Energy, environment, food, water: Is the glass half full or half empty?

Our demand for resources cannot be sustained

By Gary Gardner

Former World Bank economist Herman Daly has used the term "full world" to describe an increasingly crowded planet whose people demand ever more materials and energy. I like the term because it neatly sums up this stage of our civilization. If the 20th century were an era of resource-intensive expansion and new frontiers, the 21st will be about adapting to greater limits on resource use. Oil, water and arable land are all finite resources, yet human demand for them is on a steady upward trajectory.

Consider oil. The concept of a coming peak in oil production is increasingly accepted even by mainstream organizations. The World Energy Council, for example, recently predicted that the peak of global oil production would arrive within 15 years -- this in a world whose energy demand, says the council, is projected to double by 2050.

Similarly, 47% of the world's population will live in areas of severe water stress by 2030, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Scarcity reveals itself through extreme and costly measures of supply: Desalination capacity globally is up by 45% in the last five years, with similar growth projected through 2012. On a local level, the government of Spain's Catalonia region declared last month that it would import water by boat and train to get through the summer.

(More here. This is the first in a series of articles in the L.A. Times under the heading "The New Scarcity". The series can be found here.)