Probably the latter. Doesn't mean he will be wrong, though.
I really don't get people's optimism here. This is not some doomsday prophecy divined from religious texts. It's a trend in the data - if nothing significantly changes, we're headed for a crash in the coming decades.
It's like watching a program with a memory leak - you see it ticking up in its memory usage, knowing that when it approaches 100%, it will crash. Oh, it didn't, because Haber-Bosch^W^Wthere was a swap drive? Well, the swap space isn't infinite either.
Sure, maybe skyrocketing oil prices won't crash the economy (though people seem to forget that oil isn't just fuel and energy, but also anything made from plastics - i.e. just about everything). But something else will give (likely the habitability of this planet). We need to step off the exponent, or ride it to space. But we can't fit it on Earth much longer.
I really don't get people's optimism here. This is not some doomsday prophecy divined from religious texts. It's a trend in the data - if nothing significantly changes, we're headed for a crash in the coming decades.
It's like watching a program with a memory leak - you see it ticking up in its memory usage, knowing that when it approaches 100%, it will crash. Oh, it didn't, because Haber-Bosch^W^Wthere was a swap drive? Well, the swap space isn't infinite either.
Sure, maybe skyrocketing oil prices won't crash the economy (though people seem to forget that oil isn't just fuel and energy, but also anything made from plastics - i.e. just about everything). But something else will give (likely the habitability of this planet). We need to step off the exponent, or ride it to space. But we can't fit it on Earth much longer.