But we can pay for land to make land-fills. Sure, people who consume things should pay for their disposal -- but that isn't that hard.

As can the other costs of emissions. You'll notice that the emissions from most industry have been reduced by many orders of magnitude over the last 30 years...

Human ingenuity?

Remember: the economic cost of (say) emitting CO2 is bounded above by the cost of fixing it (removing the CO2). It can quite often be cheaper than this.

Also note that the answer "don't mess with the environment, leave it alone" is not a sustainable answer. The environment will produce ice ages, asteroid/comet impacts, super-volcanoes that shut out the sun, etc.

We've got the ability to prevent any of the listed?

The environmental cost of a widget isn't entirely dependant upon the cost of the space in a landfill, though. There's the reduction of remaining resources used to produce it, various environmental impacts of the manufacture of the widget. Will the widget leak toxic chemicals into the environment while it sits in the landfill? Does it deplete some limited resource? Heck, even the environmental cost of the transportation of the widget to the landfill counts for something. Consider this:

Iron is a fairly valuable resource. Sure, there's lots of it, but not an infinite supply. It's used to make lots of things. The environmental cost to produce these things is fairly high. We mine iron ore from the ground, extract the pure iron, form it into a widget. Use the widget. At some point the widget wears out. Does it make sense to just throw that refined iron into a landfill? Or does it make more sense to recycle the iron? It's already in a fairly pure state - it seems almost silly to just throw it back into the ground after we spent so much effort getting it out in the first place.

Now, lots of iron (and steel) *is* recycled - old cars are a good example of that. Lots of iron, fairly easy to separate from the rest of the car...a perfect candidate.

However, even *recycling* iron has environmental consequences! Whatever energy is used to recycle it certainly has consequences. If nasty chemicals are used, those have environmental consequences depending on the method of disposal...you get the idea.

My point is, it isn't just any one factor that you can say "Oh, well, I did this and this, so my consumption didn't have any net environmental impact." That simply isn't true! Everything we do has an environmental impact! If the sum environmental impact of the entire human race is such that it's going to negatively impact our quality of life in a short time, we are in deep shit. It seems pretty clear to me that this is the case right now. How can we change that? The two main ways seem to be:

1) By changing our habits - by consuming less, by making intelligent choices so that our lifestyles have less of an environmental impact. It's encouraging to me that more and more people are aware of this, even if it is in terms of the too-simplistic 'carbon footprint' idea.

2) By having fewer people. This, to me, is the key. And (almost) no one is paying attention to it! I'm not suggesting any sort of draconian methods here, so don't get excited. For instance, here in the U.S., where birth control is cheap and widely available, where medical care and a high standard of living are the norm, birth rates are such that the population would decline without immigration. That's pretty encouraging. Other parts of the world, however, are in a different situation. People routinely have more children than they can afford to feed. Birth control (aside from abstinence, which the human race does not seem psychologically adapted to practice) is prohibitively expensive, or simply unavailable. What if free, effective, and safe birth control were universally available? I would argue that this would be the single most beneficial environmental policy possible. Unfortunately, in large part due to misplaced religious dogma (Hello, catholic church!), and fears of eugenics-style population control, this is a political hot-potato, and considered essentially taboo. I fear that unless this taboo can be broken, we are doomed.

To be clear - I would never advocate preventing people from having as many children as they want. I simply advocate providing everyone with access to free, safe, and effective birth control (as safe and effective as science can make it). Everyone.

They have? I have not noticed such a thing. Do you have a citation for that?

I would never advocate such a position. It is simply impossible. We are part of the environment, just as much as everything else. We can't help but have an impact on it. The question is, does our impact result in a reduced quality of life for ourselves? By 'ourselves', I mean the human race collectively - if my quality of life is secured by keeping millions of other human beings in intolerable conditions, that simply isn't a morally viable option for me.

Some we are on the edge of being able to prevent (an asteroid impact). The others require more technology, or a higher-energy society, or the ability to understand how to actively manipulate the climate of the planet earth.


As an example, SO2 production.

The rate of emissions of many pollutants in the USA has dropped massively. This isn't an edge case. The US environmental laws have had huge impacts over the last half-century.

You can check any source -- hell, wikipedia -- and it will spew the massive reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions from the 1970s, 1980s, all the way to today.

Why yes. But when you buy gas, you should be paying for the costs of production (and side-effects of consumption, as they are relatively easy to quantify). When you buy iron, you should be paying for the costs of production.

Many of these things can be quantified, and if quantified, we'd do them in about the right amount, instead of religiously banning or blinding supporting the action.

Sure, but ... you do know that the Earth is made out of a huge percentage of iron? Iron ore in high concentrations on the surface of the planet is more rare, because iron is dense and likes to sink. The rarity of iron ore has a lot to do with what technologies we have to extract it, and not all that much to do with how much "there is".

Well, if you worked out the costs of making the results of the recycling process through other means, and worked out the costs of recycling the widget, and you work out the costs of disposing of the widget through other means, the answer would be clear. Replace + Dispose vs Recycle. One side will be bigger. That is the correct choice, assuming you worked out the costs right.

On the other hand, if you simply said "recycling good, disposal bad", you might ignore the cases where recycling is far more expensive than just going out and getting more iron from a hole in the ground. This is a true waste of resources.

Sure -- but you can price in the environmental impacts.

That really depends. How much negative? In that same time, using those resources, how much technological improvement will result?

Imagine if there are 10 coconut trees on an island.

As it stands, the entire population is living barely above starvation, eating those coconuts (with just enough to plant new trees at about the same rate that old trees die)

It turns out you can do a research project. This project will require "over consuming" the coconuts, reducing the max capacity of the island to 8 coconut trees.

However, the research project will also double the yield of each coconut tree.

The environmental impact on the island is negative -- 20% reduction in the island's yield!

The overall impact? 60% increase in wealth.

*nod*. And pricing in the environmental cost into our decisions and purchases is a good idea, as it will let people know which are better decisions, and which are worse.

Actually, I thought the USA was just barely above replacement, domestically? But, the developed world as a whole is far below replacement, yes.

Often, having a baby is a gamble investment. If things go bad, the baby can just starve. If things do a bit better, and the child reaches 10+, it can start contributing to your well being.

Ie: apparently, the level of social safety nets/social security has a huge impact on fertility rates.

This is a tricky chicken/egg problem.

There is a third option. Massive increases in the amount of resources we have to use.

More energy, less emissions. More materials, better recycling and cleanup technologies, etc etc.

Take nuclear, for example. Built a massive nuclear power infrastructure, and you can run a society using modern western energy requirements for the remaining lifetime of the sun using known, earth-base, sources of uranium. (You need breeder reactors, and you do need to start going after unconventional sources of uranium, such as uranium dissolved in sea water, but uranium is really energy dense -- and in any case, that level of effort is only required after many 1000s of years of more conventional uranium sources).

As energy gets cheaper, and materials science gets better, and other technologies advance, seriously crazy solutions also pop out. Imagine talking to a English peasant about solving the English middle-ages deforestation (for cooking and heating) problem by building a solar energy power plant, to ship heating energy to homes over copper wires?

Ignoring the positive, and only paying attention to the negative, does mean we are doomed.

Well, to nitpick, you originally said "By orders of magnitude". Wikipedia, as you mentioned, shows a not-quite-50% reduction. A good trend, but not orders of magnitude.

Also, I thought you meant that these gains had been made by economic forces, or something like that. They haven't, they've been made by regulation.

Ah, but currently environmental impact isn't factored into the cost of production or consumption, except by blunt methods such as regulation and combined taxes (sales tax, gas taxes, etc...)

Sure, I was just using Iron as an example. And while we can get more iron with improved extraction methods, those extraction methods are likely to have even more of an impact.

I agree. But figuring that out is hard.

But we don't. By and large, environmental costs aren't figured into production costs. Hypothetically, we could do exactly that instead of relying on the blunt instrument of regulation that we do now - but there are lots of complications. Consider - even now there are very loud voices that claim that global warming is a hoax. All those people would advocate that emitting CO2 should bear no cost at all. These same groups claimed that SO2 didn't cause acid rain. Who is going to set the environmental costs? Whatever group it is will be intensely lobbied by industry to set the environmental costs as low as they can get away with. And, in some (most) cases, there is legitimate scientific debate about the exact environmental impact. That uncertainty leaves lots of room for unscrupulous parties to manipulate the science in their favor.

Er - no, I figure a 60% increase in the yield of coconuts. A 20% reduction in the # of coconut trees, though.

There we go. However, things are never that simple. Cutting down the two coconut trees results in more soil erosion, and increasing the yield of the coconut trees depletes the remaining soil. In 20 years, the island is uninhabited.

Aside from the complications I mentioned above, this is a great idea.

List of countries and territories by fertility rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Says we're at 2.1, which is about right.

I think you're being overly optimistic. For one thing, you're only counting on the upsides of energy and materials production. Sure, nuclear provides lots of energy, but the environmental impact of the waste (There's still nuclear waste, even with breeder reactors) has to be considered.

Sure, we can hope that technology will help solve our environmental problems. The technological advancements of the last century is certainly a hopeful sign. But that doesn't mean we can sit back and do nothing.