There have been occurences mass starvation throughout history, so human ingenuity does not always find a way out. I think many Irish people live in the US today because of one of those starvation events not that long ago.
Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" lists several civilizations that only went down after hundreds of years, sometimes thousands.
Our current practices are in effect for less than 100 years, so we really have no idea yet how it will all play out.
Currently we reap the rewards of the "green revolution", but that is not a sustainable way of farming - it depends on extra energy sources. So we don't know how that will play out in the long run, either.
Meanwhile, as you know, world population has exploded. So if our current way of producing food might turn out to be unsustainable, even more people could die.
> Currently we reap the rewards of the "green revolution", but that is not a sustainable way of farming - it depends on extra energy sources. [...]
If we were ever to hurt for cheap energy really badly, we could just opt for nuclear. At the moment politics prevents nuclear, but that's not an immutable fact of physics.
The balancing act that we have to pull whenever free energy (in the form of petrol) starts to show signs of depletion will have to be played not at the pre-industrial 1000 million people level, but at the current 8000 million. That is a very difficult act to pull - specially without the jackpot that petrol has meant for humankind.
Can you make the transition to nuclear or to another energy source? Maybe, but that's far from sure. We do not even know if nuclear (or any other energy source) is a good enough substitute for petrol at the global level, not even clear that it is an energy source (it has a much lower eroei than petrol, maybe even negative if you account for disposal costs).
Maybe everything plays out well and in some decades we are flying our tesla-jets with rechargeable batteries powered by clean australian uranium, but that seems far-fetched. And even then we might have not yet solved the demographics problem, meaning it has just been kicked down the road for another while.
Nuclear has ridiculously high eroei, if you ignore one-time capital costs to build the reactor. The capital costs to build the reactor are high at the moment, but they don't have to be. (Mostly political reasons.)
> Maybe everything plays out well and in some decades we are flying our tesla-jets with rechargeable batteries powered by clean australian uranium, but that seems far-fetched.
We can invest (nuclear) energy to make artificial petroleum, if that turns out to be the most energy-dense battery.
> And even then we might have not yet solved the demographics problem, meaning it has just been kicked down the road for another while.
You mean the problem that lots of rich countries are aging rapidly? Population growth has pretty much ceased to be a problem.
Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" lists several civilizations that only went down after hundreds of years, sometimes thousands.
Our current practices are in effect for less than 100 years, so we really have no idea yet how it will all play out.
Currently we reap the rewards of the "green revolution", but that is not a sustainable way of farming - it depends on extra energy sources. So we don't know how that will play out in the long run, either.
Meanwhile, as you know, world population has exploded. So if our current way of producing food might turn out to be unsustainable, even more people could die.