File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9711, message 137


Date: Sat, 08 Nov 1997 12:29:16 -0800
From: Mark_Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: Pimentel (2)




Another one, on arable land, I told you we lose 12 million
acres due to erosion and salinization annually. We have a
shortage of arable land generally in the world, what technology
do you know that will double the arable land of the world? And
biodiversity and pollination and to give you one illustration
here, in New York State for example, I'm going to give you that,
my estimate. I made a calculation on what honey bees and wild
bees and the number of blossoms they pollinate on a bright sunny
day in New York State. The number is I trillion blossoms. And
what technology do you know of that would allow us to pollinate
one trillion blossoms in New York State or Minnesota for that
matter. Well I could go on about this, but. I believe in science
and Technology, but I also recognize there are limits.

Now I was in Uganda earlier this year. This still shook.. has
shaken me, there was a large article in the newspaper, that the
farmers in Uganda could not afford $5 to buy a hoe to till their
soil this year. The annual income per capita is $170.00 so the $5
is a large number. So there are people that are really, sincerely
desperate today. Now over the last 10 years, what's happened to
some of our resources as shown here, land per capita has declined
21%, irrigation has declined 12%. This is all on a per capita
basis. Fish production has declined 10%, and fossil energy 7%.
Now we made a study a year or two ago on what would be the
optimum population of the world and the U.S. Based on a standard
of living like Europe . That means cutting consumption if you
want to know the relative to the United States, cutting our
consumption of energy and foods and water by 1/2. So if you use a
standard of living like the Europeans, that would be like cutting
consumption and also making the assumption that we stop soil
erosion, we stop mining the ground water and conserving our other
resources, we estimate we could support a world population of 2
billion and the U.S. could support a population of 200,000,000.
Now I think all of us realize, now obviously you can have more
people than this, we've got more in the world today, but they're
not living a very good standard of living And we won't have as
high a standard of living if we double or quadruple our
population in the U.S. There is no question that we humans are
going to have to stop reproducing, or growing some time in the
future. Either we ourselves with our wisdom or knowledge control
our numbers or nature is going to do it for us. We've got two
choices. Because if we let nature, it is through starvation,
violence, disease, and so forth and not a very pleasant . In fact
you can see this already in many parts of the world if you travel
to some of the developing countries. Now, I've given you some I
suppose of not terribly encouraging information about population
growth, the environment, living standards for many people of the
world. But I am optimistic at least from this point of view. That
if humans will make up their mind on what we want, I think we can
achieve a better life for everyone in the U.S. and the world.

(Applause)

Dr. Meyer: We have time for questions. If we can have
the lights back on in the back, thank you.

Q (Intelligible)

Dr. Pimentel: Well they don't, The great majority, I
agree with you, do say that probably 95%. There is a small
percentage that is growing. Herman Daily, John Chapman, and there
are several others that are taking, and Carl Folk in Sweden and
so forth that are taking a different view. They call themselves
ecological economists. And in fact there is a society that Herman
Daily is contributing toward. Now, yes I received some letters
making the statement, don't worry, if you get the price up
they'll find oil anywhere, or everywhere. And I just wish they
were correct. Now I 've been talking to geologists and so forth
and their statement when you say "well look at the oil we
were discovering, isn't there a lot under the ground that you can
discover or find for us." And they say that statement would
have been true in the 1930's or possibly early 40's . But they
said our knowledge of what exists in the ground is very good, and
maybe we're a 1% or 2% off, but when it takes more than a gallon
of oil to get that gallon of oil out of the ground, it's time to
quit. Now we can use some of the new technology of steam and so
forth to recover and their estimate is that perhaps we can get
another 10%. But there's no question we're getting down to the
bottom of the barrel and world wide I say, we peaked out 2 years
ago, or maybe 3 years ago in the per capita use of fossil energy
world wide. Remember 80% of the fossil energy today is being
utilized by 25% of the worlds population. And the majority of the
poor people in developing countries are only getting 20% of that
share. I just wish the economists were correct, but I must admit
I don't agree with them. And I had one come up also who wanted to
make a bet with me, if I could name 5 resources, this was in a
letter to me, that in 5 increasing. And I did write him
a letter offering to bet him the $1000. But then I never received
a reply from him after that.

Q: From a world wide viewpoint, should we not be
putting more of our resources into nuclear fusion for so energy
would be a non issue. And wouldn't that be a good Manhattan
project rather than these other things we are talking about.

Dr. Pimentel: The question is shouldn't we invest in
fusion. I ..my.. the lady here says no, but I think we should,
and I was a member of the advisory, science advisory staff of the
Department of Energy a few years back and I think a majority of
the members supported this. However, it's not a panacea. And
that's where I agree with you. There are radio activity problems,
not as much as fission, but there are problems. Number 2 and the
major factor as to where we would have problems with supplying
all of our needs with fusion, and I don't believe we ever will,
is that there is a heat pollution problem. To illustrate that
with fission, a physicist, in fact a Nobel physicist at MIT made
the calculation if we supplied all of our needs, that is
electrical needs in the U.S. today, which accounts for about 30%
of our energy consumption with fission, the water temperatures of
our lakes and streams would increase 15, I think 12 or 15
degrees. Now, we can cool these units with air, now they're not
as efficient, but even then of course you'd be adding quite a bit
of heat to the atmosphere. But again you get back to, how many
people do we want to have. It is still going to take land to
produce food. It is still going to take water to produce that
food. And we still want water for drinking and other purposes and
we cannot eliminate all of our species on earth, and we be the
only species or with our crops, that's not going to work either.
Agriculture depends on these other organisms. Yes. and then?

Q: You know in China, you are only allowed to have one
baby. If everyone on earth were only allowed to have one baby,
per couple, how long does it take us to get to where you want us
to be?

Dr. Pimentel: It would take us a little over 100. The
question here is if you allowed everybody, or made I mean
everybody agreed to have one child per couple, how long it would
take us to get down to 2 billion from 6 billion. A little over a
hundred years. Now for the first. What's that? No, I agree with
you.... you know, the first 50 years, there would be very little
change, because of the age structure. just to illustrate, lets
use China. If they had fully implemented this I child per couple,
their population in the next 20 years they would have added a
population equivalent to the United States. A little over 200
million, and it is because of the young age structure. The number
of teenagers and twenties that would be reproducing for example,
would just totally overwhelm the system, even with one child per
couple. To illustrate that with Mexico, if they adopted ZPG
tomorrow as 2.1 children per couple, the Mexican population would
more than double in the next 60 years. It's that young age. We've
got a tremendous momentum built into the world population. So,
even with going to one child per couple, we would slightly
increase during that period, but eventually when you get a lot of
elderly like myself,. there would be a dip, a very rapid dip in
the world population.

Q: One of the big problems it seems to me is that that
a great number of individuals in legislatures that make policy
decisions, that allocate funds etc. . are abysmally ignorant
about environmental education about biology, about energy
transactions and the whole business. And so, one of the major
issues it seems to me is to get those characters well educated,
and I think one of the things that could have been done would
have been to have him on public radio and it's too bad it did not
happen at this point. And so, how do you go about that and get to
talking to legislators.

Dr. Pimentel: You are correct, I think most of you
heard. You are correct, politicians, incidentally, I am an
elected official in the mayor's council, are generally, well, not
well educated in the terms of environmental issues and certainly
not in the terms of population issues and they do not want to
touch it. In fact, it is a political no no. They are wimps!
Right! But, I can assure you that you can't,-- incidentally
politicians are followers, they are not leaders. They wait to
hear from you and me, that is the voting public, and make sure
that there is a great majority out there before they will make
any decision. And so, it's you and I to speak and write, I mean
it's ... up to us.

(Tape change missed end of answer and beginning of next
question)

Q:... population growth by the United Nations is not 2
billion in 100 years, it's 12. And so does that imply since
you're optimistic that you have more faith in technology than you
indicated in your remarks here today?

Dr. Pimentel: I'm optimistic only from this point of
view. The question related to population growth is we're going to
have about 12 billion in the next 40 to 50 years. And I must
admit I think that's probably an accurate number and that's
probably where we're going to end up. My, why I am optimistic,
it's not relative to science and technology, although it would be
nice if we could put something in the water throughout the world
to stop this reproduction, but uh, what I am optimistic about is
once humans make up their mind on what we should do and have the
will, we've really been able to accomplish great things and this
is what I am counting on that there will be, and I must admit it
is an awful thing to say, is there are going to be some spots in
the world we're going to have some real serious disasters. And it
appears that it takes disasters, for the, now, blame the public
now, not only politicians, it takes disasters to get public
opinion going and then eventually to get politicians moving to
try to do something about these issues. Now, I hope we don't get
in the similar disastrous situation that China is in, that Africa
is in, India is in, Bangladesh is in before we make a decision
that we ought to do something about our population. Now hardly
anybody talks about the U.S. as having a population problem. They
do recognize China's got a problem, India's got a problem, and we
invest money and we give advice to them. We in the United States
do not have a population policy. I was asked to testify before a
Senate Committee a while back on what our immigration rate should
be. They wanted to know what resources we have and how many
people this would support. And I told them, tell me what your
population policy is. How many people, and what standard of
living do you want to have in the United States, and then I'll
comment about your immigration rate. I'm not quite as optimistic
as I said.

Q: I was curious about the, your commentary about
topsoil. You said it takes about 500 years to develop 1 ft of
topsoil under agricultural conditions. I was wondering if that
could be increased by different policies of composting or
applications of more crop residues back onto fields, and also
what in your views are the best techniques for preventing more
erosion.

Dr. Pimentel: Well, on increasing topsoil, you can get
it. I remember one stage, I was trying to improve a soil that was
heavy clay, that had been eroded quite a bit. And I put on 500
tons of manure per acre and 500 tons of sludge per acre. That is
a lot. And it did improve the soil. The question is where can we
get all this organic matter to incorporate into the soil. Now
your second question is what soil conservation techniques do I
favor? I favor all of them! And we ought to! It depends on the
particular land. You know, crop rotation, strip crops, contour
planting, even though no till uses a lot more pesticides, I favor
no till, even with, or despite the pesticides. Because, that is a
problem we can deal with-- over,-- in a relatively few years. But
you can't sit around and wait 500 years for one inch of top soil.
And there are mulchers, there's ridge till, there's a whole array
of technologies that we've got available today that we could
produce crops and lose a minimum of only 1 ton per hectare per
year, which is the soil formation rate. But we ought to get at
it, and do it.

Q: Recently, last week at the University of Minnesota
here, in a test in the College of Natural Resources, there was a
question on how soon will the human population double, and the
answers were 60, 80, 90, 100. And the answer that the professor
had was 100. And when a student went up there and said adamantly
opposed that and said it was 60, he said well we'll get back to
you. And they were a little red faced about that. And when they
graded the test and handed it out the next day, or the following
week, they said, we'll throw out that question and everyone will
get credit for it. The question is how can we expect people to be
educated when our educators are ignorant?

Dr. Pimentel: You are correct. Don't believe everything
I said, or anybody else that you hear or read. Go and check it
out on your own. No, there's no question, perhaps that, I'll try
and defend that faculty member. Perhaps what he was looking at is
that the population reference bureau states that the rate of
growth of the U.S. population is either . 7 or .8% per year.
They're ignoring immigrants. But if you include the immigrants,
they account for about half that population growth. And so, again
the statistic from the U. S. Bureau of Census is 1 .1% per year.
And if you calculate that out it's a doubling time of 60, to be
exact, 63 years.







     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005