Sunday 14 September 2008

Neo-Malthusians on the Roll Again

A few years of increasing commodity prices and again the Neo-Malthusian Crowd is coming out of it's caves and preaching ecological doomsday. The other day I found a a new website on the topic: Approaching the Limits: http://www.paulchefurka.ca/ which obviously is in good faith and based on facts and logical reasoning tries to show that the End is at Hand .

I have posted below comment on the website:

" I respectfully and completely disagree with your views.

However, the best way of getting to be wiser is to seek out contrary views instead of preaching for the choir.

Basically, I like your number crunching approach. I more or less use the same numbers. What amazes me is that the same data can lead to complete opposite conclusions. I see a world with great potential for growth, you see a need for a world where we all live in small self sustaining villages.

I basically think your reasoning is biased and faulty, and I believe I can factually and logically refute all your points, and would be happy to discuss with you later on.

Let me give you one example.

I live in Denmark where renewable energy already supplies 15% af the total energy consumption. The plans are to increase that to 30% in 2025. The Danish Society of Civil Engineers has already shown how we can achieve a 60% reduction of CO2 in 2030.

The opposition has proposed zero-emission of CO2 in 2030. So this is "Realpolitik".

Anyway, the only reason for not doing this quicker is financial as a quick transition would destroy valuable infrastructure and be very expensive as renewable energy is still (a lot) more expensive than fossile fuels.

Furthermore, Denmark has one of the highest Energy Intensities (GNP/Energy Units) in the world.

There is no reason to believe that the rest of the world could not do the same.

So why this depressingly alarmist approach?"

1 comment:

Paul Chefurka said...

I didn't see the comment you posted above on the comment page of my site. I did see a bunch of others, though, so perhaps you changed your mind about this one?

There is no point in us arguing over our differences of opinion, we have diametrically opposed world views, and would simply end up shouting past each other.

Also, as I said in my reply to one of your comments, I'm just not that interested in laying out my views any more. They are all there for anyone who cares to read. My opinions, whether right or wrong, will make not a whit of difference in how things unfold. I'm now much more interested in sitting back and tracking the course of event, to see which parts of my analysis were correct and which were mistaken, so I can adjust my views to correspond a bit more closely to reality.

Now if you'd like to discuss the merits or demerits of a spiritual response to calamity, I'd be all ears. It's now early morning on Monday, Sept. 15, and I suspect a lot of small investors in the USA will be investing a bit of effort in prayer later today.

Thanks for reading my writing, no matter what you think of them. Their purpose was to stimulate thought, and they appear to have succeeded.

Best regards,
Paul Chefurka
Ottawa, Canada