Water and Energy Crises in Pakistan

PredictionsAlthough technology has made oil extraction more efficient, the world is having to struggle to provide oil by using increasingly costly and less productive methods such as deep sea drilling, and developing environmentally sensitive areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The world's population continues to grow at a quarter of a million people per day, increasing the consumption of energy. Although far less from people in developing countries, especially USA, the per capita energy consumption of China, India and other developing nations continues to increase as the people living in these countries adopt more energy intensive lifestyles. At present a small part of the world's population consumes a large part of its resources, with the United States and its population of 300 million people consuming far more oil than China with its population of 1.3 billion people.

William Catton has emphasised the link between population size and energy supply, concluding

“ The faster the present generation draws down the fossil energy legacy upon which persistently exuberant lifestyles now depend, the less opportunity posterity will have to live in anything like the same way or the same numbers. Yet most contemporary political proposals for solving problems of economic stagnation or inequity amount to plans for speeding up the rate of drawdown of non-renewable resources. ”

David Pimentel professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, has called for massive reduction in world populations to avoid a permanent global energy crisis. The implication is that cheap oil has created a human overshoot beyond Earth's carrying capacity, which inevitably led to an energy crisis.