The author nails it.
I wish I had said that.
Any theory predicated on massive social change is doomed.
All these enviro-wacks rants usually start out with dictating some behavior change that MUST be adopted by the greater population.
They fail to realize simple facts of human nature:
1. People will only change their behaviors when it benefits them to do so.
2. Mandates on behavior are difficult to enforce (ask any cop)
3. Survival instincts compel some to consume and amass resources in excess.
Perhaps the most significant psychological characteristic of doomsters is their unshakeable faith and their fundamental rejection of science.
"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits…. climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."
-- Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister, Calgary Herald, December 14, 1998
"We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing"
(Tim Wirth 1990, former US Senator) as quoted in NCPA Brief 213; September 6, 1996
"A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect"
(Richard Benedict, US Conservation Foundation)
"The data don't matter. We're not basing our recommendations [for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions] upon the data. We're basing them upon the climate models"
(Chris Folland, UK Meteorological Office)
"Because of imperfections in the coupled model which would cause surface temperatures to drift away from reality, calibrated seasonal flux adjustments are applied."
Hadley Centre GCM Description
"These models just don't handle processes like clouds, water vapor, and precipitation systems well enough to accurately predict how strong global warming will be, or how it will manifest itself at different heights in the atmosphere," remarked Spencer.
Is Earth's Temperature Up or Down or Both?; Feb 6, 1997 quoting Dr. Roy Spencer
"The trouble with this idea is that planting trees will not lead to the societal changes we want to achieve" (Kyoto Delegate, 05 December 1997)
"We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion -- guilt-free at last!"
-- Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue)
"We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects . . . We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land."
-- David Foreman, Earth First!
"Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed."
-- Pentti Linkola
"The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world"
-- John Shuttleworth
"Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs."
-- John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
"The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run". -- Economist editorial
I think we need to rethink the cemetery thing. If we keep allocating a plot of land for every dead person, we are eventually going to run out of room for living people. This planet will turn into one very large cemetery.
Even now, think of all the valuable real estate that is occupied by cemeteries. Think of the golf courses, housing developments and shopping malls we could build if only we could reclaim the cemeteries for the use of living people.
I never realized how much land cemeteries took up until I started walking. Just walking around my hometown, there are nearly a dozen cemeteries, most of them taking up hundred and hundreds of acres. There is one massive cemetery about three towns over from me that has to be five miles in circumference. I kid you not. This is just crazy!
I guess this means I can dump all that zinc I've been hoarding. Dang!!