What’s all this warm and fuzzy about carbon anyway.
Today I’m going to take the Tatra 813 for a spin, because it’s the most effective in terms of mpg when you want to go train parallel parking in a Tatra 813. I could have taken a modern 815 but everybody knows that the 813 was designed properly from the get-go and engineering advances are a merely a transparent cloak front for the consumerist world conspiracy.
The neighbors were a bit annoyed at me for revving it up in the driveway, but I told them if i were king I’d make sure 60% of the neighborhood would be made to disappear, to make life more bearable.
Ever since they seem to look at me with a newfound respect and admiration.
Rwy20 wrote:
It has been said here: The most effective solutions are education and economic development. Doesn’t sound so ugly to me.
I agree. Education is not ugly, and I think its more effective than focusing politically on the fantasy that an overpopulated Europe can affect its climate through behavior modification.
Fact – energy usage declined massively since LED bulbs were introduced and incandescent bulbs politically mandated out. Fiction – we can educate people without hitting their wallet.
Fact – Switzerland has to import garbage to run its incinerators. Fiction – it was due to “education” not to garbage bag taxation.
I’m a bit bemused – Europe’s population is already decreasing or on the cusp thereof. CO2 outputs per capita are also dropping. For the developed world, we use considerably fewer resources per capita than e.g. the USA. Why pick on Europe?
kwlf wrote:
Why pick on Europe?
Because the European population density, the basic cause of the problem in Europe, exceeds the secure supply of resources. Per capita energy consumption is a good thing for the individual, and the basic resource problem is much too many people. I think centuries of political leadership have looked at people as their source of income and power, so its not an easy thing to correct.
Airborne_Again wrote:
This is something that AGW deniers always claim, but it is misleading almost to the point of being an outright lie. It was literally true up to a year ago, but only because 1998 was an outlier – a single year much warmer than the years before and after. If you disregard that single outlier, there has indeed been a constant and statistically significant warming. Anyway, this claim is not even literally true anymore since 2014 was even warmer than 1998.
I find your words ignorant and highly objectionable. Calling me a liar and a denier is unacceptable to me, especially considering my ancestry for the later. You epitomise what is wrong with this debate coming from the left.
Silvaire wrote:
Because the European population density, the basic cause of the problem in Europe, exceeds the secure supply of resources.
But many of the most resource-poor parts of the world are amongst the most prosperous, and many of the richest are amongst the most miserable places to live – unless you happen to be a member of the elite. Most of the European population increase happened over the 20th century as industrialisation and farming enabled population growth. I don’t think population increase was a conscious decision on the part of our various governments in the same way as it was in China/Russia, for example.
Besides, the population density in many of the states is higher than most of Europe. The USA’s relatively lower population simply reflects the remoteness and relatively late development of much of the interior of the country. If Europe can demonstrate the feasibilty of checking its population growth, and living materially satisfying lives whilst reducing energy consumption, I find it unfair to single it out as the problem.
Martin wrote:
I think I touched on that. I wouldn’t call that effective. Here I was thinking more along the lines of setting limits by law, sterilizing part of the population and it goes downhill from there.
It’s all been tried, and generally ends badly. Indian men rounded up in vans, anaesthetised and vasectomised without their consent. The Chinese one-child policy. I’m sure I remember a scheme to sterilise minorities by putting radiation sources under the chairs in waiting rooms, so that you’d get your testicles covertly irradiated and become infertile. None of it – other than perhaps the one-child policy – has done anything other than to sow resentment and discord.
And here we are, with the demographic explosion tailing off almost by accident. On a diving trip in Indonesia I learned that our boatman had lost 6 of his 8 children to accidents/disease. Who will look after him when he’s older? With odds like that, he’d be well advised to have more children, but if the death rate were to be reduced, he’d be satisfied with fewer. How pleasing and paradoxical that saving lives can reduce the population.
kwlf wrote:
There’s a good reason we aren’t concentrating on reducing population growth in Europe, which is simply that our population is shrinking already
Which is also why, the more educated countries at least, is more welcome to immigrants and refugees than others.
I think it is rather complex. Our economy can only function with a steady growth. Without real growth we will head back to medeaval ages where a handful of people controlled everything in a stagnant and decadent environment. This is already happening in the US and UK and Russia. The rest of Europe is more resilient to this.
An economy were growth is not the main factor, cannot be run by greed. It should be obvious. Thus the only way to enforce growth is to import it by importing poor people.
This is already happening in the US and UK and Russia
I must disagree with that bit.
The US and UK are so different from that it’s hard to know where to start.
Russia (whose history as an ex Iron Curtain guy I am somewhat familiar with, and there is a number of us on EuroGA) has had the “benefit” of almost 100 years of zero freedom, being run by variously crazy dictators (Stalin’s 80M deaths via mass starvation make Hitler look a positive nice person) an under an oppressive “everybody spying on everybody else” regime for longer than any living person can remember, had a big problem with the collapse of communism. In essence, those who were well placed (usually meaning: knowing where the skeletons were buried) grabbed everything that could be grabbed. The result is that it is run largely by gangsters a business community with good political connections.
It is true “we” need immigration. The US was built on that. It isn’t just due to an ageing / shrinking population. It’s because the “natives” get rich and lazy. That’s a normal natural process. Here in the UK, everybody wants a Polish builder/plumber – because unless you are very lucky they are the only ones that turn up on the day and do a half decent job. The locals do stuff like this (my photo – and this was done while I was watching them!). The good craftsmen are booked up for 3-6 months ahead. Immigrants are mostly, and with many caveats a self selected population – within any given country they are predominantly the people who get off their ar5ses and do something to change their lives, so it’s no wonder they are above-average good at progressing.
Agree, agree & agree – on everything. (for a change :-))
(Okay, maybe the Stalin-Hitler comparison … let’s say both weren’t exactly nice guys)
