Neil - Be careful what you pick up from Leonardo di Caprio
- the population of the world has not doubled in the last ten years (which is what I think you were saying - please forgive me if I have misinterpreted
), though it is still growing fast.
I'd not disagree that much of this problem stems from the fact that there are more and more of us (homo sapiens) and we want more and more stuff, cheaper and cheaper, and the only way we have so far found to do all that is burn more and more oil. Where I split from your argument is splitting the world into them over there causing the problem, and us here not causing the problem - we're all causing a problem, just in different ways.
Per capita, its us in the richer countries using up most of the resources (the US uses, I think, about 25% of the global oil production), and all the multitudes elsewhere are using far less per capita (about a ratio of 10:1). Many of them are poor, and have cultures of large families as a social insurance policy against high infant mortality and poverty in old age. Cultures move the slowest in response to change, so in many cases fertility rates lag improvements in healthcare and wealth by generations - and some cultures appear pretty resistant to adaptation
. Perversely, the best way to reduce fertility is to increase wealth and social support - but the only way we know how to do that right now is burn more oil... And of course, as wealth increases in the developing world, the people there quite understandably want all the stuff we've got, including cars. Its not a very good model we've built really...and yes, we made a lot of damn silly transport decisions thirty and forty years ago (and more recently - Mme Thatcher's 'great car economy' anyone?) which have made our own position far less flexible.
So yes, population growth is a problem, and wealth distribution is a problem, since our global economy needs to keep a lot of people poor in order to provide cheap labour to provide cheap goods and commodities - thus preventing them being able to adapt to lower fertility because they are sure of their own future security in old age.
Brian - this debate could clearly run and run between us! Nigel Lawson is one of the city types who have been the cause of your problems - who is paying him now? And Patrick Moore has always been a little on the 'eccentric' side... That said, because global climate is such a complex system to understand, there is always some doubt about causality. I'm not one to accept the fashionable view of the world - indeed on most things I tend to think rather against the flow - and I would rather find reasons to believe that global warming was not happening, or not caused by human activity, and that oil was not running out - but everything I see and read suggests otherwise. I don't think we'll agree on this one though
.
Stuart - fair point, that seems an idea I would give consideration. However, in the long run, even under that model, fuel needs to get more expensive in real terms over time to wean us all off the stuff and find viable alternatives (not least because even if it doesn't run out as quick as we think, most of the oil is in places where people don't like us, and our energy security is heavily compromised - you know, because you've been personally caught up in a war about oil). We've plenty of renewable options to 'grow our own' energy if we were but to put our minds to it, and in the interim, we also have your own industry to help out.
Anyway enough from me for now, I've got to go and burn some oil and recce the route for the Giro di Salopia...
