What an interesting idea - living within our means. This unconstrained growth which we have prized for so long is really called cancer.

"According to Mander, the "Triple Crisis" is rooted in a globalized economic system that prioritizes exponential growth, which is in turn dependent on the unrestrained use of natural resources. This growth is also propelled by a near-universal culture of consumerism and the destruction of societies that are sustainable, such as indigenous and agricultural communities. Finally, Mander added, population pressures, which continue to intensify, exacerbate all these realities."

Well said. The search for cheap labor also makes for bigger families in the corporate exploited third world. These strive to keep up with falling wages by having more children to put to work and bring home more of the less available bacon.

These countries (and ours too) could incorporate their people, giving them equal shares of non-transferable stock in their public resources. Dividends from competitive leases of their public resources could lift countries out of poverty, exploitation and resource depletion.

More feel-good happy talk. We're just going to change a few habbits and the world will be fine, huh? The speaker uses a bunch of emty Euphorisms instead of clearly deliniating the problem. The problem is immediate overpopulation that is about to disolve the Amazon rainforest and SE Asia's Indonesian rainforests. You think temperatures, weather and air quality are bad now, wait till these giant green lungs disappear.

All the slain consumerism boggiemen in the world will not stop these peasants from their current slash-and-burn activities. The most populated city in the world is Sao Paulo, Brazil. Those people are headed in droves into the Amazon as we speak. That National Super road they're building into the jungle is going to be the death of us all. It's going to split the Amazon forest in half through Manaus, and chainsaw sales and Caterpillar stock is going to soar through the roof.

Just changing out of the global economy is not going to save us in my opinion. Besides, the Fortune 500 is going to fight this tooth and nail; odds are they will win, and put these "reforms" off for ten years. What we need is mass mandatory planet-wide sterilization now.

Nothing else is going to do it.

Why am I the only one who understands this?

pacplyer - out

Sorry about the bad spelling above. The site wouldn't let me edit it saying: it was not written by me.....
But I should retract the part about being the only one who sees this. Clearly, most of the readers of this site know unchecked population is the destroyer of all systems. I am calling for replacing world leaders who do not address this unpopular problem.

newbie pacplyer

Palm oil sucks. My biodiesel comes from local recycled waste grease from restaurants and on my travels i do my best to source it from other recycling rendering plants. the best domestic producer for biofuel in USA is canola (125gal/acre) but of course the conversation is centered around corn and soy (25-30gal/acre).
Just like america, waste a ton to make a pound!

pacplyer

Mass manditory sterilization might be bad for the future of humanity...

Uh, what about hemp? Now that's a sustainable alternative renewable and it requires NO PETROLEUM.

We have 1 billion tons of biomass from farms and forests that can be used for biofuels each year in the U.S. (according to the Departments of Energy, Interior and Agriculture)

That could create 100 billion gallons of biofuel or more than 100 billion therms of Synthetic Natural Gas. If you use the SNG for combined cycle power plants, you can provide electricity for cars CO2 neutral, or you can just pipe the SNG to homes and people can refuel in their garages.

There are many things we CAN do, as soon as we free ourselves from the grip of big oil and the politicians that front for them.

Pacplyer I loved your new word, "euphorism" I presumed it was a phrase that would make you feel euphoric when in actuality your life-blood was draining away. Like a drug.

sjc_1

And I assume all of that scattered biomass is just going to gather itself together without the need for any energy.

Then it is going to find a way to turn itself into a fermentable form and distill itself without using any energy.

The US now uses at least 300 billion gallons of petroleum, so the 100 billion gallons of ethanol will replace about 75 billion gallons of petroleum leaving a shortfall of 225 billion gallons.

The only way out of this mess is either doing away with most of the population, or radically changing our lifestyle.

Do away with the suburbs so that almost all transport could be done with solar and wind powered rail transport. Stop buying and wasting so much consumer "stuff" which uses resources and energy. Eating lower on the food chain.

The above is just a start. Production needs to be localized to stop the waste of energy in shipping. No more growing cotton in Africa, shipping it to the somewhere else to turn into cloth, then shipping the cloth to be turned into clothing, and then shipping it to the consumers.

No simple, east answers that will allow the current lifestyles to continue. Now we have billions in China and India who are dreaming of living like us in the US. Not possible!

I forgot to add this.

Stripping all of the biomass off of the land for fuel is going to destroy the soil!

I'm so glad that the biggest single problem driving global climate change was at least mentioned at this conference: the population explosion. It took 150,000 years for homo sapien population to reach 1 billion around the year 1800. In just over 200 years we've now arrived at 6.4 billion...and the last half of that came since JFK was president. This had never happened before in human history. Population stabilization followed by orderly decline should be one of the highest priorities in our global warming efforts...otherwise, using all the flourescent lights, hybrid cars and windmills in the world will be for naught.

Since the food system is dependent upon petroleum, for fuel, pesticides and herbicides and natural gas, for nitrogen fertilizer, the coming peak oil will take care of the "excess" population. Estimates predict between 100 million and 2 billion people left after the crash due to peak oil.

First, I want to mention that I was at the conference--population was mentioned, but probably not given the importance it merits. However, I think the arguments about whether we really need to slash population, or whether the First World really needs to slash consumption, are silly. We need to do both.
I have read a 20 page piece that went into detail about why even using switchgrass, biofuels are not a truly renewable resource. They may be of some limited use in some local situations, but they will not be a major part of the answer. This conference devoted two whole panels to False Solutions--one just on biofuels (a woman from Brazil spoke about the problems with sugarcane ethanol) and the other covering Canadian tar sands oil, liquid fuel from coal (a battle raging here in WV right now)and carbon trading. Nuclear power should have been in there too, but its omission likely wasn't too important with this savvy audience.
The two glaring omissions were renewable energy--to what degree can it replace fossil fuels?--and time in the program for meals. They went twelve hours Saturday and nine on Sunday with no breaks longer than enough for one set of panelists to leave the stage and another set to take their places. So you could go pee or grab a cup of coffee, or eat a meal you had packed in your bag (not easy to arrange for most)but to actually eat a decent meal meant missing some of the fine speakers they had lined up. I ended up living on junk food.
Key take-home points were that Bush is having a dog-and-pony show September 27th in which the biggest GHG emitters convene--widely believed to be a way to avoid real action--and then the post-Kyoto negotiations are happening in Bali in December and it's crucial that real progress, a much more ambitious and fair agreement, is adopted there. One point made by many speakers was that the US MUST participate--"or China won't move," the Third World will refuse to cut their own emissions, and we're all cooked.
How can we get the Bush Administration to allow its diplomats to accept a real treaty? I'm not sure there is any way to force this group of sociopaths to care about even the survival of their own children--perhaps a rapid impeachment is the only way. Perhaps we have to accept failure in Bali, because we can't rip those criminals out of their positions of power in time--but we can create a climate in which the next administration will be forced to sign the Bali Accords the day it takes office. And we can all work on reducing our own footprints, and those of our organizations, employers, towns, etc. And finding ways to join with others to sway policy in our towns, states and countries. On November 3 there will be another Step It Up day of local actions highlighting the urgency of tackling climate change.