One indication of faulty reasoning and extreme foolishness, I suppose, would be for us to believe that we can keep overconsuming, overproducing and overpopulating as we are doing now and somehow achieve different results from the ones in existence now.

If, for example, by doing “more of the same business-as-usual activities” that we are doing now, we could be leading our children down a “primrose path” to a recognizably horrendous fate of some unknowable kind, would reason and common sense not suggest a change in behavior?

We have self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us who are recommending to the children that all of us can live large and long; that we can conspicuously consume limited resources, pollute the frangible environment, overpopulate the finite planet and ravage the Earth……just the way they are insisting all of us do now. These arrogant and avaricious leaders are living examples of patently unsustainable lives and, yes, they take pride in their gigantic ecological ‘footprints’ and lifestyles based upon excessive consumption and unbridled hoarding. If our children were to keep doing what my not-so-great generation of elders are adamantly advocating and doing now, what is likely to become of them?

My growing sense of frustration results from a realization that remarkably clear, intellectually honest and morally courageous reports from so many responsible and duty-bound scientists show us that the Masters of the Universe are determined to deny what could somehow be real and not to speak publicly about what they believe to be true regarding the predicament in which the family of humanity finds itself in these early years of Century XXI. Even worse, their minions with leadership responsibilities and duties in environmental organizations have collusively been enjoined from speaking about whatsoever they believe to be true. As a consequence, a conspiracy of silence has been established among all these leaders and the absurdly enriched talking heads in the mass media who eschew intellectual honesty and moral courage in favor of reporting repetitively about whatsoever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable and religiously tolerated.

The silence of so many leaders is deafening, while the duplicitous, disinformational chatter of the talking heads is morally outrageous. What is much worse, sad to say, is that the determination of these leaders and the talking heads to live large and long in such stupendously unsustainable ways — come what may for the children — is not only grossly irresponsible, it is a profound dereliction of their duty to warn, I believe.

Perhaps change is in the offing.

        Steven Earl Salmony said:

Ok. But, if the Earth is finite and humankind is rapidly dissipating Earth’s limited resource base as well as irreversibly degrading Earth’s environment, where will the resources and ecosystem services come from to SUSTAIN a human population that is fully expected to grow to 9.1 billion people a mere 40 years from now?

Consider that the Earth is not the cornucopia economists have told us it is. Economists are ideologues not scientists who have repetitiously stated what is clearly wrong about the way the world we inhabit works and done so many times. As a consequence, many too many people have ended up believing the specious ideas the economists have promoted so repetitively, dishonestly and duplicitously for the sake of their and their super-rich and powerful benefactors’ selfish interests.

While the Earth’s resources are finite, it is unlikely that they will be exhausted in such a short time-frame.

First, the low-hanging fruit always goes first, so estimates on how much of any material resource is left tend to be on the low end. New technologies has gained us access to more difficult sources in the past and will likely to do so in the near future.

What constitutes a critical resource also tends to change over time, so it’s difficult to predict shortages without reliable knowledge of what is going to be critical.

Secondly, affluence leads to negative population growth, it doesn’t just slow it. Make the world rich enough, and the population will begin to shrink, if the experience of the ‘comfortable classes’ of the developed world are any indicator.

But even if it’s assumed your premises are true, it’s more probable that the future will devolve into a struggle for these resources between groups before voluntary rationing and voluntary birth-control are going to happen world wide.

This is why most of us here believe that a nuclear-powered, cheap energy future is a superior objective to work toward, as opposed to the sort of world that the supporters of the stupid bit of tokenism that is Earth Hour represents.”

Ok. But, if the Earth is finite and humankind is rapidly dissipating Earth’s limited resource base as well as irreversibly degrading Earth’s environment, where will the resources and ecosystem services come from to SUSTAIN a human population that is fully expected to grow to 9.1 billion people a mere 40 years from now?

Consider that the Earth is not the cornucopia economists have told us it is. Economists are ideologues not scientists who have repetitiously stated what is clearly wrong about the way the world we inhabit works and done so many times. As a consequence, many too many people have ended up believing the specious ideas the economists have promoted so repetitively, dishonestly and duplicitously for the sake of their and their super-rich and powerful benefactors’ selfish interests.

I think you’re right that increasing the standard of living is the best bet for reducing the birthrate.

        Steven Earl Salmony said:

Human reproduction does not occur by means of some magical process over which human beings have no control. Quite to the contrary, people know about “where babies come from.” It is for this reason that I am suggesting people can choose to take responsibility for this behavior. There are all kinds of incentives that could be deployed to encourage people to have “one child per family”, for example. This is only a guess but I believe adequate incentives would lead to rapid behavior change, the kind of change that would put the human community on the road to population stabilization/reduction. The idea that human population stabilization will occur automatically in the foreseeable future has been refuted by good science and shown to be a product of preternatural thinking.

The only thing that seems to work in lowering the birthrate is to increase the standard of living first. Affluence in general leads to smaller families. This can clearly be seen in most Western capitalist countries where reproduction is being deferred/declined among the well-off young.

This is why most of us here believe that a nuclear-powered, cheap energy future is a superior objective to work toward, as opposed to the sort of world that the supporters of the stupid bit of tokenism that is Earth Hour represents.

Not only does human production not occur magically, we can see from voluminous evidence from the twentieth century — when there were two world wars and other ubiquitous armed conflicts, AIDS and other terrible diseases, pestilence, famines, natural and manmade disasters leading to great loss of life — that the global human population skyrocketed from 1.6 to over 6.1 billion people in that century alone. Please note that nothing served to stem the rapidly rising tide of humanity on Earth in the years between 1900 and 2000. It seems to me that human beings simply have to take responsibility for the propagation of our species {as well as consumption and production activities} because these activities could soon become unsustainable if they remain as unbridled as they are now.

        DV82XL said:

Solar chimney generators are not all that they are cracked up to be. They consume a significant area of land, inefficient, and have rather long payback on investment. This and they have all the other issues that come up with solar energy.

The solar thermal chimney is actually able to do something quite impressive: It under performs other forms of solar energy!

The proposals for solar chimneys are absolutely enormous for a small amount of power. It’s just plain amazing that anyone takes it seriously. One proposal was for a 1000m tower and a 20 square kilometer greenhouse collection area. This would make it both the world’s largest covered area in terms of structural sprawl and at the same time make it the tallest structure, making it considerably taller than the Burj Dubai with nearly 200 meters over the top spire and considerably more from the roof.

This would generate… tada: 100MW

Another proposal called for a structure 750 meters tall and covering several hundred hectares. This would be technically a bit shorter than the Burje Dubai spire, although taller than the habitable floors of the building – still the tallest structure in Europe (proposed to be built in spain) and also a contender for the largest ground footprint of any structure.

And this would generate…. 40MW

Then there was a proposal for Africa for a tower that was 280 meters… IN DIAMETER and 1.5 to 2 kilometers tall – this would produce a reported 200 MW

This would of course be “Nameplate” but the towes are supposed to be able to produced near sustained nameplate output…. during mid summer… and a bit less than half in the off season.

So really it’s more like a 150 megawatt generator… that dwarfs the tallest structures in the world by a factor of two and encloses more ground area than the footprint of many cities…. Absolutely gargantuan for a piddly amount of energy.

My god, they actually make photovoltaic energy seem cheap and space effecient and that is an accomplishment!

What idiot would take this seriously has me scratching my head. I think it just falls into the “new and inovative” myth because it’s different than existing proposals (which are already being shown to not work.) Of course there’s nothing new about it. We’ve known for centuries that hot air rises, but our ancestors were too smart to think there was any point to this idiocy.

I had a question about this and about Australia especially which is a big player in Earth Hour. According to a website on it, Australia gets almost all of their electricity from burning coal and because of this the emissions in Australia of both CO2 and harmful smog-producing pollutants are mostly from coal power plants. The site stated that Australia is planning on soon moving from one of the biggest users of fossil fuel for electricity to one of the lowest and cut their emissions more than in half by building something called solar draft chimneys.

It sounds really great but I looked at the numbers and it seems like something doesn’t add up. They want these things to be some of the tallest structures in the world and I know how difficult it is to build like that because they need tower cranes and crawling scaforlding to go up that high. Unless they have a new way of constructuon which I haven’t found anything about. If they want to replace coal then I assume they will need many of these because they said output is 200 megawats and I know a regular power plant can be more than 1000 megawats.

If I am not missing something major I am skeptical of whether this is all it is made out to be,

        Sung Li Kim said:

Sydney just got hit by an irony meteorite.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090330/wl_nm/us_australia_power

I can only smile.

Yes, quite! It’s all fun and games while you think you have a choice, but lets see how they feel after that choice is removed (as it would be under the kind of Green dictatorship the Earth Hour advocates so desperately want for the rest of us).