As George Carlin said: "Stop talking about saving the Earth. The Earth is fine. We're fucked."
One of the things I hate about green ideology is that it frames this issue in selfless religious moralistic terms when it's really all about pure self-interest.
To what extent can we continue doing this? For how long? We depend on these ecological systems, and the economic cost of replacing them would be far beyond our capacity to invest (if it's even within our technical capability). We depend on many, many resources that are presently being extracted far faster than their rate of formation, with fossil fuels being chief among these. Couriscant in Star Wars is fiction, and is likely impossible even with imaginary post-singularity-level technology. Its climate would have little or nothing to regulate it, and its atmosphere would revert to pre-photosynthesis reducing composition.
Less than a thousand years after mass die-off and the collapse of global civilization into a new dark age, most of the "damage" will be gone. This is less than a microsecond on geological timescales. The planet will be fine.
Such brutal die-offs have occurred before many times in geological history, and it's absurdly naive to think that it couldn't happen to us. Nature doesn't care about us. It doesn't care how much we suffer or how many of us die. We have to worry about that, or nothing will.
And even if it doesn't happen suddenly, there's the whole quality of life issue. Do we really want to live in a b-grade cyberpunk dystopia of endless ugly sprawl, routine Fukushima/BP Macondo type industrial disasters, increasing pollution, commodity hyperinflation, and unattainably distant gaps between the rich and everyone else? Because that might be what an ecologically depleted world looks like: a few super-rich demigods presiding over massive seething ghettoes policed by drones. That would also be a new dark age.
Edit: it might help people understand if we tried to estimate the cost of replacing these ecological systems with artificial industrial replacements. I'm gonna guesstimate somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000X current world GDP.
You could probably arrive at an estimate by working backwards and assuming thermodynamic efficiencies at reconstructing the biosphere in the 10-15% neighborhood. So SUM(GDP,1012AD,2012AD) / 0.15?
One of the things I hate about green ideology is that it frames this issue in selfless religious moralistic terms when it's really all about pure self-interest.
To what extent can we continue doing this? For how long? We depend on these ecological systems, and the economic cost of replacing them would be far beyond our capacity to invest (if it's even within our technical capability). We depend on many, many resources that are presently being extracted far faster than their rate of formation, with fossil fuels being chief among these. Couriscant in Star Wars is fiction, and is likely impossible even with imaginary post-singularity-level technology. Its climate would have little or nothing to regulate it, and its atmosphere would revert to pre-photosynthesis reducing composition.
Less than a thousand years after mass die-off and the collapse of global civilization into a new dark age, most of the "damage" will be gone. This is less than a microsecond on geological timescales. The planet will be fine.
Such brutal die-offs have occurred before many times in geological history, and it's absurdly naive to think that it couldn't happen to us. Nature doesn't care about us. It doesn't care how much we suffer or how many of us die. We have to worry about that, or nothing will.
And even if it doesn't happen suddenly, there's the whole quality of life issue. Do we really want to live in a b-grade cyberpunk dystopia of endless ugly sprawl, routine Fukushima/BP Macondo type industrial disasters, increasing pollution, commodity hyperinflation, and unattainably distant gaps between the rich and everyone else? Because that might be what an ecologically depleted world looks like: a few super-rich demigods presiding over massive seething ghettoes policed by drones. That would also be a new dark age.
Edit: it might help people understand if we tried to estimate the cost of replacing these ecological systems with artificial industrial replacements. I'm gonna guesstimate somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000X current world GDP.
You could probably arrive at an estimate by working backwards and assuming thermodynamic efficiencies at reconstructing the biosphere in the 10-15% neighborhood. So SUM(GDP,1012AD,2012AD) / 0.15?