The Oil Drum: Local

I don't understand the logic that using oil carelessly resulted in greater population. If you are talking about modern agriculture, I am sure that those who would otherwise starved to death would disagree with the characterization as "careless". Please explain.

To add to my comment about the relative ineffectiveness of being conservative in the big picture, I would like to point out that had we used oil more conservatively in transportation, we would have used the savings somewhere else. Why? Because the oil was there and we are human. If you don't spend your income on gasoline, and spend it instead on something else, that something else took energy to create. To boot, getting around on less energy encourages more getting around, so there goes some more of the conservation.

The hydrocarbon savings account was limited. Using it more conservatively would not have changed that simple fact. The nature of technology is to use resources faster than they would have been used without technology. In effect, most technology is just knowledge applied to resources resulting in increased use of resources in elevating human living standards. Had we not tapped the hydrocarbon savings account we still would be living as we did before we started using coal, complete with that level of population and with similar living conditions.

I think things unfolded, and are unfolding more or less the way nature dictates. It probably was inevitable that the industrial age occurred. It is just as inevitable that we will return to pre-industrial age living conditions as the cause of the industrial age (exploitation of stored hydrocarbons) is depleted. The cycles of nature are far more powerful than the machinations of man. It just so happens that we are at the peak of a very large cycle, about to experience a sharp "return to the mean", complete with overshoot. In all of human history (past and yet to be written), the industrial age will turn out to have been a random blip in an otherwise relatively flat line.