Thanks for the book recommendation. I will read it. As I'm sure you appreciate, I've been thinking a lot about it.<p>In my current thinking, it seems that there must be a new moral code. The powers of individual people, or even small groups, are too great. A million dollar act can cause billions of dollars of damage (e.g. 9/11) causing a many trillion dollar response (our current wars) and we haven't even seen the first real acts of biological terrorism. And what would become of a human population consisting of one group willing to take responsibility for the finiteness of our world, and one group unwilling to do so, intent on expansion, growth, greed and reproduction. There must be some moral code, some mode of thinking, some sociological structure, to deal with this.<p>(PS: Are you really that keen on thorium? People can still make dirty bombs and I'm not sure about how secure it is in terms of preventing enrichment, and as far as I can tell it's more expensive in terms of amortized cost than uranium reactors, which are more expensive than coal, which in some cases is more expensive than wind and, possibly soon, solar. So plan A for me seems to be using the nuclear reactor that we've already got: the one floating in the sky.)<p>---<p>Also, thorium isn't enough. It's just one in a long list of limitations in terms of the planet's resources. We fix more nitrogen than all of other life in the planet combined. Human beings have reshaped one third of the Earth's surface. About one billion people on Earth now enjoy an 'american' standard of living, and thusly an american standard of consumption. In 20 years it will be <i>3 billion</i>. We don't really have room for another factor of three, even just looking at the amount of food that we'll need. At the currently level of technology, for example, it is not even remotely possible for south and south east asia to switch from a largely vegetarian diet to one which consumes half as much meat as the average american.<p>---<p>I highly recommend the article "A Sober Optimist’s Guide to Sustainability"<p><a href="http://sloanreview.mit.edu/beyond-green/a-sober-optimists-guide-to-sustainability/" rel="nofollow">http://sloanreview.mit.edu/beyond-green/a-sober-optimists-gu...</a><p>"The guiding principle of more: It’s interesting to imagine what it would take to change that principle, even by degree. Because making that change seems so fundamental to what you’re saying we’re going to have to do.<p>I think this is the most difficult issue. And it’s not one you can tell people about. But you can show them.
One of the simulation models we use is a model of the overall interactions between population, resources, pollution, technology, and the environment. We’ll run the model live in class. We’ll say, “Okay, here is the simulation, and some very unpleasant things may happen yet in this century. But everything in the model is uncertain. Let’s assume there’s a whole lot more cheap oil and gas available. The marginal cost doesn’t rise so quickly as we pump more out of the ground.” Then you just slide a lever in the model and instantly see the result.<p>What happens, of course, is that by relaxing the constraint that’s limiting economic growth by lowering the availability and raising the price of energy, the economy grows even more, for an even longer time, until it hits some other constraint. So if you relax the constraint on the availability of fossil fuels, then you hit another constraint, which might be climate change. And if you go in and you relax that constraint, even magically assuming we can solve the climate problem right now, and for free, the economy grows even further until you hit another constraint, such as soil fertility or fresh water, and you see agricultural productivity fall. Relax that constraint, and you’ll grow until you hit some other one.<p>Pretty quickly people discover for themselves that as long as everybody in the world wants more—as long as everyone in the world wants to be as rich as we are, and we all want to be richer than we are today, there’s no solution.<p>What makes it particularly hard is that this is a conversation that’s not permissible in our society. Even the English language doesn’t allow it! There are words for not having enough—shortage—but there’s no word for excess demand. There’s no such word as a “longage” of demand."