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If it weren’t for all those Jesus-hatin’ atheists, Jews, and homosexuals, America would have the low gasoline prices it deserves.
I’m praying for a fresh supply of scapegoats.
Gotta love the sheep thinking that religion is the answer.
Exactly what has religion solved in the past? What’s that you say, absolutely nothing?
So let’s take religion and apply it to oil…that ought to work!
Holy fuck he listened!! and gave us the strategic petroleum reserves, but we shun gods gift.
-Erik
OMG… only in America.
Remember in the movie Bullit with Steve McQueen when he ran the Dodge Charger off the road and it hit the gas station and blew it up? That’s what I would have prayed for.
And as usual the nutballs are out asking for God’s help when its apparant that you shoudl have never let yourself get into this mess.
The blind leaders leading the blind into The Ditch.
Fools.
Cursor_
Extinction of SUVs is the most important extinction to prevent.
#30 – JimR,
Misanthropic Scott said, In a global economy, it does not matter where on the globe the overpopulation is. Sorry.
Well, actually it does matter. Their overpopulation is helping our economy and quality of life by providing inexpensive luxuries. We just get too piggish about it.
So, you are preaching to the wrong crowd. We are barely maintaining the population we have in NA. The other side?… there is nothing we can do about their lack of vision and their moronic superstitions. They’ll populate themselves into starvation before we do.
There’s only so much food and other resources to go around. We’re treating our renewable resources the same way we treat our non-renewables. Mine them as fast as possible.
We’re mining our top soil. We’re mining our fresh water, especially aquifers. We’re mining our oceans for fish (90% dead already on the species we eat).
The problem is when we mine things that should be cared for as renewable, we don’t leave any for the next generation. This is one major part of the definition of “not sustainable.”
Here’s another definition. I heard at a lecture, so can’t provide a link, that at the present population growth rate the mass of humans will be greater than the mass of the planet in 5,000 years. For any positive (non-zero) population growth, one can perform the calculation and determine the time at which the humans will out-mass the planet.
Clearly, this is a physical impossibility.
So, population growth is, by definition, not sustainable, planet wide. Your thinking is far too narrow for this small island we’re all on, regardless of which “side” of the sphere you’re on.
Even if you don’t care what happens to all of those people when they die off, what are you going to do when you can’t get cheap electronics, sneakers, and the rest?
Your narrow-minded thinking, along with that of billions of others, will be the cause of The Great Human Die-Off. We need to reduce population globally and voluntarily if we are to avoid a catastrophic and involuntary drop in human population.
Lastly, yes, there is something we can do about people on “the other side”. We can support programs that provide education and family planning services. Education of women in particular typically drops birth rates from about 6 per 1,000 women per year to about 2.
Pull your head out of your ass and look around a bit please.
This is not only we todd it, but sofa king we todd it.
#38–Scott==while we may “assume” there is some upper limit to human numbers, identifying one maximum limit does not prove any lower one.
I did have the pleasure of reviewing you blog site and note you haven’t come to any maximal number of supportable people there, so I think it is fair for you to provide that number before hammering other people with it?
Its another subject that is very definitional. How many other species or what kinds of other species to be preserved in addition to human and should “we” make that choice or only the future generations? Thats probably the biggest variable besides finding a pollution free cheap energy source?
#40 – bobbo,
1) My point in this case was not about a maximum number. It was about any population growth at all being unsustainable. Imagining a mass of humans greater than the planet from which we are made is a vivid illustration of the point that no amount of population increase is sustainable.
2) Actually, on the blog topic you reference, What is the sustainable human population for this planet (and thanks for the excuse for a plug), I do come to a conclusion. Unfortunately, it is based solely on my own calculations. I came at the number from the other side however, and came up with a minimum number that we know is unsustainable. By my calculations, 300 million people is more than this planet can sustain for the long term. We are currently at 22 times that number.
IMNSHO, there is a big reduction coming soon to a planet near you.
How many other species should be preserved? That’s an interesting question for a variety of reasons. The two most prominent are:
1) We do not know how many can be removed and still leave us with a biosphere capable of sustaining ANY humans at all.
2) There is actually a moral issue here. Is it moral to commit species-cide? That we have already been doing so for at least 15,000 and probably even at least 50,000 years, does not make it moral. Now that we recognize that we are doing it, is it even less moral than before?
As for a pollution free cheap energy source, we had one for 190,000 years. Then we decided it wasn’t good enough. Our problems have increased dramatically ever since. Technology has not solved any of our problems yet without creating new unforeseeable problems. Often these problems are more difficult to solve than the original.
Lastly, if you want my opinion (and that is all it is) about how many people the planet really can sustain, it is probably somewhere between 6 and 60 million.
Remember, the population was a lot lower than today when we crossed the land bridge into the Americas and caused 83% of the large North American mammal species to go extinct and 87% of the large South American mammal species to go extinct, all within just about 1,000 years of coming here.
That’s a lot of biodiversity loss without even having a source of energy other than the current generation of plants soaking up sunlight.
well golly sarge, I didn’t know it was that easy.
Hah! look at that… now they’re praying to the arabs!
#38, Misanthropic Scott, … your entire post, except for the unnecessary ass remark, is common knowledge to anyone with at least half a brain. Listing them off and then claiming that I didn’t know about them just diminishes your argument.
“Even if you don’t care what happens to all of those people when they die off, what are you going to do when you can’t get cheap electronics, sneakers, and the rest?”
>>>For one thing I didn’t say I didn’t care.b but that seems to be your style of discussion… to insult and discredit in order to bake your points look better. To answer the question, I would happily do without those things.
Your hyper posts with their dire warnings border on hysterical. We can’t even get rid of Osama bin Laden after trying for 7 years and you think there a chance in hell that we westerners are going to be able to halt population growth in those countries in any meaningful time span? Riiiight. Dream on.
Everybody knows the situation Scott. The only way to make a change is for each of us to do our part. The trouble with you is that you are a hypocrite. You eat food trucked in from the far corners of the continent, you travel in gas consuming vehicles …more than you need to, you consume the coal fired energy you despise, and you have the gall to tell everyone else to stop … AND irrationally think you can get 6 billion people to turn on a dime when you can’t or won’t even do it yourself first.
I am aslo very confident that my carbon footprint would dwarf yours.
# 44 JimR said, on July 15th, 2008 at 8:25 am
#38, Misanthropic Scott, … your entire post, except for the unnecessary ass remark, is common knowledge to anyone with at least half a brain. Listing them off and then claiming that I didn’t know about them just diminishes your argument.
So, if you know about limited resources, how can you make the statement that it matters where the humans are versus how many there are in total?
To answer the question, I would happily do without those things.
Good. Just remember that it’s pretty much everything you have and most of what you eat.
Your hyper posts with their dire warnings border on hysterical. We can’t even get rid of Osama bin Laden after trying for 7 years and you think there a chance in hell that we westerners are going to be able to halt population growth in those countries in any meaningful time span? Riiiight. Dream on.
Were we looking for bin Laden? I thought if we were looking for him, we might have questioned some of his family members about his whereabouts before flying them out of the country on 9/13/2001. The Saudis are our friends.
Everybody knows the situation Scott. The only way to make a change is for each of us to do our part.
Some of our part is to help others do their part.
The trouble with you is that you are a hypocrite.
You know me that well do you?
You eat food trucked in from the far corners of the continent,
Actually, I always consider the source of my food and do my best to local, organic, or both as much as possible since both reduce our impact on the planet.
you travel in gas consuming vehicles …more than you need to,
Somewhat more, yes. I also buy carbon offsets for my vehicle and my air travel and do my best to minimize my fuel consumption whenever possible.
you consume the coal fired energy you despise,
Actually, NYC doesn’t get any power from coal. And, I conserve energy at home to the best of my ability too. Power strips for all devices. CFLs. I’ve even unplugged the fans on my heaters causing them to heat to about 66 or sometimes lower in winter with no fan pushing the air. I almost never turn on the air conditioner, have probably used it twice so far this year, both times when company was over. I do laundry in cold water. I try not to buy excessively packaged items, especially bottled water. Actually, I do rather a lot to reduce my footprint. It’s still too high, of course. But, I am doing what I can.
and you have the gall to tell everyone else to stop
I most assuredly do not. I advocate making small simple changes to our lifestyles that will have large impacts, such as those I mentioned above. I also advocate legislation that will make a bigger difference here in the land of the great waste and greater waists.
… AND irrationally think you can get 6 billion people to turn on a dime when you can’t or won’t even do it yourself first.
See above for the changes I’ve made. Oh yeah, and I have not contributed to our largest problem of all, that of overpopulation.
I am aslo [sic] very confident that my carbon footprint would dwarf yours.
That is not the most important thing. Are you making changes to try to reduce it?
Misanthropic Scott, for nearly 20 years… I grow, in my back yard, much of what I eat and store as much as I can for the winter. The rest I get locally from outlying farms. I drive my car (a one car family) once per week on average, visit all necessary locations for the whole family on that trip, and plan trips to maximize efficiency from place to place. I don’t use air travel, rarely use busses (the ones here spew diesel enough to choke you). I rarely use air conditioning, instead opening windows at night and closing up tight when the sun rises. If have taught myself to fix practically anything. An appliance can last for 30 years, I fix electronics, furniture, most things that everyone else throws out when they break. My family of 5 produces no more than one small bag of actual garbage per week sometimes extending to 2 weeks. We separate all plastic, and metal for recycling, and all food waste goes into one of 4 composters. I don’t use chemical fertilizers. I conserve water, save runoff from the roof, and don’t water the grass. My children are eco knowledgeable, and are an asset to the world population and health. I also happen to be worth more than a million $ and have zero debt, so my lifestyle is by choice.
That’s how you make a difference. Lead by a REAL example. I’ll bet that very few if any IPCC scientists can match that or even try because they are the same as everyone else. Very few if any of them would have the courage to actually live like how they expect everyone else to live. If they changed their lifestyles en mass dramatically in reaction to their discoveries and that would show how much they actually believe what they say concerning human induced GW. All their dramatic lip service in the world is just more BS to everyone who is used to political diarrhea.
And, if you want SUV’s off the road, don’t tax the poor… outlaw SUV’s for christ sake. Legislate speed limiters. Legislate engine size per lb of car until alternatives can be integrated without causing unnecessary hardship to everyone but the rich.
#45–Scott==rarely do you degrade the quality of your posts by describing your penis in such detail.
Seriously, you can buy carbon credits and you actually do it? Isn’t it true that until India and China sign up to the program, Carbon Credits is a scam to make Algore even richer?