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The Forum > Article Comments > Look on the bright side > Comments

Look on the bright side : Comments

By Richard Heinberg, published 12/6/2009

Reasons to be cheerful: here are some items that should bring a smile to any environmentalist’s lips.

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fractelle, its not just fungo who may (or may not) believe we can go on consuming resources. A lot of the world's population believe this and why not, surely a resource like sunlight is almost never ending (another billion of so years at least), but I suspect it was resources you would like to see limited you were referring to?

Would you like to be in charge of resources fractelle, how would you decide what to use and who gets what? I'm guessing that will irritate you as not being your point, but you're the one who wants to berate people with an ABC program of doom and gloom.

You refer to another "doom" prophet, cheer up, it may never happen that way - there's doom predictions in OLO and the media every day. You can count on the fingers of one hand which predictions of doom have come true in the last 100 years, well you don't need all those fingers to do it.

Trying to force everyone to change to the way you think the world should be run by threatening doom, or "hell" or purgatory or "your children will be slaves, starve, have no resources, live in a forest of glass" etc - is old school religious stuff, that last one is from the Tibetan bhudists, now those guys know how to control the plebs let me tell you! You need to modernize mate, maybe "do like I want and you can all have a TV", no that's been done .. well over to you, but look, the threats of doom thing is just not working is it?
Posted by Amicus, Sunday, 14 June 2009 12:50:45 PM
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Amicus, you wrote: Would you like to be in charge of resources fractelle, how would you decide what to use and who gets what? I'm guessing that will irritate you as not being your point, but you're the one who wants to berate people with an ABC program of doom and gloom.

fractelle will NOT be in charge of who gets what or otherwise.... the PLANET will.

Re Paul Gilding, did you actually listen to what he has to say? He may be a prophet of doom, but he also has solutions, solutions I know work because we have put most of them into practice. You can't have it both ways by 'attacking' doomsayers and the solutions they profer.
Posted by Coorangreeny, Sunday, 14 June 2009 6:07:45 PM
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Eclipse now
The mere fact that you don’t like something does not provide a justification for using force to settle the question your way, and nothing that you have said has given any reason why it does.

It is not valid to argue, in favour of environmental policy, that “we” need to plan the use of resources. Why not? Because “we” *already are* planning our use of resources, even before any question of policy arises. It’s just that you don’t agree with it.

What you are calling the ‘growth lobby’ presumably means the political forces behind continued growth in human population and the use of natural resources. However that is circular argument, because we are already agreed that if people *voluntarily* want to restrict their reproduction or consumption, they should be free to do so.

The political issue is whether there should be political action to forcibly restrict people’s reproduction or consumption. Otherwise, they would go right ahead and do it. That’s exactly what you don’t want, remember?

“* the … front for big oil and king coal

The only reason big oil is big, and king coal is king, is because they provide goods that literally billions of people *voluntarily* pay for because they value their use. The root problem you have is with the human tendency to live, reproduce and consume, otherwise what objection would there be?

• the cornucopian fantasy land for multinationals denying the fact that most fossil fuels, precious metals and rare earth's are about to go permanently into decline

We are barely scratching the surface but again, the reason the corporations suppying these goods are big, is because they represent the demands of such a large number of people.

What makes you think that your assessment of the scarcity of these resources is better than theirs? This is just more of a display of fake superhuman wisdom about the future, and fake moral superiority.

* the big car companies begging for more government handouts because to loose "Government Motors" is "unthinkable"

I totally agree there should be no handouts to failing companies.
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Sunday, 14 June 2009 6:22:33 PM
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But that is an argument *against* a policy response, not in favour of it. I’m consistent on the principle. You are inconsistent: which is it?

* the McDonalds McMansion McSuburban plan of McBlandness for the pseudo-delirium of the McLife

I happen to agree with you. But the point is, no-one has appointed you or me to pass judgment on what should make other people happy, backing it up with violence.

* the anti-humane front for big business which values PROFIT over the working lives of those poor bastards stuck in sweat shops 15 hours a day in developing countries

The reason people choose to work in factories is because they judge it to be better than the alternative, probably of greater poverty. When the employer provides them a job, together they are responsible for the rise in the workers standard of living.

But if he doesn’t, he is not any more responsible for their poverty than you or I are. You don’t employ people at a loss to produce something that others aren’t willing to pay for. Why should he?

* the rape and pillage of African villages and people in a resource grab to enable our McMansion "lifestyle" (in all its tacky blandness and community destroying horror)

No-one is arguing that rape and pillage are okay. But you are arguing, correct me if I’m wrong, that the use of force is okay, to stop people *voluntarily and consensually* using natural resources in disagreement with your opinion.

• the Bhopal's and Exxon-Valdez "environment enhancing spills" of multinationals cutting corners in the name of PROFIT

Human perfection is not an option. You’re not proposing a method by which the people of the world could be provided with the same amount of goods at the same price, and not have the same or a greater risk of spills, are you?

That being so, the spills are no more in the name of profit, than they are in the name of the human welfare that is served by providing these goods and services. The alternative is only greater environmental destruction *and* more poverty.
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Sunday, 14 June 2009 10:30:13 PM
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Part of the problem is that we run our labour market in a way that means that unemployment starts to climb as soon as economic growth drops below some critical level. So to avoid the evil of unemployment we have to believe that man is made for the economy, not the economy made for man. Any environmentalist who starts babbling on about reducing consumption, limiting credit growth, cutting back on junk product advertising IS THREATENING MY JOB and the re-election of governments!
However, there is no rational reason why we can't control unemployment by sharing the available work in a fairer way. Sure, employers will scream like stuck pigs about potential inefficiencies costing more than the gains from a fresher workforce and the potential for larger increases in working hours when required. However, part of the problem with the existing system is that employers get the gains from longer working hours while it is the community and taxpayers who have to live with increased welfare costs and the social cost of high unemployment.
If Richard seriously wants us to cold turkey on unecessary consumption he should start talking seriously about the changes needed to avoid this causing a growth in unemployment.
Posted by John D, Monday, 15 June 2009 9:58:06 PM
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Jardine,
I said nothing about using force, that's your own assumption there sorry.

However I will admit to wanting certain policies.
Try this one from Sustainable Population Australia. It is basically about
http://www.population.org.au/images/stories/Rescources/spa_population_policy.pdf

Freedoms in some areas of life are very good indeed. But demanding *freedom* from the constraints of physics and chemistry, and pretending we are free to live on an infinite planet, I'm afraid, is just called wishful thinking, even delusional. Physics and chemistry are not matters of opinion or politics or libertarian persuasion. If we break "Liebig's Law" of the minimum in a catastrophic enough manner people will just plain starve. Think Irish Potato famine, or even worse, "Mao's Great Leap Forward" with poor resource management leading to 20 to 40 million people starving to death.

As for your opinion about plentiful resources and "barely scratching the surface", discovery of oil peaked 40 years ago, the last time we discovered more oil than we burned was in the early 80's, and we know burn 5 times the oil we discover. Plenty enough for ya? ;-)

Lester Brown has calculated from USGS figures that just a 2% increase in annual consumption will exhaust all conventional reserves of most of the important metals within the next 70 years (IRON INCLUDED!), and many more run out in the next decade or 2, and most PEAK way before them. Plenty enough for ya? ;-)

http://eclipsenow.blogspot.com/2007/08/peak-metals-and-minerals.html

It's time to wake up and face a whole variety of inconvenient truths. Ranting about "freedom" as our resource over-consumption catches up with us isn't going to assist the REAL discussion we HAVE to have.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Monday, 15 June 2009 10:46:32 PM
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