Garden Diary, 4 May 2008

Mostly just tidying up at the moment and planting lay crops, but I'm trying some brassicas again. Also, we've got a lemon tree in again so we'll see how that goes.

Someone told me about http://www.myfolia.com/ which looks quite cool. I'll stick with my diary, but this would be great for someone just starting out.

Eclipse on Ubuntu Hardy Heron

Just to possibly help others get around this problem, I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy Heron and suddenly had Eclipse 3.2 (standard Ubuntu package) crashing on me constantly. The solution was to downgrade the Sun Java runtime to 1.5 (also a standard package) - there's some sort of bug in 1.6 apparently.

World Population Growth

I was thinking the other day about the rate of world population growth in the context of the natural disasters that have happened recently. Take for example the 15000 people killed in China in the recent earthquake. This is tragic for the people involved, but the world will make up this number in just under ....

2 hours

I don't know about you, but I find this pretty mind-blowing. If you don't believe me, here's the facts. The rate of world population growth in 2000 was estimated at around 75 million people per year, around 200,000 per day.

At the rate we're consuming the planets resources, the best we can say about this disaster is that at least it buys us all a couple of hours. We might use that time to think about how we can buy ourselves some more time ...

Demand destruction has its limits ?

Oil's up above $130, and the mainstream media is starting to get worried:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/business/worldbusiness/23oilweb.html?em&ex=1211601600&en=22c0f81c36f22b59&ei=5087%0A

One theory is that, as the price increases, we'll reach a pain point where demand will reduce sufficiently to drop the price. This assumes two things:

• Oil demand is completely price-elastic. This implies that oil is a non-essential good that people will simply do without when it gets too expensive, like going to the movies.
• Less of an economic assumption, more of an article of faith, the supply of oil is capable of steadily increasing, it's just that our rate of increase of demand is too high. This sudden acceleration in demand is being caused by China and India, the punters say. What are they suggesting, then ? That we ask China and India to use less ? A lot less than us ? I can just hear the reaction to that ...

The problem with oil is that it is not a non-essential good. We may be able to curtail some of our discretionary travel, combine trips, car pool, etc., but transport energy is just one of the uses of oil. The primary use that we simply cannot cut back on is food production. The other problem with simply cutting back our demand to a previous level is that supply is not simply going to stop increasing - it's going to start rapidly decreasing. So, rather than the solution to the problem of high oil prices being a one-off exercise in reducing consumption, we need to develop a culture of reducing consumption every year.

So, picture a scenario where we helpfully turn our lightbulbs off for an hour and instead of getting a pat on the head and returning to business as usual, we just get asked to save more energy, and keep on doing it - forever.