Cheryl I am not a 'doomer' I just know limits when I see them, particularly from a scientific point of view.

Most people these days erroneously equate science with technology. Thus scientists in labs create the latest iPhones and cures for diabetes. Give them enough time (and money) and they will cure cancer and perfect cold fusion. Just don’t hold your breath while you are waiting.

You allude to the internet being a saviour, another techno trap of our age – the assumption that the universe operates along linear lines. That’s why most put hope in economists who regard monetary and fiscal policy as scientific instruments. Just tweak this knob and this will happen. Pull that lever and that will happen. But that’s not how the real world operates – economies are human constructs and as such they are vulnerable to the vagaries of human irrationality and emotional drivers. Fear and greed are two words conspicuously absent from economics textbooks.

Those of us who are realists know the scale of the problems and we are now seeing the first part of the great deleveraging. For the past hundred years or so we have seen a giant credit bubble grow – the biggest credit bubble in the history of the world. There is now something like 99 units of phantom ‘money’ for every unit of value.

Those in the know are quietly getting rid of their soon-to-be-worthless paper wealth and using it to buy up tangible wealth in the form of solid productive enterprises, land, minerals and gold.

Empires in waiting are quietly disposing of their US debt and buying up precious metals, and the average man in the street thinks the fact that the stock market is rising means that everything is doing fine (just don’t look at the trading volumes, which tell another story).

You can breed as much as you like, consume as much as you want, it makes no difference to me in the long run, but I do think it will make a big difference to you directly as we continue down this road of denial.

Ah, I see, Geoff, you're just a survivalist with pretensions.

Don't forget the 9mms.; gold bars are no use against a feral mob looking for working solar panels.

You can't get more accurate an assessment & prediction than the last two posts by Geoff & cohenite. Anyone disagreeing with them is disagreeing with reality & should finish dreaming & shake themselves awake.

Thanks 'individual' so true.

Cohenite, I don't own or need any firearms.

Solar panels in the city will be much easier to steal, probably from your neighbours I would suggest.

Happy with my lot and not a survivalist, just ensuring that I don't need to worry about much as the government continues to defraud those stuck in their industrial ways of life.

When they come knocking on my door, which I doubt, perhaps then I will consider using my ex-military skills and buy some ammo and a gun or two, thanks for the heads up!

Cheers

Geoff

Sustainability is not of this world, not of this universe. Every second the distribution of atoms changes to a new configuration, never to go back to what it was before, and only to change the next second. Every second the distribution and abundance of species changes likewise. More than 99 percent of species that ever lived are extinct. All is constant change.

Sustainability is a religious, not an ecological concept, a dream of stasis in which the original economic problem of the scarcity of resources is permanently solved by virtuous human self-abnegation - a Paradise.

Fretting about sustainability is foolish, and fully on a par with James Joyce's mother's fretting that power-points left unplugged were leaking electricity; on a par with the mediaeval monks who hated women as the instruments of generation.

The bald presumption that government, of all things, can and should aid in the achievement of ecological sustainability, is nothing short of laughable. Before astounding us with your rank foolery, you guys should pause for a moment and reflect on what government actually *is*, rather than what you think it *should be* - and take a look at what it's been doing for the last few hundred years while you're at it! Even just the last few years should be enough to cure your delusions!

Of itself, the basal idea of the anti-populationists is so obviously false that we can only laugh at their vanity and foolishness.

But as they want to use the State to restrict people's freedoms and choices, and physically coerce and threaten people into obedience with their foolish opinion, I resent them, I refute them, and I condemn them.

It is enough to point out the illogic and hypocrisy of Geoff's reply. Like all the anti-populationists, secure in all the comforts of industrial capitalism, he deals with with questions that he can't answer because he knows they disprove him, like any cultist, by evading a discourse of reason, and returns to chasing his tail gabbling his self-righteous anti-human, anti-rational, hypocrisy. The rest of them share the same methodology.

JKJ you are obviously in your 60's, probably toward the later end, i.e. nearly 70 odd-ish and really have no idea about the genuine world that now is our real reality. Perhaps, given your surmised age, you don't really care about the future of mankind. Selfishness is such an easy option when you are not threatened by the truth.

May I suggest you take your head out of your 'English Literature' books, and take a really hard look at reality.

Such a pity that someone, obviously intelligent, is so woven up in such a misguided and misaligned paradigm to reality.

I really do feel sorry for you.

Geoff