“The problem with the sustainability school is that they are not making a coherent argument.”

Agreed Wing Ah Ling. There is no coherent effort to address sustainability.

We are at a very rudimentary point in addressing a genuine sustainability paradigm….in Australia and around the world. Major environmental organisations such as the Australian Conservation Foundation and aid organisations such as the Gates Foundation still don’t get it!

Just what is your ‘sustainability school’?

“…you can't have indefinite growth on a finite base. Fair enough”

Wonderful. At least we agree on that.

“…implicit in the argument is the idea that people, acting voluntarily through the market, are too stupid to have any interest in the future…”

Implicit in whose argument? Certainly not in mine. I’ve often said that if our illustrious leaders would just espouse sustainability, they’d get enormous support from the general community, including those with short-term vested interests in population and/or economic growth.

The ordinary person knows that continuous growth with no end in sight is just profoundly stupid and that a sustainable existence, as opposed to an unsustainable existence that will bring us all unstuck, is just eminently sensible.

“…but *the same people*, acting through government, suddenly become possessed of superior wisdom and prudence”

Huh? I don’t see much wisdom at all in government in relation to sustainability…. and I’ve been a scientist and public servant in an environmental capacity for 21 years! ( :>|

“Huh? Make sense!”

Um….no it doesn’t really make sense so far Wing.

“The resource uses that the greens want to ban are currently supporting many millions of human lives”

The ‘greens’ that you refer to are one small group (or disconnected set of individuals?) of environmentalists…and certainly not true sustainabilityists!

You have a tendency to tar everyone with the same brush….to see the most extreme point of view and then project it as if it was being espoused by the whole environmental movement!

I’ve reached the word limit. Too many questions at once. Let’s approach this more gently.

PS You and Peter Hume aren’t one and the same person by any chance, are you?

Peter I generally don't respond to posters who's prime motivation is to belittle others just because they do not agree. Wing Ah Ling is one of those posters.

You say the onus is not on Wing to disprove a negative, which reveals your own stance on this issue. The need for sustainability is obviously not a 'negative' to those arguing for sustainable populations, but a positive, in that you first have to recognise a problem before you can solve it (if a solution is indeed possible).

If there is an increasing number of deaths/accidents at a particular intersection generally the relevant authority ensures traffic lights are installed. The proof is in the statistics. I don't know what more proof you need that human lives in the developing world are already at risk due to overpopulation and inequities in the distribution of food resources.

I am not here as an advocate for the Greens and if you have read any of my other posts on OLO I am against the ETS for various reasons. As such, I cannot comment on the Greens 50% reduction in fossil fuels. In a general sense I am not sure how replacing one form of energy source with another renewable source in a gradual approach would cost lives.

Like Wing Ah Ling, I don't have great faith in governments to control resources any better than the private sector who often see short-term gains override any long term effects.

When speaking about regulation I am talking about the economy and the idea of 'growth economics'. We have unfortunately devised a system that is highly dependent on consumption and increasing consumption - "growth". There has to be a better way where profits do not come at a greater cost and where it is recognised that resources are not a bottomless pit that we can plunder at will over the long term.

Continued.

The basic idea behind the need for sustainability is Malthus's theorem: population increases at an exponential rate, while the means of subsistence increases at an arithmetic rate.

But the problem is, it's wrong. Malthus wrote in the 1770s, and like the current crop of people fretting over sustainability, he thought we faced a catastrophe then. But it didn't happen. Ehrlich took up the theme in the 1960s. By the 1970s, there will be food riots in the USA, we're all going to run out of resources etc. etc. etc. But he was wrong. On the contrary, both the human population, and the standard of living have increased.

The means of subsistence - such as crops - are also living populations. They also have increased exponentially, or at any rate, much more than arithmetically.

We currently measure the depth of mining in hundreds of feet. But technology is improving all the time. If and when we can mine to kilometres of depth, the resource base will thereby increase exponentially. We already have hundreds and hundreds of years worth of fossil fuels - more than the entire amount used since the Industrial Revolution. The idea that we face a critical shortge is simply rubbish.

One of the differences between science and religion is this. With science, if the facts don't fit the theory, we keep the facts and throw out the theory. With religion, if the facts don't fit the theory, we keep the theory and ignore the facts.

That's what people fretting about sustainability keep doing. They don't seem to ask why Malthus's and Ehrlich's predictions were wrong, and therefore why their own belief system might be wrong. They keep assuming that we face an ecological catastrophe. But this is religion, not science. They keep on insisting on the Malthusian premise. But the Malthusian premise doesn't prove what they are saying.

Don't just ignore the disproofs. Actually try to answer the numbered questions I have asked, or have the intellectual honesty to admit that you are wrong.

Wing Ah Ling wrote: "We already have hundreds and hundreds of years worth of fossil fuels ..."

Rubbish!

Queensland's coal reserves are roughly enough to continue mining at the rate we did last year for 210 more years. Hardly "hundreds and hundreds of years".

Yet Queensland's Premier Anna Bligh stated in July last year that she intended to triple our coal exports by 2030! How long will our coal reserves last then if Bligh gets her wishes? I would suggest roughly 80 years from now unit all of our coal is dug up if we are very lucky.

The world's gas and oil reserves are even more limited.

All these issues are discussed in "The Final Energy Crisis" (2nd edition, 2008) edited by Sheila Newman (see http://candobetter.org/TFEC)

Wing Ah Ling wrote, "If and when we can mine to kilometres of depth, the resource base will thereby increase exponentially."

It takes an enormous amount of fossil fuel energy to bring ore up from those deep mines. When oil runs out we may get by using far more polluting coal powered machines, but even that will run out much sooner than people realise -- if the planet doesn't fry first.

When fossil energy runs out, we are not going to be able to move any where near as much dirt as we do now from those deep mines with donkeys or human labour.

Wing Ah Ling wrote: "They don't seem to ask why Malthus's and Ehrlich's predictions were wrong, ..."

Of course we do.

Malthus never anticipated how coal, which was solar energy captured by plants over tens of millions of years, would make possible the expansion of agriculture and Ehrlich never anticipated that the Green Revolution would further increase agricultural productivity using fertilisers manufactured from gas and petroleum.

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Effectively our agricultural system has greatly expanded by using energy captured by plants millions of years ago, and, in the process, the soil has become degraded and had many nutrients drained from it.

No-one knows how it will be possible to continue to feed all the extra people who were born because of the Green Revolution once fossil fuels run out.

Let's hope we can, but let's not count on it and, at least let's not add to the problem in the meantime by increasing the numbers of mouths to be feed.

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Christopher, if your refusal to, even once, acknowledge any of the mountains of evidence of the 9/11 Truth Movement of the complicity of the Bush administration in the 9/11 attacks is not 'denialism', then the word no longer has any meaning (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166&page=0).

Wing Ah Ling,

Your first two questions make some assumptions about government. Sustainability crises existed in hunter/gatherer and tribal farmer societies before there was anything that we would call a government or a free market, as described in Prof. LeBlanc's book. At this sort of level, people really have no choice, whether they are intelligent or stupid, because if they limit their numbers to avoid putting too much pressure on their resource base, more populous neighbouring groups will simply wipe them out. In the states and chiefdoms, the elite are more concerned with their own wealth and power than the welfare of the people under them. There were a lot more people in Europe in 1800 than 1400 and a lot more wealth and resources for the elite, but the average person was worse off. Currently, the common people are having fewer children and are largely against mass migration, the other population boosting measure favoured by the elite, all over the world. See

http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=258

Example of a Malthusian collapse: If your soil and climate are really suitable for potatoes, you can feed up to four times as many people to the hectare as with grain. The population of Ireland grew from about 1.2 million in 1600 to 8.5 million in 1848, with most of the increase entirely dependent on two varieties of potato. The Irish may have been aware that they were in a precarious position. Peasant farmers know very well that they need genetic diversity in their crops and livestock. The Andean farmers who domesticated the potato have more than 250 varieties. Population growth was especially fast in Ireland because inheritance customs and colonial laws required land to be divided among all the sons. In the 1840s, the late blight arrived from Mexico and devastated the potato crop. 1 to 1.5 million people starved and 1.5 to 2 million had to emigrate. It is true that Ireland's British colonial masters made matters worse, but hundreds of thousands of people starved in the rest of Europe too.