967, Nordhaus 1973, Brown and Field 1978, Fisher 1979, Hartwick and Olewiler 1986, and Schmidt 1988) is mixed, but it generally has found that the economic evidence is inconsistent with the increasing scarcity of nonrenewable natural resources. In fact, technological change driven by free market forces has increased natural resource availability.``

Nice article. For everyone warning us against fouling our collective nest, there are three dreamy-eyed technophiles that believe no problem is beyond technical fix. Problems and fixes are our natural evolutionary style where one follows the other along a helical path - toward collapse or continuing evolution?
Problems and fixes feeding into each other is good because it keeps us busy, and the hubbub generates a sort of a collective wealth. What if we screw up here? Let`s explore colonizing the moon. What if there is global warming? Let`s trap the green house gases in the ocean by seeding them. This sort of fixing stops when we run out of the elixir of all life - water. That`s what is thought to have done the Mayans in. We are running out of clean water everywhere - in china, india and even the US.
What we need is a drastic rollback of human population by a factor of 3 or 4 so that we will exist in equilibrium with the rest of life on earth. But that`s not going to happen. Population will fall eventually but will not reach equilibrium. It will continue to fall until we are not there to damage the earth any more...