It is tougher because our parents didn’t take care of this.

As for starvation of the elderly, that’s over the top and makes it clear that you realize that you have to realign your ideological filter to meet reality.

Policies could change that push back the retirement age of the baby boomers (you know they did that already to gen x… you know that?), and they could apply means testing. I have a multi-millionaire uncle who pulls in nice more than I do in salary and still collects SS. Reduction in the level of benefits might also have to occur. It is a bloody reality.

If wishing were all it took to have a clean and strong economy…

Batteries may be a better solution. Honestly, it’s not my area of expertise. I’m just trying to make sure people understand that there are solutions to the intermittancy problem, since intermittancy is often used as an excuse to dismiss wind and solar altogether.

So let old people starve until they die off and won’t be a burden anymore!

I’m just saying that if you truly believe that we’re doomed no matter what we do (because there’s no way we’re getting India or China to stop fucking), you have to deal with the reality that nobody wants to think about population control.

In all honesty, if we’re doomed anyway, fuck the planet. Leave it uninhabitable by any species until it gets swallowed by the sun eventually. If we go down, we’re taking the Earth with us! Now there’s a policy I can get behind.

We should build this non-fossil fuel system before growing our population further, just in case we can’t pull it off. We should not be reckless with our children’s future.

“…pumping water upwards with solar and wind energy and draining it through a turbine at night and when there’s no wind.”

What of the laws of thermodynamics? Or you are purporting an inefficient energy system? The kinetic energy stored in water compared to the chemical energy in batteries are magnitudes different.

Here is what I heard from you: Rape the planet because I want my generation to be able to retire comfortably.

SS is poorly designed and should have been changed long ago. Maybe it is time.

FORTUNATELY, economies do not need to grow their populations to have increasing productivity. It sure is easier to to grow the size of the economy with simply adding more people and its a lot easier to do that in a socially unjust way.

Unfortunately, more people means more resource utilization, more pollution, and less space to grow an urban farm.

And then what do we do about social security and the increasing proportion of older people that need an income and medical care without the young people to work and support them? As it stands, social security is going to go broke in 15-20 years.

But hey, we might get to see some dystopian films begin to come true before we are about to check off the planet. Haha.

Regarding your assesssment, do you have data or analysis to back you up? I do. I’ll post some ref’s later. I look forward to seeing the studies you cite.

If population growth is impossible to stop, the world will eventually be doomed to unsustainable resource utilization levels and have very unpleasant lives.

Fortunately, it is not impossible to stop. Many human populations have negative internal population growth rates (without targeted public policies for this).

Ignoring the population growth rate and focusing on short-term (very short term in a geological time scale) per capita reductions that save us less than 3-4 decades seems like a mistake to me.

A huge delusional mistake. Way bigger than the real estate always goes up delusion.

Vote yes on Measure Q. Limit families to one child before it’s too late!

You’re quite right to point out that population size is an important variable in humanity’s environmental impact. Environmentalists shy away from talking about it because it’s sure political suicide to suggest, as Garret Hardin does, in his classic essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons” that “the freedom to breed [without limit] is intolerable”.

I don’t share your gloomy assessment of the efficacy of reducing transportation GHG emissions. Given a growing population, per capita reductions are the first step towards overall reductions in GHG emissions. Yes, population matters too, as do GHG emissions for things besides transportation, but ignoring per capita reductions to pursue politically damn-near-impossible population controls seems like a mistake to me.

All the better then.

If everyone took the bus we are still screwed. If everyone rides a bike we are still screwed. Why won’t people address the most important factor in the global change equation-population size?

Modern Wind Turbines are less lethal to birds than outdoor cats:

http://www.capecodtoday.com/news265.htm

And Elana! This data was posted on either 13 or 19 January, 2009. Mr. Obama did not take office until 12 noon on 20 January 2009. This is the work of a USDOT under the guidance of the likes of Tyler Duvall, a Bushie-idealogical political hack with no transportation background father of the idiotic HOT lane concept that is currently preventing users of I-10 eastbound from accessing the HOV lanes between Downtown and El Monte.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/16/AR2008031603085.html

Those choices include clean renewables like wind and solar. You can solve the intermittancy problem by pumping water upwards with solar and wind energy and draining it through a turbine at night and when there’s no wind. (The only real drawbacks are the amount of land you’d have to use and the number of birds that would be killed.)

Hence, the door to fossil-fuel-free transportation is opened by electrification.

California, for example, uses less coal than the rest of the country does. We do 20% hydroelectric and 20% renewables. Our light rail is a lot cleaner than say, Denver’s, which gets 57% of its energy from coal.

As energy efficient as a Prius is, it’s still burning gasoline.

So all we need then is for everybody to drive hybrid cars or something? It sounds like from an environmental point of view that taking light rail uses up the same energy as taking the car. What’s missing?