This post should also be in solutions. It really gets to cusp of the problem. We have reach this level of consumerism and material comfort (&population) due to fossil fuels. We couldn’t have done it otherwise.

Well its screwed up the climate and now were running out of the stuff and were falling off a cliff. It really couldn’t be any worse. Is this really the peak of civilization?

With a WWII approach we also have restructure our societies. Its like dieting, you always put the weight back on until you realize that you have to change your lifestyle and eating habits completely.

I am one example of as green as you get now, and I loved all the useless designed stuff before I woke up to our species exceedingly miserable chances at surviving the consequent climate change.

Some people can learn from scientists. Some can’t. That’s the difference.

Then there are the intermidable runs down to the dump, carefully separating all this crap into 35 different categories for ‘recycling’ (which I believe generally means stuffing it all in a container and shipping it back to China for burning).

I wish I’d lived 300 years ago, poverty and all. I like growing my own veg, collecting logs for the wood burning stove, drying clothes on the line, etc. I don’t mention it in polite company though in case they lock me up.

I just posted this on another thread. But in light of your comment, it is so much more appropriate here.

From Martin Durkin: “Romanticism is in essence anti-Capitalist. Not in the sense of traditional Marxism. The Marxists wanted to go forwards not backwards. They wanted to build bigger factories than the capitalists, not folksy medieval craft workshops. No. Romanticism was a kind of reactionary anti-capitalism. And it was the ideology and aesthetic worldview of those people who lost most, or gained least from capitalism. I think it’s the same today. In Europe, the toffs (Prince Charles and his gang) are green because they have lost their position in society. The intellectuals – teachers, lecturers, scientists are green because they don’t have the status they used to. (Not long ago, a professor would have been someone important, had a big house, maids etc). These days, plumbers make more money.

It’s not easy to explain this properly in a few lines, but this I think is the real basis for all those anti-modern green prejudices.

They hated all the factories and cars long before global warming came along. The importance of global warming is it linked what otherwise would a have been a disparate bunch of prejudices and gave them some moral impetus.

So you can say that scientists profit from global warming (grants etc), but that’s the icing on the cake.

You can easily tell that global warming is really a political idea rather than a scientific one. In any gathering in polite society you can tell who will be ‘pro-global warming’ and who will be sceptical, in the same way as you can guess who will hate George Bush, or who will be sympathetic to Sarah Palin.

Go into a party of lefties in New York and tell them the science on global warming doesn’t stack up. They don’t say, ‘Good Lord, what a relief, I thought we were in for it.’ Instead they get very cross with you. They’re terribly attached to their apocalypse and don’t take kindly to people rocking the boat. ”

[JR: Tilo, the science has been elaborated on at length on this website. You are one of those Junk Science people who simply choose to ignore what real science and real observation tells us. Fine. But this is not the website for debating long-debunked denier talking points.

You don't believe in science and you don't like progressive solutions, so you have to attack those who disagree with you as anti-modernist. We get it. Do it elsewhere.]

As somebody who has made a living for decades and decades off making (admittedly completely useless) designed stuff, my question would be “what can I contribute to the economy that you really need?”

We all have to contribute something to our shared economy. For some of us, maybe that has to be something redundantly ridiculous!

With 6 billion of us, how can we really create a spartan economy comprising only the “good wok, a rice cooker, a tea kettle, a hot plate, some utensils, good china, a teapot with a strainer, and maybe a thermos.”

It’s a difficult problem. I think we just are hopelessly beyond the simple and needed objects stage of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.