[ExI] Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 7:05 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> Since there’s nothing that can be done about climate change, because
> there’s
> no scalable alternative to fossil fuels


Starting the article with a claim, and repeating it constantly throughout
the article, doesn't make it true.

But there was no mention of Energy Returned on Energy Invested
> (EROEI) or the scale of how many windmills you’d need to have.  So you
> could
> be left with the impression that these problems with wind could be
> overcome.
>

According to the study Wikipedia cites, wind's EROEI is 18 - a net
positive.  Sure, you couldn't solve all the world's energy problems with
just wind power; solving them is going to require a combination of
solutions, so arguing against each component in turn because it can't do
100% is the opposite of helpful.


> The best possible solution is de-industrialization, starting with
> Heinberg’s
> 50 million farmers, while also limiting immigration, instituting high taxes
> and other disincentives to encourage people to not have more than one child
> so we can get under the maximum carrying capacity as soon as possible.
>

So is this a world problem or a US problem?  "Limiting immigration" doesn't
affect the world so much, but "carrying capacity" only makes sense in the
context of the entire world (because food can be imported, on a sustainable
basis, to any given nation).

That drivel has no place on a transhumanist list, other than to see the
nature of the ignorance and attitudes we're still fighting against.
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