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Riprion wrote:How far out into the future do you extend this claim, one generation or fifty?

musashi wrote:

Riprion wrote:How far out into the future do you extend this claim, one generation or fifty?

Aye there is the rub!

As Tolthar wrote there was a system of life before the consumption of all this oil and coal – and there will be a similar system of life after (assuming there will be no apocalypse.) It seems the ultimate driver in the matter is selfishness. I decide that my comfort today is more important than my internal satisfaction from creating a more sustainable future world.

This seems rather short sighted, but it is a choice, burn the candle at both ends and the party is over when it is gone, further it is the path we are on.

This whole drama will play out well after we are all gone, so I suppose it is not a serious question for consideration. On the other hand, if we consider Objectivism a utopian concept – shouldn’t perpetual sustainability be one of the characteristics we seek? To conceive a society with a definite expiration date seems like a flawed proposal.

To consider that the only way an Objectivist society could work is in a pre-industrial societal frame work just does not sit right with me. It just seems too much like the 8th century world the Muhammadins want to give me with their Sharia law. Again it will not be me riding my ox cart to the free market of the future, so I guess it is someone else’s problem.

Tolthar Lockbar wrote:Musashi, your version of an objectivist society is basically a bunch of lemming walking towards a cliff.

musashi wrote:An Objectivist society or not, there is a finite resource being depleted. The processes that created fossil fuels took place over hundreds of thousands of years, and mankind will consume the meaningful bulk within a few hundred years. And when the fossil fuels are depleted society (as we know it) goes with it. The unfettered market gets us to the end point by the quickest path.

musashi wrote:I do believe that the rational mind is our only solution to the problem. I just predict that the solution may not come in time (I’m pessimistic that way). And if my pessimism is validated then yes, society will be forced back to an agrarian form.

Petyr Baelich wrote:Yes. It will be replaced by a better society. What happened when people decided to stop using animals and manual labor for everything and built the first machines? That ended society as they knew it too! For the better. When we get close to running out of oil, there will be an immense amount of motivation for people to devise new ways to power the devices that increase our quality of life.

• World wide consumption of just crude oil is roughly 85,000,000 barrels a day, that is 31,046,250,000 barrels a year.
  
  One barrel of oil can do the work of about 2,411 horsepower-hours.
  
  One year’s global oil consumption amounts to 74,852,508,750,000 horsepower-hours.
  
  Assuming you have horses that work 8 hours a day seven days a week, we’d need 25,634,420,805 horses to roughly equal the amount of energy we are consuming in oil alone. This does not even take coal consumption into account, albeit coal is supposed to hold out longer than oil.

Tolthar Lockbar wrote:Talks about how industrialist are using the term, "going galt," as meaning cutting back because of government interviening.
http://www.patriotpost.us/opinion/miche ... tors-.html

Tolthar Lockbar wrote:There has never been anything in history like you are saying. Your lemmings view of the human race (and therefore of individuals too), is collectivistic. And then you say that the free market has issues, and basing it on your lemmingistic/collectivistic assumptions.

Riprion wrote:This article is particularly germane to this discussion.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/132111.html

European Union President Vaclav Klaus one featured speaker at the Davos conference's opening dinner. Klaus, is a longtime skeptic of the claims for imminent global warming disaster wrote:"They want to operate technologies that have only one defect," said Klaus. "They have not been invented." Klaus added, "There is no known and economically feasible a way for an economy to survive on expensive unreliable clean green energy."

Vaclav Klaus wrote:Klaus called into question the common notion of inter-generational equity—that the current generation should sacrifice now to benefit future generations. Should we have a preference for future generations over poor people today? Klaus ended by observing that environmentalist ideologues say that they want to "save the planet. The question is from what and for whom?"

I can’t deny the rights of people that are currently in existence. But can I deny them the right to breed unchecked by market constraints? I think this is a fair constraint on the current population. These un-born generations do not have the right to exist – until they exist.

Riprion wrote:People have been making Malthusian disaster claims for a long time and they have been wrong every single time. Technology has advanced carrying capacity more quickly than population has grown.

Riprion wrote:I don’t believe that mankind is immune to population pressures, but it seems the best way to deal with these pressures has been economic advancement. With economic advancement comes both technological advancement which increases the carrying capacity of the land, and lower infant mortality rates which ultimately leads to the reversal of population trends.

Keith Lockitch 3/24/09 ARI Blog wrote:The Real Meaning of Earth Hour

On Saturday, March 28, cities around the world will turn off their lights to observe “Earth Hour.” Iconic landmarks from the Sydney Opera House to Manhattan’s skyscrapers will be darkened to encourage reduced energy use and signal a commitment to fighting climate change.

While a one-hour blackout will admittedly have little effect on carbon emissions, what matters, organizers say, is the event’s symbolic meaning. That’s true, but not in the way organizers intend.

We hear constantly that the debate is over on climate change--that man-made greenhouse gases are indisputably causing a planetary emergency. But there is ample scientific evidence to reject the claims of climate catastrophe. And what’s never mentioned? The fact that reducing greenhouse gases to the degree sought by climate activists would, itself, cause significant harm.

Politicians and environmentalists, including those behind Earth Hour, are not calling on people just to change a few light bulbs, they are calling for a truly massive reduction in carbon emissions--as much as 80 percent below 1990 levels. Because our energy is overwhelmingly carbon-based (fossil fuels provide more than 80 percent of world energy), and because the claims of abundant “green energy” from breezes and sunbeams are a myth--this necessarily means a massive reduction in our energy use.

People don’t have a clear view of what this would mean in practice. We, in the industrialized world, take our abundant energy for granted and don’t consider just how much we benefit from its use in every minute of every day. Driving our cars to work and school, sitting in our lighted, heated homes and offices, powering our computers and countless other labor-saving appliances, we count on the indispensable values that industrial energy makes possible: hospitals and grocery stores, factories and farms, international travel and global telecommunications. It is hard for us to project the degree of sacrifice and harm that proposed climate policies would force upon us.

This blindness to the vital importance of energy is precisely what Earth Hour exploits. It sends the comforting-but-false message: Cutting off fossil fuels would be easy and even fun! People spend the hour stargazing and holding torch-lit beach parties; restaurants offer special candle-lit dinners. Earth Hour makes the renunciation of energy seem like a big party.

Participants spend an enjoyable sixty minutes in the dark, safe in the knowledge that the life-saving benefits of industrial civilization are just a light switch away. This bears no relation whatsoever to what life would actually be like under the sort of draconian carbon-reduction policies that climate activists are demanding: punishing carbon taxes, severe emissions caps, outright bans on the construction of power plants.

Forget one measly hour with just the lights off. How about Earth Month, without any form of fossil fuel energy? Try spending a month shivering in the dark without heating, electricity, refrigeration; without power plants or generators; without any of the labor-saving, time-saving, and therefore life-saving products that industrial energy makes possible.

Those who claim that we must cut off our carbon emissions to prevent an alleged global catastrophe need to learn the indisputable fact that cutting off our carbon emissions would be a global catastrophe. What we really need is greater awareness of just how indispensable carbon-based energy is to human life (including, of course, to our ability to cope with any changes in the climate).

It is true that the importance of Earth Hour is its symbolic meaning. But that meaning is the opposite of the one intended. The lights of our cities and monuments are a symbol of human achievement, of what mankind has accomplished in rising from the cave to the skyscraper. Earth Hour presents the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights being extinguished. Its call for people to renounce energy and to rejoice at darkened skyscrapers makes its real meaning unmistakably clear: Earth Hour symbolizes the renunciation of industrial civilization.