Second, I feel that your argument fails to consider that the only long-term sustainable solution for all environmental and resource availability problems is a significant reduction the total human population back to pre-1900 levels. Now, mind you that I am not talking about some crazy Nazi/Republican scheme to exterminate billions of people — it’s not like I’m some deranged zealot who spends 16 hours on the airplane doing nothing but creating unsolicited comic books for you and flirting with a cute flight attendant! — but rather I mean simpler measures, such as promoting economic growth in poor countries, global poverty eradication efforts such as those being pursued by your hero, William H. “Bill” Gates, distribution of contraceptives in developing countries, etc. Nearly all demographers who have considered this subject agree that global population will begin to decline by 2050 for the reasons just mentioned. [See, e.g., "World Population Prospects: 2002 Revision" published by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, which contains an extensive discussion of the matter. (This should not be confused with the legendary, triple-crown winning race horse also named Secretariat.)] I believe we should be doing more to try to accelerate this transition from a rapidly increasing population to a gradually declining one.

The problem with your argument is that you consider only a single problem facing the human race, energy availability (and the associated issue of atmospheric carbon emissions), whereas there are many other environmental and resource problems that pose equally serious threats to the long term survival of the human race, not to mention that of animals such as talking cheetahs who use PySolar to determine the position of the Sun without having to strain their necks. These include ozone depletion, contamination of ocean and ground water supplies with heavy metals, loss of species that are part of complex ecological webs in which feedback loops can cause the system to evolve in unpredictable ways when even a single predator is removed, etc.

What all of these problems have in common is that they are not the result of some “what” but of a “how much.” For example, if there was only one person living on the Earth, and he devised a system for removing liquefied dinosaur carcasses from the ground and then burning them inside of a machine that was designed in just such a way as to induce rotation of four cylindrical disks about a set of axes that are parallel to the ground, the effect on the planet as a whole would be immeasurably small. However, if he replicated his machine many times and distributed the replicas to 3 billion other people, and all of them proceeded to run the machine for the next 100 years, then the effect would be much greater. Thus, we see that the problem is not one of “what” (dead dinosaurs), but “how much” (a motherfucking shitload of them).

In conclusion, I would like to encourage you to contact your local stock broker and add to your Diebold holdings. Bush in ‘08!

LinMarty