Amerika

While I normally like reading the stuff over at Green Blog, such as the excellent find of Climate Code Red: The Case For Emergency Action by David Spratt and Phillip Sutton (Scribe, Melbourne, 2008), I think he makes the same mistake most greens make: They assume they are leftists/liberals, and try to adopt the left’s platform and somehow make it green.

Let me suggest something radical. Any party based on equality is soon going to be the party of entitlement. After that, it will become the party of never saying no to anyone’s random desires. Why is that? Because ideas decay into simpler forms over generations. If you start out with something unrealistic, the hole will widen, just like how kids playing a game of Secret tell a secret at one end of a room and at the other end, it’s almost a completely different text. Entropy exists!

The dogma of the left, which exists on a spectrum from anarchy to Communism to Socialism to modern American Democrats, is based on the idea of individual empowerment, based on the delusion that we’re all equal. It naturally decays into entitlement.

When it comes to environmental, energy and climate issues, only Obama stands out as the strong and aggressive candidate with a detailed and comprehensive plan to tackle these problems.

While both candidates support a cap-and-trade system in the U.S. only Obama would enforce it properly. Obama wants to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050 compared to McCain’s 60%. Obama also intends to auction off all emission credits, making the polluters pay for the right to pollute. McCain says he instead would give away many of the credit and not make the polluters pay until further “down the line“.

Obama would require 10% of the electricity in USA to come from renewable energy sources by 2012, and 25% by 2025. McCain says he supports renewable energy but hasn’t offered any specific targets or plans. McCain has also been absent when the Senate has been voting to support renewable energy tax credits – four times.

Green Blog

Here we see where most greens fall down. The solution to our problem must be more compact fluorescent lightbulbs, caps on pollution, and renewable energy, right?

No, because you’re talking about the smallest sources of pollution. The problem is overpopulation and it always will be. The “developing world,” where they burn their trash and equipment, is as big a polluter if not more than the developed world.

In economics, the Jevons Paradox (sometimes called the Jevons effect) is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. It is historically called the Jevons Paradox as it ran counter to popular intuition. However, the situation is well understood in modern economics. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given output, improved efficiency lowers the relative cost of using a resource – which increases demand.

Wikipedia

(I am not the first to point this out, and as soon as I can retrieve the link to another blog discussing this from my crashed Opera, I’ll post it.)

The problem is too many people and not enough space for nature.

The more efficient we get, the more we use.

The more we civilize, the more we support parasites among us, until the dogma of equality (not quality) overcomes our common sense and we deny the environmental reality:

We need fewer humans, and more untouched land reserved for nature.

But that’s unpopular — and the truth is never popular.

Tags: industrialization, overpopulation