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.

Welcome to your Thursday open thread. Is it just me or did I wander into spring today? I guess that’s o.k. since we skipped spring this year. So spill your secrets on this open thread.

Should conservative think tanks be called echo tanks instead? Another ideological purge at a conservative institution:

The libertarian Cato Institute is parting with two of its most prominent scholars. Brink Lindsey, the institute’s vice president of research and the author of the successful book The Age of Abundance, is departing to take a position at the Kauffman Foundation. Will Wilkinson, a Cato scholar, collaborator with Lindsey, and editor of the online Cato Unbound, is leaving on September 15; he just began blogging politics for the Economist.

I asked for comment on this and was told that the institute does not typically comment on personnel matters. But you have to struggle not to see a political context to this. Lindsey and Wilkinson are among the Cato scholars who most often find common cause with liberals. In 2006, after the GOP lost Congress, Lindsey coined the term “Liberaltarians” to suggest that Libertarians and liberals could work together outside of the conservative movement. Shortly after this, he launched a dinner series where liberals and Libertarians met to discuss big ideas. (Disclosure: I attended some of these dinners.) In 2009 and 2010, as the libertarian movement moved back into the right’s fold, Lindsey remained iconoclastic—just last month he penned a rare, biting criticism of The Battle, a book by AEI President Arthur Brooks which argues that economic theory is at the center of a new American culture war.

So could the GOP purge have anything to do with this?

Former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) will come to Pennsylvania tomorrow, Aug. 24, to formally endorse Admiral Joe Sestak’s candidacy. The two-term Nebraska Senator will speak about Joe’s independence and focus on doing what’s right for Pennsylvania’s working families.

Hmmmm…I wonder how much this will help Sestak. What will probably help Sestak is Pat Toomey’s past as an advocate for killing Social Security and Medicare.