An oldie but goodie question.

In a word, the answer is NO.

Not mainly for the faddish reasons trotted out by anti-science poster Kano, but because of

COAL.

Coal is dirty, messy, and less efficient than natural gas when burnt, but it is cheaper to get than drilling miles below frozen or half-frozen arctic seabeds for the last new untapped conventional oil fields, or blasting the bejesus out of vast swathes of Rockies or Great Plains to dredge up little droplets of oil or pockets or frack out gas, and coal is relatively abundant. We are running low on several other key cheap conventional energy sources, but are many decades away from "Peak Coal," and can easily get the earth way above 450ppm CO2 before market prices force a shift to non-carbon fuels.

There are no easy technical fixes to the problems posed by AGW. Otherwise people, even the school dropouts and crackpot geezers featured here, would be discussing them.

Edit: I'm not aware of one general site where "one could share the interest of humanities future without the babble of fools" (but would be interested myself to learn of such a site!). A useful and well-developed on-line resource (but focused on climate change only, and often at a rather advanced technical level) is http://realclimate.org/ ).

A rebuttal to some of the lame anti-Malthusian half-truths dumped on this page is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_H...

The main reasons why Malthus was incorrect re the British Isles in the early 1800s (not totally wrong: look at what happened in Ireland in the 1840s!) is that he failed to take sufficient account of the exploitation of fossil fuels, and expansion from Europe to the New World (and from a long-term historical perspective, both were non-repeatable one-offs). Diamond's "Collapse" (previous link) gives five historical examples (there are plenty of others) in which Malthusian overshoot DID occur: Mayas of Central America, Anasazis of Arizona, etc.Easter Island, Pitcairn Island and Viking Greenland.

I think its quite sick to be honest. This all comes back to a guy called Malthus, who lived in the early 19th century, and he came up with this idea that the more populous we become, the worse off both humans and the natural world will be. This was absurd even then because according to his own theory, people in the 16th, 17th and 18th century should have been far richer than people in Malthus' time, and people in Malthus' time should have been far, far richer than we are today. Would you want to swap places with the average person living in 1814? Or 1914? I doubt it.

Unfortunately, Malthus' cult still has its adherents, of whom Rubin appears to be one. These are people who are fundamentally anti-human. They want the human race to fail because apparently we're a virus on this planet. Economic growth is the future of the human race, especially when you consider that about half of the population of this planet survives on about $1000 dollars a year or less.

This is just veiled racism here. As oil prices increase who is it going to hit first? The people who can least afford it, which is the developing nations. Africa, India and China they cannot be allowed to develop to western living standards because they want *our* oil, so they can just go down the drain.

People like Rubin welcome the end of growth because they don't want the human race to succeed. Especially not if you live in a country where people have non-white skin.

He is just another Ehrlich IMO. These people have been proved wrong time after time but leftists can't resist falling for them time after time.

Did it occur to you that Saudi oil may be returning less in "oil" (who uses oil as a currency?) because it cost more then? It seems to me that the author is cherry picking his currency because he doesn't want to reveal that it is cheaper by far to remove a barrel of oil today than it was then. You Ehrlichs always suggest that any advance is just a drop in the bucket and not worth it. Clinton said developing Alaska wouldn't be worth it because they wouldn't get any oil for 10 years. Obama and his regime has been at war with the energy sector but even they couldn't stem the tide of new technology and new finds. Instead of getting your information from garbage, I would suggest you try to diversify your sources a bit more.

Assuming that we could cut consumption by half, it would not make any difference, CO2 growth rate has barely changed since the 60's. In other words, during the 60's when the world was using less than half the oil it is now, almost the same amount of CO2 increased in the atmosphere each year that it currently does.