[Macfury]

So what's it gonna be folks, resource wars or support for changing the way we do things and taking leadership in those directions for the world to follow? It won't be so bad for someone my age coz I'll be dead in a few decades or less, (I'm 50), but if you're younger than that or if you have kids that you care much about, you might want to really think about how long we can just carry on with the status quo.

I think I remember this speech from "The Limits to Growth" that forgotten tome from the early 1970s--boy were they ever wrong!

 

[Macfury]

The report projected exponential growth in population and compared it to finite resources and came up with a disaster that we have long since left in the dust. While it's helpful to make projections, it's often possible to create a disaster scenario based on fixing just the right variable to create it.

We might argue that the world could not sustain EXACTLY the same appetite of the Western world if all 6 billion residents behaved like us. But it doesn't mean that there could not be some sustainable level of consumption created if we all had equal access to the resources and competed for them as their prices rose. The world would be different, and we would be consuming different things and different quantities of them, but we wouldn't necessarily be in freefall either.

 

[Macfury]

SINC: I think the theory is that if you shifted taxes to carbon consumption then some enlightened politician would take them AWAY from somewhere else. The joke is, of course, that all other products would suddenly become grossly more expensive after absorbing the tax on energy.