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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group

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To: Elsewhere who wrote (31974)	6/9/2002 8:14:18 PM
From: Maurice Winn	of 281500

Gidday Jochen, natural, even if finite, resources are the least of our worries: <what about the greed of our generation depleting resources which are difficult to substitute once they are scarce? Obviously the original Club of Rome projections were wrong, but oil and natural gas are finite and an important raw material for many products outside the fuel industry. Would you say that manufacturing synthetic carbohydrates doesn't constitute a problem for future generations?> There are vast quantities of coal and heavy oils. The worst that can happen in the supply of hydrocarbons is that we have to go to more costly coal and heavy crudes to make plastics and other stuff we want. But they aren't much more costly and I think the actual costs will reduce because other input costs continue to drop dramatically. I'm not aware of any resource which is running out which will pose any significant problem. If CO2 in the air does become a problem, we can fairly cheaply sink it under the ocean and that's the end of the problem. Some hagfish in the area will have to move house and they won't get to eat delicious whales which die and sink into the CO2 puddle. Bad luck for them. Our generation [those alive today] isn't specially greedy. Just normal people, doing as well for themselves and their families and companies and friends and countries and colleagues as they can. I'm not aware of any problems with synthetic carbohydrates. "Huh?" is my reaction to that part of your comments. My bet for biggest disaster in human history is an incoming space mountain. We've got diseases under control. Birth control takes care of wars due to overpopulation. Genetic engineering will tiny up our genome and improve it. We've got most stuff more or less covered. But we haven't done much at all about avoiding the grand scale mayhem that would result from space landslides. We are depending on luck. Some people have bunkers, so there'll be heaps of survivors no matter how big it is. But it would be nice not to have to give up golf and hide in a hole for a year. Mq

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