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Group Warns on Consumption of Resources
gollum123 writes "Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels, the spread of cities, the destruction of natural habitats for farmland and over-exploitation of the oceans are destroying Earth's ability to sustain life, the environmental group WWF warned in a new report Thursday."
I too think that depletion of our planet's resources is a terrible thing that ought to be avoided. However, this is a gigantic planet. There are places on this globe where Man has yet to set foot, much less look upon with the naked eye.
To start trying to cut back our resource usage when we do not have a clear understanding of the true vastness of the Earth's resources is like pairing up a newbie programmer with an experienced programmer. The results are going to be fine, but it's going to take a hell of a lot longer and with a lot more frustration to do it that way rather than let the expert programmer go it alone. So too is America, the world's greatest consumer of resources, going to be hampered by any sort of "global" effort to stem resource consumption. Forget, of course, that America is also the world's leading producer of high-quality manufactured goods as well as agricultural goods.
In the end, the newbie programmer is only slightly better off but the whole project has been delayed by countless cycles because the slow guy was holding back the fast guy. Perhaps in a Rawlsian system of "justice" this kind of purposeful crippling of the leaders without a systematic way of boosting the losers, this might make sense. But from my perspective this is nothing more than an effort to cripple the American industrial engine and bring the American (along with the world) economy to a standstill.