10. A degree of truth in the main premise – but it’s way too late to focus on any one thing, or even on just the noticeable items. The narrower the focus, the more intense the pain. Yes, coal is the worst case – but ceasing all coal production would be disastrous for those involved, while all the other sources go unchecked.

9. Well, it would be nice if we didn’t have to change anything at all – but it’s not practical or likely. All our infrastructure is going to have to change – any way; it has a limited lifespan, and will need to be replaced. Why not replace it to suit the 21st cntury, not the 20th? An infrastructure has always changed, over time. The mistake is to imgine that the current setup is somehow ideal.

8. ” “Natural” “Organic” and “Bio” do not mean “good.”” So what? Nothing to do with environmentalism.

7. Eh? It’s the business-as usual crowd who are the wildest optimists.

6. Well, duh! But we are perfectly entitled to criticise plain bad behaviour – especially when there are plenty of alternatives.

5. Bollocks. Taxation can be progressive, caps are neutral (but tend to weigh heaviest on the most profligate). Price rises certainly are regressive.

4. More nonsense. A purely American conceit, it would seem. Most of the rest of the world acknowledges that we can’t always get what we want.

3. Oh yeah? Tell that to the European railways. Do the huge and persistent subsidies on the US arms industry have the effects you describe?

2. No, every tiny effect isn’t worth much effort. But every class of effort that is excluded, increases the degree of effort required on everything else. At the heart of this is the need for the broadest possible action, to share out the costs. That puts a personal responsibilty on everyone to do what they can – even if it’s just a bit.

1. A really doozy,this one. Sacrificing the envionment is the surest way to destroy the economy.

In such a society, if one person becomes enterprising and tries to achieve more or to have more then is absolutely needed, they will end up succeeding more than others. The system favors those who will use their creativity, skill or drive to go a little bit further than the minimum and as soon as that gets rolling, people realize that it’s kinda nice to build an addition to their home to have some more space or to go and get some stuff they might not absolutely need.

Once this happens, the ideal of everyone living in modest little cottages that are exactly as large as they need for basic shelter and not a square inch larger completely breaks down. Those with drive and incentive to do more, to have more, to make more will do better and the ones who spend their time trying to do as little as they can get swept under.

How do you prevent this? Simple you must use force and draconian measures. Historically, every society that attempts to institute Marxist systems and absolute economic equality does this because they have to – it is the only way such a system has any chance of working.

In practice, you must keep a very close eye on everyone, and the moment anyone takes even the smallest action that is not in line with the societal plan or begins to do anything that might somehow oppose the instituted social order, they are immediately given the harshest punishment possible.

In any society that attempts to actually have true Marxism, true social and economic equality, there is, by necessity the mass use of execution, often immediate and without trial. The threat posed by anyone who does not conform is so great that you can’t have a trail system in which there is innocence until proven guilty – the burden must be on the other side. Besides, it’s society that matters, not the individual, so if a few innocents get killed in the process, it’s worth it for the greater good.

And this is why there are death squads in any system that has such planned equality. People are dragged out of their homes and shot at even the allegation of not supporting the state. Stalin did it, Lenin did it, Mao did it and even the various darling Marxists who people put on T-shirts lived by this idea. Ho Chi Mein, Che Guevara were all loyally committed to deadly force in keeping economic equality.

        Green Is The Color Of Life said:

Well I want to ask something and that is what if capitalism is the only system that has worked?

Maybe it has but it is such a horrible system for people and the environment maybe we need to get something else to work.

Yes, I admit that Marx was wrong on some things. I have studied Marx and where he thinks a big worldwide society is the way to do it, he was wrong. Communal living, however, is right. The difference is it needs to be on a local scale and we need to do away with our reliance on big societies and big technology. We should have technology, yes, but we need to change how we think of success. Capitalism might have a small place but basically we need to move back to small villages and small regional cities with limited trade when needed. We need to redefine success and be more modest and less materialistic.

It’s not communism. It is more like multiple communical minimal localisms. It is the best of all worlds and it’s fair, modest and human and earth centered.

We need to change the way we think and I already see it happening. More organics, more local farms, more agriculture, less oil, less energy, less consumption. More community and more family. Lets think of terms like ‘clan’ and ‘village’ as the basis.

Does this mean no electricity? No, of course not. Think of electricity generated in your little village by burning biomass and used only sparingly for small lights and that kind of thing.

We need technology but we don’t need so much. We need as little as we can possibly get by with.

This system is what we should work for and I believe if we all work hard enough we can do it.

So what if we save the environment with nuclear power and technology? Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose! It’s just more of the same. Less modesty and less restraint.

This needs to be about how we change the way we live and define our lives!

Do you seriously think that this is even remotely viable?

There are an absolute myriad of issues I could raise here, but I’ll go with one that most people would probably overlook: population. First of all, there is absolutely no way you’ll feed earth’s current population on organic agriculture. It’s not even remotely possible. But put that aside for a moment, do you know what the population of earth is? Overpopulation has long been cited as potentially disastrous, both for humanity and the earth, but growth is finally slowing and projected to level out. If you break down population growth rate by country, you’ll find that the most affluent societies have slowed the most (enough that in some cases they now actually worry about “demographic collapse!) Whereas in more “humble” agrarian societies, it remains high. Put aside the fact that in places where people live the closest to your “utopian” vision they tend to have the lowest qualities of life, if we all somehow went back to that level of society, population would explode, starving people would carve up the grasslands and forests in an attempt to feed their families, and everyone and everything would be in a much worse situation.

        rollinginsanity said:

Thankyou very much for the little informative conversation. I personally have no fears of nuclear power, but in Australia where I live Nuclear power is opposed quite heavily. The incident of Chernobyl is often touted as the reason why not, but people don’t seem to understand that chernobyl was 95% human error and 5% dodgy Soviet reactor design.

Ya, except I would put it at 80% criminal stupidity and 20% shoddy reactor, but that’s all moot. The bottom line is that there is no reactors of that type anywhere outside of the old U.S.S.R. and the ones there are all scheduled to be decommissioned in the near future.

        DV82XL said:

There are several valid ways of dealing with spent fuel. Reprocessing removes the transuranics that act as neutron poisons in the reactor. What you are left with is new fuel and a small bit of material (about a golf balls worth from every 1000kg) This has been practiced, most notably in France, for decades. The fact is, our ‘once through and bury it’ cycle is very wasteful of good nuclear fuel.

The other option is to use liquid core nuclear reactors, a technology that had working examples in the 50’s and 60’s, which are so effective at burning their fuel, that they leave very little waste at all.

It’s all there, just waiting for the political will to deploy it.

Thankyou very much for the little informative conversation. I personally have no fears of nuclear power, but in Australia where I live Nuclear power is opposed quite heavily. The incident of Chernobyl is often touted as the reason why not, but people don’t seem to understand that chernobyl was 95% human error and 5% dodgy Soviet reactor design.

        rollinginsanity said:

My mistake, I did forget about Nuclear. I tend to just forget about nuclear, but it is a perfectly valid source of power. Just thinking about it, it would be a cheaper and easier idea researching even better ways of disposing nuclear waste instead of finding alternate fuels.

There are several valid ways of dealing with spent fuel. Reprocessing removes the transuranics that act as neutron poisons in the reactor. What you are left with is new fuel and a small bit of material (about a golf balls worth from every 1000kg) This has been practiced, most notably in France, for decades. The fact is, our ‘once through and bury it’ cycle is very wasteful of good nuclear fuel.

The other option is to use liquid core nuclear reactors, a technology that had working examples in the 50’s and 60’s, which are so effective at burning their fuel, that they leave very little waste at all.

It’s all there, just waiting for the political will to deploy it.

        DV82XL said:

See that’s the BIG LIE – the fact is we can have our cake and eat it too, all that is needed is cheap, abundant energy. We have the technology available in the form of nuclear fission, in fact we have had it for the last half-century, even most of the ‘new generation’ reactors had examples running in the 1950’s!

My mistake, I did forget about Nuclear. I tend to just forget about nuclear, but it is a perfectly valid source of power. Just thinking about it, it would be a cheaper and easier idea researching even better ways of disposing nuclear waste instead of finding alternate fuels.

        rollinginsanity said:

The current economic system and environmentalism are mutually exclusive. One or the other, and I don’t think we have the knowledge to go back and live on the land.

See that’s the BIG LIE – the fact is we can have our cake and eat it too, all that is needed is cheap, abundant energy. We have the technology available in the form of nuclear fission, in fact we have had it for the last half-century, even most of the ‘new generation’ reactors had examples running in the 1950’s!

Nuclear power reactors each have an output similar to coal power stations, namely around 1000 MW. There are now about 440 nuclear reactors worldwide delivering about 2,500 TWh per year, around a fifth of world electricity consumption. The numbers of nuclear power stations built in each country depends on its natural resources, principally coal and oil. France, which lacks these resources and is unwilling to become dependent on imports, generates about eighty percent of its electricity from nuclear reactors. It is unlikely to rise higher than this because nuclear reactors take time to get started and therefore cannot react quickly when there is a sudden demand. They are best suited to supply the base load, supplemented by other methods of generation (such as gas power stations) to handle the fluctuations in demand. Many other countries generate around fifty percent of their electricity from nuclear power, and now nuclear has outstripped coal in Western Europe. There is thus no doubt that nuclear power stations are able to provide for the world’s energy needs.

Please note that ALL of the issues that detractors like to wave about when nuclear energy comes up HAVE SOLUTIONS right off the shelf: The wastes can be reprocessed as they are in France and several other countries; we are not running out of nuclear fuel -there is enough to last us for as long as we inhabit this world; nuclear weapons are not made with power reactors, nor do such reactors blow up.

The only thing standing in the way of nuclear energy is politics and lies, it’s that simple.

Keep going the way we are going and hope for the best, that all forces (including our pollution) ballance out and not too much damage is done.

Change our economic system to one that environmentalism will compliment (huge task, I think it’s pretty impossible)

Or somehow make environmentalism more economocally viable. (Again, I don’t know how that will happen).