It’s not the nations you mentioned I am worried about. Its places like Mexico which at its current rate will increase its population by 40% in fifty years that catch my attention.

How do you scale your resources to accommodate that large an increase in population?

I think global warming is pretty much all hype. We’re warming up, so what? The environmental problem I see is acid rain, air quality that causes asthma, water contaminated with pharmacueticals, the world’s best farmland paved over with houses and roads, and unsustainably cutting down rainforests in the southern hemisphere when we should have enough land and know-how to grow enough wood ourselves in our own developed countries. So I will recycle, drive a high-mileage car, grow a garden and walk/bike when i can; not because of global warming and panic induced by the media, but because these other issues are far more pressing and local.

When I go to the store and the produce is all from overseas, I worry about their chemicals and farming practices that our “enlightened” country can’t enforce? Also, what happens when there’s a political fallout with that country’s leadership? Or when their wages catch up with ours? And when I drink my water these days (city or well water) it’s laced with hormones and antibiotics someone else flushed down the toilet. Is that good for me or my kids? Is the haze coming out the back of my car good to breath for me, or the guy 1000 miles away where my car exhaust falls in the rain? When I buy lumber at Lowe’s, have I helped destroy the home and community in South America somewhere along with contributing to air/water problems with all that shipping from there to here? The way I see it, costs are sometimes long-term and hard to see, rather than the $1.00 I save buying normal house cleaners instead of the “new” greener kinds out there that are safe to breathe. Or the $5.00 I save buying food from Chili instead of local organic produce. I save a little now, but what’s the long-term cost? It’s the same with energy. Save a little using oil now, or pay in the long-term because we don’t have oil to make safety and medical plastic equipment that helps solve the asthma problems created by burning that same oil in our cars.

I do live in a city, 4 miles from work, walking distance to shopping and friends, and we are working on a garden. We buy organic/local etc when we can. We’d do solar if we could afford the installation cost. More than environmental sense, it makes economic, social and health sense. I’m not panicing, just trying to live smart.

@parent: Why are you convinced we aren’t doing enough? What evidence is there that we really are damaging the environment as badly as you feel we are?

Global warming is happening. But what does that mean? Does that mean we’re in a grotesque environmental collapse that no one has noticed yet? Or are we in a cycle of heating and cooling that has been going on for eons? No one knows for sure.

Peak oil? Maybe, maybe not. There’s a lot of oil out there in relatively inaccessible places, like oil sands and oil shales. When oil gets expensive (like the present $120/barrel), the oil companies have a financial incentive to go after the tough stuff. And they are. On top of that, there’s an innovative process which can synthesize crude oil directly from organic waste. Check out Changing World Technologies if you’re interested. It is possible that as gas prices ramp up, both less convenient supplies of oil and synthetic oil will also ramp up rapidly, causing this price spike to look like the 70s instead of like the apocalypse. Remember the 70s? People thought the world was ending then, too, and it didn’t.

A continued supply of oil at below apocalyptic prices gives engineers time to improve batteries, continue cleaning up gasoline engines, and improve production processes. Who says we can’t gradually transition to cleaner tech? And who says it won’t be cheaper and more convenient? The Chevy Volt has all the price advantages of a pure electric with a range boosting gasoline system to make it attractive to long distance drivers while battery tech improves. That’s coming out in 2010.

The world produces enough food to feed the entire world, if only it could be distributed. We learned that CFCs were killing the ozone layer, so we ditched CFCs. Gas and oil prices are rising, so alternatives are being investigated in the grand tradition of capitalism. Populations in developed countries have always gone into plateau or decline.

Why panic? Is there evidence we should panic?

But back to my original compliment, great post.

But no one will say the obvious, the world is not a infinite resource, and the best way to limit our impact on it is to limit each couple to two children. But that wouldn’t be easy so lets just keep reproducing until there are no resources to keep us all alive and we have a massive die off from starvation. But hey, at least we’ll have the freedom to make babies that are born into a desolate world.

Thats the end of my extremist rant.

Six years ago I made the mistake of buying an SUV. It fit our needs and lifestyle at the time but shortly afterward, our lives changed dramatically and I’ve been commuting in that gas-guzzler ever since. I’ve got no one to blame but myself. Yes, I could sell it. That doesn’t solve the problem though — it just shifts it to someone else. Some day I’ll replace it and when I do I hope I make a smarter vehicle choice.

Earth Day is just another media hype day. It’s one day where people use cloth bags and feel better about themselves.