Welcome to your Wednesday open thread. Hopefully I have the day correct. The floor is yours.
First, try this out for fun: The Postmodernism Generator
A professor takes on the question: Is the real environmental problem population growth or overconsumption? The answer is Yes.
To start, let’s be clear about one thing: global environmental problems are not caused solely by population growth. The number of people on the planet per se doesn’t affect our climate, our ecosys tems or our natural resources. It’s how we collectively consume and pollute that impacts the environment.
Plus, a relatively small number of us are responsible for the vast majority of the globe’s consumption, pollution, land and water degradation, and biodiversity loss. In the United States alone, our 4 percent of the global population accounts for roughly 25 percent of the world’s fossil fuel use—about six times our share of the planetary pie.
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Population growth is definitely contributing to our global problems too, but in a different way.
The world’s poorest nations are not only home to some of the fastest growing populations, but also often the most vulnerable to environmental, political and economic disruptions. While the people who inhabit them contribute relatively little to global environmental degradation, they will be the first to feel the impacts.
It’s a one-two punch: The rich are rapidly increasing consumption and causing the lion’s share of our planetary environmental problems, while the number of poor is growing, putting more people in harm’s way and increasing human vulnerability to environmental disruption.
As poor nations develop they also consume more resources (they have a long way to go to match U.S. consumption). Natural resources are finite. China is now the world’s largest consumer of oil and they’re still growing. India is also growing rapidly. What happens when we hit peak oil?
We got some more bad economic news yesterday with reports of a huge plunge in home sales. Frank Ahrens at the Washington Post argues this is a good thing.
Painful as it is to take in the short term, today’s news about the plunge in home sales is exactly what this economy needs for the long run.
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The second effort — government-sponsored attempts to prop up the housing industry — has only postponed the inevitable pain. The government offered a home-buyer tax credit program last year, then extended it, then extended the deadline for closing on new purchases, in an effort to spur sales.
And, for a time, it worked. But literally the minute that the government subsidies stopped, home sales fell off the cliff. Again, this is simple economics. I don’t know why it still surprises us. We saw the exact same thing to auto sales when the government’s cash-for-clunkers program ended last year.
This is wrong though, car sales are back up. I see nothing wrong with temporary stimulus. It works. But the housing market is much different. How much more proof do you need that the Reagan/Bush model of economic prosperity will no longer work?
You’ve probably already seen the value of your home drop 20, 30, 40 percent over the past four years. That’s painful, especially because it’s the largest purchase most Americans will make in their lives. But today’s number — combined with the general economic malaise — tells us that home prices probably still have not hit bottom.
And that’s exactly what needs to happen before the economy can right itself.
Color me skeptical at the pain caucus, but this graph is an eye-opener.
