Sustainable development and Population Reduction

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Dee_Dee_King said:
i believe that God desires us to return to a more natural lifestyle in harmony with the created order. our current american life style is unsustainable, materialistic, wasteful and artificial. globalism and free market capitalism is like a giant ponzi scheme that will come to a catastrophic end. something has got to give. i do believe that at some point in the near future, our consumptive lifestyle will be forced to change.
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Dee Dee King, I am not sure I can say how God desires us to live, but you are quite right right about the unsustainable nature of our commuting lifestyle. There are hundreds of thousands of people in my neck of the woods driving two hours each way every day to get to work, with no public transit alternative. With oil probably hitting $100 per barrel in the next year, automotive fuel will continue its inexorable rise, making it more and more difficult for poor people to commute. In fact, in many of our local communities here, the service sector employees who run video stores, restaurants, cleaning services and gardening businesses cannot even afford to live within an hour of where they work.

One solution that is getting some press is moving away from bedroom communities that presuppose long-oil-dependent commutes to self-sustaining villages, with companies, schools, and stores located where people work. Another solution is to impose a mandatory contribution on the part of developers to provide light rail to serve their housing developments. A third approach is to encourage bicycle commuting, which a lot of people in my community do, myself included. I just hope we can get comprehensive rail running all over the place before there is no longer sufficient petroleum to fuel the construction equipment cost-effectively.

Petrus
 
One solution that is getting some press is moving away from bedroom communities that presuppose long-oil-dependent commutes to self-sustaining villages, with companies, schools, and stores located where people work.
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true, there are solutions, but unfortunately no impetus. our economy is run by numbers and greed and not common sense. with computers and the internet, much of my work could be done from home, or anywhere. but industry decided to consolidate in houston because it’s cheap even though many wouldn’t choose to live there.

our country, especially in the south and west, will be in deep doo-doo once gas prices make it difficult to commute.

it’s too bad our government are so slow to act. we should be proactive.
 
Dee_Dee_King said:
true, there are solutions, but unfortunately no impetus. our economy is run by numbers and greed and not common sense. our country, especially in the south and west, will be in deep doo-doo once gas prices make it difficult to commute.
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Dee Dee King, while I agree that greed is certainly part of it, I don’t blame individual people so much as a system that is premised upon perpetual economic growth. When I hear economists tie a “healthy economy” to perpetual “housing starts” I wonder whether we are all helpless within the system. Logic would suggest that at some point on a planet that is not physically expanding, housing starts have to come to a stop, and yet few talk about this…

What do you personally think is the price point at which commuting long distances will be generally perceived as no longer manageable? Gasoline at $5.00, or $8.00 or $11.00 per gallon? Or is there such a price point? I’m amazed that where I live people opt to live 120 miles and two+ hours from work so that they can afford a 2,400 square foot house. My wife and I chose to live in a 1200 square foot house so that we could be in a cosmopolitan city and be able to spend most of our non-work time with our kids, rather than in a car. We regard that as a valuable choice.

Petrus sum
 
bankerdavid said:
Is it really our fault that they have no pensions or social security? That said, it **is **our fault that we have social security, which is neither social, nor security.
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So you’re not planning to cash those checks when you turn 65?
In many cases it is our fault that their countries are as poor as they are, from repeated invasions and US-sponsored coups d’etat to
The fact is, we are not ripping off poor countries, we are, indeed, helping them. We support families in poorer countries by buying the goods they make, which feeds them, houses them, clothes them, and gives them a sense of pride that they can help themselves.
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“And Pilate washed his hands.”
I swear, I log into CAF but it seems more like the Adam Smith Society or Social Darwinists. Untrammeled capitalism is every bit as evil as communism.
Go ahead and tell yourself some poor Guatemalan when you buy produce from there. More likely entire communities were bulldozed to create huge plantations, displacing small farmers who worked their own land, all for the profit of some global corporation.

I agree that UN handouts (and probably “development programs” generally) are worthless, but undeveloped countries need investment that will maximise employment and self-sufficiency rather than profits. The micro-credit movement seems to offer an interesting approach.
 
Dee_Dee_King said:
our country, especially in the south and west, will be in deep doo-doo once gas prices make it difficult to commute. it’s too bad our government are so slow to act. we should be proactive.
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Dee Dee King,

Ashley Seager filed this report on Monday (22 October) in the Guardian. Petrus

“Steep Decline in Oil Production Brings Risk of War and Unrest, Says New Study”

Output peaked in 2006 and will fall seven percent a year. Decline in gas, coal and uranium also predicted. World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown.

The German-based Energy Watch Group will release its study in London today saying that global oil production peaked in 2006 - much earlier than most experts had expected. The report, which predicts that production will now fall by 7% a year, comes after oil prices set new records almost every day last week, on Friday hitting more than $90 (£44) a barrel.

“The world soon will not be able to produce all the oil it needs as demand is rising while supply is falling. This is a huge problem for the world economy,” said Hans-Josef Fell, EWG’s founder and the German MP behind the country’s successful support system for renewable energy.

The report’s author, Joerg Schindler, said its most alarming finding was the steep decline in oil production after its peak, which he says is now behind us.

Global oil production is currently about 81m barrels a day - EWG expects that to fall to 39m by 2030. It also predicts significant falls in gas, coal and uranium production as those energy sources are used up. Britain’s oil production peaked in 1999 and has already dropped by half to about 1.6 million barrels a day.

The report presents a bleak view of the future unless a radically different approach is adopted. It quotes the British energy economist David Fleming as saying: “Anticipated supply shortages could lead easily to disturbing scenes of mass unrest as witnessed in Burma this month. For government, industry and the wider public, just muddling through is not an option any more as this situation could spin out of control and turn into a complete meltdown of society.”

Mr Schindler comes to a similar conclusion. “The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life.”

Jeremy Leggett, one of Britain’s leading environmentalists and the author of Half Gone, a book about “peak oil” - defined as the moment when maximum production is reached, said that both the UK government and the energy industry were in “institutionalised denial” and that action should have been taken sooner.
 
drpmjhess said:
I’m amazed that where I live people opt to live 120 miles and two+ hours from work so that they can afford a 2,400 square foot house. My wife and I chose to live in a 1200 square foot house so that we could be in a cosmopolitan city and be able to spend most of our non-work time with our kids, rather than in a car. We regard that as a valuable choice.
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Do you ever consider what your house would have cost if everyone who now lives two hours away had made the same decision you made? The only reason you could afford what you now have is that competition for it at the time did not price it out of your reach. Those people who are willing to travel greater distances reduce the housing costs for those who are not. Be careful what you wish for.

Ender
 
Ender said:
Do you ever consider what your house would have cost if everyone who now lives two hours away had made the same decision you made? The only reason you could afford what you now have is that competition for it at the time did not price it out of your reach. Those people who are willing to travel greater distances reduce the housing costs for those who are not. Be careful what you wish for.

Ender
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“Sustainable development” ensures that only the wealthy will survive. It will be the middle class and the poor who are erased because they will not be able to afford any kind of home and will be rent and wage slaves. That is not consistent with Catholic teachings on social justice.
 
rpp said:
“Sustainable development” ensures that only the wealthy will survive. It will be the middle class and the poor who are erased because they will not be able to afford any kind of home and will be rent and wage slaves. That is not consistent with Catholic teachings on social justice.
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Quite the contrary – sustainable development means economic growth that can be sustained over the long term. The “development” currently going on in my neck of the woods does not help the poor at all; most of what is being built are McMansions well out of the reach of the poor. And this is development entirely at the mercy of auto travel – many people in these wealthy neighborhoods cannot do the simplest errand without hopping in their Denalis or Escalades or Hummers. They are going to be up ***t creek in a few year when gasoline costs $8.00 per galon
 
i work in regulation of offshore oil and gas development. specifically, my section identifies resources using reflection seismic data and well logs. therefore, i see first hand that while we won’t run out of oil and gas, all of the cheap stuff has been identified and drilled. now we are looking deeper and more remote. added to this is the great pressure of environmentalists and native groups on preventing domestic production.

trust me, gas prices will continue to go up. cheap energy basically drives our lifestyle. as for housing, it’s out of control. in our case, we will be renting until we can afford a home close to work, which may take years.

i don’t think the government is completely ignorant of this issue. we are spending lots of money in iraq which has some of the most undiscovered reserves in the world. in fact, i heard that the median oil field there is in the billions barrels.
 
Dee_Dee_King said:
trust me, gas prices will continue to go up. cheap energy basically drives our lifestyle. as for housing, it’s out of control. in our case, we will be renting until we can afford a home close to work, which may take years. .
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Dee Dee King, I am a theologian working on theological and ethical issues at the end of affordable oil; my partner in this venture is a physicist-turned oil explorer. He is quite concerned at the lower and lower return he is getting for more and more costly drilling ventures in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere.

While I agree with you that in theory we will never run out of oil, in the practical order of things we will. When petroleum is simply too expensive to be practical, the average person won’t be able to drive a car, the average independent trucker won’t be able to deliver food to grocery stores, it will be too expensive to fly fire-fighting airplanes, etc. We don’t have to come close to running out of oil for it to become so expensive that it will have a disastrous “economic cascade” effect on society.

I worry that in the coming fuel crises – episodic and protracted – we will collectively lose civility, respect for the law, and even regard for human life. If we don’t prepare well now, we face a “Lord of the Flies” future. Catholics have to get into the thick of this discussion and planning or we will see the agenda set willy-nilly by eugenicists, abortion rights advocates, and misanthropic survivalists.

Prayerfully yours,
Petrus
 
Dee_Dee_King said:
trust me, gas prices will continue to go up. cheap energy basically drives our lifestyle. as for housing, it’s out of control. in our case, we will be renting until we can afford a home close to work, which may take years…
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Dee Dee King – $90 per barrel now? How high will oil go? Actually, high gasoline prices would be a good thing if it got people out of their cars, but high heating oil prices this winter will hurt a lot.

I suspect that in the next fifty years we will see an exodus away from places where it is difficult to live without extensive heating or air conditioning (the upper Midwest and the Southwest). The option of staying would require serious attention paid to sustainable energy, such as deep geothermal wells and extensive wind and solar arrays. Trouble is, drilling deep wells and manufacturing solar arrays currently costs petroleum.

Petrus
 
Sorry, but using nuclear is jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Those nuclear power plants become so radioactive in just 40 years that no human being can go near them. Of course, they can’t be shielded from the rain and ground water and radioactivity leaks into the surroundings.

As far as conserving, Americans are just too used to luxury and independence. In Germany, where people are also extravagant in many ways, they are basically very content with the simplest accommodations and food. They think nothing of walking 2 or 3 miles in the course of their work day and getting to and from work and shopping. Bread for breakfast and bread for supper. No one eats between meals, because it isn’t customary. The cooked food is pretty simple, too. People eat lots of potatoes and not too much meat.

The US also has the problem that in the 1930’s, the car companies bought up all the street car lines and promptly closed them down. So to build them now is going to be very expensive, especially considering the distances involved.

We have to live 25 minutes away from work because the housing is too expensive in the city and the houses there are too small for our family of 9. As it is, our house is too small. And we didn’t want our little children growing up in a grad school slum.
 
Cars may run on hydrogen now. I think that in the future that will be the fuel for cars. My husband found a kit to convert his present car for $10,000. Since we drive antiques cars only, we don’t buy new cars and it would be doable.
 
Leeta said:
Sorry, but using nuclear is jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Those nuclear power plants become so radioactive in just 40 years that no human being can go near them. Of course, they can’t be shielded from the rain and ground water and radioactivity leaks into the surroundings. There have been fewer injuries and deaths from nuclear power then fro any other form of modern power.

As far as conserving, Americans are just too used to luxury and independence. In Germany, where people are also extravagant in many ways, they are basically very content with the simplest accommodations and food. They think nothing of walking 2 or 3 miles in the course of their work day and getting to and from work and shopping. Bread for breakfast and bread for supper. No one eats between meals, because it isn’t customary. The cooked food is pretty simple, too. People eat lots of potatoes and not too much meat. My grandfather ate meat twice a day, bread three times a day and had cheese for breakfast every day. He also baked and ate pasteries till he passed at the ripe old age of 99.

The US also has the problem that in the 1930s, the car companies bought up all the street car lines and promptly closed them down. So to build them now is going to be very expensive, especially considering the distances involved. The streetcars where still in use in western PA in the 1970s on the old lines. They are still in use on new rails in some places. Government closed them down.

We have to live 25 minutes away from work because the housing is too expensive in the city and the houses there are too small for our family of 9. As it is, our house is too small. And we didn’t want our little children growing up in a grad school slum. The houses in the city tend to be cheaper then in the burbs in our area. The schools are not the best but we homeschool. We chose to live in a rural area about 15 miles for our work places.
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I’d go nuke. And maybe wind since we don’t get enough sun to make solar practical and the battery storage uses mercury.
 
Leeta said:
Sorry, but using nuclear is jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Those nuclear power plants become so radioactive in just 40 years that no human being can go near them. Of course, they can’t be shielded from the rain and ground water and radioactivity leaks into the surroundings.
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  • The measurable radiation at the perimeter fence surrounding a nuclear facility is the same level you are exposed to sleeping with your spouse in a double bed.
  • Grand Central Station (I think this is the one) is composed of granite and its radiation level exceeds that which is allowed at a nuclear facility.
  • One of the newest congressional buildings in DC is also built largely of granite and also has levels of radiation exceeding what is allowed at nuclear sites.
  • The nuclear generator is surrounded by a concrete shell designed to keep out a 747; I’m quite sure it suffices to keep out the rain as well.
I’m throwing out these statistics from memory but I’m comfortable they’re pretty accurate. I’m certain they are a lot more accurate than the accusations I’m responding to.

Ender
 
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