To summarise, this approach promotes mind over matter.

But this approach is also flawed because it requires and assumes a state of peace. For this model to work, peace is necessary, yet it is by and large absent.

If you want to subdue materialism, the first thing to resist and subdue is one's own genes which dictate to us their material desires. So long as we listen to them and continue to procreate, we are being conscripted by our genes to fight their never-ending wars among themselves - and no peaceful solutions are possible while we live in a war-zone!

I seem to recall just a few years ago that the CSIRO (Turner et al) looked at the 1972 Limits to Growth study and found that many indicators were coming true. LtG seems to support the idea of a long term no-growth economy perhaps with a smaller world population. That's not sexy enough for the new bosses of CSIRO so we're back to indefinite growth with all the green trimmings.

They say if you are not part of the solution then you're part of the problem. By pushing myths like CCS, unrebounded efficiency gains and super carbon absorbing trees we are actually locking ourselves into fossil fuel dependence. Don't fret about driving your big SUV to the airport because it's all going to be carbon free and sustainable in future. Nobody wants to hear the future will be hard and involve what is effectively rationing.

More globalist garbage to sell an agenda.
I read an article a few years back where the CSIRO actually said CO2 was greening the planet.
Someone must've said "Hey get with the program or we'll cut your funding"
http://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2013/Deserts-greening-from-rising-CO2

And always comes with compulsory bonus guilt-trip 'everyone needs to move into coffin sized homes'.
Ugh... tempts me to reconnect with my spiteful aloof teenage years and the lack of respect for authority and go burn some old tyres...

As I stated in a post a couple of days ago:

"...we have a way bigger energy and economic problem barreling down on us!

Here is the short reason: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-01-31/end-of-the-oilocene-the-demise-of-the-global-oil-industry-and-of-the-global-economic-system-as-we-know-it/

And here is the scientific version of the evidence: http://www.thehillsgroup.org/petrohgv2.pdf

Oil is everything, without it we are buggered, forget the coal problem and focus on this more important predicament if you dare."

The article in question here relies way too much on untested assumptions and is therefore invalid.

If you take the time to read the two links I have shown above, the second being the more technical version, you will realise we are stuffed and no amount of wishful thing, i.e. Algae farming, biofuel, fracking, thorium etc are going to solve this most pressing of predicaments.

Never mind permaculture, green utopia blah blah, we don't have the time or the money, it is way too late, period

Geoff

I subscribe to the last paragraph : Implications for the growth economy".
I'm not a sicko Green, but trust me, without sustainable oceans there will be no life!

Chinese (as the peak Asian Nation, but not alone among other Asian ocean rapists), wholesale plunder of the oceans fish stocks, and everything else that moves in it, must stop quickly if this is to be achieved..

For survival sake, Australia should tuck in behind the U.S. and declare war on China, not be sucking along to it, with blind economic lust!

That is my own view of a lower sustainable growth rate...

The blind leading the blind.

Sorry.
The vision impaired leading the vision impaired

I see a economic growth scenario not dependant on population growth!

I see population growth being moderated by the only means shown to have worked thus far, sustained economic growth!

, And that growth just can't be coal fired end of story.

We are stuffed without oil? And stuffed in a plane without wings?

Well we can put a virtual plane without wings in a vacuum tunnel and fly on magnetic wings just under the speed of light and possible if a rail gun is the motive power.

We can make oil forever, by sucking Co2 directly from seawater and then through a series of compression and expansion phase, turn it into a liquid we can combine with hydrogen to create hydrocarbons.

We just didn't have too much difficulty in finding the odd 2.5 billion to build the odd power station, but are flat out like a lizard drinking, finding 200 mill, for a pilot project.

All while burdened by Aussie super funds now in excess of two trillion.

Interestingly as fast as we suck copious Co2 from seawater, the atmosphere gives up a similar amount over time.

To sit there all doom and gloom, knowing that untried thing can't or won't work, is just giving up before the battle is engaged! And I'm no quitter!

There's is a world full of folk who also deserve their chance! And we should be wise enough to ensure they get it.

And unachievable if we all clutch the security blanket, while mouthing broken record rethoric, it can't be done.

Sadly, maybe Geoff is right, given leaders who know all the reasons it won't work and should never ever be tried?

You'd think current poll numbers, might actually inform them otherwise, and or, it just isn't all about them and their mates anymore?
Alan B.

Joh Bjelke Petersen has just left the building!

On population growth: countries with developed economies are experiencing either no-growth or declining population. Without immigration, Australia would be in this situation. China looks like it will reach a no-growth situation before 2050 and thereafter its population will decline.

Historically, why have people had lots of kids, and where ? Because it's expected that some will die before they reach adulthood, and there is no pension in most 'developing' countries - so in those countries, people have to have plenty of kids just so that there will be some who can support their parents when they can no longer work. So economic development in those countries - minus the corruption in government - might pull incomes up to the point where governments can tax people, in order to pay pensions. If so, within a generation, birth rates there would fall. Overall, world population could stabilise and even fall over the next century.

Global warming: I'm old enough to remember when they used the term 'greenhouse effect': i.e. growers using greenhouses would pump in extra CO2 to boost production and use water more efficiently. Strangely, the term is not used these days: it's more chic to talk about 'extreme weather'.

Extra CO2 in the atmosphere seems to be much more of a Northern Hemisphere problem than a Southern Hemisphere one. Here, in Adelaide, I've got a heater on at the moment to warm my feet, and it's mid-Summer.

Okay, assuming CO2 is a huge problem, and we want to avoid using the oodles of oil, gas and coal, and if renewables are not doing the job, we will probably have to re-consider nuclear energy. Current technology has advanced somewhat over Chernobyl-type reactors built in the fifties, and seem to be used safely in France and other European countries, and to produce cheaper and more reliable energy than can be produced in Germany with renewables. So it won't ever go off the agenda AND doesn't produce CO2.

Tough choices !

The con job is still on, loud & clear.

You must use less so as to leave more for us specialists. All these clowns, sucking on a taxpayer teat some where are getting worried we peasants are using up the resources too quickly.

Bet there were such clowns back in the caveman days, complaining someone was eating too much of the mammoth.

Sorry fellers, you'll have to dream up a new scare story, & quickly, or you might be part of the garbage drained from our swamp as we follow Trump into the brave new world, where the global warming scare is just a bad memory, of evil conmen who almost won.

It is clear to me that CSIRO is bowing to the dollar and corrupting their findings so as to satisfy their pay masters. For this the CSIRO will lose credibility and Australia will suffer.

Hi Has been,

I don't know, I think Trump will change his tune when he realises, dimly and slowly, that there are bucks to be made from the GW scare.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi Joe I think Hasbeen may be onto something? And maybe hottest record following hottest record year, when that solar furnace in the sky has been in a simultaneous waning phase, since the mid seventies. (NASA) And having survived the hottest recorded January.

And the prospect of a hottest ever february? Caused as Hasbeen might agree, by all those fevered imaginations in science labs and institutions around the world, need to sit down take a cold shower and stop obsessing!

And as those fevered imaginations cool down, so will the planet?

It's not really hot, that's just false reporting by folks with a vested interest? And that's not rivers of sweat pouring off my brow, just the remnants of a passing shower.

And because it is not hot, all those hoodwinked oldies can stop rehydrating to beat nonexistent heat!

After all we have Hasbeen's assurance it all a con, not real, it ain't happening! And must be right because Hasbeen is never ever wrong! You can take his assurance to the bank and get busy buying up seaside real estate at bargain basement prices from hoodwinked owners.

And we'll know that Hasbeen is right, given he'll mortgage his entire portfolio to buy, just to show those scammers, he has their number?

No joe, don't hold your breath, just kidding.

Incidentally, Nuclear power needs, as you say, to be on the table, as cheaper than coal, safer than coal, cleaner than coal, thorium! And just on the vastly superior economic case alone!
Alan B.

And you actually believe the tripe they are feeding you Alan?

You obviously aren't spreading your research net wide enough.

See the new thread I've just done, showing the NOAA used false figures in their paper trying to defuse the 17 year pause.

The CSIRO is presently flawed.

CSIRO agenda does not include the state of the world ocean environment and ecosystems linked to water quality and sustainable supply of affordable seafood protein and fish for industrial animal feed meal, including for aquaculture.

The CSIRO case for growth is similar to farmers not knowing how and where feed will come from to supply farmed animals.

Without knowledge of ocean ecosystems how can anyone know how many humans can be fed sufficiently, daily on this planet.

Australia is now importing over 70 percent of fish PLUS pork in pizza replacing a fish and chip shop in virtually every town

CSIRO 'management' appears to be even ignoring the Australian Sediment Dispersal System and point source sewage and land use and aquaculture nutrient flowing into alongshore current flowing to Great Barrier Reef waters.
Nutrient overload pollution is feeding algae that is smothering coral and marine plant nurseries.

CSIRO economic rationality is absurd, why allow un-managed sewage and port excavation nutrient pollution to so seriously impact professional and amateur fishing and GBR icon tourism industry?

The CSIRO has changed.
About 20 years ago CSIRO scientists were warning many of Australia's 300 plus rivers were is danger of collapse and reaching a point of no return, but now whole estuaries and bays are in advanced state of collapse. Moreton Bay Qld for example.

Foreshore development is ignoring the overall state of Australian marine environment collapse.

Whole coastal community economies and people and marine industry are impacted.

Malthusians keep regarding their record of being wrong as further evidence that they must be right. They get this mindset from their mantra that you can't have indefinite growth on a finite base, which is fair enough, but does not justify their time-frame, namely, that the end is nigh.

Either you're going to compare apples with apples, in which case the hairshirts and mung beans crowd are not going to satisfy the same number and kind of human wants to the same degree.

Or you're not, in which case, who appointed you as Supervisor-General of the World?

However notice that the voluntary simplicity proselytes never seem to start with themselves and stop communicating with us by computer?

Particularly offensive is their constantly presuming to take a Gods-eye view of the rest of us, as so many undesirable bacteria on a petri dish owned by them.

I bet not one of these so called 'experts' go one single day without their air-conditioned offices and central heating; whilst millions of other hard working Aussies do actual productive work right out there in the harsh Aussie sun.

Not being able to see the wood for the trees, comes to mind.
Or willing to see.
Cry fox, too.

Then there is the politcs of corruption and greed.

Yet science is so extremely capabable. Extraordinarily capable.

How can there be such confusion, such as disagreement about impact or not of CO2 on climate?

How can the CSIRO not be acknowledging the total natural and anthropogenic nutrient load linked to increase of algae linked to increasing ocean dead zones and dead coral and devastated wild fish populations worldwide?

Why is Australia's most significant scientific body not advising government of reality of South Pacific Community reporting that populations of the 999 main tuna species are now at historically low levels?

Evidence of substance indicates government should be debating whether or not seafood protein affordable supply will be adequate to sustain the estimated world human population in 2050, and whether under-nutrition and rundown immune systems will fail generally and lead to worldwide pandemic well before 2050.