I see you are relying on Greenland still being under Danish rule 40 years from now…:dubious:
Uzi writes:
> The real problem is that you are not going to get the west to give up their
> lifestyle, nor stop the rest of the world from wanting it for themselves. What
> you have figure out is how to give it to them without destroying the planet in
> the process.
You can’t. It’s simply impossible. We have the choice: destroy the environment of the planet to the point that there would be a quick die-off from starvation (and probably other factors) or reduce our consumption (through either slowly bringing down the population or changing our lifestyle) to allow us a sustainable combination of lifestyle and population.
Your choices are impossible. Rather than spending time and resources on telling people to stop, spend them on finding ways to allow them to do.
O.K., suggest some ways to allow them to do so. What do you mean?
The you see wrong. I rely on that Denmark would be very little dependent on fossil fuels in 2050 (“Denmark is probably not going to suffer from lack of fossil fuels, because by 2050 we won’t be using very many of them (there’s a fairly detailed plan to be completely rid of them by 2050”))
That said. If you want to talk Greenland, then I expect that it will still be closely tied to Denmark in 2050. I expect it will remain so for the foreseeable future. I’m in favour of full independence both for Greenland and the Faroe Islands, but the historic ties and cultural ties are too many and the family ties between Greenlandic and Danish families are too numerous and there are too many Greenlanders living in Denmark ad even given oil billions, then Greenland has not enough educated people to run the administration. Etc. Anyway Denmark has its own oil resources, which even though much reduced by 2050 should be enough to cover our reduced needs. And Norway has a shitload, which if the shit should really hit the fan, I’m sure they’d let flow to their brother-nation. I see no large problem fossil fuel wise.
You think humanity has reached the pinnacle of efficient industry and scientific knowledge and nothing we do from this time on will ever be able to advance our knowledge or optimize our production? There’s a shitload we can do. Renewable energy and nuclear plants instead of coal and oil plants. Electric cars instead of gasoline cars. More energy efficient industry and households. Better crops and animals more suited for husbandry. Better recycling technology.
A bigger investment in fusion technology, for example. Making clean and cheap electricity would solve almost every problem.
I consider all of those suggestions to be part of changing our lifestyle. I don’t know if those will be enough by themselves.
Well, almost everything that I use at home, other than my car, furnace, and water heater are all electricity. The latter two can be changed easily with no change of ‘lifestyle’ on my part. The car is the only issue where I’d have to plan changes around (shorter range of battery vehicles). That’s it. Get cheap and clean electricity and everyone on the planet can live in nice homes and have ‘stuff’ they enjoy. Enough cheap power and you can clean up sewage, put in greenhouses, and recycle to your hearts content.
And how do we get enough cheap and nonpolluting electricity to sustain everyone in the world on a high enough consumption level?
Rather short attention span, it seems. More investment in technology like fusion.
If I was actually able to tell you how (as in predict the future), I’d eventually have enough money to buy that island in the pacific (currently called Hawaii, I think), stock it with naked playboy bunnies, and drown myself in hedonistic pleasure for the rest of my life (probably short) and no longer worry about your petty problems.
Fusion won’t work. We’ve been trying to perfect fusion for sixty-some years now and we’re no closer to making it work than ever.
And that is why you fail, young Skywalker.
It took them over a century to get the steam engine to work, you know.
Discovering a method of producing energy from fusion is far more likely than what you’re suggesting, which is altering the human psyche. For one thing, fusion doesn’t violate the laws of nature.
Assuming that we will eventually be able to make fusion work for energy production and in the meantime making no effort to reduce consumption and population is like spending all your extra cash throughout your working life on tickets for the lottery and putting nothing into your retirement fund. You would be saying, “Hey, I know I haven’t yet won the lottery, but I’m sure that before I retire I’ll win the jackpot.” Yes, it’s possible that you’ll win the jackpot, but it’s far more likely that you’ll reach retirement years with huge debts and nothing saved for retirement. It’s unlikely that fusion will ever work for energy production.
We should do everything we can to reduce consumption, to slow down population increase (and reduce population if possible), and to do research on energy production (including fusion) and other kinds of energy-saving technologies.
Assuming that we can meet the need for resources, the raw number of people isn’t nearly as critical as how a society deals with it. Northwestern Europe is very densely populated, but because of good city planning and high fuel prices that discourage suburbanization, one usually doesn’t feel “crowded”. At a very short distance from a typical city center, you will often find areas that are completely countrified, with farms, cows mooing in green fields, and all of that. Contrast that with the gradually diminishing but far more extensive ring of bland suburban development that surrounds a typical American city. Most Americans seem to insist on a private house and yard, especially when it comes to raising kids, but this is not the best way to deal with population growth because it leads to more sprawl and fuel consumption.
Over population ALWAYS causes more crime, more laws, poverty, unemployment, pollution, disease, big intrusive government, and less personal freedoms.
The United States is committing suicide in its rush to overpopulate itself via record immigration. The overpopulating/destroying of the United States is a deliberate, intentional, but preventable act.
Fusion is a dream. It is fiction.
Nobody has a workable fusion power plant.
If you over-populate based on the assumption of having hundreds of working fusion plants, then you are doomed.
The lifestyle will be automatically reduced as a country overpopulates. As you get too many people/more and more people, you get crowds, traffic, less personal freedoms, less available energy, more pollution, more demand and more expensive housing, fewer available jobs, etc, so that the lifestyle of an overpopulating nation must of course by necessity reduce the lifestlye of its peoples.
There wont be any choice. Once your town and your highways have 10X, 20X the current number of people you are not going to be having any fun.