The U.S. and its Environmentalism

I was listening to NPR on the way home from work yesterday and they were discussing the top news stories on the Onion for the year. The discussion had segued into the fact that 2007 might mark the year that global warming had moved from a “Is it?” to a “What do we do about it?” question for the average U.S. citizen.

I got to thinking about what Joe Citizen (hereinafter “J.C.”) meant by that. I wondered if J.C. (including myself) were willing to make the hard choices and sacrifices solving this problem may require. Or, in our typically U.S. mindset, when we said “solve the problem” did we really mean “Find a way that I can keep doing everything I’ve been doing so that, with no inconvenience to me or alteration of my lifestyle, I don’t have to feel guilty about it because I’m causing a global problem.

Then I thought about something Dad observed once. The problem here, the real core of the problem, is that we have too many human beings on this planet. No matter what the solution, if everyone takes the same solution and the population keeps growing, we will hit crisis every time. Consider, what would a nation with our population do if God suddenly threw a switch and we had to instantly revert back to wood burning, pre-automobile, technology. It’s not pretty and I’m thinking that all that wood being burned would create a fair amount of CO2, probably more than either our air or our forests can sustain. Hell, if we just talk about the CO2 produced by human breathing, there is some numerical threshold where the sheer number of people breathing creates global warming.

So, how do we fix this problem? Any attempt to regulate population is a “Human Rights Violation” and immediately unacceptable, ask any Liberal. We’ve all seen how upset they get at China for its draconian population control policies. If we tried it, the proposal would die in Congressional committee. I wonder if survival of the species if a Human Right. Still, controlling population seems to me to be necessary to actually solving this problem. Any other solution, be it more efficient engines and MPG requirements, hybrid cars, wind power, or anything else I can think of, simply moves the critical threshold instead of solving the problem.

If we won’t control population then we have but one option. Our eggs are already in the technology basket and we must double down the bet. We must create more efficient technologies, not to solve the problem, but to buy time to avoid it. We must establish successful and self-sufficient off-planet colonies where we can send our extra people without creating a continual drain on our Earth’s dwindling resources. Then we have to pray that we never run out of room to expand. In The Matrix, Agent Smith observed that humanity is a virus. If we take this approach, we’d be acting like one.