....I can't see emerging nations being bound to a level below first world (or why they should be morally), nor can I see the first world dropping its consumption appreciably.
All strong points well made.
I also think that ever expanding populations mean that, even if we can reduce per capita emissions, net emissions will continue to rise
We're building coal fired power stations with CO2 capture. We're constantly improving the efficiencies of our buildings through better design and tighter regulations. We're installing better insulation and better heating technology. We're making more effort to use low-carbon power generation (although, heaven help us, in the UKAEA we were telling governments that we should be doing that thirty years ago -- I was one of the ones telling them when they quietly pulled the plug on the next generation of nuclear plant). No, it isn't enough.
But we
can live with lower net consumption. Not so long ago I watched a WWII bomber built in under 24 hours. They were so far ahead of schedule when it was ready to fly they had to send somebody to wake up the pilot. Most people these days haven't had to dig deep and perform because of some terrible threat such as that faced by our nation in the early 1940s. I have confidence that when they see how serious things really are, people can and will put their shoulders to the wheel and that can really make a difference. The problem at the moment is that we have for the most part a bunch of glory seekers running the show, and they can't bear to think of cutting their own personal consumption and their self esteem, which is what will happen if we start to reduce the population. There will be a growing number of older people with a shrinking number of younger people, and that scares the accountants more than melting ice caps. It scares them because their pensions are effectively multiplied by the number of young people but divided by the number of old people. More old people and less young people means lower pensions. People don't like that. It might take something like a revolution to get where we need to be quickly enough.
no-one has a proposal let alone a concrete plan to tackle population growth
China has an effective policy. The rest of us do not, but it must come. There's no alternative except
Malthusian catastrophe.
Wrap that up with the fact that fossil fuels WILL run out with all that that implies for an inflated population, then, I'm sorry to say, that the logical and pragmatic approach is to prepare for a different world rather than engage in Canut style disaster planning.
In another post you've mentioned fossil fuels running out in a few decades. When I was looking at this stuff thirty years ago, we had proven, economically recoverable fossil fuel reserves (mostly coal) of around 300 years. Since that time we've found a lot more and the escalating price of fuels means that much of what was not economically recoverable is now economically recoverable. I guess we might be using fuels at twice the rate we were then, but even so we're still looking at getting on for a couple of centuries at current consumption assuming a reasonable amount of new discoveries. It seems to me that if we use that all up it's enough to raise the global average temperature by four or five degrees. Yes, that would be a different world. Vast areas of the planet which are now home to billions of people would become uninhabitable. I'm not sure how you prepare for the sort of population movements which that would cause. There would certainly be global conflict. I can see no reason to sit on our hands and wait for it to happen.
