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zkhalique

I wonder why so many people are only looking at the economic side of this

DO THEY NOT REALIZE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND HOW WE USE FOSSIL FUELS?

We burn (no pun intended) through resources as fast as we want until there are none left. And then what?

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Pretty clear the majority of people don't care. So just hope that when the music stops, you're already dead.

And hope your children are dead too, and also your grandchildren.

That escalated quickly.

Bringing children into the world where you expect that as the future seems a little irresponsible.

As much as life extension technology is going to cause tremendous social conflict, it would certainly give people a better perspective on these things.

Living roughly eighty years on average does frame things very narrowly. The Koch brothers, for example, aren't stuck with the legacy of their policies, they only care about making their mark. If they were stuck living with the consequences they might think differently.

> And then what?

And then the price of the scarce resource will go up, pushing us towards alternative energy sources. And as time passes, we should have more efficient ways of harnessing those.

By that time we might have already destroyed an ecosystem. It's not just resources coming in, but the entropy that comes out of doing useful work with them. Whether pollution, or great pacific garbage patch, or overfishing, etc.

The invisible hand of the market hasn't been very great at solving externality problems. Neither has government, as an institution. What we should be doing is investing more in initiatives like the Virgin Earth Challenge to stave off collapse. But when it comes to overfishing, and other things ... I'm not sure we can do that.

The best we can advocate is using condoms...

Overpopulation isn't a problem. It's human desire for luxury, as is meat, as is 5 AC components for each room of your house. Problem is that the whole world cannot live as an average citizen of USA (when it comes to energy use, not the health care and the bad bits) but the whole world, when it realizes, wants exactly that.

Scarce resource might be clean air and land in a place that doesnt hit 120f daily.

This line of logic says that it is impossible for us to come to any sort of "cliff" where we are unable to smoothly transition from one energy source to another (where the possible ensuing resource wars could prevent us from ever harnessing those alternative sources). It's basically a "nothing bad can happen because ECONOMICS!" answer.

It does, and to do so it presumes that there will always be some readily available alternatives with smooth supply curves, and neglects transition costs.

It also ignores the output (garbage, buildup of entropy that destroys ecosystems)

I've seen it referred to as the Adam's Law of Slow Moving Disasters

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102964934001/fact-checking-adam...

Production of beef and lamb makes about 15% of greenhouse gases, not mentioning transport of it, or dairy. Lot of greenhouse gases are produced for energy use, heating, AC and similar.

Problem is that we aren't really burning that much oil for our own personal transportation. We're burning oil on places where efficiency isn't a goal. Feeding a mammal to harvest meat or milk isn't efficient. We humans like meat, we support the industry and it keeps producing and transporting.

Maybe giving up on a car once a week, or something similar is easy, but most of your burning comes through heating, AC, meat and dairy, and then transport. Transport is efficient, it's product of engineers.

Mammals are product of evolution, they are not efficient in their production of meat and dairy.

One will burn less much more if one changes the diet, not means of transportation.

transportation usage accounts for over 93%(!) of crude oil usage, and about 40% of overall greenhouse gas production.

You are including industrial transportation into these numbers, when realistically, these numbers should be included in the accompanying industry. Personal transportation has a much lower footprint.

http://www.wri.org/sites/default/files/world_greenhouse_gas_...

A huge world war, and then the survivors become farmers until the heat death of the universe

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