Smurf rightly raises the factor of "over-population". To which many might *cringe* and put their fingers in their ears. Well, China's current birth rate is between 1-2 per woman and the situation we find ourselves in is bad enough. Well, where do we think the planet would be right now if China had maintained it's 1969 birth rate level of 6 children per woman??!!
I'm being totally serious when I say that Australia's 21 million people is too many. NSW, Vic, SA and WA are pretty clearly struggling to sustain present populations as it is with only Qld, Tas and possibly NT being logical places for population growth. But even in those 3 states, the realistic potential for growth is likely to be less than the needed population reduction in the other states - Australia is over populated.
I'm looking solely at environmental and resource issues here and ignoring economic arguments about the benefits of population growth.
As for the "greed" argument, totally agreed there. We're not going to stop wrecking the environment unless and until we embrace a target for sustained negative GDP growth. That's the bottom line - if we fix CO2 then it will either be directly at the expense of something else or will simply enable us to carry on until some other limit is hit.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Examine the outcome of four decades of conservation versus development debates in Tasmania and you'll find quite simply that the outcome has
always been a tradeoff. All that's really happened is a few less dams were built and a lot of woodchips produced as the economic alternative. A mill was stopped and oil-fuelled tourism (and thus CO2) ramped up as the alternative. Forests locked up so we had another go at hydro-industrialisation, albeit fuelled mostly by coal and gas this time around.
All we've done is change the location and nature of the impact - we're still harming the environment. If the conservation groups had never existed then in Tas we'd have quite a few more dams, about the same number of trees but in different places, more water pollution but less air pollution, and we'd be burning less coal, oil and gas. That's the net effect - impacts changed but not avoided.
That's a point well understood by conservationists themselves. It's a fact that they were the first ones to propose ramping up logging as a serious alternative back in the dams debate era. As they put it at the time, they saw it as better to keep half the rivers and half the trees than to end up with no rivers but still have nearly all the trees. That's roughly the outcome we ended up with so they pretty much got their way.
Same with most things environmental. There are environmental downsides to CFL's (energy saving lamps) just as there are benefits. There are downsides to catalytic converters on cars, mass tourism, wind power, solar, recycling and everything else "green". Just as there are benefits. To a large extent, we're just changing the nature of the impact rather than actually reducing it,
the inevitable consequence of continuing to pursue constant growth on a finite planet.