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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (23511)	12/22/2008 9:02:26 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Respond to of 36918

Oops, I added on a century [due to senility]. I meant 2100 not 2200. But either way is more or less the same. "Puny" is hardly an apt description of human powers these days [on Earth scale if not cosmic]. True for many things, but a determined effort could make some big shifts in climate. CO2 production isn't one of the ways though. Well, it might be but I can't get excited until 500 ppm gets closer or we see some actual effects. Excellent Neo. You have seen a trend where I also see one. <Careful eyeballing of the CO2 graph over 1000 years does show a trend which matches the human population. Its bloody obvious even to an idiot. > Don't forget a lot of that carbon used to be in the form of trees. NZ for example used to be covered in forests which were burned off to a large extent to make way for grass. It's not just fossil carbon burning which raised CO2. My point is that when [not if] human population falls to perhaps 1 billion, CO2 production will also fall. It's too expensive to dig oil, coal etc for energy. Better to be moved in a 100 kg vehicle at 200 km/h than a 2 ton one at 30 km/h in traffic jams. Better to fly in transcontinental vacuum tubes at 1000km/h on superconductor maglev than in aircraft 10km high after battling through airports and traffic for half a day in preparation. Best to wait and see what transpires when there's no real problem and lots of things are going to happen on a super large scale before 2100 by which time no particular problem will have arisen with CO2 anyway. If CO2 does become a problem, it's easily fixed by cutting all taxes to zero and replacing them [in part - cut government expenditure by 90% as well] with a carbon emissions tax unless people prove the carbon is sequestered or otherwise disposed of. In 20 years, huge adjustments could be made since cars and other things don't last that long. Mqurice