Reply #25: It's certainly not a magic wand

[Dead_Parrot]

First off, I'd dissagree with your carrying capacity figure: I'd put it at around 3 billion, which is where the population was before the green revolution. I'm not claiming this is right, it's just by way of a disclaimer so you know where I'm coming from. :) It's a thread in itself.

Yeah, whatever we do at this point we're fucked to an extent: We've already wiped out tens, probably hundreds of thousands of species, killed a hundred million people from pollution: We'll probably loose a billion more from peak oil, and another billion will die from hysteresis without even knowing what it means.

But this is still the "if we're lucky" scenario: We could easily loose millions of species and an extra 4 billion people. I'm afraid I'm one of those people who thinks biodiversity has a value in it's own right, whatever happens to our (cough, cough) "civilisation": And the billions who are getting it in the neck are invariably those who are the least responsible - the poor. Imagine NOLA scaled up to the size of a country or a continent and you get the idea: Those of us in the developed world will be the last to go, even though we're the ones causing the damage.

No, ditching fossil fuels isn't going to fix our problems. The corpses are already stacking up: But it will make the difference between a mass extinction, coupled with a climatic clusterfuck and the deaths of billions, and something really bad.