Quote:
Originally Posted by Uplifter
I hope you're right.
But our "legacy of improvement", is actually more like a 'legacy of destruction'. We pollute more every year, our seas are turning more and more acidic, we are using more fossil fuels without looking for alternatives, we are creating more nuclear waste that we cannot dispose of, and we are still fighting wars for resources.
Nevertheless, if the scientists can get sorted with Nuclear fusion, hydrogen fuel cells and other renewable power sources then I'm sure that we won't end up killing ourselves.
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In the west we've had the historical advantage of dealing with the problems of pollution and destruction of local environments over time as they have happened, so we've had the luxury of learning from and correcting our mistakes.
The greatest danger we face at the moment is that by moving our industrial capacity to developing nations we've managed to cut the costs of production, but only by cutting the protections of environmental safety standards.
As a consequence all we've done is moved the pollution out of our own back yard and no longer have to pay the true costs of production in the short term, but will face far bigger problems in the future.
I fully expect that if we don't act now, we'll be facing a massive refugee problem in the future as large areas of the world become uninhabitable.
This is why, while I'm a skeptic about AGW, I support a lot of the issues that have been allied with that movement, such as decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels and the research into truly cleaner and efficient technologies. As and when those technologies can be introduced, we can provide economic incentives for production houses such as China to introduce them.
We have one advantage at the moment: with the large increases in energy production due to the uncertainty over oil supply, the market is ripe for R & D into those new technologies.