Welcome to my Nightmare - Andrew Bolt

I heard an excerpt from a great article that really coincides with my opinion on several matters and decided to check it out at length. Here's a link, check it out.

Welcome to My Nightmare

But such apocalyptic talk was everywhere then. Take the Club of Rome, a top think tank, which in 1972 warned the world's economy was about to hit a wall. We were running out of oil, gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminium, copper, lead and zinc, it warned in Limits to Growth, which sold 30 million copies, becoming the best-selling environmental book in history.

Panic spread. "We could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade," warned US president Jimmy Carter.

Except we didn't. Instead, we've now got bigger reserves of all the things the Club of Rome said would soon be used up, except for tin.

This article lists around 10 conditions and/or environmental situations that were touted as "the end of the world" and how they really turned out. It's a nice trend line and, of course, the current "world ender" is manmade global warming. I'm guessing it's going to follow the trend.

Interesting link. It's hard not to be cynical about doom mongering, when so little has gone wrong in the past. All I'd say on the side of caution is, beware the boy who cried wolf.

Generally speaking I'm able to deduce which opinions and warnings I trust because they come from people I consider to have beeb proven trustworthy and who are authorities on the subject in question. By way of example I feel I can trust David Attenborough's analysis of the state of the natural world because I know he has spent his entire life studying it. I can't say the same of Jimmy Carter on oil fields, unfotunately.

The problem with apocaluptic arguments, to my mind, is that they miss the point. We so often hear of the "death of the planet" - as if the planet gives a toss whether or not it has too much CO2 in it's atmosphere or whether its ozone layer has holes in. The suggestion that humans can "kill the planet" - or life, for that matter, one of the fundamentally indesctructable forces in our immediate world, which has been through much worse than we can throw at it - is infused with arrogance.

What isn't in question is our capacity to make life more difficult for ourselves - or for our neighbours. I would suggest rather than panic buying baked beans in advance of a tin shortage, we do our bit on a very local level to have more respect for the resources we have at our disposal. Wastefulness is silly because it's so poor an idea economically, not because it "destroys the planet".