Re: The Destructiveness of High Technology

Bombadil wrote:
Marten Kemp <marten.kemp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
D.Campagna wrote:
Bombadil ha scritto:
Roger Blake <rogblake10@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2009-05-07, Bombadil <justme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
That's what you want people to believe. But you are a liar.
You and your kind are the liars. I was involved in the "environmental
movement" 35-40 years ago, and I know full well the arsenal of
lies, tricks, and misinformation that is your stock in trade
I am really astonished by the extremism that both of you are putting in this discussion. Here in Europe (I live in Italy, so sorry for my English) it's common knowledge that pollution is a big problem.
There is no need to be very fluent to say, anyway, that:
- cancer is growing
- allergies are growing, (following some sources 30% of english childs suffers now of some kind of allergy)
- Industry pollutes. We here had many cases of dead fishes, completely polluted rivers, soil so contaminated that it is unthinkable to eat vegetables grown on it, if ever someone would be able to grow something on it.
-It's a matter of fact that brazilians are destroying the forest that is the lung of the planet at a rate that makes think that in a short period scientist should begin to think were to find the Oxygen we need to breathe.
-Whe burn one milliard barrel oil every year? Well, someone really thinks that all the smoke and toxic products of combustion go away in the air without consequences?
You missed the crucial point

And people are still having babies.

We are already past the point at which it is technically feasible for the earths population as a whole to ever be affluent, except possibly with massive use of nuclear energy.

We don't need what Americans et al call "affluence".

We have plenty of resources to provide comfortable and healthy
lifestyles for everyone on the planet.

No, we dont.

That's your basic mistake.

There isn't enough WATER in many places to have even a flush toilet.

There isn't enough food in many places to feed the populations. OK, it could be grown elsewhere..but then you have to truck or fly it in.

There is an absolute and direct correlation between people per unit area, lifestyle, and per capita energy consumption that is irrevocable and irreducible.

Populations expand till they die off from something. Disease, starvation, war, auto accidents..

we haven't been 'in balance' with nature for 10,000 years, when the population of the earth was a few million.

Your stupidity, if universally adopted, would result in us going back to the stone age.


But we have to fundamentally change how we live and this begins
by putting severe limits on technology. We need to use the lowest
order of technology that will get a job done, because the lowest
order is the least destructive.


Bull***. Pandora's box was opened the first time someone took a stone and hit another stone with it (irreducibly reducing the flints in the world by one) and hit an animal with it.

All animals change the environment, and if they get too dominant, end up drowning in their own waste. Life itself changes the environment. There is no way back to the carboniferous era with few animals and a lot of plants.


For example -- Growing your food with handtools and within walking
distance has a tiny, tiny, fraction of the ecological footprint
that our present means of producing and delivering food has.


And a tiny tiny fraction of the food per acre as well.

IN the UK, when we were limited to that, we just managed to support a million population. Its 60 million now.

And people today simply couldn't do it. Its unbelievable backbreaking dawn to dusk slog. And an early death.

It is a matter of lifestyle, not population.


They are one and the same. The earth can support a few million hunter gatherers, a few tens of million non industrial agriculturalists, and a few billion if we use hi tech farming. And have an excess of energy per capita to draw on. Lose that and the 'lifestyle' reduces to the point where its merely choosing a novel and interesting way to die.

These sums have been done, but people like you dont want to know. Maths is too hard for you.




I don't think there will be a collapse. The number of people living
the elistist Middle Class supermaterialistic lifestyle will decline
and the rest of the population will receive only subsistence support
from industry, enough to keep them healthy enough to work and buy
cheap goods.

Good grief. You are criminally naive aren't you?
It's an old story and it's coming to America.
It may well be, but it aint coming to Europe.


Once the population is reduced below a billion or so the planet
will start to heal. It's problematic whether or not the remaining
human population will be viable in the long term.
Along with the idea that Technology will save us, this is the most
destructive myth -- that population is the problem.

It is _lifestyle_ that is the problem.


I am afraid you have your head up your arse.

How big is America 250 million people? Its NOTHING. Europe is bigger than that. Asia is HUGELY bigger in population terms.

Let me say this slowly.

America is utterly irrelevant. The only thing it has is enough surplus - well it used to - to develop hi tech solutions. Now it doesnt even have that any more., Americas is finished as a world power the way Europe was finished post WWII. It just doesn't know it yet.

The worlds future is largely in Chinese hands. In as much as anybody has the power to dictate it.

Whether or not America suddenly reduces its lifestyle to European levels, barely dents the world energy budget.

Yiou are about as Naive as the South African who told me that 'come the end of Apartheid, we will all have a Mercedes car and a swimming pool like the White man' I did the sums, and answered' there isn't enough water to give every citizen a flush toilet'
But the guys fro Cuba told him it was so, and he wanted to believe it.

You are no better.

You are just a little zealot with his head full of someone's propaganda. You haven't really thought about it, you don't really understand it and you certainly haven't done the sums.

You are just cannon fodder in someone's bid for political power.

A million people with cars and everything involved in making them
happen have a hundred times the environmental impact of a million people
using their own feet and mass transport.


Sure but that's not the issue. Even if everybody stayed at home and lived on Welfare, you still need to grow the food and build the homes.

That cannot be done without excess per capita energy input.




The planet can support 100 times as many people using mass transport
and their feet than people using cars.


That is utterly irrelvant. It cant FEED, CLOTTHE and KEEP WARM AND HEALTHY that many. AND although I know this seems incredible from your tiny narrow little parochial perspective, most of the world does NOT have a car or access to one, and does do everything on foot.

Mas transport is NOT more efficient than cars *unless* you are moving goods or people from one center to another. IF uyou want that lifestyle, everyone lives in cities, in tower blocks except for a few farmers, who grow everything and truck it in. Now, when are you moving to downtown Detroit? And what useful thing can you do there? What can YOU generate to pay those framers for doing it?

Yeah, right, not a damned thing. Useless as tits on a bull.




I kinda-sorta hope that there's some sort of life after death
so I can see if my predictions come to pass.

They will not. But you may very well find yourself living like
one of the new Chinese industrial de facto serfs. Toiling in
factory or farm for subsistence wages and living in a slum.


That is exactly where your ideas will take you.
You aren't fit for anything better.
Bombadil
.