Can everyone in the world live like you/me?

[Cutlass]

That's just semantics. But by the same token, Something like 80% of Americans think of themselves as middle class. So it's not just the middle 20% or so.

What cannot happen is all of the world's population living as the American population lives right now. What can happen is for nearly all the world's population living in similar levels of comfort and material prosperity. What is needed is to reduce those aspects of the developed nation's lifestyles that are unsustainable, such as suburban sprawl and gas powered personal cars, and increase those things that are more sustainable, like livable, walkable cities with good public transit.

 

[Mark1031]

Sure we know what needs to be done but can we do it? What is the economic, cultural, political force that will do this before a resource or environmental catastrophe. Economics seems to always push the other way eg from today:

Obama overruled the Environmental Protection Agency -- and the unanimous opinion of its independent panel of scientific advisers -- and directed administrator Lisa Jackson to withdraw the proposed regulation to reduce concentrations of ground-level ozone, smog's main ingredient. The decision rests in part on reducing regulatory burdens and uncertainty for businesses at a time of rampant uncertainty about an unsteady economy.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Obama...9.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=6&asset=&ccode=


I think the newly developing and more authoritarian places like China have a better chance of doing this as purely short term economic forces which dominate in the US will always oppose such major change.

 

[Kozmos]

I have this feeling that Western nations, so afraid of a strong government will eventually end up with no government, only financial power of the corporations.

 

[illram]

Well having a spineless President beholden to business interests in a time when there is not much to be gained politically from doing anything on the environment does not help. Yes all Presidents are like that to some degree but some are better than others. I also think there is a bit of a lackadaisical attitude on the environment in the public. Public grassroots campaigning and marching in the face of horrible environmental degradation got the attention of Nixon to the point where one of the worst Presidents helped create the EPA and the Clean Air Act, the foundations of modern environmental regulation. But after one of the worst environmental disasters in history what was done to really mitigate this in the future? Renaming an Interior Department office? I don't think Presidents like Obama see as much political value in environmental regulation, and the Right has been successful in tarring and feathering regulations as job killers. E.g., a huge pipeline for shale oil from Canada--the dirtiest, most wasteful oil you can get--goes down without a hitch. Darryl Hannah gets arrested in front of the White House but other than that no one cares. Where are the marches and the protests and the big time campaigning we saw in the past? It seems to be kind of dead.

I think the economy has supplanted real environmental activism right now unfortunately. I say unfortunately because I think green initiatives could really help the economy.

 

[Narz]

The Earth's "carrying capacity" 100 years ago was maybe 2billion people. Now it is at least 7billion. The difference, technology.

Dead wrong. The carry capacity of the Earth 100 years ago was far higher than it is today. There was far less pollution of fresh water, far more arable land & far less strain on all the biological systems. Now we're already in a spiral of destruction with global warming that will further reduce the carrying capacity of the Earth.

With technology you can fit 1,000 people in an apartment building that used to be a corn field but thinking technology increased the carrying capacity of that land but actually you've decreased it. Carrying capacity is the long term sustainablity of population, not population itself. A parasite population may well drop well below it's original levels after a bloom, especially if it damages the life support system that sustains it.

A billion people in the world today live as poorly as all of the world's population 400 years ago.

Yeah, as long as that's the case we can't claim life on our planet is so great, just that we are very lucky.

The other 6 billion live to some degree better. At least 2 billion live much better, in many respects, now than kings lived 400 years ago.

Tech did that.

The tech requires fossil fuels to run. We are burning millions of years of energy in a few decades & we think it's all our great innovation. We just stumbled on a gold mine. Our creative minds thought of a million ways to use it but we take it for granted the same way most of us take fresh water & food for granted.

We could possibly make a shift from that but the TPTB aren't going to make that happen because oil & coal/centralized control of power allows them to make a killing. They will buy up the tech & control it. A tank of gas is about as powerful as a tank of gas 40 years ago. AA batteries are only a little better. Either we can't do better or we're deliberately being duped into thinking we can't. Either way, we aren't. The next big thing that will "save" us is always 20 years away.

 

[Narz]

Sure we know what needs to be done but can we do it?

Wait & see pretty much.