The ONLY solution is to cut back 80%.
How easily such pronouncements trip from the lips of Barack Obama, or Al Gore, or U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki-moon.
WHO is willing to return to the dark ages, permanently. Show of hands please?
You have just shown all the logical thought processes of a Rushblob fan who has had too many beers.
By 2050, world population will be ~40% greater than it is today.
This assumes no major pandemics due to over-crowding or poor nutrition or break down of sanitation or ecological damage or more benign influences like schools teaching kids what a condom is for.
Please divide the allowable 20% of energy by 1.40. You get 14.2%.
Everyone in favor of cutting your PERSONAL use of energy by 86%, please feel free to do so.
You pulled that number out of your ass. You assume that all of our energy is fossil-fuel-derived. From that point, your whole line of reasoning (if it can be called that) starts a bobsled run into the latrine pit.
We drive too much to begin with. It harms our health because we get fat and lazy, and we have to breathe in the fumes produced just to produce the fuel and then to burn it. It also harms to food supply when the run-off from all the roads we build gets into the salmon spawning streams or similarly sensitive environments. That our whole transportation system is built around cars and long commutes, people who wish not to drive, or who cannot drive for reasons of some disability or age, or who should not drive because they are dangerous degenerates, addicts or lunatics are either forced to drive or limited in their ability to move about freely or to be productive citizens of an industrialized society. If counties simply stopped encouraging urban sprawl and encouraged the revitalization of cities with places of employment within walking distance of most of the population, a great saving of energy could be had right there. Add in the savings when food can be produced on local farms that are no longer being squeezed out by the tacky-box-builders and you have taken another huge bite out of energy requirements.
Changes in life styles are not always impossible to achieve, nor does the destruction of one industry have to mean the total and permanent loss of jobs, nor do the adaptations we must make neccessarily make life more miserable or the human spirit less joyful.
As one example, every night, the electricity to power and entire city of a couple thousand is spent just on lighted billboards and neon lights of businesses that are closed for the night. in Tacoma. As a result, there are thousands of children who will never have the opportunity to see the Milky War or the Persead meteor shower. I was blessed, in one way, to have grown up in the country, far from city lights, where I could see such things and marvel at them.
I shall always remember one source of amusement from my Army days and otherwise miserable field exercises. Many was the young soldier who, when night fell on his first field problem, would look up and ask why there was this strange glowing band in the sky that stretched from one horizon to the other. And I forgot how many utterly freaked the first time they saw a single meteor falling on a moonless night.
Okay, I know that people are going to scream rape about shutting down the billboards and neon lights at night. I don'tb really give a rat's. The financial benefit of one party is less important than the harm that that individual's ecconomic activity does to others without some balancing ecconomic improvement.
Billboards are a traffic hazard. Billboards hide the beauty of nature and waste resources. It is hard to see pedestrians and pot holes at eye-level when you have white light streamingh into your eyes from a billboard. Artifical light at night makes one area look brighter, but makes the shadows look much darker.
Maybe, instead of advertising on billboards which just annoy the hell out of people who are not interested in your product, you could buy some advertising space in a newspaper to keep that crucial sector of our ecconomy andour culture going.
Your problem is very simple. You have no capacity for creative thinking.
Ever wonder why the really talented artists tend to espouse the more liberal causes?
