Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

[Objectivist]

I think today's environmental problems will be solved by tomorrow's technology because who wants to live in a dirty, polluted environment?  That is they will be solved if we don't destroy the world's economy by prematurely ending oil and gas use.

I hope that you are right, but, what if you are not?  Let's say that Humanity's quest for energy sources in the form of nuclear fusion is an exercise in futility, and while theoretically possible, is yet impossible to implement with any engineering, present or future.

If we burn all the fossil fuels that can be burned, will life on our World cease to be, other than, perhaps, extremophile bacteria?  And, is such a nightmarish scenario worth the risk?

I hope I am too, but I don't think that all life on the planet will end because we are burning fossil fuel for another 20 to 50 years.  Scientists in California just announced a major breakthrough in fusion but I understand that they have sort of walked that back a little.  I think the theory is sound and now there are major engineering hurdles to solve but I think we will get there, but not if we destroy the worlds economy with green energy boondoggles.  Solar and wind sound great but they are orders of magnitude less efficient.  I think there is a lot of room for improvement and that these technologies have a place but not as the main source barring any major breakthroughs which could very well happen.  

What I do know is that if we try to switch to less efficient and dense power sources many, many people will die because our current population is built on oil and gas for the most part.  We need to be finding much more energy dense sources and nuclear is that in spades.  

If you look at the most developed countries with relatively good economies you find that they are much cleaner and the people are more environmentally conscious.  I am.  I recycle, I don't use poisons on my property to control weeds, I ride my bike a lot to get groceries, and carry my packages daily to the post office six miles away.  I conserve water.  

I've been to third world countries and there's no comparison.  They are filthy, they don't know how to take care of human waste.  They use DDT.  When I was in Cancun there were no mosquitoes and it's because they use DDT.  Brazil was even worse.  They just run a pipe from their houses and dump their sewage right into creeks and rivers.  There are mountains of trash everywhere.  When people are poor they will cut down all the valuable rainforest trees.  How can you blame them for cutting down an ancient Mahogany tree that's worth thousands of dollars to them when they are just trying to feed their families?  That's another thing, as a woodworker I refuse to use tropical woods even if people want me to.  

If you want a clean environment then people need to be free to produce and trade and create wealth to invest in research and development of new technologies.   There is an even greater threat to humanity and the environment that no one is talking about.  It's far more dangerous than nuclear weapons and Asteroid strikes and pandemics combined and that's the extreme bubble in the global bond markets that appears to be popping.  When that goes billions could die and the rest could strip the land of anything that they can eat.  look at what's happening in Europe right now with electricity prices soaring because they are switching to wind and solar.  They are all freezing if the news can be believed and they are going out into the forest to get wood to burn.  

That's my unexpert opinion anyway.  And my final thought about climate change is that humans have already survived massive shifts in the climate in the past and without all this modern technology that we have.  The climate is always changing.  It's either getting warmer or colder and given the vast amount of people that need to eat, we'd better hope it's warming rather than cooling.  I've read that the Earth is getting greener as a result of rising CO2.  Personally, I'm convinced that the whole global warming, now climate change since there hasn't been much warming since 2000, is the modern version of original sin.   As Dr. Ferris in Atlas Shrugged said, "there's no way to rule innocent men.  If you teach men that looking at flowers is evil and they believe you then you've got them and you can get them to do all sorts of things to relieve them of their guilt" and if there aren't enough criminals to crack down on, one must create them.  One must pass so many laws that it's impossible to live without breaking them.  

Consider the words of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead, one of the vilest villains in the history of literature:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jguJM3TIehI

That's what I think the whole global warming thing is really about, not that there is not global warming or climate change.  There always has been and always will be.  If CO2 is really a problem, there is a simple and cheap solution.  Figure out how many extra tons of carbon dioxide we are creating and plant a sufficient number of trees to absorb it.  Problem solved.  I'm doing my part.  I'm creating a permaculture food forest on my land.