Has anyone watched "An Inconvenient Truth"?

[SC David]

isnt there a super volcano under yosemity?

Yellowstone. When that goes off in however long, much of North America is done with.

The way I see it, Earth has its own natural energy balance that is being partially disrupted by the "progress" of humankind, and the lifestyles of those with influence. If everyone on earth lived like the average American, we would need more than 3 earths to support ourselves. The main contributing factors being our diets and the amount of land it takes to raise the cattle for our carnivorous, and our energy consumption. The energy consumption of America is high because of our land use patterns, with our sprawling landscape being the reason we are so reliant on fossil fuels. We NEED cars and trucks to be a successful nation since our infrastructure depends on it.

Good point Paul, but an even better point would be each of us trying to tell that to a couple of hundred thousand Chinese or Indians who want their turn at becominmg a developed nation and want the same environmental restictions (ie none) that the developed world had when they were at that stage of development.

Whatever we do is miniscule compared to these future superpowers.

You don't think that the problem might be that there are too many people on this planet do you ? (And no I'm not a fascist, left wing or otherwise, advocating death squads.)

Countries like China and India which are quickly industrializing and catching up to modern nations may try to model some parts of their lifestyle off of the US, Europe, and elsewhere, but will not be successful in replicating our societies since there are simply too many people in too small of space in their compacted cities to handle the amount of space that cars require. Roads, houses, everything would have to change. It's impossible to tell what is to come of these countries, but they do not have many environmental standards at this point and many big cities have been polluting like for many years. Busy Indian cities are already at a point of capacity as far as automobiles are concerned. There are already too many of them on the road and the up and coming middle class would be foolish to think they could have 5+ cars per household, as we are allowed in rural America. As far as polluting and such goes, these future superpowers won't get much worse, since the cars roaming the streets are all dinosaurs and the new ones they will be able to buy will be much cleaner. Same thing goes with all other industrial technology that is being outsourced. Newer = cleaner, and newer is what they will soon be getting.

The population problem will likely sort itself out. Your Neo-Malthusian view about population control implies that there are already too many people on the planet, and that it is a problem that will only get worse. I think that as innovation in overpopulated areas of India and China continues, solutions will arise. The carrying capacity will be sorted out and poverty rates will, hopefully, decline.


As for humankind making matters worse, I believe that we are playing a minor role in offsetting the natural balance of the earth and making global warming come upon us a little sooner than would happen without us here. The earth has its cycles, and we will have to adapt to the climate changes that are naturally occurring, and it should be in our best interest to slow these changes to the best of our abilities. Hope I made sense