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Comments
Let us consider the rate at which we are using up natural resources. Let us also consider the attached pollution, its effects on climate and subsequently on weather patterns, on the increasing destruction of arable land through pollution and exploitation... It adds up to a very ugly picture.
People did get by without oil and stuff for several milennia. Running out would be bad in that it would make a lot of modern conveniences either no longer accessible, but wouldn't cause us all to explode or something.
This is definitely a thing, and I don't want to sound like it's not bad, but the entire planet isn't going to suddenly become uninhabitable or anything.
You're vastly underestimating how much land there is. Again, that doesn't make it a good thing that some of it's getting screwed up, but to put this in perspective, I live in Alabama. That's 52,419 square miles. Can you even picture how vast that is? Pretty much the whole thing is viable as farmland if there were demand for it. We're not going to just run out of arable land.
Basically, what I'm saying is that a lot of bad stuff is happening and we should definitely do something about it, but it's still nowhere near enough to drive us to extinction.
I suppose you're right. But even being within a stone's throw of screwing things up as badly as we easily can now is an awful state of affairs and something worth avoiding.
The bigger shortage concern isn't arable land itself, so much as glacial runoff for irrigation. Between hotter climates and less snowpack in winter, mountain glaciers have been receding terrifyingly quickly, and a lot of key river sources have been tapping out in the summer -- particularly in the Andes and Himalayas. Of notable concern is the Kashmir source, which feeds farms in India and Pakistan. You can bet how well that's gonna go across. Coastal and tropical areas would be relatively well-off with high amounts of rainwater, so long as they're smart about conserving for winter (they would be).
The biggest problem, though, is that while a worst-case scenario is something humanity as a whole would survive, it's not something 7 billion of it would survive.
The other biggest problem is that the business owners that are causing the worst of it don't give a shit because they know very well that they'd be the ones in control of the resources to survive.
^ Money can't buy you clean air...
Yes it can. It can buy you very good filtration systems.
That, and freshwater would be a strangling resource long before breathable air will, so it's a moot point anyway.
^ It already is...
Some corporate top dogs might profit from climate change, but if they gamble on sitting out possible resource war scenario with their resources, they'll also know the risks of them being targeted by PR backlash. But meh, this is turning into hypothetical what-ifs instead of the already deplorable current state of affairs.
I feel that at least some of those "corporate top dogs" are not necessarily ill-intentioned about the environment. However, they're totally signed onto (by choice or necessity) a culture not just emphasizing but requiring a very short-term, profit-oriented thing. I say required because I think there are actually some laws that require profit maximization, so if a company's executives or board of directors suddenly chooses to make the company more environmentally friendly at the cost of short-term financial success they may actually be liable to the shareholders.
Furthermore, a behavior pattern that i think is at play is that a lot of companies are like high schoolers who are playing videogames when they should be doing homework, but think they can get the homework done in time anyway. They may or may not be right about this, but whether or not they are, they still hate it when their parents tell them to stop playing videogames and do their homework. They'd much rather be able to finish their homework before their parents lower the boom on them, and so they'd have something spiffy to show off when their parents do lower the boom. But in the meantime they'd also like to continue enjoying their videogames, so their parents aren't quite convinced that they'll actually get their homework done.