Do you spend a considerable amount of your time thinking about how we might run out of various resources in our lifetimes? And how the fuck do you calm yourself down about it?

Every time I let the water run to let it heat up.

i mostly deal with it by fantasizing about the worst-case scenarios anti-oil-dependency types write about - with the whole current system caving in, disorder, panic, and eventually rebuilding.

I do the exact same thing every time I run the water.

I mean I think about it every time I let the water run longer than necessary.

And about every third time I drive somewhere, and every time I fill my gas tank. And every time I leave extra lights on or forget to shut down my computer. And often when I buy stuff.

Sometimes I convince myself that I'm really just anxious about adult life and about the changes I'm going through, but that's probably only half true.

I'm quite nihilistic about most things (it's too late, we've gone too far already, there's no more oil fields to be discovered, the population explosion should have stopped decades ago, water will be flooding half my country in x years, I'll never ever stop being single and die a virgin, 1/3 of everyone dies from cancer so it's only a matter of time, etc), but I've discovered that keeping these things in the back of my mind and not losing sleep over them since that wouldn't help at all kinda helps rationalize it and it also helps me live a little more responsibly (concerning natural resourses, not that other stuff, that was just more examples of "I could be depressed all the time, but there's no point").

I gotta say I don't think about using up energy resources much in my day-to-day life (I don't have a car), but water all the time. I just don't really understand how we can be so wasteful with it (I mean I have to be--it takes 10 minutes for my shower to heat up), as a matter of course.

Also, we have no idea how much oil there's left, Brazil just discovered this: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aw2AnEl6KPxo&refer=news

(booo, layout.)

I try to think about the best-case scenarios, then I think about my children's lives, then I freak the fuck out until I'm right on the verge of puking.

somebody watched nbc's green thursday

It's true that we don't know how long oil will last, but it's best to live as though it won't be long. Which is not what we're doing.

I used to think population control (of the benign sort) was the most important factor, but when you consider that a developed world person might be consuming five or ten times as much as a third world person, economic development starts to seem even worse than massive population growth. But that argument falls apart because it leads to advocating keeping people in poverty.

I actually get angry sometimes when I hear about research into further extension of life (meaning already long rich western life, since that research will probably have little bearing on the poor people who still have no access to the discoveries of fifty years ago).

New Yorker article on the 'car of the future' doesn't make me optimistic.

Consider what’s happening in India and China. As Carson and Vaitheeswaran point out, car ownership in both countries has been and still remains, by U.S. standards, almost absurdly low. There are nine personal vehicles per thousand eligible drivers in China and eleven for every thousand Indians, compared with 1,148 for every thousand Americans. But incomes in the two countries are rising so rapidly—the Chinese economy grew by eleven per cent last year and is expected to grow by the same amount this year—that millions of vehicleless families will soon be in a position to buy automobiles. Assuming that incomes continue to rise, in a few years tens of millions of families will be buying their first cars, and eventually hundreds of millions. (To satisfy increasing demand in India, the country’s second-largest auto manufacturer, Tata Motors, is set to start producing a four-door known as the one-lakh car—a lakh is a hundred thousand rupees—that will sell for the equivalent of twenty-five hundred dollars.) Were China and India to increase their rates of car ownership to the point where per-capita oil consumption reached just half of American levels, the two countries would burn through a hundred million additional barrels a day. (Currently, total global oil use is eighty-six million barrels a day.) Were they to match U.S. consumption levels, they would require an extra two hundred million barrels a day. It’s difficult to imagine how such enormous quantities of oil could be found, but, if they could, the result would be catastrophe. “Just consider the scale of the potential problem—for instance, the effect on global warming of seven hundred and fifty million more cars in India and China, belching carbon dioxide,” Carson and Vaitheeswaran write.

i mostly deal with it by fantasizing about the worst-case scenarios

you should read the world without us

I kind of hope oil prices stay high - it might put a little more pressure on us to do something.

Hurting the following doesn't refer to you because I think you made a nuanced argument that isn't the same as what I'm gonna rail about.

When "environmentalist" friends or work-colleagues start on the "there are too many people" schtick I have to choke back my rage because it sounds to me like "fuck the inferior races" misanthropic idiocy. And this is fresh in my mind because I had this argument with my boss last Friday.

stanM, i'm sure on the eve of the apocalypse you will find a virgin girl who will be all too ready to put out

silver linings etc

Yeah "there are too many people in the world" kind of sucks coming from a westerner, ESPECIALLY an American, I've realized. "And quit hogging the road with your bikes!"

Bottom line is there's enough food, energy and land on the planet for the population as it is now plus another couple of billion as long as nobody wants to hog shit.

xxxpost: well, it can't come soon enough then! *leaves car & taps running overnight*

i calm myself down with the knowledge that we will never run out of drugs to dull our perception

Bottom line is there's enough food, energy and land on the planet for the population as it is now plus another couple of billion as long as nobody wants to hog shit.

But isn't that talking about what we actually need to live rather than what we use?

I mean, modernized people be hoggin!

I worry more about the continued availability of clean potable water than I do the planet running out of water.

I don't worry so much about the planet running out of oil, because I have spent the last year converting a garbage dump into a source of natural gas. And there's a lot of garbage available.

I worry more about processed foods, dependence on unregulated sources for food additives, packaging waste, and the toxicity of everyday stuff we intentionally expose ourselves to than I do about global warming.

I'm dismayed by the sense of entitlement so many people exhibit, but can only shake my head really.

I worry more about processed foods, dependence on unregulated sources for food additives, packaging waste, and the toxicity of everyday stuff we intentionally expose ourselves to than I do about global warming.

I'm dismayed by the sense of entitlement so many people exhibit, but can only shake my head really.

There's a bit of a contradiction here. I mean the toxicity of the stuff we eat every day is hardly as big an issue as this other stuff considering how generally long and generally healthy our lives are if we want to make them that way, so I could point the finger at you on that one for "sense of entitlement," i.e. "I'm more worried about the sanctity of my own body than a threat that will displace millions of people, increase the spread of disease, disrupt the global food and water supply, and generally make life on this planet more unpleasant for almost everyone who survives at all."

I don't want children, so as long as we don't go all Mad Max in the next 45-50 years...

Hurting: Yes, but I don't do enough about it. I probably thought about it (far?) more when I was 10-17.

s long as we don't go all Mad Max in the next 45-50 years...

See, I'm not at all sure we can count on this.

I mean, if I really cared, I'd have biked (10 min at worst) to meetings and rehearsals tonight in the light rain/37F weather.

Or buy less CDs. Or get my hair cut on campus.

I'm more afraid of the mayhem and bedlam than I am of having to live meagerly.

Well Hurting 2, you just keep spending your time worrying about what you want to worry about, and I'll spend mine perfecting a process that keeps thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere every day.

Well, I suppose you have me there.

The world's population before the industrial revolution was about one billion. Don't kid yourself that it isn't oil doesn't make more possible today. In short, we're fucked.

In answer to the questions:

Yes

Go for a long drive

I'm confused that despite living in a house of people who should care, it seems to be that recycling is actually in the way of progress, and that drying clothes on the line is an admittance of weakness.

Plus, working in a studio that uses alot of paper, and the caretakers take away our paper bin and people throw their cups of tea in there when they could just bring in a mug and wash it...urrrghhh. I think time is running out. Just look at Australia, dry as.

"that it isn't oil doesn't make more possible today"

Hahaha don't write hungover.

I kind of want to become one of those techno-optimists, because I don't see enough people voluntarily cutting their consumption by enough to matter.

If we had poured tons of money into research and taken more policy initiatives like 30-40 years ago, when we knew we should have, we might be in a less bleak situation now. Actually, under Carter we sort of did, but then Reagan undid everything he started.

brasil is so ready on that count -- they took the 70s as a warning, and as a result their cities smell like sweet manure and their cars run on alcohol

I'm more afraid of the mayhem and bedlam than I am of having to live meagerly.

Yeah, that's sensible. And I wouldn't say I live extravagantly by Western standards. I do bike or bus when it seems reasonable, try to buy fair trade/green when I can, try to vote accordingly. But I'm quite sure it's nowhere near sustainable. If I could see that me taking more radical steps wrt my personal consumption would actually have some kind of meaningful impact on the big picture (e.g. if there actually was some kind of mass movement), I'm sure I'd be more pro-active.

The cliche has long been 'think globally, act locally' and I think that will have a greater relevance with time. Jaq mentions the work she's doing -- well, that's here in OC, and one of the big clients for this new energy source is in fact the OCTA, which runs the bus system I use for basic local travel. Meantime there's also my focus on locally grown organic fruit and vegetables via the CSA program I belong to, and relying on seasonal product first and foremost. I don't say all this to claim perfection, hardly that -- my plane travel alone probably offsets it all -- but I think that in a lot of ways I've quietly aimed at what strikes me as a more sensible way to live that is neither self-abnegating nor for show. (Other factors: florescent light bulbs (same ones I've used since I first moved in five years back), rarely using either A/C or heat, heck just living in an apartment rather than some big house, etc.)

I do worry about the future, frankly, and I'm not sanguine, though neither am I panicking outright. I do honestly think a lot of kids born now are going to look at a lot of what our generation and those just previous to it did with something close to appalled horror mixed with a certain envy, though.

I wish I had a good idea of how I could channel my planned law career into work on this issue. Problem is everyone goes to law school thinking they want to practice "environmental law" but there are very few jobs in it. Also a lot of them wind up practicing environmental law for the wrong side.

A lifetime of apocalyptic fiction and film has readied me for any mayhem and bedlam. Can't wait for my dog to start communicating telepathically.

(can't believe I sold that! I want to see it so bad right now)

dream last night -- started with me having to drive my wife to a vacation in a giant greyhound bus (although we were the only ones aboard), then we wound up in this hotel and there was some kind of nuclear attack or other civilization-threatening disaster and I spent the rest of the dream trying to hide food in various places and fearing what the other hotel guests would do to me if they found out.

seems like the giant bus might have had something to do with overuse of resources

I'ma get me a dog to travel thru the wastelands with.

srsly in my more frightened moments i consider taking up firearms training.

/roger adultrey

like wtf is that gonna do when there's no potable water right, but i've considered it.

Welcome to Thunderdome

but i try not to think about this stuff anymore and instead enjoy good beer, good cooked food, good music. try to write well.

lol milo otm

I can't believe I haven't already stopped in on this thread to make some kind of comment to the effect of you guys being rank amateurs. there's nothing you can do about it and you can't plan for everything so just pay your insurance and try to enjoy what little time we have left

haha this from you?

It seems like economists always just shrug this stuff off, and Malthusian predictions have generally been wrong in the past, so I never really worry about it.

http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Commentary/Live_Action_Walt/Pollyanna.jpg

we can all live in floating houses and drink processed seawater

in a world where kevin costner drinks his own piss

one man

one desire

btw do not GIS kevin coster drinking pee waterworld

there's only one solution, and it rhymes with 'blucide.'

'bluicide,' even

telluride_film_festival.jpeg

srsly @ the apocalypse i'ma put this shit on and go out in a good mood

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV1SVBQaoCM

^^^^ antidote to all despairs

2 late you'll have no oil to run your computer and youtube will have been taken over by Skynet.

naw i got the vinyl and the mp3 and the cassette

backups dawg

srsly in my more frightened moments i consider taking up firearms training.

uh, this is actually a good idea

tho it might be more effective to learn how to plant and maintain a garden, first

i linked to this websit a few times but ,like : http://www.worldchanging.com/planet/
this particular page is encouraging stuff about Climate Change / Sustainable Development / Biodiversity and Ecosystems/ New Science / Imagining the Future.

Governments need to regulate the consumption of resources, because businesses aren't gonna make themselves less competitive. But they won't do this because they're terrified of fucking up their economies by driving companies elsewhere. I don't think anything will actually be done on a large scale until half the world's major cities are underwater and it's too late. Maybe the best we can hope for is if global warming/peak oil/scarce resources fuck up things so much that nobody can afford to pollute or use imported goods and we'll all be forced to go back to simpler, less destructive ways of life anyway.

Just don't have children.

ner ner ner ner ner

http://www.marveldirectory.com/pictures/individuals/a_1d/apocalypse1.gif

http://www.marvel.com/universe3zx/images/thumb/7/70/Apocalypse_(House_of_M)_Head.jpg/440px-Apocalypse_(House_of_M)_Head.jpg

Can't afford a car, air travel or kids. Doing my bit for the enviroment by being a scrub.

You want to do something to reduce our energy consumption? Educate other people. I feel like so many people that are beginning to understand our consumption problems just read about this shit online for 8 months straight, but never actually try to explain it to friends who have no idea. Like, next time you see a political attack ad that says something like "Representative X supported a tax that would raise the price of gasoline. RAISE the price of GASOLINE! Representative X - wrong on gasoline, wrong for humanity", point out that raising the price of gasoline, say, to European levels, would probably be a good idea, especially if done incrementally.

And people in London, next time you hear someone complaining about the Kengestion tax, try to talk some sense into them.

serious haw at the idea that anybody is going to stop big oil from selling their products however the fuck they please

or that we are ever going to clean up coal plants in a meaningful way

From that site, Sebastien:

You know that Hollywood sign on the hillside in that photo? I have a good idea, been thinking about it for a year or so. .......Someone who is good at photoshopping, ......should erase the word "Hollywood" from the sign there....... and replace it with the words "GLOBAL WARMING" as a kind of iconic warning sign for the world. ......Do you know anyone who could do this and post it somewhere on the Web, maybe right here ? I for one will be happy to see it done and i think the the photoshpped sign will become a powerful tool to wake more people up to the needs of fighting this climate crisis we are in, in both big ways and small ways, can you photoshpp this and ask someone.

-- Danny Bloom

??? :(

I have a good idea, been thinking about it for a year or so.

jesus christ

dnftt

I see I didn't respond to this the first time around, which is unlike me. I guess my doomie reflexes have dulled.

First lesson: neither panic nor worry will help you a bit unless you transform that energy into productive ideas and plans. (NB: Ideas and plans should not be confused with running in circles, screaming and shouting.) If you have a hard time thinking about certain unpleasant possibilities without freezing up in fear, then it is a good idea to talk it out with other people who aren't as seized up over it.

Second lesson: You have no control over anything beyond your own personal actions, so do not plan on saving the world. Stay realistic about what you can accomplish.

Third lesson: You can share your own thoughts, ideas, plans and information with others, once you have accumulated some. Although you cannot control what other people do, you can give them the necessary information to change their thinking and eventually their actions. People operate better with support and encouragement. (NB: encourage is a great word; it means "to call forth courage" and courage is always enormously valuable for the success of any endeavor.) It is hard to encourage others when your own courage is slender, but it's not impossible.

Fourth lesson: Be flexible. Plans, thoughts and ideas should always be open to new information and to change. If you are thinking clearly about life, you will always find reason to be glad.

Final lesson: Be grateful. If you are thinking clearly about life, you will always find grounds to be glad for what you have. Recognize when your sorrow arises from fruitlessly grieving over what you do not have. We are so trained to want more than we have and to imagine we would be happier with what we lack that it is like a mental illness that wastes us. Reject that way of life. You'll be saner.

? @ abbott
yes, it's from that site: I googled a part of that guy's post to find that it's just some random guy who commented on one of their post...

And people in London, next time you hear someone complaining about the Kengestion tax, try to talk some sense into them.

says someone not from london

honestly Z S any regulation that specifically puts the onus on the hoi polloi to somehow come up with more cash to pay for the privilege of getting to and from their fucking job is bullshit and a half

You guys aren't thinking in terms of progress enough. Just imagine a few crises happening and the world's governments and corporations freaking the fuck out enough to take drastic action. Next thing you know, we're living in giant eco-friendly cities, siphoning gases from Venus to power shit, and mining Mars for water. Potable water is doable, it just takes more energy than we currently have to do the conversion. I, for one, await our nuclear-powered, space-hopping future overlords.

I never think about this shit :D

ALL THE GOOD PEOPLE WANNA RESCUE YOU
ALL THE SMART PEOPLE WANNA TALK WITH YOU
ALL THE CLEVER PEOPLE WANNA TELL YOU THAT
ALL THE LITTLE PEOPLE WANNA DANCE ITS TRUE

honestly Z S any regulation that specifically puts the onus on the hoi polloi to somehow come up with more cash to pay for the privilege of getting to and from their fucking job is bullshit and a half

I hear this all of the time and I understand the motivations behind it, and I don't claim that congestion charges are any sort of panacea for transport fuel problems, either. It's just one way of trying to internalize environmental costs that were previously externalized. You can complain about burden placed on the hoi polloi, but practically any measure that aims to make goods reflect their true environmental cost ends up being filtered down to the people at some stage, and that's the point. Having to pay 15 bucks extra to go to work may be bullshit and a half, but pretending that it's normal or remotely sustainable to have hundreds of millions of people driving alone and sitting in traffic jams for hours on their way to and from work everyday is....at least two bullshits, maybe 2 1/2.

It's a way to create a change in behavior, reduce the use of private automobiles, clean up the air (slightly) and most importantly, to raise money to improve public transport systems. They alternatives are to wait until everyone magically has a 100mpg supercar, pretend that biofuels are a solution (when they create massive food vs. fuel and CO2 emission balance problems), or do nothing and wait for an energy crisis.

It's a way to create a change in behavior of poor people, reduce the use of private automobiles by poor people

Fixed.

pretending that it's normal or remotely sustainable to have hundreds of millions of people driving alone and sitting in traffic jams for hours on their way to and from work everyday is....at least two bullshits, maybe 2 1/2.

someone's never had to rely on One Great Eastern clearly

Well, back to the status quo it is then.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/05_02/couchDM2405_468x312.jpg

otoh perhaps it will encourage government and employers to stop structuring everything around the inevitability of the universal car commute

My new solution, internalize environmental costs, but find a way of doing it that doesn't affect anyone's lifestyle, and doesn't create an inconvenience.

otoh perhaps people who don't live in London should STFU about living here

fartnoise.jpg

Yeah and because you don't live in the U.S. you can't have an opinion about the Iraq war etc

yawn

Errrr, there are British troops in Iraq dude.

Anyway, pointing out that direct taxation disproportionately hits the poorest people in society isn't the same as saying "government should do nothing". It's saying "government should do something that doesn't disproportionately affect the poorest people in society".

Of course, but who organized it and manipulated their own people and other countries of the world into participating, is what I meant.

Anyways, I'll STFU.

good idea :D