Okay, so we all knew oil was running out, but...
"Locate reliable current data on global petroleum reserves and consumption rate. Report these numbers and cite your source. Under the assumption that this resource is used at a constant rate, calculate the lifetime of Earth's petroleum resources."
I went and found some numbers from the Department of Energy. Reserves were reported in billions of barrels, and consumption was reported in thousands of barrels per day. I crunched them up and got...
About fifteen thousand days. I once calculated the remainder of my lifespan at something like twenty thousand, conservatively. Uh oh. Divide by 365, and we've got 42 years - and that's at today's rates.
We should all learn subsistence farming right now because in a few decades anyone who doesn't know how to live off the sun is fucked.
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Subsistence farming is probably going to be a very secondary concern in the next few decades if our food-transportation infrastructure crumbles. There is a reason that there were not BILLIONS of people on the earth prior to the advent of nifty industrial techniques to eek out the most yield from crops, not to mention moving them over moderately far distances to city-centers and otherwise infertile areas. That, and it would be short-sighted to say we aren't living off of the sun right now. The question is whether we find a more sustainable way to do it.
While I think that transporting food tens of thousands of miles will become obsolete in the absence of a super-dense energy source like fossil fuels, moving food a more modest distance of hundreds or a even few thousand miles seems like a more realistic achievement and precisely what we will need to avoid major social destabilization, not to mention famine.
Of course, famine is occurring all over the place anyway, but at this point I think that's still an artifact of property relations and their artificial constraints on human need -- not our actual ability to feed the people of the world.
I simply do not think that giving 4+ billion people the necessary land and relatively primitive tools to yield what they need to survive will or can be the answer to these subsistence problems. Subsistence farming also engenders a kind of social relation I do not think the species or planet can afford to see humans return to with such force or in such numbers: the tribalism of the oikos.
The only way we might even begin to assume this sort of "get back to the land" revivalism is with a very robust State to facilitate the universal access to what's needed to get it done (not to mention other civic structures). That or we descend into a de jure corporate or national-socialist (i.e. fascist) feudalism, which we see possibly on the horizon when you see mass land-grabs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/22/food-biofuels-land-grab
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