Appar­ently, the world is screwed if China and India keep grow­ing at their cur­rent rate, by pro­jec­tions that dare to com­pare their stan­dard of living/consumption to that of the US.

News, appar­ently, but all it really means is that we’re (a safe enough con­trac­tion, in light of the fact that if you’re read­ing this, you’re part of the fifth of the world’s pop­u­la­tion that has access to a computer/the Inter­net) over­con­sum­ing. And they’re not. And if they do, too — that is, leave the ranks of the sustainers/impoverished pop­u­la­tions of the world — then there won’t be enough resources left.

Wow, clever. I’m pretty sure I agree with the researcher’s idea(s) entirely, but the way the arti­cle is writ­ten it’s like… damn those emerg­ing nations for com­ing out of poverty, etc. It reads as ridicu­lously parochial (in a global “West­ern” parochial kind of way. Maybe stretch­ing the def­i­n­i­tion some­what.), but maybe that’s just me being cyn­i­cal. Yes, I see IT/sustainable resource usage as not being mutu­ally exclu­sive. I’m not being com­pletely hypocric­ti­cal on this one… though I have to admit, air con­di­tion­ing was amaz­ingly wel­come on New Years’ day, irre­spec­tive of power usage (Aus­tralians, inci­den­tally, use the sec­ond high­est vol­ume of elec­tric­ity per-capita in the world, com­ing in only after the US).

Ulti­mately cli­mate change doesn’t mean that much. As in, it’ll all level out when it gets too hot for us to con­tinue pro­duc­ing goods using carbon-based prod­ucts. Sure, lots of peo­ple will die, but it’ll all be sta­ble even­tu­ally. Cue eye-rolling. We know it does mean lots, cer­tainly for our gen­er­a­tion and the next sev­eral. Cur­rent efforts (in which a 3% reduc­tion in emis­sions is seen as mind-boggling) strike me as being way too lit­tle, too late.

The solu­tion? No idea. Ideas such as an vehi­cle emis­sions tax could work, along with sub­stan­tial­ish mar­ket­ing bud­gets (hey, this is Gov­ern­ment we’re talk­ing about here… if they put in sub­stan­tial money to start with, at least some­thing should trickle out the other end) to try and change atti­tudes… but the biggest prob­lems are indus­try and power gen­er­a­tion. And 3% sounds sus­pi­ciously close to nothing.