Posted on 01/05/2014 9:21:29 AM PST by artichokegrower
Fresh-faced tech millionaires snap up glitzy new condos in San Francisco. Across America, construction is up and unemployment is down. Consumers are buying. The economy is growing.
Yet instead of applause, voices from across the political spectrum - Berkeley activists and Beltway conservatives, Pope Francis and even some corporate CEOs - offer a critique of economic growth and its harm to the well-being of humans and the planet.
Ecologists warn that economic growth is strangling the natural systems on which life depends, creating not just wealth, but filth on a planetary scale. Carbon pollution is changing the climate. Water shortages, deforestation, tens of millions of acres of land too polluted to plant, and other global environmental ills are increasingly viewed as strategic risks by governments and corporations around the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I have zero academic economic credentials.
That puts you way ahead of this economic illiterate. I bet he gets paid $120K per year plus massive benefits and full lifetime pension to be this stupid!
“Unbridled growth” is harming the planet at all.
The unwillingness to use the science and resources available is making things worse than need be.
Use NUCLEAR POWER AND NATURAL GAS and all the dirty coal fired plants can go away. (leave the low sulfur coal plants alone)
Use DDT to control third world malaria. (Ref. NatGeo July 2007)
(It was only a problem in the U.S. due to significant overuse.)
Replace oppressive socialist and dictatorial regimes with free democracies, to allow ingenuity and capitalism to thrive.
Ohhhhhhh.....I see it now......Obama and the Democrats screwing up the economy is actually good. That, friends, is a stretch that any First Baseman would be proud of.
The average population density in America is 84 people per square mile. A sudden transformation from American values to communist values reliably occurs above 800 people per square mile. Berkeley has 10,752. From their personal perspective they are 100% correct that there are too many people stressing their environment. Ironically they think the solution is to pack humans in even tighter so that they are forced to share more. Scientific studies of happiness show that human happiness decreases the closer in humans live. Conservatives should support managing growth to prevent more than 800 people living per square mile. That will greatly foster happiness, health, long life, and reduce evil of all kinds, such as communism.
Nice theory (sort of like the latent heat of crystallization).
Plausible for a novel by Dan Brown. In the real World only the government is strong enough to destroy a large percentage of the population as in North Korea, The Soviet Union, China and a myriad of African countries all run by Stalinists and Maoist trash.
As for a first World capitalist economic system, Our poor wield an immense amount of political power and not only eat well, are offered 24 hour a day entertainment on the scale the kings of old would not recognize. The 1 or 2% at the top could ill afford an upset general population. Besides the wealthy generally became that way by providing goods and services to the greater population that freely chose to give them their money in exchange for said goods and services.
All these Malthusian proclamations are total BS. We could easily house every man, woman and child in the entire World with each having their own 1/4 acre lot and four bedroom home and still wouldn’t ‘fill up’ Texas.
As for food resources, we have become so good at agriculture that a fraction of a percent of the population can feed the World. The only cause of famine today is war and Leftist governments. The American Chicken farmer can incubate, raise, slaughter, dress, package and deliver a chicken anywhere in World cheaper than can be raised locally.
If their is global warming the increase in available farmlands in the Northern Hemisphere would allow for a population on a level that is many times larger than we have today. An order of ten would have to be reached before the food resources of a warmer Earth where even marginally taxed.
It is time to put an end to the idiocy that is the falsehood of over population. Certainly cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Newark, Detroit, Pittsburgh and many others could easily provide for two to three times their present populations considering they have all lost 50% of their inhabitants.
Not to worry -- these likely Libs will be "absolved" as long as they say their prayers to Gaia & quietly pay the carbon taxes ....
All this blather focuses on the population in developed nations. Hint: Producers
None of this blather focuses on the population in under-developed nations. Hint: Takers
It even addresses the races inside nations. White upwardly mobile people, have concern for the planet. Have fewer kids. Use less resources.
Poor people with no means of supporting yourselves or your offspring..., oh never-mind, we’ll get to you later.
NEVER do you see focus on poor families with five to ten children. Always you see focus on the upwardly mobile who are already having far fewer kids than are needed to replace them.
Those that listen are causing a system where the best and brightest are not swelling in the ranks, but the bottom 1% is.
This is suicidal talk. Oh, UC Berkeley? LOL, who could have guessed that...
The West, the Capitalist nations are the target. We don’t want them reproducing do we...
For the most part, no, they don't. They live in a false superiority bubble.
leftist politics not withstanding(their science being garbage science).
there are a few things that scare the crap out of me.
the population growth (which seems to mostly in the 3rd world)
the movement of peoples from the 3rd world to the west.
the increase in food production(whether by normal breeding processes or by genetic modification) to permit this population growth.
and one or more catastrophes happening at once.
these could be:
a huge solar flare of the 1859 caliber
a large volcanic eruption of the Toba catastrophe or even one of considerably less like the Tambora eruption and subsequent year without a summer, 1816.
a big (not chicxulub big, but big)Asteroid hit
a World War (non nuclear)
a World War (nuclear)
a pandemic of the 1918 Spanish flu caliber
we could wind up, literally, in a world of hurt as we approach our tipping points.
I am told it has nothing to do with Sandy, and everything to do with a growing economy.
Oh. OK. Nothing to do with insurance payouts and certainly not anything to do with the love between their governor and his boardwalk buddy
I do not know why I as a taxpayer have to pay so that people who want waterfront property so their home is also their summer home and can get national flood insurance on the peoples dime.
I rented a house for a few years on a Long Island canal while single back in the late 1970s. It was a blast and I boated every day after work and all weekend and just pulled my boat back into its slip in my back yard when I was done.
when I got married and went to buy a home....it made no sense to risk the fates. we bought upland and inland. Why trust the fates on that kind of dangerous move.
“But the Berkley professor and the LEFT can’t have it both ways. Either the people of the planet have jobs (which necessitates growth in industry which in turn necessitates consumption of energy and resources) or people of the planet don’t have jobs and live in abject poverty.”
They explained that in the article saying that the poor could just ‘share’ things and not own them. There wouldn’t be a need to produce much if everyone had to share things.
Then everyone could work less and spend their time on the ‘Arts’.
They kind of run out ideas after that and forgot to mention how everyone supported themselves. Communism is like that, it runs out of ideas on how to make it work.
“I bet he gets paid $120K per year plus massive benefits and full lifetime pension to be this stupid!”
I’ll bet it’s double that.
without a doubt it is double that....perhaps triple.
So what are they going to do—eliminate more of the unworthy?
Easy solution!
Just kill all the "ecologists (NEVER call them scientists*)" and their acolytes.
* "Such large returns of conjecture from such small investment in facts," Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Two statements that have guided me well since I was a child, first learning science.
Growth is the only evidence of life."
The only everlastingly unchanging planet is a dead planet."
That might explain why a college degree costs $250K.
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