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Science

Group Warns on Consumption of Resources 63

Posted by michael from the think-of-the-children dept.
gollum123 writes "Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels, the spread of cities, the destruction of natural habitats for farmland and over-exploitation of the oceans are destroying Earth's ability to sustain life, the environmental group WWF warned in a new report Thursday."
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Group Warns on Consumption of Resources More

Group Warns on Consumption of Resources

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  • ...i see a quite dark feature ahead of us. The nature isnt a machine to turn it off when it starts producing bad things. No. It builds up, so even if we dont feel too much bad effects atm, it could mean that after 30 years, even if we stop ruining the environment, the effects will be severe. Perfect example is the greenhouse effect, and please dont flame me with studies "fueled" by oil companies...Im not willing to turn this planet into a dump just to let companies keep their profit up. Pollution will just

  • Bad Science (Score:3, Funny)

    by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:51PM (#10599380) Homepage Journal
    But if it's bad for profits, it must be Bad Science. You know, Fuzzy Math, and that kind of stuff. Good Science is good for profits.
  • I too think that depletion of our planet's resources is a terrible thing that ought to be avoided. However, this is a gigantic planet. There are places on this globe where Man has yet to set foot, much less look upon with the naked eye.

    To start trying to cut back our resource usage when we do not have a clear understanding of the true vastness of the Earth's resources is like pairing up a newbie programmer with an experienced programmer. The results are going to be fine, but it's going to take a hell of
    • I too think that depletion of our planet's resources is a terrible thing that ought to be avoided. However, this is a gigantic planet. There are places on this globe where Man has yet to set foot, much less look upon with the naked eye.

      Where? I'd love to colonize something- it's only when you move into new territory that you have freedom.

    • Re:The sky is falling! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I too think that depletion of our planet's resources is a terrible thing that ought to be avoided. However, this is a gigantic planet. There are places on this globe where Man has yet to set foot, much less look upon with the naked eye. To start trying to cut back our resource usage when we do not have a clear understanding of the true vastness of the Earth's resources is like pairing up a newbie programmer with an experienced programmer.

      Talking of misplaced analogies, I guess you have just given the ans

    • So, what you're saying is that our planet can take anything we throw at it, that consumption for consumption's sake is a moral good, that any attempt to stem that consumption is an attack on our Star-Spangled Economy, and that newbie programmers should never be paired with experts for fear that they might learn something.

      Where is all this untouched vastness of which you speak? We're using most of the potential farmland, we've colonized all the reasonably habitable areas, we're fishing the oceans bey
      • What he's saying is "don't pair newbie with Larry Wall". Not that newbie would not learn valuable lessons, but Larry would spend time explaining "why a list on the left hand side must match a list on the right hand side". And that might be great for newbie, but bad for progress.

        Dwight Eisenhower told us "Farming is easy if your plow is a pencil, and you field is a paper". It's amazing how many slashdotters are experts in agriculture, automotive engineering, etc, but would howl like mad if a Farmer tried

      • I like your response, but I will argue one point (this is Slashdot after all, I have to nitpick something!)

        Anyways, I say we consume because it is the nature of the Industrial Method. The Industrial Method says that you must consume all possible resources for maximum profit. Good intentions, alternative energy cars, wind power count for nothing. The Industrial Method is a blind march towards consuming everything!!

        And this is the bitch of it. I don't think we can extract ourselved from the Industrial Me
  • I didn't know Stone Cold Steve Austin was an environmentalist.

  • Yes, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by feorlen ( 214880 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @01:04PM (#10599518)
    Really, now. I'm one of those "Pinko Liberal Commie Environmentalists" (if you believe the far Right's opinion of my public transit and recycling "personal virtues") and I'm sick of sensationalist claptrap.

    Ok, we are using natural resources. Lots of natural resources. Yes, this is a problem. Although the usual Satan in this, the United States, is about the same as their previous report and now the new bad guys are China and India. And the US isn't even the worst, we are behind UAE's air conditioners.

    So when are they planning to release a report in Hindi? What I want to know in their sensationalist press release, is what are they doing about it? If the goal is to attract donations to further their work, I'd like to hear more about it than "Ooooo! Evil Selfish People Ruin The Environment!!"

    So there are huge changes since 1961, or 1972 or even the 8% increase since 1991. We know the Bad Old Days were, um, Bad. That's why many people are trying to make changes. But how have we been doing since? What are the current trends?
    • Well, you have to look much more closely to the overall consumption of resources. Granted that the rate of increase of consumption of oil is high for developing nations like China and India, but so are their populations. If you look at resource use per person, people in developed countries use far more stuff than those in the third world countries (10 times more energy if i remember right). I think there are easy ways to bring it down. THere are already reports like this in Hindi (and twenty seven oher lang
  • That movie about the spoon was right, we really are a virus. At least, most of us are. We consume and move on, consume and move on. If the universe were a giant organism and we were a virus inside it, you better believe someone will be looking for a cure. *duck*
    • That applies to ALL life. Deer don't magically say "hey, we've got 1/10th the biomass of our food as deer, that's enough babies." They either starve or get eaten by wolves--who, again, don't say "hey, there are ten times as many deer as us; let's stop having cubs for a bit."

      Man is different from other forms of life only in that we have successfully broken the cycle of nature and evolution. We have no predators, we have the ability to rape the planet to end hunger, and the reason we don't use due to our
      • Well then I say we eradicate all deer! It's not like there aren't enough resources in the entire universe to support human expansion over the next infineum of years. We just need to hurry up and move on to the next space rock. Or invent a replicator.

      • Limiting population (Score:4, Interesting)

        by FlyingOrca ( 747207 ) on Saturday October 23, 2004 @12:49AM (#10606783) Journal
        Did you notice that the population factor was conspicuously missing from TFA? The scary thing is, we HAVEN'T broken the cycle of nature and evolution at all - we just dodged the consequences while we ramped up our population. The crash at the end, which is inevitable unless we control our population, still awaits us.

        Cut our global population by somewhere between 50 and 90 percent, though, and it's all good. Plenty of resources to go around. No political will to do anything about it, though, and even talking about it is well-nigh taboo.

        Go, humans, go.
  • From TFA: Humans currently consume 20% more natural resources than the earth can produce

    It doesn't help that we're tearing down forests and paving over habitat all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if that number reached 30% by 2011.

    • The Republicans have pressured the Earth into Deficit Spending. There's no other way to explain it. Expanding social programs like Housing and Eating have caused the Earth to pay out more wood, concrete and food that it can pay for.

    • Re:This is just a start (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Gewis ( 717661 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @03:18PM (#10601774)
      We're tearing down forests and paving over habitat all the time? Pardon me if I'm rather confused by that. There's a big difference between reality and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest.

      My maternal extended family has worked in the logging industry for more than fifty years. And strangely enough, the lumber companies are still making money and selling cheap lumber. They certainly aren't cutting everything down in their path and moving on like some strange marauders. There's only a certain amount of land they own, and they've always recognized that they have to replace what they cut down if they want to stay in business. Thus, nearly every tree cut down by Simpson Lumber or other companies was a tree they planted 50 years ago. They plant 5 trees for every one they cut down, in fact.

      And then you have places like the Salt Lake Valley. It looks like a veritable forest, yet when we evil slash and burn white folks got here 150 years ago, there wasn't a tree in the valley. We planted all of them. There are a lot of reasonable estimates that there are now more trees and forest in the United States than there were when the pilgrims set foot in Plymouth.

      What's really distressing is that, when you get into the higher echelons of these environmentalist groups, they don't give one hoot about the environment. Go do an internship for one of them in Washington. It'll be a real eye opener, from what I've heard. :)

      • Re:This is just a start (Score:4, Informative)

        by winwar ( 114053 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @04:10PM (#10602719)
        "...the lumber companies are still making money and selling cheap lumber. They certainly aren't cutting everything down in their path and moving on like some strange marauders. There's only a certain amount of land they own, and they've always recognized that they have to replace what they cut down if they want to stay in business. Thus, nearly every tree cut down by Simpson Lumber or other companies was a tree they planted 50 years ago. They plant 5 trees for every one they cut down, in fact."

        The large timber companies tend to own much of their crops (aka trees). These are probably sustainable (this is hard to determine a few hundred years out...) in theory. However, much of the outcry was/is about cutting on public lands especially old(er) growth forests. Company lands are forests in name only-they are generally single crops-trees in this case. Areas (public and private) that are replanted/managed are not much different (from what I have experienced growing up in the PNW).

        "There are a lot of reasonable estimates that there are now more trees and forest in the United States than there were when the pilgrims set foot in Plymouth."

        I have seen those estimates. There are almost certainly more trees now. More useful forest habitat, probably not. Trees do no make a forest, although they are required.

        "What's really distressing is that, when you get into the higher echelons of these environmentalist groups, they don't give one hoot about the environment."

        Unfortunately, I seem to get that feeling. I really hope I am wrong. I tend to ignore most reports from these organizations-they seem to be designed to get donations.

        That is not to say their goals are bad. We are using a heck of a lot of resources. It is unsustainable. But most people won't want to change their lifestyles enought to make a real difference. And it may not matter if the rest of the world doesn't follow (most of the world wants to be like the US....)
      • My maternal extended family has worked in the logging industry for more than fifty years. And strangely enough, the lumber companies are still making money and selling cheap lumber.

        Yes, most lumber companies replant trees after they cut them down. Either because they realize that those forests are like any crop or because they are required to. But, let me give you some specific examples of what's happened in the 'burbs of Washington:

        1. A lake was just drained completely and filled in to make way for a

      • There are a lot of reasonable estimates that there are now more trees and forest in the United States than there were when the pilgrims set foot in Plymouth.

        No, there aren't. There's an oft-repeated claim about more trees now in the U.S. than in 1900, which is a true lie in that heavily-forested Alaska was added the U.S. in that time.

        Forest companies have the same short-term outlook as other U.S. companies, and the ones that don't get bought and looted by others seeking those short-term profits.

        Why do
        • They do have their own "fields," silly. Take yourself a little trip out to Humboldt County, CA. That's redwood country, there, and you'll find most of the county is owned by the lumber companies.

          Indeed, if you had actually read my post you replied to, you'd have realized that your argument was deflated before it was started: they aren't being short-sighted about it. Most of these companies have been around for about a century or so and are cutting down trees they've planted in that time-frame. Public

  • Wrong category (Score:5, Insightful)

    by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @01:26PM (#10599763)
    Slashdot recently added a "Politics" section. That's where this belongs. I didn't see any science in the article at all - just unsupported claims of how large a "footprint" (a dubious metric to begin with) is appropriate.

    I'm not claiming that we are using too much or too few resources or that any of the quoted groups are right or wrong. I'm only saying that when groups like the WWF issue press-releases to push their agenda and others like the The Competitive Enterprise Institute try to counter those to push a different agenda, it's politics, not science.

    • Re:Wrong category (Score:2, Informative)

      by Ozwald ( 83516 )
      I pretty much discount any article that puts "energy efficient" and "solar power" into the same sentence anyway. It's been like 30 years since the invention of solar panels and all we've discovered is that we are way better at comsuming electricity than we are at gathering it from the sun.

      Now if they said promoting better battery technologies or geothermal heat, then sure, then we wouldn't need a shite section in slashdot.

      Oz
    • Slashdot recently added a "Politics" section. That's where this belongs. I didn't see any science in the article at allM

      Note the editor who approved the story. That will explain it all.

  • Cost is a great motivator for conservation. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bob_Robertson ( 454888 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @01:39PM (#10599880) Homepage
    As oil gets used up (as people have been proclaiming would happen very soon since before WW2), the price goes up.

    The only reason oil and other petrochemicals are utilized is that they cost less than the alternatives.

    So as the price of oil goes up, the prices of alternatives such as grain alcohol and veggie oil for fuel, telecommuting, atomic generation of electricity, solar, wind, etc, will be exceeded and they will in turn gain market share.

    The greatest danger is in trying to prevent the changes in price which reflect demand and supply. Distorting this process keeps destructive processes in place, or brings "alternative" systems into play before they are safe, cheap or clean as they would have had to be before people would have paid for them without that coercion.

    Relatively small, safe and clean atomic power generators have been in place for decades, but not in the so-called "private" sector. They are used in warships. This is an important lesson in "fine for me but not for thee".

    Bob-

    • Re:Cost is a great motivator for conservation. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by An Onerous Coward ( 222037 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @02:24PM (#10600863) Homepage
      Great, another libertarian who believes that market forces will be our salvation. This is a very uninformed view, given that the last fifty-odd years of economics research have been devoted to showing the very real limits on Adam Smith's "invisible hand."

      One of the most basic is the "tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org]," which basically says that if an individual can profit in the short term by overusing or damaging a communal resource, the "invisible hand" will end up destroying that resource.

      It's very likely that the cost of alternative energies is already significantly lower than that of conventional fossil fuels. But since many of the costs of fossil fuels can be shoved off onto future generations, our collective atmosphere, etc., these costs don't end up on the pricetag.

      The government is the only mechanism by which this disparity can be fixed. They can step in and regulate pollution, or provide subsidies for alternative fuels. Government regulation can make the invisible costs visible, and thus better subject these market forces to free-market economics.
      • One of the most basic is the "tragedy of the commons," which basically says that if an individual can profit in the short term by overusing or damaging a communal resource, the "invisible hand" will end up destroying that resource.

        Not to mention that the fact that the invisible hand takes time to work. Oil too expensive? Fine except it now becomes profitable to invest in renewable energy. Except... it takes, say, twenty years of investment before renewable energy becomes feasible; you don't have that time

        • Ahh, but thats the beauty of market forces: All it takes is on person who has the foresight to realize the need 20 years in advance, and develops it. That person gets rich by investing long term, off everyone else. Thus rewarding someone with foresight to invest long term.

          In case you have not noticed, alternative energy has been with us for years. I can recall reading about it in the early 1980s. Someone will be getting rich - someone who realizes the right time to invest.

          Every adviser I've talked to


      • I agree that there are market externalities, "invisible" costs of resources the producer doesn't have to pay for. But part of the problem is that the US government HEAVILY subsidizes fossil fuels, making them appear cheaper to customers (even though they might be more expensive when you include the taxes that paid the subsidies). Plus laws that demand better gas mileage from cars just INCREASES the viability of oil because customers will get more value from the same gas. If everyone drove a Hummer, we'd run
      • Fancy terms and fuzzy feelings aside, uhm, NO, damnit!

        A Tragedy of the commons [hence: TotC] is a failure of people to consider the impact of _their own_ consumption...

        You need to assume that everyone wants to maximize their personal benefit, and not being idiots, you know everyone else also will want that, and they know you know. See the thing is, each person thinks of themselves being the 'last one in.'
        Because of this, EVERYONE uses a little too much, and someone(everyone actually) can be made better of

        • You might like this article over on LVMI:

          http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1662

          It goes into the absurdity of "TotC" concerning the radio spectrum and the way the government fostered a crisis in order to justify their regulation of the medium.

          Bob-
      • The "tragedy of the commons" is completely dependent on the lack of private property. This is clearly echoed in the atrocious conditions in so-called "public" housing projects, compared to the condition in privately owned buildings practically next door.

        Government is the CAUSE of the commons problem in the first place. No one owns the commons. Otherwise, the owner could step in and prosecute for the abuse exactly like I would if someone abusively grazed their sheep on my front lawn.

        This is a very uninfor
    • Those shipboard "atomic" power generators you refer to run on highly-enriched fuel, have a hell of a lot of excess reactivity, and can safely change power levels at excessive rates. In other words, they are race-car engines. You would not use a race-car engine, or even a bunch of race car engines, to pull a train. It would be an inefficient use of resources, and the cost would be prohibitive.

      Instead, you would use an engine that maximizes fuel economy, can pull real hard for a long time, and doesn't have t
      • I'm not sure what you're trying to say with your "fine for me but not for thee" comment.

        The fact that governments exempt themselves from the restrictions and regulations that they impose on others.

        Thanks for the elaboration on the ship-board reactors. I would be more than pleased if the only reasons they weren't used privately were technical ones. Unfortunately, that kind of investigation is styfled by the legal restrictions. Thus my comment.

        Bob-

    • The only reason oil and other petrochemicals are utilized is that they cost less than the alternatives.

      The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone. Nor was it because stone became too costly to extract from the ground.

      We ought to be developing new tools now; not blithely continuing to use fossil fuels that are extraordinarily costly in every way except strict dollar accounting.

      • The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone.

        The Stone Age ended because mud huts and dung fires suck. As soon as alternatives became viable, people changed their lifestyles.

        Dung fires are still used in places like India where the alternatives are simply more expensive.

        The cost to me of a block of stone the size and shape of a cinderblock, don't forget the cost of handling something that heavy, makes stone far more expensive than cinderblocks for building.

        That's why cinderblocks were developed,

  • Kudos! (Score:4, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Friday October 22, 2004 @02:10PM (#10600537) Homepage
    the environmental group WWF warned in a new report Thursday.

    Kudos to them! God knows they've been wrestling with these issues for a long time.

    [Clears throat.]
  • if you take into account the fact that the Earth has a finite lifetime, in the end, it doesn't matter.

    we're all going to die one day, and I'm talking about total extinction here, unless we develop the technology to colonize other planets/systems.

    I guess it would be nice if, in the mean time, our planet wasn't too uncomfortable to live on, though.

  • Hulk Hogan - Yeah! (Score:3, Funny)

    by shrikel ( 535309 ) <hlagfarj&gmail,com> on Friday October 22, 2004 @02:27PM (#10600919)
    As much as I respect the World Wrestling Federation's opinions, I don't know if their research in this area is entirely trustworthy.
  • Dihydrogen Monoxide [dhmo.org] is found to be a pervasive, corrosive chemical found in every facet of our culture. It plays a key part in nuclear power, gaseous dihydrogen monoxide has been seen to cause burns, the chemical industry makes extensive use of it and dumps it straight into the water supply. Corporations are ignoring the DHMO threat. Third world countries suffer widespread disease due to dihydrogen monoxide contamination.

    I think it's high time that the WWF, Sierra Club and Earth Liberation Front tackle
  • Yep, it's time for another prediction of total destruction of the planet by the human plague.
  • Here is the solution to all of our problems: http://www.vhemt.org/ [vhemt.org]
  • I have the solution to the environmental problems of this planet. How about we get all the tree-huggers, and all the Big Oil Company CEOs together to settle this matter once and for all.... IN A STEEL CAGE MATCH!

    Oh, wait a minute, that's WWE now... Nevermind.

  • No, just like we proved Malthus wrong with his arithmetic/geometric race conditions of overpopulation, we can replace all these species in the biosphere with machines, or perhaps genetically modified humans.
  • "The real question is not whether the United States is a wealthy place but rather whether it's producing more wealth than it's consuming. Obviously, we are. We're using a lot of the world's resources but we're producing far more of the world's resources."

    We are *NOT* "producing far more of the world's resources". Unless, of course, you redefine "resource" to mean something other than what it actually means. As a matter of fact, 'resource' in this context does not mean something that "we" can produce;

    • The US isn't "producing more wealth than it consumes". I has a current accounts deficit.

      But the real point is that the things we call 'resources' are usually scarce because 1) they are finite (land, metals), 2) regenerate slowly (minerals, oil, tropical hardwood), or 3) it becomes increasingly costly to find or extract it (potable water, minerals, oil, clean air).

      It is simply not true to say that we are not competing for the same things because "market economics is not a zero-sum game". We are competing f

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