It has been estimated that the world human population stood at about one billion around the early 1800s, which was roughly about when the industrial … - James Howard Kunstler

The Internet is now assumed to be a permanent fixture of human life. I doubt it will work out that way. It has been interesting while it lasted but I’m persuaded that it will not last very far into the future. Our resource limits are too stark and pressing. The electronic server “farms” composed of massed computers require too much electricity. Networked computing is unlikely to shift soon enough (if ever) to less energy-intensive nanomachines, or computers that run “biologically,” or anything else currently on the wish list for new leaps forward. The computer industry shows little interest in our fundamental resource limits. All this will come as a huge and unhappy surprise for people accustomed to thinking of technological progress as both inevitable and a kind of entitlement. We've been so dazzled by the magic of computers that we were not paying attention to what has happened in the background. A greater irony is that the Internet, including so-called social media and cell phones, is facilitating the first stages of epochal social unrest that will synchronize with the contractions in energy and economic activity that await us presently. Angry youth may be out rioting in the streets when their cell phone service goes dark for good.

There have to be limits. If we project “housing starts” ninety-nine years forward at current rates, there wouldn’t be a single buildable quarter-acre lot left in the world. Not a few economists would rationalize this outcome by declaring that [in] ninety-nine years from now we will have colonies on the moon or Mars or under the . Or that technology coupled with human ingenuity will solve the problem some other way, […] by genetically reengineering human beings to be one inch tall or booting all our consciousnesses into computer servers where unlimited numbers of virtual people could dwell in unlimited virtual environments of endless cyberspace.
More likely, we will remain confined to the planet Earth. Economic growth that has appeared normative and desirable during the story of industrialism is already becoming pathogenic in an economy showing more… signs of positive feedback and accelerating positive entropy manifesting as damage to the biosphere. High entropy becomes particularly problematic in an economy utterly dependent on a few… commodities […]. It becomes especially relevant when the limits to those commodities become tangible, as is now the case as we approach the global oil production peak and the actual depletion (thirty years past peak) of the North American natural gas endowment. But the collective imagination of the public cannot process the notion of a nongrowth economy, even though the limits to growth are visible all around us in everything from the paved-over suburban landscapes to the steeply rising gas prices, to played-out aquifers, to the death of the Atlantic cod fishery. We are not capable of conceiving another economic way. We are hostages to our own system.

An overwhelming majority of scientists who have looked into the matter agree that global warming is underway and is... caused by people burning fossil fuels. This is the meta-fact hovering over all the details. [...] In [mining and] burning so much [hydrocarbons in the form of] coal, oil, and gas [as fossil fuels] we've released [a fraction of] 460 million years of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere in a mere two hundred years. There are consequences for doing this. The trajectory of climate problems has gotten only more severe since I discussed the issue in The Long Emergency in 2005. Greenhouse gas emissions have exceeded predictions. The IPCC report expects a sea level rise of at least three feet [91 cm] […]; of NASA says... seventeen feet [5.18 m]. If that is the case, there would be no need to argue over the finer points of how many square miles in the Netherlands would be underwater... along with Bangladesh, many Pacific islands, most of Florida, and the Mississippi River Delta, Houston, Jacksonville, Key West, and thousands of other places.