I’m starting to believe the only permanent solution to these problems is reducing the global population. We just can’t keep using natural resources at the rate we are today.
I hate this sentiment. It's counter-factual and absolutely poisonous.
Go live in a hut in the middle of nowhere if you're so concerned about resource use.
For me, I fucking relish the day when everyone on the Earth can be as wealthy, or indeed wealthier, as I am today. Can live comfortably and look forward to sumptuous and delicious meals instead of living in fear of starvation or disease or war.
People who want to see a reduction in human population relish the same things you do. We can consume as much as we want if there are fewer of us.
You can to almost anywhere on this planet and you can see human settlement encroaching on and damaging natural habitats. The magnitude of these effects are in direct correlation to human population growth.
This is exactly backwards. The more people there are who are skilled, educated, and working, the more resources are produced. Resources aren't manna from heaven, they are the products of human labor and ingenuity. In 50 years we'll be using robots to pluck Neodymium and Copper from the ground and Iridium from asteroids. We're not going to be running out of resources, we're going to be wealthier and resources are going to be more abundant.
It's easy to imagine that we'll "run out" of "resources" because in theory many resources are in finite supply. But in reality the hard natural limits are so high as to be effectively infinite over extremely long periods of current levels of use and historically humans have gotten more and more clever about finding new methods to extract or produce resources that previously were not available.
Moreover, our increasing wealth and technological capabilities have made it possible to reduce and reverse our environmental impact and encroachment of habitats.
Personally, I like my life and I think it's worth living, and indeed even justified, and I think that denying the ability to live a similar lifestyle to others simply because they were born into a different part of the world is just know-nothing nonsense and veiled racism.
For me, I fucking relish the day when everyone
on the Earth can be as wealthy, or indeed wealthier,
as I am today.
I assume that your wealth, unlike that of many Americans, doesn't include a house with a big yard because everyone on Earth will never be able to have that.
We've got some form of carbon tax in Australia and people are up in arms about it. "How DARE they put my power bills up". "Why should we go first if no one else is doing it"? Everyone complains about global warming and wants something done, but not out of their own pocket. Any government instituting these kind of taxes will be booted out, and the opposition will come right along and repeal them.
The number of children between 0-20 has been rather steady for the last decade or two, the only reason the world population is growing is that the average age is increasing, not that an ever increasing amount of children are being born.
Eventually the population will stabilize by itself and possibly also start decreasing as the countries that have the largest population growth continue toward full industrialization and modern ways of living.
Not a bad idea, but maybe we should also educate the people living in the wealthiest nations to consume less and have more sustainable life styles? 80 percent of the world's natural resources are spent by the wealthiest 16 percent after all: http://articles.cnn.com/1999-10-12/us/9910_12_population.cos...
I don't think I could work any less than I already am, but I agree with you.
I am also convinced that in order to "do more with less" in the future, we will need to actually solve the basic problems that keep prices high on food, clothing, shelter, and knowledge. I'm not sure how to do that when science is a prisoner of copyright, for example, and education costs as much as a house, for example; I just don't see how to solve the physical problems, even for myself, in any big way when we can't collectively solve even the self-inflicted/social ones like copyright (and superstitions, and violence, and, ...). I think working less would be a sign of success, but I'm not sure how to get there from here. People won't do it voluntarily (nor should they be forced to). The government can always tax the wealthy and redistribute, but I'm leery of promoting that and just giving the government more power. (Now they want my guns too.)
It doesn't help that the U.S. defaulted on it's gold debt in the 70's (brilliantly calling it "going off the gold standard") and now U.S. money is just an interest-bearing loan (as opposed to you, the government, just printing paper...), which means people pay interest on public debt, the rich get richer, keeping the pressure on and prices going up. (Most of the world's currencies are U.S. dollar backed, so it's not limited to the U.S..) It's musical chairs: ie, every now and then someone has to lose big (one chair is removed, in the form of interest payments), and the pie gets divided among fewer and fewer (and their children). No one's going to work less with that gun in their back.
That's why, as unpopular as it can be around here (hey, everyone has to make a living), I think we have to fix this idea that we can charge for knowledge (or patent it, or copyright it), because we're really not (IMHO) going to be able to get to the important stuff if we keep fighting over the "how" (most food plants are sterile for goodness sake). I can't justify giving an inventor, even if it's me, a monopoly on an idea if it just means the whole world needs my permission to solve their own problems.
We start with the global emancipation of women. Unfortunately we barely seem able to get that going in the most developed country in the world, which makes doing it in the poorest a lot harder.
And if you have set the volume change notification to silent, Shift+volume does the opposite. Also ALT+Volume opens the system sound configuration window.
