So kill them rather than fix the issues? Ever heard of the idea that some people get many children because they hope some of them will survive or pay for their retirement etc.? How about we fix their medical and retirement issues instead of starving their children on purpose?
I think you oversimplify a bit unless you want to say that a world of oversized cockroaches and scorpions in a desert environment would be a nice place for us to live in. As I said above, if we lose species such as bees, we also lose a lot of plants. And if this happens very fast in comparison, evolution is probably not fast enough to adapt unless we are talking bacteria and species that are already very tough.
Again, the immigration is already a big topic now, if the new normal is that half of Africa will come to live in northern Europe, I'm not sure if people will just adapt to that and go "I bought that second car, now I house an African family in my home to adapt to the consequences."
ALL of the non-fossil alternatives are substantially more costly than the fossil fuels in terms of power generation. A coal-fired power generation plant is cheap in relative terms.[/QUOTE]
A few issues/questions:
1) What do we do when fossils run out in 30 years? Just say "that sucks" and watch all our food go bad because the cooling units are offline? Just not drive to work anymore?
2) That non-fossils currently don't produce enough output is hardly a secret, but if we don't invest in them, they never will...
There is a lot of energy coming from the sun, it is completely free of charge and already provides more than enough energy for all the biological life that has developed here. There are also plenty of ways to convert it to electrical energy, you forgot to mention wind farms for example. We may not even have to replace those entire 550 exajoules if we are clever and manage to reduce our usage. A shrinking population would be a nice step, but we are currently working hard in the other direction.
Isn't this why we should try to stop growing? At some future point it will have to happen anyway unless we want to ruin the planet in other ways or just wait until we actually run out of food.
There's also a yellowish-red fusion reactor that sends energy to us all the time for the next few million years or so, then we have this other cosmic friend that moves the entire water of the oceans around all the time...
I think we have plenty of natural energy sources, we just need to begin to use them. Some of the technology was already in development before WW1, that the change is a lot harder now is entirely our fault for focusing on the wrong tech all the time without thinking about the consequences. We can't realistically expect to use fossil fuels for the next 200 years even if there were no warming effects, we'll simply run out...![]()
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