On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, Hardpan
And just think: China needs all that oil because *we* buy all the garbage Wal-Mart sources there and ships here. We have the power to stop the Chinese guzzling all that oil. All we have to do is stop buying from them.
...not to mention discouraging the mindless production of ever more and more babies.
It's thoroughly unpalatable to those folks who've grown up with the postwar-baby-boomer vision of the American Dream (3 kids, 2 SUVs, a house in the suburbs and multiple trips weekly to Safeway, Wal-Mart and Best Buy...consume, consume, consume...). Why, it's downright unAmerican, given that the red Chinese forcibly control their population growth. But the unpleasant fact remains, we cannot invent our way out of simple, basic biological laws. Our technology can't and won't exempt ourselves from habitat carrying capacity, it can only buy us additional artificial carrying capacity. The difficulty is, when the underpinning of this constructed extra carrying capacity -- oil -- goes away, the rest of it will crumble very soon after.
And we've made it very difficult for ourselves to back up and go a different route. Much of North America's prime farmland has been paved over for suburbs and shopping malls.
So, yeah, it's pretty basic: Too many people competing for too few resources = problems.
(Given that, one wonders how long it'll take for society to begin to smile on those who, for whatever reason, do not contribute to the population boom.)
DS
