Yes we humans are a funny lot. We consume, consume, consume until our resources diminish, then we find a new source to diminish and so it goes on.

Unless we all become vegetarians grain production for ethanol will provide a different set of problems. The issue of sustainable populations continues to be ignored and ironically our obsession with growth will be our undoing.

The bottom line is our whole system has to change and we all have to live more frugally. It is not difficult we have done without plastics before and we have done without plasma screens etc. In a pre-industrial world we operated in the local sphere - living, buying, growing and eating. We may have to adapt to something similar which is quite funny when free trade agreements have created the opposite - spending food miles importing from OS, food we can very well produce ourselves and often within our own local communities.

We can do it, we are an intelligent species even if we are a bit stupid at times.

We have an unlimited supply of energy. Think nuclear, always there, forever. America has hundreds of years of coal, time to go methanol, not to mention abiotic oil. Drill all over the place and while our hundreds of years of oil and coal run out, technology will solve the futures energy supply. Quite simple.

DeepDarkOpps

There is a solution to the problem and it is simple to implement and is guaranteed to work.

The problem is the problem of the Prisoner's Dilemma or in the multiparty version "The Tragedy of the Commons". We have a common resource where it is to each individual's advantage to consume as much as they can as quickly as they can. Unfortunately excessive consumption destroys the common resource.

The solution

Reward those who consume little or none of the common resource
Those who consume the common resource pay for the Rewards
Require the Rewards to be spent on building infrastructure to extend or create more of the common resource

I will be giving a talk next week at EcoForum 2008 on the Gold Coast for those interested in finding out more. You can also see more in a submission to the Garnaut Climate Change study under the company name of edentiti.

Fickle Pickle,

Yes, going back to the time period before we harnessed fire, coal and oil sounds like a lot of fun. No lights, primitive heat etc.. The course of humanity is forward, not backward, where have you been, in a cave with bin Laden ?

DeepDarkOpps

DeeprkOpps

The approach suggested does not change the GDP of a country and there are good arguments that can be mounted to show that it is likely to increase the GDP. In other words rather than going backward we will increase our wealth through this approach. True there will be a redistribution of wealth from the high consumers to the frugal but that may be a good outcome.

The approach is guaranteed to work, that is it will reduce greenhouse emissions to whatever level we want. It will do it while at the same time increasing GDP and it is socially equitable. Bit like the magic pudding.