Protesting coal plants is a great cause for ALL citizens of the Earth to undertake, and as with all his deficiencies, Al Gore is at least out there on some level bringing these issues to the front.

I think at the same time as we protest, we need to put viable alternatives in front of people. The blunt question is: How do we sustainably, ecologically, and immediately begin to house, cloth, feed, educate, tranport, and otherwise take care of nearly 7 billion homo sapiens on this relatively little planet? Can the earth sustain this mass of humanity-- with or without new Coal Plants?

I think the answer is Yes and No. No, if it means sustaining them at anywhere like the standard and quality of life that Americans and the affluent have enjoyed. Yes, if we return to some kind of organic village based lifestyle, living perhaps sort of like eco-hobbits, where everything from food to clothing is produced locally.

Then how come Teddy Kennedy and his nieghbors spent twenty (or was it thirty?) million dollars fighting that proposed windfarm in Nantucket - because it would spoil his view - and nobody bats an eye?

Why do people worship celebrities who travel by private jet?

Why do people continue to eat meat, meat, meat, three meals a day, every meal, consuming vast natural resources?

Population is continuing to explode, and nobody cares.

I have made the personal commitment to family planning. I have no children, and plan on one child and adoption. I eat meat sparingly. I recently spent fifteen hundred dollars on solar reflective panels. I use rechargeable batteries which last for years.

I agree with Gore and James Hansen of NASA that stopping coal projects is a top priority. Coal along with tar sands and othe "heavy oils" are the most likey source of long term CO2 once the good oil runs out as Hansen points out.
Physical protest against coal plants and mines, expecially the oldest and dirtiest will probably help get more publicity, alhtough "elite' American college kids are probably the most likey source of these protestors.
But niether Hansen or Gore adeqately confronts the population bomb as you mention. The most effective has been the "Peoples Republic" of China. They are considering eliminating the one child rule which would be an enviromental disaster since they can barely feed their current population without polluting and besmirching their land, forests, air and water.

Limits to greed ........

A remarkable amount of mental energy has been exerted by many ?experts? (and wealth distributed to them by their benefactors) over much of my lifetime in a concerted effort to widely share and consensually validate the specious idea that there is no such thing, of all things, as the most obvious of things??..limits to growth in a finite world. Most recently, Schellnhuber in Germany, Rapley in England, Rees in Canada, Hansen in the USA, McMichael and Butler in Australia??.the list goes on and on??..good scientists all, have been noting over and over again that the human species is approaching ecological limits evidently, obviously imposed by the biophysical reality of the planetary home we are blessed to inhabit. To put it another way, rampant overproduction, rapacious overconsumption and unregulated overpopulation activities by the human species now overspreading the surface of Earth will lead to an ecological ?tipping point? of some, perhaps unimaginable sort.

The question seems to have been, Which biophysical limit will be exceeded first? Precisely what will it mean for the human species to overreach and by so doing ?give rise to? or ?produce? some sort of ecological tipping point? What will happen then? What kind of global wreckage might ensue? What will that moment in space-time look like? Many scientists seem to have been thinking that the unbridled overgrowth activities of the human species would literally and eventually overwhelm the Earth and its environs because the family of humanity has chosen to recklessly ignore the reality of human species limits and Earth?s biophysical limitations. For example, recall the ruthless derision of the great work of the Club of Rome regarding ecological limitations to the growth of absolute global human population numbers.

Even so, despite all the attention, the warnings and the good scientific evidence, an ecological tipping point may not be the source of the greatest, most imminent challenge to human wellbeing in these early years of Century XXI. The most pressing, most forbidding threat to human wellbeing may not be ecological in its nature.

For a long time, I have been haunted by the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) that are emblazoned in a sonnet about Ozymandias.

? I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter?d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp?d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock?d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
?My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!?
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away. ? ?Schelley

What was the ?colossal wreck? this ?king of kings? observed and how had it happened? What caused the destruction of the world?

The calamity Ozymandias witnessed may not have been more or less than the incredible consequences of human greed having exceeded limits to its growth. That is to say, the adamant and relentless greediness of kings and self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe precipitated the gigantic, distinctly human-driven catastrophe to which The King of kings makes reference.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

Why are only the American taxpayers bailing out the whole global economy?

A billion members of the human family exist on resources valued at less than one dollar per day. Africa is suffering from "slow drip" problems. Europe is getting warmer fast. Arctic ice is retreating and the arctic coast of Alaska is eroding.

Where are the new ideas, the financial backing, and the innovations needed to address these problems? There are tens of trillions of dollars in the global human economy. Where has all that money gone?

The front page of the NYTimes tells the family of humanity that we are on the verge of a global economic catastrophe. Are the taxpayers of the American family, acting alone, to become responsible for the problems now presented to the human community by the greed of a small group of rich and powerful people worldwide?

Why are an astonishingly small number of greedy people, holding hundreds of billions of dollars of ill-gotten gains from what are now recognizable as failed business models and Ponzi-like financial schemes, not taking responsibility for their avarice?

Who are the people behind the mess we see splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world this morning? Perhaps they need to be named, shamed and held to account.

Some greedy people are easy to identify. They are ones who have proclaimed themselves "Masters of the Universe" or Bohemians or the Greedy Boys of Greenwich or the Bilderbergers or members of The Trilateral Commission or the many too many outrageously enriched 'experts' and politicians who say and do anything to enhance wealth and power of themselves and their benefactors.

At least to me, it appears the problems in the global economy we are seeing today are the results of greed having reached its limits or, to put it another way, having "hit the wall" of unsustainability. That is to say, greediness of self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe and their minions has reached the point of greed's unsustainability. The global economy can no longer support the conspicuous, patently unsustainable behavior of a small segment of the family of humanity.

Yes, definitely yes, something new and different needs to be done. Bold action is needed; but, more of the same, old business-as-usual behavior appears insufficient. Limits need to be placed on patently unsustainable behavior. People who are responsible for the mess need to account for their behavior.

The American family is not responsible for the world's economic mess; but at the moment American taxpayers are being held solely accountable. There is something not quite right about such unfair and inequitable circumstances.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

Real issues, and straight talk for a change, about a $700 billion dollar bail-out as well as abject failures of one generation to accept responsibility for its own patently unsustainable behavior.

Have the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us adopted a behavioral repertoire characterized by unconscionable super-human greediness, the likes of which this world we are blessed to inhabit has never before endured and cannot much longer sustain?

What is to become of our children, whose future is being mortgaged once again this week and threatened more seriously with every passing day?

When is my not-so-great generation of rapaciously consuming and relentlessly hoarding elders going to stop its disturbing behavior of dropping problems of our own making into the laps of our children?

The financial engineers who manufactured the spurious business models and Ponzi-like schemes that are undermining the functioning of the global economy today need to take some responsibility for their greedy behavior rather than pass along the colossal debt derived from their subterfuge for our children to repay.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php