Climate Policy

[kandrathe]

That's where you go wrong. The article made no claims about the possibilities of providing for a world full of Americans. It was about total current world consumption, and how much that would take. It should be no surprise that if you take only a subset with way above average needs, that this subset would also require more space then average.

How much energy will you allot to each person in your world? Any unit of power measurement over time will do.

You have the same wrong assumptions on overpopulation. Sure, if the world was full of Americans, it would never be able to sustain the amount of people we have now. But as it is, 90% of the world population could vastly improve it's standards of living by getting rid of just the other 10%.

How much food would you allot per person in your world? Calories per day would be a useful start. Once petroleum based agriculture crashes, how will you sustain the current supply of food? Quintuple the number of acres tilled? Or, will you allow starvation to crash the population down to pre-petroleum levels (about 1 billion). Also consider that the US exports quite a bit of its agricultural production to feed the rest of the world.

Then, consider, "China presently has about 1.827 billion mu (121.8 million hectares), or 1.39 mu (0.09 hectares) per capita, about a third of the global average. In 1996, it had 1.951 billion mu (130.07 million hectares), or 1.59 mu (0.11 hectares) per person -- a loss of 6.4 percent of the arable land in 11 years mainly to urbanization." I'm not sure what you plan to do about the farm land shortage in China, let 2/3 of the population die off?

Once you answer those questions, we can determine whether we want to live in your world, or mine.

In my world we would work toward sustaining our current standard of living, while continuing to adopt efficiencies, and moving toward sustainable harmony with our environment. All of this transformation being a net positive experience for the economy, and its participants. I envision a world with cheap and abundant energy, where the people have learned to live in harmony with their planet.