BTW Lester Brown’s Plan B 2.0 is on-line in HTML and PDF here: http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB2/Contents.htm and you can listen to him talk at http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3062 WGBH out of Boston. It’s about an hour long.

Thanks! Just from an initial look, the report looks very interesting, with educated guesses about effects of climate change that we don’t hear so much about.

Sorry.

Those are telling links, indeed. It’s definitely an uphill battle, but there’s room for hope, I think. I need to read your comment on Trinifar’s essay which looks at the possible “tipping point” regarding raising awareness:

http://trinifar.wordpress.com/2007/03/04/the-cia-saving-the-world/

Once I get a chance to read it, I’ll come back to this to see if I can still be an optimist — or at least one who hopes. :-/

In addition to Trinifar’s comments, I would just add that I and others are perfectly willing to discuss these issues civilly. I too invite you to join in and do so. Sarcastic, unsourced jabs don’t really help us accomplish anything.

I’ll just underline Trinifar’s points by adding that world grain production per capita peaked in the ’80s and declined in subsequent years up to the present:

Here’s a graph

As for Ehrlich, his ideas have actually been very solid. He made a mistake, I think, in betting on some resource prices with Julian Simon. His basic argument was correct while Simon’s was wrong. (Simon said, for instance, that we could continue growing the human population for the next seven billion years, an absurd notion which has been completely debunked.) But when you bet on something like the price of copper in the near future, there are many variables at work. You may actually have the best side of the bet, but will frequently lose anyway. Any professional gambler knows this. And of course Simon lost similar bets with others and refused a follow up bet with Ehrlich.

Ehrlich shouldn’t have bet on something that people who didn’t understand the nature of the bet would latch onto to discredit him, and should have been reluctant to make many specific predictions. There are too many variables at work. But his general ideas are valid: The earth is finite. There are limits to growth. We will pay for overshooting them by too much for too long. He should be your hero.

It is?

Oh, OK.

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Well, I’m laughing here. Ha ha.

Believe me: I’m all hopes, but hell: it seems as if we’ve got a long way to go. Not only are a lot of people only looking for reasons to believe the opposite of what is the general tendency of the eco-blogs of this universe (including yours); the latest mainstream news also bug me. –

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/03/science/03climate.html

Quote: “According to the new report, the administration’s climate policy will result in emissions growing 11 percent in 2012 from 2002. In the previous decade, emissions grew at a rate of 11.6 percent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The report also contains sections describing growing risks to water supplies, coasts and ecosystems around the United States from the anticipated temperature and precipitation changes driven by the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases.”

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Banning_New_Coal_Power_Plants_Will_Slow_Warming_999.html

Quote: “”There should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants until the technology to capture and sequester the (carbon dioxide emissions) is available,” said James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
“This is a hard proposition that no politician is willing to stand up and say it’s necessary,” he told journalists at the National Press Club.

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Anyway: we truly are becoming more “aware” every day, now aren’t we?

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Verdurous: – Future generations of wise citizens; young people who can’t understand why we treated the Earth’s ecology so brutally in the early part of the third millenium.

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You know what: the way we – the modern adult population – is parenting, socializing and otherwise guiding our little ones, I’m afraid there is no reason to believe it’s an earth saving lot we are raising. Bad habits are very hard to change. Especially when you don’t know about any other way of doing things, and coping with life.

Who’s going to teach the children that we might as well need to come to terms with the fact that, over the past few generations, we’ve all grown accustomed to making enormous mistakes, and that making these mistakes is “our way of life” – which our government troops are waging wars in far-away places, in order to protect ..?

Not funny. Not entirely untrue either.

First, thanks for pushing a little hope and optimism around here. It’s all too easy to see mostly denial and lack of change, and I’m as guilty as anyone of that. But we need to remember that these things do take time, and there is a reasonable chance we’ll ultimately see real progress. The steps you describe are certainly realistic. So let’s hope the more we and everyone else push for progress, the more damage will be prevented down the road. Okay Magne, time for some optimism, man!

On libertarianism, I hadn’t thought of its influence in the way you describe it, but it does make sense. I suppose the actual libertarians represent the extreme end of a spectrum (well, perhaps not as extreme as the anarcho-capitalists, but similar) so as a small minority don’t have a lot of direct representation. But their line of thought (or very similar lines) does seem to have had a lot of influence. And yeah, it’s swung pretty far in recent times. Personally, I think it’s disheartening, to say the least, to see where it’s brought us. But the recent democratic victories in the US spark a lot of hope.

Thanks too for the David Korten link, which I’ll look into. I’ll be looking more closely as well at Communitarianism and Relocalisation, terms I hadn’t heard, though I see they describe some ideas I’ve seen touched on in articles, but not named. Interesting to see they are actually well defined movements.