@kmccune I agree that the whole world cannot live like we live today. As time goes on we have to become more and more frugal as to how we use our resources. A good example is paper; The advent of computers and the internet, as well as recycling, has hit the newspaper industry and paper mills very hard. And that’s a good thing, as Martha Stuart would say! We only use a lot of stamps at Christmas for our greeting cards. Bills, letters are all email now. My son never buys a newspaper; he reads them all on line.
Food supply will have to grow substantially, and most fish, for instance, will have to come from fish farms, salmon is aready 50% farmed, as is most shrimp. This movenment started long ago with the invention of margarine, a butter substitute which was cheap to produce and required very little land area. The amount of calories used per $1 of production keeps falling. Switserland and Denmark are two countries with very high living stanbdards that use less than HALF the BTUs or Calories per $1 of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the US.
So our brave new world with 10 billion people will make better use of energy and resources. Our cars will be smaller and lighter and most will be hybrids, with a good smattering of all-electrics recharged from out solar houses.
The mistake we all make is to assume that current practices will continue; Europe nearly destroyed all of its forests before they started using coal as a fuel. There is still coal in the ground in Europe, but it is expensive to get out with current practices. But in-situ gasification may make it both clean and economically viable in the future.
With respect to the British Isles and their unemployment, this is mostly self-inflicted. The country is full of Polish and other East European migrants doing work the British don’t WANT to do. Most British industry in non-competitive due to excessive wage demands and poor product quality. The latest pride of the British Cunard fleet was built in France, and floated across the channel for its christening in a British port. Germany has high wages as well, but very competitive industries with good quality, resulting in low unemployment. Both Ford and GM in Europe have basically stopped making cars in England and transferred that work to Germany and other European countries… Britain sometimes calls itself the “first post-industrial society”. However, you cannot live on financial services, tourism, and exporting entertainment products! Even the Swiss need high tech manufacturing and food production to round out their economy.