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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (15444)	1/3/2002 5:16:31 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Carl, < I realized that the growth rings were 3/8 of an inch apart. Rather than being 100 year-old wood, these were somewhere around 20 years old or less. Beautiful wood.> With increasing CO2 in the air, plants will be feasting and growing fat quickly. They have been starving for eons but now, dinner is served. Crops will do better. Horticulturalists have to burn methane to make their glasshouses warmers and fill them with CO2. With SUV distribution of CO2, the energy is used in transport and the CO2 helps all plants. It's good that George W ditched the Kyoto deal. I'm all for being a greenie and I would call myself a rabid environmentalist, but not an irrational one. I don't see a major risk if human-produced CO2 really causes warming and I see large costs if it doesn't. People who think the world is increasingly polluted have little memory. In my 53 years, I have seen rapid improvement in environmental conditions. All sorts of barbarities used to be inflicted on harbours [the one I grew up in - I spent days and days in it] became dead from sewage, abattoir offal, blood and muck, open air dumping of all rubbish, steel works runoff [oil and other muck], road runoff [tyre wear, oil, other muck], other dumpings down drains. The harbour was literally dead. It was seething with life when I was 4 and we'd go swimming at Shelly Beach. By the time I was 25 it was as lifeless as a moa [it's a huge harbour and parts of it were fine, flushed each tide into the ocean but the region where I lived was dead]. Now, it's coming back to life. Those polluters have been closed or restricted. That's one small example. Cars and garages used to be filthy, oily polluters. Now they are almost as clean as a living room. Lead paint used to be everywhere. So did lead in petrol. Lead sprays were used on fruit. Mercury was used all over the place [I still have it in my teeth!]. Factories were all noise, dirt, oil and mess with groundwater and soil a common disposal means. Everywhere I look, things are cleaner, more efficient, cheaper, better. Underlying the environmental concerns are Ted Kaczynski ideas and that's the real source of the complaints. Technology and science and big government and globalisation and multinational companies and all that stuff are big and threatening and taking on a life of their own. That's true. I quite like it, but environmentalists don't [generally]. People don't understand science and technology and what we don't understand is scary, when it is obviously more powerful than us. Greenies [generally - the best of them are highly knowledgable] don't understand science, technology and have short memories [being young]. The 'good old days' involved horrors and destruction on grand scales, pollution, short life spans, famines, disease, waste and poisoning. I like the 21st century much better. Mqurice

To: Bilow who wrote (15444)	1/3/2002 5:26:32 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

These guys have been promoting the concept that we're all about to die because there's too many of us and there's not enough food since Malthus wrote his original essay on population limits in 1798: Yeah, the 18th Century, which gave us Tom Paine, the American Revolution, and our Freedom, also gave us Kant, Rousseau, and Malthus. Most of the modern Malthusian theory now is coming out of the Paul Ehrlich, et al, report called "The Limits of Growth", which expanded Malthus' to apply to a larger range of resources. It claimed that exponential growth rates in population and economic growth would cause resource depletion, starvation, and increasing death rates. Population has tripled the last century, but food supplies and real wealth have grown even faster. As a result, global life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900. Since the '70s, The US GDP has doubled while air and water pollution levels have fallen. This is a worldwide phenomenon. We have increased our wealth enough to pay for safe drinking water and cleaner air. 200 years after Malthus, it is now clear that the exponential growth of knowledge, not population, is the real key to understanding the future of humanity and the earth.

To: Bilow who wrote (15444)	1/3/2002 11:14:31 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

(OT)If you want to see some REALLY NICE wood, take a look here: timelesstimber.com timelesstimber.com timelesstimber.com timelesstimber.com timelesstimber.com And even golf clubs: timelesstimber.com And not a tree has to be cut down since they were cut over a hundred years ago and sank to the bottom of the Great Lakes, lying preserved there in oxygen free water all of that time. All they have to do is salvage and dry enough of the stuff and get their sales lines going. This stuff will go for a premium price. And one day maybe the little BB stock, EVRE, will find some value (I don't currently hold the shares as they have been very unstable): timelesstimber.com