This does bring up one problem with central city living. At least in Philadelphia, a large proportion of those folks seem to buy from the worst corner of agribusiness – organic food:
On the other hand, in my experience, people living in high rises are a lot more likely to be vegetarians than those living in exurbia. Vegetarianism more than makes up for shopping at Whole Foods
That is true and it is why environmentalism is a mentally bankrupt movement as a whole. I love the environment and true open space more than most people but you end up with a conflicting set of priorities when you try to scale up local environmental movements to a national or international scale. They turn out to be contradictory and irreconcilable.
That is the true heart of the problem. Local solutions like organic farming do not scale up to support even a fraction of the current world population but that is only one of many such problems. It all goes back to the root cause - overpopulation that surpassed sustainable carrying capacity a long time ago yet humans are smart enough to make it work in the short-term. That is a double-edged sword that will lead to catastrophic collapse at some point in the foreseeable future. We might get lucky and not witness it personally but your kids or grandkids will.
Good thing I’m on record of not supporting organic farming.
Sorry, but using a field that has a lot of woo (but some good, as we can see later) to then declare the whole environmentalist movement as “mentally bankrupt” is really using such a broad brush make your points look ridiculous before getting to the important item that has to be criticized. Specially when many proponents of organics also go against genetic engineering and evidence that shows that nutritionally speaking there is not much difference between organic food and the one that is not.
OTOH, a lot also depends on what crop we are talking about, so on some items organic farming can have a role to play.
What you get when you solve for clean energy without solving our human nature to live well, consume hard, and reproduce ourselves is Coruscant.
It’s a complete waste of time to focus on CO2 overproduction without focusing on overconsumption and over-reproduction.
Unfortunately, icons of anthropogenic climate change tend to be folks like Mr Gore, who know how to live well and fully, and (like me) are not about to give it up. Alarmists are not about to permit attacks against their Great Cause Popes, so personal responsibility to live simply until we solve CO2 production is not on the table as a putative solution. Yet without radical and immediate widespread diminution of total consumption, all else is useless. And since we all want to live as profligately as possible, it’s overpopulation that is easily the biggest problem.
Sure; if we all lived like Tanzanians, earth could support more people. But we would rather all live like Mr Gore, and the alarmists generally consider him much too significant a figure to suggest that Al Gore live like a Tanzanian.
But in any case, there won’t be any hope at all for mother earth’s ecology to survive even if we get cleaner and more efficient energy. For example, what happens when cars go from 10 mpg to 100 mpg? You guessed it: Ten times as many people can afford cars. Oh; and because we want the less privileged to get wealthier so they will stop reproducing, we can’t even tax 'em out of those cars…
Perhaps you could clarify which point is unsupported:
AGW alarmists focus on CO2 overproduction but not on controlling over-consumption at a personal level or over-population at an international level.
Among the reasons it’s difficult for alarmists to focus on over-consumption is that their iconic figureheads–exemplified by Al Gore–are themselves extreme over-consumers of energy, with enormous carbon footprints when the CO2 cost of all their goods and consumption is calculated.
While a diminution in CO2 production through cleaner energy is a potential future solution to excess CO2, IPCC models show an immediate need to reverse current CO2 production levels. Given that the developing part of the world is anxious to live more richly, such a reduction using currently deliverable energy is possible only if the high-consumption portion of the world immediately and drastically lowers their carbon-generating consumption, leaving CO2 production available for the developing world’s consumption.
Even if CO2 were solved for, overpopulation alone is dramatically injurious to the earth’s “natural” ecosystem. We are an extremely invasive species, whose ecological footprint is devastating well beyond temperature change.
I appreciate the sincerity with which you are involved in your Great Cause of Climate Change. As with any other belief system, however, sincerity of heart and purity of faith are insufficient to render the core tenets automatically viable.
I personally see no indication whatsoever that the vast majority of people will forego their immediate best life, and sacrifice substantially enough to effect a good for the commons. I see no indication whatsoever that “population control” in any form will prevent at least a 30 or 40 percent increase of an already overpopulated world.
Nah, as usual the reality is that you are the alarmist, that is all. The repeated use of Gore has been pointed may times already as an attempt to personalize this with empty and flawed rhetoric and all of what reported before is ignored by you.
And resorting once again to the accusation if using religion is a boiler plate maneuver of the followers of pseudoscience.
In essence the point stands, many of the ones opposed to do much about controlling CO2 emissions are also telling you how silly is to concentrate on the population issue, and as pointed many times before, problems brought by technology can be decoupled from the increase in population as many examples show, the alarmism from the contrarians comes from ignoring recklessly what was done many times in the past and using ignorance to exaggerate the effort needed to control our emissions.
I so wish I could understand you better.
But for now I’ll assume you are deeply committed to propagating concern over AGW, an abiding faith that the problem can be solved, and absolutely no idea how to coherently rebut the 4 points I just made.
And a reminder: we both like Al Gore. At least, I do.
Perhaps in 20 or 30 years we’ll see how well your faith in mankind’s altruism, technical competence, and self-restraint has played out.
Perhaps some examples of how overpopulation does not cause the excess production of CO2 would be helpful.
Reduce the population by 50% and the excess production of CO2 will cease. However, as mankind seems to think that overreproduction is a good thing, it will be down to Gaia to wipe out the pesky human race, and it won’t be pretty when it happens.
In the meantime, I trust that everyone that believes in man caused CO2 overproduction does not use any CO2 producing machine, or use electricity produced by any means other than renewable energy. If they do- hypocrisy springs to mind!
Nothing is more obscene than vast numbers of government employees flying to climate conferences. Have they never heard of conference calls? Of course then they couldn’t party in exotic locations at taxpayer expense. When was the last time an international conference was held in the Bonx?
Straw man, the point is that pollution due to technology can be decoupled from the population increase, if that was not the case CFCs would be increasing, acid rain also, and algae choking out rivers and lakes due to Phosphates in detergents, Cholera also would be endemic in many developed cities. In all those cases government regulation and changes made by private industry made a difference, population increase or not.
In any case the population issue is not ignored, it is clear that many issues would be easy to manage but it is not impossible to deal too at the same time with our emissions.
As for the rest of your post, it is to silly to deal with.
> Nothing is more obscene than vast numbers of government employees flying to
> climate conferences.
What’s the total number of plane trips taken by government employees (any kind of government employee anywhere in the world) to climate conferences over all history? How much carbon has been released into the atmosphere because of those trips by those employees? What laws have been passed because of those trips that mandated the reduction of carbon being released into the air? How much less carbon has been released into the air because of those laws being passed? What’s the amount of carbon being released by the plane trips minus the amount of carbon reduced by the laws passed? Until you answer all those questions, there’s nothing to be discussed.
I’m sure you knew that I was referring to the example being given by said government employees flying, not to the actual amount released. Basically they are saying “you have to reduce your carbon production, but we will continue to have taxpayer junkets to exotic locations to pass laws affecting you but not us” ie giving us the finger.
None of the “laws” passed have reduced carbon production by any meaningfull measure. Most, if not all are simply tax grabs.
That implies once again that there is no reason to do it or that it will be too expensive, and calling it just “simply tax grabs” are just ignoring the main reason why we have to take into consideration the real price of using fossil fuels is needed.
> I’m sure you knew that I was referring to the example being given by said
> government employees flying, not to the actual amount released. Basically they
> are saying “you have to reduce your carbon production, but we will continue to
> have taxpayer junkets to exotic locations to pass laws affecting you but not us”
> ie giving us the finger.
O.K., so we’ve established that you know absolutely nothing about the number of trips by federal government employees to conferences. Being a federal government scientist myself, I can say that in fact government scientists don’t actually get to attend many conferences. You have to show the relevance of the conference, and the amount of money for conferences is quite limited. The total amount of carbon released in all airplane trips to all climate conferences ever by all government employees anywhere around the world is excruciatingly small compared to total carbon emissions.
This is basically trying to create a Catch-22 situation for anyone who tries to do research on or to promote reducing carbon emissions. If they spend any amount of time whatsoever going to conferences or traveling to speak about climate change, you can claim that they are increasing the amount of carbon emitted. Then you can say that you refuse to listen to them because anyone whose work increases the amount of carbon emitted, even by a relatively tiny amount, can be ignored. If they don’t go to such conferences and don’t travel to speak about climate change, well, then they will never come to your notice, so you can again ignore them.
The amount of carbon emitted by climate change scientists or people speaking in favor of reducing carbon emissions in their travels is tiny compared with the amounts that have been reduced in laws around the world so far passed and even tinier compared to the amounts that could be reduced if better laws are passed.
You have completely missed my point. There is now an invention called the internet, and using it people can talk to each other and see each other on tv screens. No need to fly anywhere any more. However, we know the reason government employees like to fly to exotic places for their conferences, and it’s not their concern for the environment.
eg Is it really necessary for the government leaders to meet in Bali, when they could videoconference- we all know the answer!
You don’t get what I was talking about. I’m not referring to scientists gathering for a meeting, unless it’s held in 5* hotels in Bali with loads of photo ops for the media.
I AM referring to the parasites that think because they are in charge of some government department that the taxpayer has to fund some extravenganza with grand dinners and photo ops so they can have their 15 minutes of fame, and actually contribute nothing to a solution.
I don’t think the conferences that you refer to actually create a solution either, because whatever is proposed has to be approved by politicians, and real solutions would threaten their re election chances.
BTW, why do all these conferences never make any reference to the real cause of over pollution, which is over population?
Till leaders start to do something realistic about overpopulation on a global scale, I will take no notice of anything they come up with, as it’s spitting in the wind.
7 billion and counting. Perhaps Agent Smith was right!
No, I don’t think you know the answer, you only show ignorance.
Not all videconferences or telecommuting are effective when dealing with complex or cutting edge issues.
BTW this issue does run into many different fields, telling them to just “video conference” is missing the fact that a lot of that was done beforehand but face to face encounters still make a difference.
As shown, you are basing your dismissals with arguments from ignorance. And the point that many examples of pollution that were controlled in the past stands, it shows that while population is an issue, the increase in population does not make it impossible to control our emissions, when humanity has done it many times before.
