PDQ Mobile wrote:I always took the view there was a "middle way".
That is we could enjoy the benefits of fossil energy but we should not be profligate with it.
Use small cars, cycle lots, leccy trains running on sustainable energy and carrying a fair bit of goods.
Low energy homes using local fuel sources. Grow some veg, that sort of thing.
Try to make a finite resource last as long as possible.
In the end we may need it for food production above all else, for a good deal of the (cheap) food on the plate is very oil dependent.
Leave a bit for future generations, and slow the greenhouse effect and the unpredictable effects.
A win /win I always thought it. Cake and eat it.
But nobody listened.
That was always my view. Every day I use my bicycle I save roughly a gallon of petrol which can be had by some future generation or better still not pumped into the atmosphere at all.
That's not to say my lifestyle is brilliantly green - it isn't, not by a long way. There's only so much I can do, the rest requires an effective government.
For all the flack China gets it spends far more per head on green technology than we do and that despite having less pollution per head.
The other point is that as green tech matures that's where the money will be made, getting in on the ground floor is important. The Chinese already know this, the Americans on the other hand seem to be reinvesting in coal - except nobody actually wants it.
As for global warming, had we not done our bit we should be cooling at this point, potentially heading for another ice age.
Of course stopping the ice age is probably a good thing for the same reasons as stopping the planet overheating but there's no need to overdo it.
Overall though it's not just climate. We're heading for a perfect storm as cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels runs out, water tables fall, bio diversity falls, weather patterns shift and become more extreme, populations grow etc etc.
All of this can be managed but it requires us all to get behind it. There's so much disinformation out there its hard for anyone to dig through it all, but the main point the naysayers have is that it's too expensive except of course it isn't. Moving over to a green economy is not only cheap, its fast becoming cheaper than not doing anything whereas not doing anything isn't just expensive in the long term its fast becoming so expensive that we can't afford it.