Posted 10/24/2006 05:43:00 PM by Douglas

I'd have to buy a separate hard drive if I had any intention of keeping every article from chicken-little environmentalists that told me that the sky is falling. But for some reason, I'm fascinated by them, and this one is no different. No different than the 1,000s of other articles that say that mankind, specifically Western-American mankind is destroying the planet. So let's dig in:

Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday.

Two planets? Shit, we better start looking for that second one. I don't think Mars is going to cooperate.

"For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path," WWF Director-General James Leape said, launching the WWF's 2006 Living Planet Report.

Hold the phone, Jim. "Exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle?" Then explain to me why it's only the areas with consumptive lifestyles that seem to be able to manage the resources that are present? It may be inequitable, but it certainly hasn't exceeded the earth's capacity.

"If everyone around the world lived as those in America, we would need five planets to support us," Leape, an American, said in Beijing.

Ok, fair 'nuff, and I can feel guilty about my decadent lifestyle, but what is this saying? Obviously it would behoove most Americans to err on the side of conservation, but if everyone lived in a mud hut, we'd only need half of the world. Is relegating humanity to third world conditions for the sake of the rest of the world being pristine somehow advantageous? How, exactly? But here's the rub:

"Humanity's footprint has more than tripled between 1961 and 2003," it said. Consumption has outpaced a surge in the world's population, to 6.5 billion from 3 billion in 1960. U.N. projections show a surge to 9 billion people around 2050.

So there's some magical tradeoff, some leftist's conversion card that determines what's an acceptable quantity of the earth's resources to consume as a function of how many people are consuming them. One wasteful American's resources could sustain five other people if we all lived like cavemen. Again, how is this advantageous? The same amount of the earth's resources are being consumed, the same impact to the precious earth is occurring. There's just five more people, dare I say, one fifth as comfortable. How could this devolution possibly be viewed as progress?

And as a footnote, the biggest ecological disaster this century will be China. With the manufacturing base of the West moving to China, their appetite for energy (and waste) will grow without bound in the coming decades. What then?

Leape said China, home to a fifth of the world's population and whose economy is booming, was making the right move in pledging to reduce its energy consumption by 20 percent over the next five years.

Yeah freakin' right. Wal-Mart is building factories to make their crap faster than they can borrow the money (from China). If China restrains their energy consumption growth by 20% in the next five years, it will be a miracle.

So, sleep tight, environ-fascist, knowing that the pithy bumpersticker you put on your Volvo doesn't do quite as much for mother earth as not driving it. I, at least, appreciate the sentiment, but then again, I'm a huge fan of irony.