Introduction

A fair number of friends reacted to my 2020 solstice e-mail, and I promised a more detailed essay about my views on the global situation.  But progress was slow and I did not make it in 2021.  With the solstice coming up for the second time after 2020, something had to be done…  This essay is not finished (updated:  2022-12-31) and not very coherent either.  Read with some tolerance (see notes).  And you may comment.

The main message is simple:

The planet is overheating, world population is still growing.
We knew we were driving straight into the wall, not pushing on the brakes, and now it is too late.

The sea level rise will inundate densely populated areas, in the heat crops will fail, diseases will spread, civilised behaviour will stop.  A very violent period is coming.  Some humans will survive the crash, but billions will die.

It is not a scenario for far-away 2100.  I bet it will seriously start in the next few years.  If you don't believe it, observe the facts and especially do the calculations.

COVID, Ukraine, energy crises are insignificant compared to the coming crash.

The urgency of the current situation cannot be explained in language alone:  it needs numbers, calculations, comparisons, data, graphs, technical and scientific knowledge.

I am extremely pessimistic, but all is not lost if we can restrain ourselves.

The second message then is:

Am I preaching against all fun during the transition?  Not at all:  I like to travel, love eating a good steak, enjoyed flying a sports airplane.  I understand people who want to go on a hunt in Africa, or race F1 cars.  But we cannot do this at a population of over 8 billion.

To return to a good life for everyone we must therefore reduce the population.  That is even more important in the long run than cooling the planet!

We have a fantastic opportunity to start working for our children's future.

If you want your children to live reasonable lives, change your lifestyle NOW.  We have to STOP our current behaviour.  Although the transition may not be fun, if handled wel it can be very satisfying and certainly meaningful.

A positive note

Many of the thoughts I collected over several decades, are now echoed in the news (e.g. young people are getting very worried).  The world is waking up.  That is the only good thing.

Parts of this essay go back many years.  For example, the population animation clips you can watch below were created in 2007, fifteen years ago.  Some simulations were done fifty years ago:  half a century.

Many of the subjects below you will have read about before and elsewhere.

Where are we?

The world has serious problems:  global warming, disappearing natural resources, pollution, contagious diseases, social tensions.

Rather than arrogantly propose solutions, I will leave you mainly with questions and some opinions.

In what follows the words “we”, “us”, “our” refers to all humans on the planet, the words “I”, “me”, “mine” are used in sentences expressing my personal opinion.

I have very little hope for a reasonable, let alone good, medium term future. But we should still try to avoid the worst.

The Main Difficulties

Examples:

“wineries will suffer from climate change, we should invest in new wineries further from the equator”.  That supposes social structures will remain stable, demand for wine will stay the same, there will be no disruption in transport, no new vine diseases, etc.

France is buying more Canadairs to combat a growing number of forest fires.  But the planes have to be built and operated, contributing more greenhouse gas, makiing things worse.  Fortunately the plan is accompanied by another one to plant ten million trees.

In many regions farming depends on hard winters to kill off insects and glaciers to provide water to fields in the summer.  If the weather in those regions changes to, say, a Monsoon-type climate, then everything needs to change:  crop types, farming equipment, types of building, city infrastructures, … .  Is there time for that?

Governments and companies must share all they know.  No trade secrets, no patents (especially on medical items).  We need to help each other, there is no time left.

We need to be much more aware of how our basic instincts prevent us from dealing with the current crises.

“Past worriers”

In the early 1970s the “Club of Rome” commissioned a report to look into the future. The report had the name “Limits to Growth” and it became a bestseller.  It was immediately translated in many languages.

The report predicted a continued growth of the economy into the early 2000s, then a peak, and a catastrophic collapse thereafter.

The group who wrote it stated explicitly that they knew very well that the mathematical model they had used for their predictions was not refined enough, but that the overall behaviour was convincing.  Despite that warning the scientific world attacked the report because of its lack of detail, and it was not taken as seriously as it should have been.

The point of the exercise of the Club of Rome was not detail or precision.  They did not want to know exactly at which day the economy would run out of petrol, or precisely how much of a certain mineral was available. They were after the general behaviour.

The “standard response” of their model looked like this:

(making graphs was often done by printing letters at different positions on a line printer, not very accurate and not very nice to look at, but form had not yet won over function.)

My friend Rob Koreman and I used a hybrid computer to check the report’s model.  The machine still exists and is now in the computer history museum at the University of Ghent:

The machine traced the different curves on a chart recorder.  (chart recorders are familiar from movies, where they often appear as lie detectors)

The curves in the chart on the right are (top to bottom) population, pollution, resources, investments, standard of living.

They also go somewhat further:  up to 2170, though that is irrelevant.

We came to the same conclusion as the authors:  whatever values one used for the parameters of the model, it always followed the same general course.  The computer output showed continued growth of consumption, pollution, population, then these all reached a peak and there was collapse after that.  If the initial amount of resources was increased, the peaks came somewhat later, if decreased somewhat earlier.

Other parameters did other things, but there was no escaping the general trend:  growth followed by catastrophic collapse.

That was the predicted behaviour under the conditions of “business as usual”.

Current situation

Consider these statistics:

(this graph is based on data from the World Meteorological Organization, but I lost the exact reference, anyone: please help find it!)

The first time I saw this graph was in 1964 (at that time it went further back than 1960).  In 1980 I thought we would never go beyond 400ppm, but…
(observe a seasonal variation, up and down each year:  most land mass in in the Northern hemisphere, the deciduous trees (trees which lose their leaves in winter) are nearly all there.  Thus they absorb CO₂ in spring and summer, but not in winter)

Finally, almost a hundred years ago, someone already perceived that things were headed in the wrong direction:

(found in the magazine's 1981 column “50 years ago”, but without mention of the author)

The Transition Period

I think it is too late to avoid catastrophes on a global scale.  The peaks are here, how can we survive the crash with minimal destruction?

If we want to get alive to the other side of the catastrophes, we will have to work hard on radical change during a transition period.  After that period we will not have the same society, but it may be better and more pleasant than now.

Stop destructive activities

During the transition we should STOP our current behaviours.  It will not be pleasant:  a large fraction of the population will have to stop their current destructive activities (see list in last chapter) and therefore be out of a job.

Let me give just one example here:  marketing and advertising produces no wealth, while polluting and consuming resources.  People working in that sector should stop, but then society must find a way to ensure their survival during the transition period.

Change the economic model

Those who stopped destructive jobs must still live:  get food, clothes, be housed, have access to medical care.

Society must provide for them while they convert to other activities.  The model of job markets will not work without drastic government intervention during the transition.  I'm not preaching communism or dictatorship:  it's a matter of civilised survival.

Reduce the population

This is most difficult, because it will take at least two generations, i.e. 50 years.  It can be achieved by education, empowering women, legislation.

(Note about fertility and life expectancy)

Keep up the morale

I do not believe we are on the planet to just work hard “in the sweat of our brow”.

Do not think I am against leisure activities, on the contrary.  It's just that right now we can't afford it anymore, we need radical and instant change.

We need to stop activities in a long list which comprises leisure travel, football tournaments, live music gigs, art festivals, and anything else that consumes vast amounts of energy.

Yet human beings must have some forms of relaxation.  A topic for inventive thought.

Regain the fun

Having fun is what we really like to do.  Some want to travel, others to create artworks, our desires are very diverse. Very good, and it's what I would like to see realised for all.  I hope we make it through the transition instead of going under in a catastrophic crash.

A Riddle

John and his wife Mary own a piece of land with a large pond.  John takes care of the pond.  One day a duckweed seed drops in a corner of the pond.  The duckweed starts to grow on the first of April.  It doubles every day.

At first John does not even notice it.  But then one day Mary says he should look at the pond's surface, because she spotted some duckweed and she does not like duckweed.  John however has other things to do, so the duckweed is left alone.  John occasionaly looks at the pond but sees no pressing need.  On the 30th of April however, Mary is very upset because the whole pond is now covered in duckweed.  ”John, you should have removed that duckweed well before!”

On which day in April did John observe that the pond was half full?

I read this riddle when I was in primary school, and was very surprised by the answer:  on the 29th.

The weed doubles every day, so if the pond is full on the 30th, then it was half that on the previous day.  The size of the pond does not matter, neither does the growth rate.

The growth of the weed is an example of an exponential.  We are terribly bad at understanding exponentials.  Indeed, in the case of the pond, during first week or so, the area covered by the weed is hardly noticeable.

Its behaviour does not change at all:  it just doubles every day.  But very soon that growth gets out of hand.

Many of the problems the world has to deal with have this exponential characteristic:  they are hardly observed at first, then they explode in our faces.  Global warming is one of them,  population is another.  Look at the graphs above.

There is also this joke:  Remember the words of the mason who falls from the fifth floor and to whom a tenant on the third asks: how are things? – Not bad so far, says the mason, but we will see at the end!

Probabilities

We need to make a number of assumptions, any of which may be overthrown as time goes on.

The ones in this list I consider 99.99% impossible to happen any time soon:

The following assumptions are possible, though not very probable;  I give them perhaps 50% chance of actually happening in time:

I sincerely do not think items in the first list will become reality, except possibly for the AI item, and just maybe the fusion.

So essentially, don’t count on miracles.

To survive we will need to use the tools we have today.

We will have to accept that human nature will remain what it is.

The Elephant in the Room

Question heard recently in a TV quiz:

"At the start of which century was the human population 1.7 billion?"

Answer: 20th, or in the year 1900.

Today we have passed 8 billion.  Since my last solstice message (2020) much advice has been given for solving the crises, but astonishingly, the biggest issue is almost never mentioned:  population.

During the Renaissance the world population was somewhere between 300 and 500 million. In 1900 it was 1.7 billion, in the 1950s it was 2.5 billion.  In the last 60 years it has more than tripled and the latest figure is over 8 billion, two billion have been added in just the last 20 years.

If you have difficulty understanding the size of 1 billion (1'000'000'000) then get your calculator out to answer this problem:  you are 20 years old, and someone gives you 1 billion €, on condition that you must spend it all by your 80th birthday, i.e. in the next 60 years.  How much must you spend each day? (answer at the end of the page)

Malthus understood that finite resources could not provide an ever growing demand.  He had his calculations somewhat wrong, but the basic statement is obviously correct:  a limited Earth cannot sustain an infinitely growing population.

But the time of the Renaissance is generally seen as a time of great developments.  What happened then flies in the face of the argument that to advance rapidly, the more people the better.  The Renaissance is a historic counter-example. There are others:  less densely populated countries are generally richer, in material wealth but also all other aspects of life.  Societies with a more educated population also do better. The Scandinavian countries fall in both categories.

Note that a population of 8'000'000'000 humans is 20 times larger than the population at the Renaissance.  If we diminished the current population by a factor of 40 there would be a total of 200 million, and I do not believe that we would be worse off in any which way.

Illustration

Represent a person by a red dot, put a blueish circle around them to indicate the radius of interaction, and let them move at a speed that indicates the rate of interaction.  Thus, a person who travels widely or controls what happens at a large distance would have a large circle, and if they also do these things very often, then they would also move quickly.

In the first animation below, a few persons are represented, more or less in a situation as it was in 1900.

The second animation is probably closer to the current situation:  many more people, much larger influence and much more per capita consumption.

Important note:  when two of the blueish circles overlap, the two people involved will be acting in each other’s space.  That may lead to conflict, or a feeling of limited freedom.  No wonder we see growing unrest.

Consider:  my grandmother lived less than 200km from the seaside, but traveled there only once in her lifetime.  I have been to Australia five times.  She never used plastic bags (there weren’t any!), I have difficulty avoiding their use.

How many people can the Earth support?  The answer is:  to what kind of life do you want to limit them?

The answer to that is probably:  ten million.  It seems Switzerland and Norway prove the point.

It is well known what can be done:  give girls good education and give all women access to birth control.  Should we accept that some cultures and some political regimes are opposed to that?

Human Nature

Human nature is not the same in every person.  But most dogmatic value systems preach that all humans are equal and that any deviation from (their) ideal norm is an aberration (sin).  Can we tolerate such nonsense?

Human nature is very diverse, each individual shows only a small subset of all possible aspects:  some people are kind, others are cruel, some are intelligent, others are stupid, some are curious, others believe they know everything. Some deny reality, believe in religions, rely on what others tell them.  Some always study, experiment, try to find causes.  A few even change their mind in the face of evidence.

But let’s not deny it:  humans have a racist tendency, whatever their own ancestry is.

Humans also have a tribal tendency, wanting to belong to a group that is different and deemed superior from other groups, but strangely should be homogeneous inside the group.

Not all sides of human nature are shown in the same person at the same moment:  each individual has a different personality, which develops over time.

There is no utopia.

It sounds like human nature prevents anything else than just letting things work themselves out.  But there are a few values that should be acceptable to all, the most important being that you should not do to others what you would not want others to do to you.  This is doubly negative, but it does give guidance.

If you don’t want others to pollute your atmosphere, you too should refrain from doing it.  If you don’t want others to impose their rule on you, you should try to find a way to agree together on desirable actions.

A widely shared desire is that we want to be free to do what we like.

Freedom is limited by the number of people inside your desired action radius.  If you are content to live in the same place, never wandering far from home, your action radius is small and if there are few people around, it is unlikely that any interfere with you:  you are “free”.  If there are lots of people around, even if your action radius is small, there will be interference and you are not free.

In big, crowded cities you are not free.  Even in wilderness regions with low population density you may not be free if you need a large area to support you.

I posit that many frustrations find their origin in the clash between one’s desired action radius and the interference from other people inside the same radius.

Physical Nature

The physical world is unlike that of human nature, it has only one set of rules and they apply everywhere.  If we want to survive, we better admit the existence of the harsher physical phenomena:  they cannot be willed away.

There is one stumbling block to the understanding of physical nature:  you must grasp statistics and probability.  That is a major problem since we need to make our choices on the basis of what we know and where we want to go.

What we know comes from statistics:  no knowledge is entirely black or white.

Choosing where we want to go can only be done by looking at probabilities of getting there, nothing has an entirely certain outcome.

Be prepared to study statistics and probability before drawing any conclusions.

Being Green

There are then a list of situations and a list of desirables. The situations are quite well defined, they result from physical nature;  the desirables are as diverse as the personalities of those who find them desirable.

What do we want?  Given the diversity of human nature, there is no general answer.  A few think we’re here to work hard and be miserable (many of those who do so become “religious leaders” and/or preach doom), but most of us prefer to enjoy themselves whenever possible. There is nothing wrong with having fun. There is nothing wrong with consuming more than producing, travelling widely, having multiple homes, changing clothes at a whim, putting ivory keys on your piano.

But such desires can only be indulged in if the total number of people is small.

Agreed that for the moment we should consume less, eat less meat, promote sustainable development.  But if there were 40 times fewer people, many of the objections of the extreme Green groups would not hold. There is no reason we could not heat our homes with wood, if the forests grow fast enough.  It’s probably possible for 200 million but certainly not for 8 billion. There is nothing agains eating meat if there is enough land to raise cattle.  But not for 8 billion.

If there are no cows, does it mean breastfeeding for all as there is no cow’s milk?

Cow farts contribute to global warming.  Fine, shall we kill also all the elephants, wildebeest, giraffes, bufffaloes etc.?  Anyway, if there are none, there will also be no tourists flying to safari photo-shoots, so, good for the planet.

I suspect that the underlying, implicit assumption that many Greens make is that we must limit ourselves because of the population, whereas my argument would be that we must limit the population so that we get more freedom for each individual.

Here is a tiny example of faulty reasoning of Green groups:  they have been pushing for LEGO (the toy maker) to find a sustainable, organic, recyclable and decomposable alternative to the ABS plastic currently used for making Lego bricks.  I disagree strongly:  there is no readily available material that has all the desirable qualities of ABS. The very essence of a Lego brick is that it can be used again and again.  It will last generations without going wrong.  My grandchildren play with the bricks I had as a kid, and that is due to the quality of the ABS plastic.  The issue is to keep the bricks going:  not throw them away!

Keep items made from ABS as if they were made of gold.  Insisting on a decomposable substitute for ABS is a way of giving up, of saying we throw away tons of Lego and nothing can be done about that. If that implies humans cannot change attitudes, then the Greens are in flagrant contradiction with their own goals.

I want my Lego from ABS, but I will also keep it indefinitely and pass it down the generations.

The problem is overpopulation relative to our desires.  I don’t want to become a vegetarian just so there can be yet more people on the planet!  Observe:  as traditionally vegetarian societies get richer, they start consuming more meat.  Humans are omnivores, they can live on soy beans but prefer a juicy steak if they can get it (not everyone, of course, remember the diversity).

There are tremendous cultural/religious aspects too:  rice has a greenhouse gas footprint more than six times that of potatoes.  Lamb has a footprint almost three times that of pork.  But pork and potatoes have “problems” in certain cultures/religions.  Will the Greens campaign for potatoes and pork everywhere?

Are Greens allowed to have children but not meat?

More silly green

(you may want to consult the page on energy)

We are told to switch electrical devices off rather than leaving them in standby.  Perhaps, but starting up a device from its OFF state can consume a significant amount of energy.  A computer with a hard disk will need to spin up the disk, then run for a few minutes before it is ready to be used.  It may therefore use the equivalent of many hours of standby just in order to switch on.  It may be better to let it sleep instead of shutting it down, but this depends on the frequency of use.

We have a night-light that runs three years on a set of three AA type batteries.  It sits there, continuously looking at changes in infrared radiation.  It switches its light on when it detects me walking around.  Obviously it consumes much more energy when it is lit than when it just sits in standby.  Suppose it never lights up but spends all its energy just in standby.  Since it lasts three years, it uses one battery per year. An AA battery holds approximately 14'000J of energy.  Thus the standby consumes 14'000J/(365days×24hours×3600seconds)=0.00044W.

Less than half a milliWatt!  If manufacturers made their device-standby at that quality, I could have two thousand devices in standby and still consume only 1W!  So, lazyness on the part of device designers?  Because we have another set of nightlights, which need a battery change every few months (though admittedly they run on AAA batteries which have somewhat less than half the energy of AA models)

Same technology, different design and quality.  But even the “bad” nightlights consume extremely small amounts of energy in standby.

So, dear Greens, attack the manufacturers, not the users.

Another faulty reasoning:  save drinking water by using rainwater, “grey” water etc. where possible.

Agreed this can be done, but requires a lot of investment: flushing a toilet with rainwater means installing a system parallel to the drinking water, which requires materials, maintenance, and may also be the source of diseases.

Nice in principle, bad in practice, and not necessary at all if the population is low enough.

Some figures

There are about 150'000'000km² of land (including Antarctica), of which about 14'000'000km² is “arable” (can be used for raising food crops), for a population of almost 8'000'000'000 people.

That means 15 people per km² overall density (including Antarctica and all deserts!) but each km² of crop land must feed 570 people.

Here is a typical 1km² area in a developed country:

While just 2000km directly south from that place, it looks like this:

Go 8000km South-West and it looks like this:

And 7500km due East we see:

The desert is unusable (at the moment).  The tropical forest should be preserved.  The very dense city is probably not very pleasant to live in for most of its inhabitants, and certainly needs to be balanced by a large agricultural area.

Global Warming

The term “Climate Change” has been imposed as a euphemism.  Certainly there are places where things will not get as bad as elsewhere, but the correct term is still “global warming”.

We have seen a global temperature rise sufficient to make the ice melt everywhere.  If 1ºC is sufficient to do that, why are we even talking about limiting rise to 1.5ºC?  If we don’t go back to earlier temperatures, then there is no hope to avoid catastrophic sea level rise.  It may take many decades, perhaps over a century, but the ice will melt.  Over geological periods this has happened several times without wiping out life on Earth.  However, a significant sea level rise over a short time will cause immense problems.

Antarctica has an average of almost 2km of ice on about 14'000'000km² of area, that is 28'000'000km³ of ice, which, if melted, gives 25'000'000km³ of water. The surface of the oceans is about 360'000'000km².  It needs therefore 360'000km³ to make the water level rise by 1m (=1/1000 km). The ice on Antarctica would make the sea level rise by 25'000/360=69m. There is a lot on top of Greenland too. If everything melts, all the land below 70m will be flooded.

And do not think there is no hurry because it will take centuries for the ice to melt. That is right indeed, but there is a significant possibility that it all slides into the ocean before:  Heinrich events.  Observations in Greenland are worrying.

A 70m rise of sea levels includes a significant fraction of the populated areas of Europe, North America, South America, Northern Asia, Bangladesh, …   Maps of sea level rise can be found easily, study them.

Greenhouse gases are still released in increasing amounts, temperature is still going up, weather is changing fast.

Consider this:  reacting to covid was at first actually a game: lockdown, social distancing, videoconferencing. It was fun, not the serious thing it should have been. When it went on beyond the first year, people started to revolt.  Will it be the same for restrictions implemented to save our planet?

Who is responsible?

Everyone is:

• the “West” for being greedy
• the ”South” for remaining traditional
• religions for stifling thought
• scientists for downplaying the seriousness of the crises
• politicians for not daring to take action
• greens for not doing the sums
• ignorants for denying
• …

The “West”

The “West”, meaning Western Europe and North America, is often depicted as responsible for all the evil in the world:  colonialism, exploitation, overconsumption, pollution, …

Any other civilisation would have done exactly the same thing, had they been in the same position.

Native American tribes were constantly at war with each other, Meso-Americans practiced human sacrifice, the Zulus conquered other African peoples, I would not want to be a woman in a Maasai tribe, and so on.

Yes, the “West” created problems, but we also acted, changed our ways and do not grow population.  I do not feel we have to pay for the inaction and stagnation in other parts of the world.

Would the world have been better off if the Chinese Emperors had allowed the colonisation of the Americas?  Read “Guns, Germs and Steel”.

The “South”

Are developing countries not largely responsible for lagging?  Clinging to “traditional” culture also implies nepotism, authoritarian government, lack of education.

If China got itself up in less than 50 years, why could other countries not do it?  They certainly had all possible access to “Western” thought and technology.  The “West” is not responsible for what happened when opportunities were rejected.

Religion

“Religion is what is holding us back” a researcher at a conference told me in private.  Too dangerous to say out loud in the Islamic country that sponsored the conference. Too dangerous to say out loud in the USA also.  And quite a few other countries.

Scientists

In a recent article in Scientific American (November 2022, p. 86), Naomi Oreskes exposes an ongoing problem with the behaviour of scientsts.  The subtitle reads: “Researchers, worried about hype, often think underestimation is good”.

This is very serious:  we have been led to believe that maybe things are not as bad as they really are, just out of caution.  Scientists need to work on their human nature.  They need to stand up!

It's rather unbelievable what happened here.  We were misled about the seriousness of the problems!

Solutions or not solutions?

The hydrogen economy is not a way out:  hydrogen is too dangerous and too difficult to produce, store and handle.  Again, unless some miracle storage is discovered.

Electric cars:  are they better?  Do we know what to do with used batteries?  How polluting is the production of the electricity to power them?  I can say though that a few quick calculations show that electric cars of the current generation are many times more enegry efficient than petrol cars.  Therefore, even if there is loss and pollution in the generation of the electricity they use, they still come out much better than petrol cars.  Problem will be the recycling of the batteries.

Solar panels:  they have become better, but there are still problems with the pollution at their production and recycling.  As with all “renewable” energy, the question is:  will more energy be produced than is needed over the lifetime of the device to make it, install it, maintain it and recycle it?  This has to do with entropy, a difficult-to-understand physical quantity, related to but unlike energy.  Entropy is the amount of irreversible disorder created by a process.  It may therefore be preferable to use a less efficient process than one that is more energy efficient but creates more entropy.  More to come here.

Fusion power:  a dream of many many decades.  Perhaps, just perhaps, but I would not bet on getting it before we meet the crash.

Can we make it?

I have very little hope:

The current set of politicians reflects the general mood of ignorance and denial.

In the past that would have led to the younger generation starting some or other revolution.  But this young generation is mostly on the hard drug of social media.  Can they transform those networks into something positive?

There is a lot we can do, but it must be drastic.  The first priority is to ensure the population stops growing, and it is the most difficult one to start on.

Switching your TV off instead of leaving it in stand-by does save a little energy, but it is negligible in comparison with what we should do.  Consider this:

Compare:

• a gym treadmill needs 500W (but they usually go well over 1'000W)
• a small petrol car driven at 50km/h needs 20'000W
• the kitchen oven goes on 2'000W
• a 1000 lumen LED light needs 10W
• the refrigerator runs on 50W
• a house uses 500W (counting household appliances, lighting etc., but not counting heating)
• LED daylight publicity panels can go at 400W/m²

For my friend in Geneva:  the famous “jet d'eau”, symbol of the city,  uses 1MW, the equivalent of 2'000 homes.

Here are some questions (only one is a joke):

• In winter, do you put thick pullovers on inside, or do you just turn the heating up?
• To save heating (or air conditioning) do you close doors, switch lights off?
• Is your electricity delivered in day/night tariffs, and if so, do you use it, e.g. by running the washing machine and dishwasher at night?
• Where you live, can you re-use glass bottles instead of recycling them? (it was normal only a few decades ago)
• When you move house, do you re-use your old furniture or just go out to buy new flat-packs?
• Do you re-use old clothes?
• Do you pack your lunch sandwich in a lunch box, or wrap it in aluminium foil?
• Do you try to re-use the aluminium foil?
• Do you use the toilet paper on both sides?
• Do you shower every day or only when you need to?
• Do you change your clothes every day or only when you need to?
• Are your bedrooms heated in winter?
• Do you drink tap water or only bottled water?
• Do you go to the gym or exercise by doing useful work?
• Is your home well-insulated?
• Do you always throw food away when it is past its best-by date, or do you use your own judgement to decide whether it is still good?
• Are old-fashioned hankerchiefs better or worse than expendable paper tissues?  And in which circumstances?
• Do you leave your smartphone to switch off by itself, or do you switch it off when done?
• Should gym treadmills not produce electricity instead of using it?
• How much does smartphone use consume? (counting the network, streaming services, …)
• How stressed are you when you com home from work?
• Do you have pets that eat meat?

Sigh.

Measures that should be immediately be imposed by governments:

• stop all advertising
• forbid computer screens for indoor advertising
• close gyms
• impose public transport in cities
• stop courier express deliveries
• stop public lighting during part of the night
• increase tax on petrol
• impose high insulation on all new buildings, impose insulation renovation of old ones
• make all products repairable
• stop fashion
• tax pets
• make birth control available to all
• pay educators better
• pay medical personnel better
• stop intellectual property in the medical sector

There are also many minor, obvious ones, such as forbidding snow cannons on ski slopes.

On repairable products:  it is often impossible to open a device's case because it was assembled by “clicking” parts together, and the bits holding them easily break off.  Admittedly screws are not very aesthetic, but it is however possible to design products so that only a single screw holds the last part of the “puzzle”, and the item can be opened for repair.

Jobs

Since I advocate eliminating certain activities such as advertising, fashion and much entertainment, there will be a lot of people out of work.  They will still need an income while they are changing professions during the transition period.

Where would be good jobs?

• food production:  agriculture and fish farming
• food distribution and preparation
• housing:  maintenance, improvements, building
• health:  medical care, doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmacies
• education:  schools, teaching
• communication about the transition

Most everything else is some form of entertainment.  All sports are, professional or not.  All art is.

But it seems there is some work for those currently in marketing and advertising:  communicate to the public about the transition, what to do, the state of things, progress made, etc.  It won't employ all of them though.

This leaves one question:  what to do with scientific research?

There is no doubt that medical research is useful and necessary.  But is astrophysics not something that can be put on hold for a while?  Do we need to send expensive probes to outer space or can we stop it until we're out of the transition?

I have spent my entire working life in research establishments, first Ghent University and then CERN.  At university I was in engineering, and it is relatively easy to argue that research to improve the efficiency of machines is a useful pursuit.

But is helping find the Higgs boson in the same class?

The answer is not exactly simple:  CERN's research has many useful side effects, not in the least in the medical sector. It also produced the touch screen and the web.

Perhaps during the transition period the brains of CERN should be oriented to solving the difficult scientific problems of the transition period.

However, I fear people will be so fed up with having to be careful that they will flee into the virtual world (metaverse, “Matrix”, …).

Answers to problems

Problem: you are 20 years old, and someone gives you 1 billion €, on condition that you must spend it all by your 80th birthday, i.e. in the next 60 years.  How much must you spend each day?
In those 60 years there are 365.25×60 days, or 21'915 days.  1'000'000'000 divided by 21'915 is 45'631€. (you can get a new 3-Series BMW every day for that; or a gold Rolex Submariner; but for a luxury sailboat you would have to save up for a month or so.)
Note this:  if each individual in the current entire world population would like to visit the Taj Mahal or climb the Eiffel Tower, these buildings would need to handle 45'631×8=365'048 people each day (including weekends and holidays!).  And each person could do it only once in their life.

Notes

References

Several images do not have references to their source.  I collected them on the go, over a fair length of time but sometimes failed to record the source.  I believe they are genuine and correct, and I would appreciate help from anyone who can find the original publications.

Fertility and Life Expectancy

Fertility is measured as the average number of children per woman (not family!).  A stable population requires a little over 2.0;  above that it grows and below that it shrinks.

Fortunately in civilised countries the number is already quite below 2, but there are still too many places where the number is too high.

Some of my friend's families have three or even four children, and there is nothing against that, because the average around here is well below 2, everyone is (or should be) well-educated and family planning is available to all.

Life expectancy is badly understood.  It was very low until recently, somewhere around 40 years.  Many people think think therefore that people born in, say, ancient Greece, died at 40 and they had to do everything they wanted to do before that age.

Not so.  The problem was child mortallity.  If you managed to survive your first ten years, the probability was high that you would make it to well over 60.  But the chances were high that you would die at birth or from an early childhood disease.

Compute:  if you have a brother and a sister, and you all three die at 40 years of age, then your average lifespan is 40 years:  (40+40+40)/3. But if your brother died shortly after birth, then to get the same 40 years average you and your sister have to live to 60:  (0+60+60)/3=40.  It gets even worse if your brother died shortly after birth and your sister died of measles at 5:  as sole survivor, you then need to be an centenarian to get 40 as average:  (0+5+115)/3=40.

Thus, although in past times the average age was low, the number of old age people was quite high.  This is a neat example of how understanding statistics is not just about averages, but involves many more parameters.

The reason why the population exploded after the industrial revolution is mainly because infant mortality was drastically reduced.  Since infant mortality no longer controls population, we have to do it now via birth control.