Is the world becoming uninsurable?

Every era has it's Malthusian alarmists and without fail, each has been proven wrong by exactly the same thing the author decries and says won't work this time: technological change and adaption. There's no reason to think this time will be any different. Will some places become uninsurable? Sure, plenty of places over time have become uninsurable. Will the whole world became uninsurable? Absolutely not, because we are quite good at adaptation in the face of adversity.

The issue in California is not the price of insurance, it's availability because of extremely myopic ballot initiatives that are entirely political in nature. Should insurance be fairly priced, then the market can force people out of uninsurable areas and into areas with far less chance to burn.

Thinking technology will always save us is no different from divine or magical thinking.

Lots of societies and civilizations have collapsed. Some were straight up wiped off the earth and we don't even know what happened to them. Western civilization has had a good 500 years, and America has had a good 250 years, but that doesn't mean things can never go bad in the future.

Plenty of places have had catastrophic droughts, famines, and plagues. Nearly half of Europe died a few times from plagues. Most natives in America were absolutely wiped out from disease and other issues. Tens of millions died of famine in China last century. Tsunamis washed away and killed hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and Japan this current century.

In the past, the Krakatoa eruption messed with the climate around the world and made the sky dark. The Bronze Age Collapse is something we still don't understand but nearly wiped out everything in the western world. With population density higher than ever, disasters that match major historical ones would be far more destructive. It's really just been an unusually peaceful few decades in first world countries and people have gotten too comfortable.

>Plenty of places have had catastrophic droughts, famines, and plagues. Nearly half of Europe died a few times from plagues. Most natives in America were absolutely wiped out from disease and other issues. Tens of millions died of famine in China last century. Tsunamis washed away and killed hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and Japan this current century.

Conveniently you selected pre-technology examples. How curious.

Meanwhile the impending global famine(s) - (plural) of the 20th century never came to be because captitalism kept pumping out agriscience improvements to improve crop yields to 10 times what they were in 1900.

Technology can't save you from famines when there isn't enough sunlight to grow crops for a season or two. One good supervolcano and civilization might collapse or at least take such a hit as to be utterly transformed. Billions dead, etc.

Literally grow lights and nuclear reactors? (Or plain old gas turbine generators)

Technology is the only thing that can save anyone from that type of situation. Prayer sure wouldn’t help!

You don't have the _slightest_ idea of how much energy and materials you would need to provide sufficient grow lights to feed humanity right?

Sure I do. Do you have anything else you can propose that would help at all?

And if a couple billion people (minimum) would be dead if we didn’t do it ASAP, do you think that energy or material wouldn’t be expended at the drop of a hat?

Hell, look at how much energy we expend just to serve cat videos.

People generally respond to sudden, external, visible risks pretty well.

It’s when risks are hidden, build slowly, or are caused by behaviors they consider ‘unsolvable’ and they’ve learned to adapt to that they suck.

Serving cat videos is about at least three orders of magnitude less energy than required to grow food. How much energy do you think you need to light half a hectare with 1 kWh LED lamps?

Depending on a bunch of factors

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601....]

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/how-much-energy-does-it-take-t...]

But let’s say we take the upper end of energy consumption multiples between input energy and output energy (kcal), say 120 times. So to feed 1 person 2000 kcal per day, would require 240,000 kcal worth of ‘production’ energy, which at that multiple would add up to 278 kWh per day per person. Signifiant!

Multiply that by the population of the US (345 million), and that is a lot of kWh for sure - 95910000000 kWh. But it looks like national energy usage is measured in ‘quads’. And that is .3 quads per day.

Current US energy production is approximately 100 quads per year, and consumption a bit less than that at around 90 something.

[https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/]

So if we picked the absolute least efficient most energy consuming plants, and grew them in the least efficient type of growing environment, we’d need to drop everything and devote all our energy production to it.

Assuming no rationing, no efficiency improvements (LED lights are quite efficient now, and if we really had this issue we’d of course devote 100% of available production to them!), and no bulk commercial production of simpler foodstuffs (we can make bulk sugars and proteins via bioreactors right now, for instance), it would be terrible but possible. At least for the US.

Countries with more solar production, or colder, would be harder hit of course.

China would be well positioned probably to pivot, and I’d be surprised if they didn’t use it to their advantage. Especially with turning up their nukes and pivoting all their solar plants to making LEDs instead.

India and Bangladesh would be really screwed though.

Everyone would finally think farming was cool again though, so that’s a plus.

I take it you never bought LED panels for indoor grow ops right? Never considered the cost and resources required for the wiring, installation, programming, making greenhouses in the span of a year? Do you know how much copper you need per capita? The bottlenecks in manufacturing? This is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.

I have to say that this thread is very frustrating to read. I see @lazide is engaging with you in good faith and providing high effort, thoughtful answers. There's a lot of statistics and factors involved in a discussion like this. So I won't say @lazide's analysis is correct or flawed. But this is a good topic where a good discussion can be had and @lazide is holding up their end of the bargain.

But every response of yours is dismissive. And this makes this thread frustrating to read. You answer every reply with more questions and a tone of dismissal. If you know so much about this area, why don't you begin sharing some facts and enlighten us? Dismissing your co-commenter and answering their replies with more questions is not educating anyone of anything!

It would help if instead of answering a comment with questions, you share what you know. So how much is the cost of wiring, installation, programming and making greenhouses in the span of a year? How much copper is needed per capita? What do you know? Tell us!