Paul Krugman, NY Times, "Running Out of Planet to Exploit"

[chogan2]

I consider Paul Krugman to be the most intelligent economist alive today. Here's the link to his column in yesterday's NY Times. He discusses the similarities and differences between the current jump in commodity prices and the early 1970s. Not much in the way of new facts, but interesting to see a respected mainstream economist ask:

"Suppose that we really are running up against global limits. What does it mean?"

Not sure whether you have to log in or not to be able to read it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/op...hp&oref=slogin

[tripp]

It worked at treat, mate. Good article. I agree with his position. The biggest problem is that there are too many people making too many people. Global population boom was the result to the fat times that he mentioned. Now that the developing nations are, well, developing, they're consuming more per capita and the world is feeling a lot smaller.

Seems we need to do at least these 5 things:

1.) become more efficient at utilizing the resources available
2.) develop new ways of doing things (technology)
3.) constantly ask the question "is this method sustainable?"
a.) apply this at all levels (individual, family, community, corporate,
state, nation)
4.) stop creating so many new humans
5.) work together to share technology and best practices. For example, helping poorer countries develop sustainable and local resources (solar power, for example) pays dividends to the citizens of that country but also to surrounding countries and indeed the global community. The world is getting smaller and smaller. We need to become better neighbors. Failure to do this will in a word "suck".

[DaveinOlyWA]

our resources are manageable...our motivation to recycle is not

[tripp]

Even with recycling we need to make changes. Things like aluminium and glass can be recycled over and over, but plastics not so much. I think plastics are much more sensitive to contamination issues too. Partly we need to simply reduce the amount of plastic that we use. There's an awful lot of useless packaging that ought to go by the wayside. Making plastics out of renewable resources (biomass, algae, etc) will become more common. Obviously recycling will play a massive part too.

[DaveinOlyWA]

proper packaging materials all have to do with recycling. making packaging that cannot be recycled is inexcusable.

localities that take pride in the level of recycling done are barely hitting 50% and they are proud??... half is pathetic yet they are the leaders in the game.

i am ashamed of the level of recycling in my own community and we are among the leaders in the state and country.

it all takes money and time and that is where the problem lies. too few people willing to take an extra minute to recycle properly.

here, we have recycle bins that we can put in anything except glass. cant be much easier than that. well, according the newsletter i get, 40% of recycle bins are not recycled because they contain garbage. any recycle bin not properly prepared is tossed in garbage. too expensive to pay someone a good working wage to sort it by hand.

add to that the fact that barely 50 % bother to recycle at all and then we have very little being done to preserve our resources.

[tripp]

I agree. The market will eventually correct this, but what we really need is attitude adjustment. The market will help with that too, but there will be more pain associated with the transition if the market is the primary driving force. It's sad, but that seems to be the way we operate as a species.