Yeah, I know very late post. Excellent comment. There is a fly in the technical and energy ointment. It is not so much a cheap source of energy – but interrelated intricacies of getting off fossil fuels that will trip up civilization.

One of the problems I see is that the currently 95% of our global food supply is tied to not only the petroleum industry – but its tied to the economic dependent the petrochemical industry (NPK fertilizer and its necessary processing chemicals, and food production management chemicals) – which in turn determines global food supply prices.

If you get rid of the energy and transportation portion of the fossil fuel industry – it totally changes the economy-of-scale cost of petrochemicals (just 5% of the current petroleum industry) – and not in a good way. i suggest you look up the term “food riots” on Wikipedia to see the historic geopolitical impact of just a few cents change in basic food essentials. A cheap energy source will require considerable time to integrate currently economically dependent fossil energy industries like food production.

The fly in the ointment is the time and whether there is enough time to make the transition to thorium or fusion, before finite critical resource competition among “have-not” nuclear weaponized nations tears the world and human civilization as we know it apart.

Hi Allen, I have never disagreed that overpopulation takes a significant place in the challenges we face as a species in the 21st century. Just as I have never disagreed that there should be a place for nuclear in the energy mix we use to replace our dependency on fossil fuels as long as the reactors we build produce no nuclear waste. Thorium-based fission reactors, reactors that use spent fuel from current nuclear facilities, and non-Tokamak fusion technology needs to be moved from the lab to commercial application. We should also be moving to smaller is better reactor technology in support of microgrid solutions.

But I am confused by your comment on how to develop policy to address overpopulation. The post-colonial Developing World faces an enormous overpopulation challenge and we in the Developed World need to help but not clothed in the “we no better” attitudes that will continue to foster resentment and distrust. Our carbon problems are not theirs. We in the Developed World have created them and then sold the Developing World on a lifestyle dream that could best be facilitated by repeating our mistakes in energy generating and transportation choices.

What kind of policies and incentives, short of China’s draconian measures through dictatorial central planning, can persuade cultures to change birth rates? One is providing universal education to women. Another is to provide subsidies to families not to have children. Another is free birth control and family planning services.

I am very familiar with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions of the singularity when man and AI machines will merge. But unlike Kurzweil I don’t see this happening by 2030. And quite frankly I don’t see how this addresses population as an issue although I would rather have AI robots attend to decommissioning old nuclear reactors than running new ones.

It would be wonderful if the developed nation leaders abandoned their feeble failing gestures to regulate CO2 emissions, and apply their considerable assets and efforts to the dual projects of drastic population reduction and development of human-intelligence-level AI robots.

You seem concerned that national leadership is backing off futilely trying to regulate carbon emissions. The larger problem has always been overpopulation, but senior leadership (except for China’s) refuses to deal with that, and even thoughtful and educated private commentators such as you have been denying overpopulation is the actual problem. You have bravely promoted and defended the false, but attractive, proposition that governments can regulate carbon, and that increased prosperity in the developing world will drive down birthrates to reverse the overpopulation problem. Perhaps that is because the alternatives are too distasteful to contemplate.

A better argument is that if we are ever going to make things better we need to accept the facts, no matter how distasteful and unwelcome. I’d like to offer a more optimistic perspective on the problem and senior leadership’s response to it. In democratic societies the majority vote elects the leadership. But the majority vote is ignorant, stupid, self-interested, and short-sighted. That insures that no matter how intellectually competent, dedicated to social justice, and well-intentioned our senior politicos might secretly be, they can only gain and retain office by pretending to be something different and deceiving the voters, not by telling them unwelcome truths and trying to teach them to reason and act ethically in the longer-range community interest. There just is no way for the public to know what the senior politicos actually think and know, because the senior politicos carefully conceal their true selves. They probably are a lot smarter and know a lot more than the public supposes. In nearly every case, the politicos are surrounded by very well-educated and highly intelligent “advisors.”

They must nearly all be aware of, and familiar with, Ray Kurzweil’s AI Singularity predictions and speculations. He’s predicting human level AI by 2025, and dirt-cheap versions by 2030. His arguments supporting his predictions are very persuasive. I’ll confess that ever since I read Marvin Minsky’s, Society of Mind, back in the 1980s, I have always been certain that superior electronic AI persons would be coming in the future. But I never dreamed the future was only 50-years away. Now, Kuzweil has convinced me the future is nearly here. My optimistic perspective is that by 2030 the ITER will have wasted some $100-billion of the public’s money and proven itself and all other magnetic fusion schemes to be impractical as sources of grid power. But, happily, by 2030 electronic AI nuclear engineer persons will have designed perfectly safe, highly reliable, cost-effective, and completely automated fission reactors, likely along the lines of the thorium fuel cycle. (If fusion is actually practical, the electronic AI nuclear engineer persons will probably implement that instead of fission) Fully automated nuclear fission reactors staffed 24/7 by hundreds of fearless immortal robot persons all sharing a collective IQ over 200 will be something completely different and much better than the pressurized-water, enriched uranium, once-through fuel cycle, reactors of the present. The high intelligence robots can safely and competently handle all the fuel production and reprocessing. Power plant robots can provide virtually limitless cheap carbon-free fission reactor electricity. In practical effect, the power plants of the future will be sentient systems crawling with hundreds of common mind robotic cells. I’m guessing most senior leadership in major developed nations is thinking in those AI robot terms, and they all realize heavy investment in human designed and manned nuclear power plants is a stupid idea. Just 15-years from now, the carbon free grid design will be here, and once implemented that will allow hydrogen cycle transportation fuel. The world will still be grossly overpopulated, but the CO2 buildup past 500 ppm will end. Then too there is the certain prospect of universal human/AI mind meld.

Last week I engaged in discourse about his public school geography studies with a 15-year old HS student. The student displayed very little intellectual curiosity outside the particulars to be tested for grading purposes. The student seemed to have an adequate grasp of lines of latitude on maps, but understood nothing of lines of longitude. I asked why he knew nothing of the lines of longitude, and he smugly replied, “We don’t need to know that, we won’t be tested on it.” When I pressed the issue, the student said, “Everything I might ever need to know I can Google.” Within 30-seconds the student spoke to his cell phone and asked about lines of longitude, the cell phone spoke back with: “Here is what I found on lines of longitude in the Wikipedia.” The comprehensive Google article on cartography, navigational conventions, and history along with a photo of the Royal Observatory and marine museum at Greenwich was displayed on the cell phone screen. All that within 30-seconds. The student still showed no intellectual curiosity, (the Cutty Sark, the Suez Canal, the connections between time keeping and navigation, the observatory’s long pendulum clock, etc.) but he had truly made his point. I judged the proper rebuttal to his intrinsically weak mind was conceptually beyond his years. In silence I thought that such organic persons will make ideal and happy subjects for AI mind meld, and they will not lament surrendering most of their natural organic purposes and free-will control systems to their future AI person mind-mate. He will become an AI robot made of flesh, and he will be self-satisfied and never notice it. He will also have a low carbon footprint.