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There's a nice/nontechnical introduction to the exponential in this streaming video talk

But these people burn SUVs to prevent air pollution. I am sure a car fire creates more CO2 and toxic smoke than operating even a tractor trailer for its entire life span. If your form of protest is an egregious violation of your own principals you are a hypocrite and and idiot. So you cannot condone their tactics if you love the earth.

Also as to the "humanity hater" issue you are DEEPLY missing the point of environmentalism. Simple experiment; 1. place a bacteria in a test tube of sugar water. 2. The bacteria divides ever minute. 3. At 60 minutes the test tube is completely full of bacteria; the resources and the room to grow are exhausted and all the bacteria die. Note: at 59 minutes the test tube is 1/2 full, 58 min. 1/4 full, and etc. If the bacteria fill the container they ALL DIE. We are increasing our population at a geometric rate, even if we limited our rate of growth to 1.6% in 600 years their will be 1 person per square meter on the Earth. THAT IS BAD.

Environmentalism is about making human lives BETTER, and ensuring the continuity of the species.

Read: http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/645
Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

Nuclear energy Belongs in the Technology Museum since it is not sustainable, and it is NOT clean.

We have the technology to make renewables more cost effective, especially the ones you haven't mentioned-- Geothermal, tidal, microhydro, and others, as well as wind and solar.

The thing that pisses me off the most when you nuke lovers speak is you always point to photovoltaic and say how inefficient it is. You're right. There are better ways to use the sun's power, ie direct heating of homes via both passive and active systems.

Throwing more trillions of dollars to the Nuclear Industry is like throwing the money into a failed bank . . .

There is still the problem of steady growth and the consumption of finite resources. Even if we come up with some new and novel way of producing/extracting energy, the exponential growth problem does not go away.

There's an interesting lecture by Al Bartlett that covers this quite well, IMHO.

"In the summer of 1986 the news reports indicated that the world population had reached the number of five billion people growing at the rate of 1.7% per year. Well your reaction to 1.7% might be to say that that's so small nothing bad could ever happen at 1.7% per year. So you calculate the doubling time you find its only 41 years, now that was back in 1986, more recently in 1999 we read that the world population had grown from five billion to six billion . The good news is that the growth rate had dropped from 1.7% to 1.3% per cent per year. The bad news is that in spite of the drop in the growth rate, the world population today is increasing by about 75 million additional people every year.

Now, if this current modest 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would grow to a density of one person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in just seven hundred and eighty years and then the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in just twenty four hundred years. Well we can smile at those, we know they couldn't happen. This one make for a cute cartoon, the caption says, "Excuse me sir, but I am prepared to make you a rather attractive offer for your square".

There's a very profound lesson in that cartoon. The lesson is that zero population growth is gonna happen. Now we can debate whether we like zero population growth or don't like it, its going to happen whether we debate it or not, whether we like it or not. It's absolutely certain people could never live at that density on the dry land surface of the earth. Therefore today's high birth rates will drop; today's low death rate will rise till they have exactly the same numerical value. That will certainly be in a time shorter than several hundred years...

In the words of Winston Churchill, "sometimes we have to do what is required." First of all as a nation we have to get serious about renewable energy. For a start we ought to have a big increase in the funding for research in the development and dispersion of renewable energy. We have to educate all of our people to understand the arithmetic and the consequences of growth, especially in terms of populations and in terms of the earth's finite resources. We must educate people to recognise the fact that growth in rates of population and growth in rates of consumption of resources can not be sustained. What's the first law of sustainability? You've heard thousands of people talking endlessly about sustainability; did they ever tell you the first law? Here it is, population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained. That's simple arithmetic Yet nobody that I'm encountering will tell you about that when talking about sustainability. So I think it's intellectually dishonest to talk about saving the environment, which is sustainability, without stressing the obvious facts that stopping population growth is a necessary condition for saving the environment and for sustainability."

What am I optimistic about?

Zero human population growth is going to happen.

What I'm not optimistic about are the prospects of its happening soon enough or in ways that are not extremely painful for all of us.

My pessimism on this score arises from consideration of the following issues:

1) World overpopulation and its current growth rate
2) Climate change
3) Imminence of peak oil and peak natural gas (or to state it another way, the end of cheap energy supplies)
4) Global economic structural imbalances
5) Political institutions unable to respond rationally to the above

Kurt Vonnegut at one point made a remark to the effect that homo sapiens is a maladaptive species.

The way I would re-state this is that homo sapiens is very clever, and has created wonderful things, but we are not clever enough to avoid doing what all other species do: multiply to the point where they overload the sustainable carrying capacity of where they live (for humans it's planet earth).

We humans have not been clever enough to avoid creating the conditions of our own self-destruction. Cf. OVERSHOOT: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, by William R. Catton, Jr. (1980) Also worth watching is http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461/, a lecture by retired physicist Albert Bartlett on Arithmetic, Population, and Energy, in which he states that the biggest failure of the human race is its inability to understand the exponential function.

I am optimistic about the really long-term prospects for planet earth, since it's been through lots of cycles of life and death over billions of years, but I think the time-frame implied in the question is somewhat shorter than this.

Even though I'm edumacated and thought I understood the implications of exponential growth, I still found this enlightening:

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461

Dr. Bartlett explains what exponential growth really means, and how quickly things can go badly when you grow exponentially.

Many (small) farmers have not choice but to crop all of thier land, and the only way to ensure you are going to get a good crop, when you crop all the time is to use fertilizer and pesticides. BTW, fertilizer is made with Natural Gas, and pesticides are petrochemically based. Now this in itself is pretty new, only in the last 50 years have we farmed like this, so we really have no idea how its going to run out in the long term. But, but but before we will know how well our Green Revolution has worked out.

Large corporte farmers have to ensure share holder returns and must use petrochemical based farming to ensure they have a good crop. Oh and add water. In many places in the US under that are hot, water is being pumped out of the ground, causing the water table to drop, which means going deeper for water, which means that many rivers might dry up.

Check out this lecture for details..
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/638

So to cut to the chase. Petrochemicals are amazing fuel sources. But they have led to some really detructive results. But, it may not matter, because in the next 30 years oil production will peak, and you will not be able to replace a gallon of oil with technology. After the peak the price of oil will go up, but so will the price of land and the cost of food because we will have more people to feed, less cheap food, and many areas that are no longer productive becuase of changes to the environment have removed arable land.

So, forget about having that nice big car in 20 years. Its a fantasy. Focus on building something that you can pass onto you children, nephews, nieces, so they will have something to pass onto the people that they car about.

BTW, almost half the energy used in the lifetime of a car is used before it has left the lot.

For a laugh, listen to this talk on Global warming and peak oil. The comedian is quite funny. http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/644

Many (small) farmers have not choice but to crop all of thier land, and the only way to ensure you are going to get a good crop, when you crop all the time is to use fertilizer and pesticides. BTW, fertilizer is made with Natural Gas, and pesticides are petrochemically based. Now this in itself is pretty new, only in the last 50 years have we farmed like this, so we really have no idea how its going to run out in the long term. But, but but before we will know how well our Green Revolution has worked out.

Large corporte farmers have to ensure share holder returns and must use petrochemical based farming to ensure they have a good crop. Oh and add water. In many places in the US under that are hot, water is being pumped out of the ground, causing the water table to drop, which means going deeper for water, which means that many rivers might dry up.

Check out this lecture for details..
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/638

So to cut to the chase. Petrochemicals are amazing fuel sources. But they have led to some really detructive results. But, it may not matter, because in the next 30 years oil production will peak, and you will not be able to replace a gallon of oil with technology. After the peak the price of oil will go up, but so will the price of land and the cost of food because we will have more people to feed, less cheap food, and many areas that are no longer productive becuase of changes to the environment have removed arable land.

So, forget about having that nice big car in 20 years. Its a fantasy. Focus on building something that you can pass onto you children, nephews, nieces, so they will have something to pass onto the people that they car about.

BTW, almost half the energy used in the lifetime of a car is used before it has left the lot.

For a laugh, listen to this talk on Global warming and peak oil. The comedian is quite funny. http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/644

My car is powered by my own sense of self-satifaction

Besides the best Peak Oil web sites are

http://energybulletin.net/
http://globalpublicmedia.com/

You are right, it is not and I seriously doubt it ever will. It just takes too much land/vehicle to be practical. Some parties indicate that this issue of oil dependence has already gone beyond critical mass (meaning supplies have peaked and will slowly not be able to meet demand in the near future causing all kinds of economic and social griefs--neither of which possibilites I had ever considered possible in my lifetime). It has even grabbed the attenion of some of the folks in the House of Representatives for whatever good that will do...

The suggestions that I have read repeatedly is that we need to put the energy and effort into renewable energy sources on the scale of the man-to-the-moon effort. Critical. It has been stated that President Bush was very much interested in this situation prior to 9/11 and the events that have transpired. Needless to say, he's been somewhat sidetracked...

Gimme nuclear fusion and better batteries!

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461/

The movie file of his presentaton. And the indexed transcription

Sigh, I remember watching this film:

http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ (There audio plus a transcript of the interview that inspired it available.)

I remember some guy in it saying how hard it would be to have a war over oil because all it takes is five pound of plastic explosive and a camel to blow up an oil rig.

Now I'm thinking how hard it is to fight for our freedoms. It seems to take so little for the U.S. Gubment to do something really atrocious like this. All it takes is a couple of guys with airplane tickets and a few phone calls.