What say you? I conclude it's unsustainable in the current form it's taken and when oil runs out we all are going back to preindustrial lifestyles.
The only inexhaustible energy source is the sun.
Effectively inexhaustible, to be precise, since the earth's maximum population is limited by our waste heat and wouldn't make a dent in the sun's output.
We need to build giant solar collectors in high orbit and beam the energy to earth safely in microwaves. Unfortunately that project will require international cooperation on a scale and timetable that mankind has never achieved.
So in the meantime we'll build more nuclear plants. There's no alternative. Terrestrial "renewable" energy sources aren't enough.
Nothing can replace the oil. Technology isn't energy. While I don't think technology will suddenly end, there will be less and less investment in this area as the energy available to us diminishes.
As noted, solar energy can replace oil; the problem is in building the infrastructure. The technology of orbiting collectors was worked out more than forty years ago and requires no advances beyond our current level.
Meanwhile nuclear will replace oil as the various governments argue over who's going to pay for the solar collectors. It's safe enough--Fukushima demonstrated that even last-generation nuclear technology can withstand two off-the-scale natural disasters without killing anybody. The long-term death rate from nuclear power will be somewhere in the percentile band with lightning and bee stings: risks nobody worries about.
The real problem with nuclear power is waste disposal. If we can actually build those solar collectors within the next couple of centuries the total volume of nuclear waste generated while we're waiting for them will be small enough to be managed with acceptably low risk. But if we fail to plan, and wind up using nuclear power forever, then of course we'll have a problem. Nuclear waste lasts many times longer than the total duration of civilization, which has arguably been on the brink of collapse a couple of times. It's foolish to believe that we can protect people fifty thousand years from now who may not be able to read our signs, understand our warnings, or even understand how any technology beyond a stone axe works.
"Modernization," here is being taken as a synonym for "industrialization?"
That would have been true 100 years ago. The Industrial Revolution is behind us and the Industrial Era is drawing to a close. The Electronic Revolution is in full swing and we are already in the Information Age. Computer technology is making obsolete the old paradigm of "bigger is better." Huge concentrations of capital are no longer necessary for most infrastructural projects, e.g., no forest of telephone poles for cellphone networks, no twelve-lane freeways for people who "go to work" on the computer in their living room, no proliferation of fast-food joints for people who are home for meals and have time to cook, no smoke-belching factories for the one-off "manufacturing" runs of instantly configurable CAD/CAM systems.
You see this all around you already. American corporations are changing from producers to scavengers, buying up each other's rotting carcasses in a desperate attempt to stay in business for a few more quarters until they, too, go belly-up. Meanwhile the son of a friend of mine and his wife emigrated to Estonia and started up a successful software house--with nothing more than their life savings.
A few giant corporations like Microsoft, AT&T and FedEx comprise the infrastructure of the post-industrial economy and they will continue to prosper, but corporations as a voting bloc of "artificial persons" will no longer dominate politics, as the "aristocracy" of the democratic era.
We've gone from animal power to water power to steam to coal to oil. We survived all those transitions. We'll survive the transition from oil to renewables.
I don't think renewables will be able to power civilization. But we'll wait and see. The post-industrial economy will require much less energy than its predecessor and (as I will point out a few lines down) the population will soon begin to shrink.
Human population density will have to be addressed proactively or "nature" will likely do so for us.
You're about thirty years behind the information curve. The second derivative of population went negative around 1980 and the first derivative is universally predicted to do the same sometime before (or only slightly after) the end of this century. Population will peak just barely into eleven digits, and then start falling for the first time in tens of thousands of years.
The problem we will have to face is one that no one is even thinking about. Every economic system since Adam Smith has relied on a steady increase in the number of producers and consumers as the engine that drives prosperity. When population starts to decrease, everything we know about business, economics and government will be obsolete. Couple this with the fact that the average age will be much higher than it has been, and that we older folks have different needs, desires and attitudes, and we're looking at a wrenching change in the makeup of civilization.
On the plus side, this will surely mean an end to war. Older people are, in general, less hot-headed and have more experience learning how to resolve disagreements or simply letting them go. Moreover, when we do start wars we send you youngsters to do the fighting, but when young people are rare and precious we'll be reluctant to "waste" them as cannon fodder.
I'll let your imaginations run rampant thinking up what goes on the minus side. But you need to start worrying about actual forthcoming problems, rather than assuming that the world will always be like it is today, and finding clever ways to solve the problems of the Industrial Era.
You make many good points and I enjoy your sense of humor.
