... not Russel!
Registered Member #1
Joined: Thu Jan 26 2006, 12:18AM
Location: Tempe, Arizona
Posts: 1052
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We can successfully pursue carbon sequestration, but it won't solve the 'resource management problem'. That will be solved when the root problem, the human population burden on those resources, is reduced. Any talk of "Saving the Planet" that leaves out population control is a waste of time. Read "Living Within Limits" by Garret Hardin. He lays out the issue quite eloquently (if a bit long-winded). Not a popular view right now, but it needs to be discussed publicly, taught in school, and perhaps put into national policies. I fathered two kids then got snipped, I done me part. I know other dads who did the same. They should give tax cuts to people who don't have litters of kids, they should tax large families as far as I'm concerned. To quote Mr. Hardin, "If we don't control our population, Nature will do it for us". Nature will be brutal.
That's the true resource management issue, as far as I'm concerned. We can certainly reduce our carbon footprints, conserve energy, do with less, and so on. So long as the population continues to increase, though, we'll eventually reach a breaking point. All our conservation efforts are for naught if we're going to try to cram 10, 20, or even 50 billion people on this planet.
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As for not liking government taxes, then don't use the highways or streets, grow all your food using your own dung for fertilizer, pump all your own unpurified drinking water, make your own electricity, and when you get a splinter under your fingernail that gets infected and you start to die from Clostridia toxins, arrange for a Shaman to wave a chicken bone over you.
There are some things that taxes handle quite well. Roads, safety of food and water, basic medical assistance, basic education, and so on. However, in some countries, taxes can also go to things like prolonged wars unsupported by the public, interference with basic human rights, blatantly illegal activities, or just plain wasteful bureaucratic nonsense. Moreover, right now many large families are subsidized by taxpayers; more kids means more government assistance in many nations. Accepting some of those things as necessary doesn't mean I have to like being taxed for all of them.
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A resource management issue