Hey man I voted for the Green Party once in 2000. You don't have to take power to have influence when it's not a winner-take-all system.

They also happen to be producing the largest emissions per capita.

The USA is a winner-take-all system....

Because it's definitely Los Angeles where they wear masks to protect themselves from pollution, not Beijing.

In the USA when you "win" all you get is a lousy political office where your opponents still thwart your every move. It's hardly worth "taking."

I was the one who pointed out the problem of coal in China, BoSox.

Let me know when you figure out how to produce enough energy to meet the needs of 1 billion plus people, though.

I've got ideas, but they're "pipe dreams" to you guys.

@Putin33 "Let me know when you figure out how to produce enough energy to meet the needs of 1 billion plus people, though."

Now you're talking sense. That is an immense problem that desperately needs solving.

@bo_sox48 There's nothing so much wrong with pipe dreams as *relying* on them. People *should* keep working on nuclear fusion, because it would be such a huge win, but it's a mistake to *count* on it happening.

You have something else to count on, tendmote?

China was the first country to have the guts to tell the population to stop overpopulating. It was good for the country. I'd go far enough to say it was good for the world. I guess they started to think it was going to get them overthrown, though.

At the same time, I can't imagine being told by a government how many kids to have.

Yes, you should be free to consume and waste as much resources as you possibly can.

Isn't our birthrate going down anyways? Look at Japan, and now with birth control people want to have fewer mids.

I don't have a clue if birth rate is going down, but our population is still many billions too high and China is a very significant part of that.

Putin, if you don't want freedom, you don't have to have it. The rest of us seem to want a bit of freedom to do basic things like, you know, reproduce. Kudos to China for trying but population control isn't going to happen. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy that there is actually a natural inclination to do such things in animals and all...

Some catastrophic event is going to happen soon enough to snap us out of the human race's greed. There's evidence that global dimming is masking the effect of global warming, and that its true furor is to come. Plus the melting of the icecaps could release stores of methane, only compounding the effects.

Population control in China worked better than their wildest dreams, which is why they are removing it.

Funny you complain about people dismissing your pipe dreams but you're doing the same thing.

Animals are being wiped out thanks to human population growth. They don't actually reproduce like crazy, they reproduce only what they can sustain.

They have natural barriers, Putin. We've long conquered many of those barriers. Medical care, for starters, is long past what nature provides us. That's why the human population charts are a straight line for ever and ever and then just recently spike through the roof.

Global dimming? What the fuck? Another lame ass "condition" to cover up the first lame ass condition doesn't hold up to empirical and demonstrable evidence?

@Putin33 Animals reproduce as much as they want, it's just what they want is at an equilibrium with their niche. Humans, still expanding the niche, no equilibrium.

No, we actually haven't conquered the barrier of needing food to live.

Arable land per capita continues to decline. We're depleting our resources at a much faster rate than we're replenishing them.

Medical care hasn't really increased life expectancy very much. Sanitation has improved it by much more.

Sanitation within medical care, then. The knowledge of bacteria. How's that?

Of course we're depleting our resources too quickly. Everyone but krellin knows that.

No, we haven't conquered food, but we've clearly surpassed some sort of somewhat natural barrier, and it clearly happened when we made technological (and, for you, sanitary) improvements, at least in much of the world.

Technology is not going to get us out of the basic problem of overconsumption and scarcity of resources.

A basic willingness to reduce consumption (dramatically) and reduce population is the only way out.

Typical Putin, wants to kill and eat babies...

Whoever +1'd all of Putin's posts deserves to be executed.

Hardly. In typical Putin fashion, half of them (identifying problems) are pretty right-on, and the other half (proposed solutions) are horrendous. Thus I've +1'd about half his posts. I imagine that there may well be some authoritarian ass-hats on here that like his ideas regarding desired levels of government power and have +1'd the other half. Either way, supporting objectionable viewpoints is hardly a crime deserving of the death penalty

Your inability to comprehend sarcasm is almost to Putin's level right there, mendax.

It was hyperbole, almost certainly, but despite your backtracking I struggle to believe that you were being truly sarcastic given your vocal disagreement with Putin's statements. Beyond this, if it was an attempt at sarcasm it was a truly terrible attempt.

Whatever tampax.

I doubt it was sarcasm. Sarcasm is the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt, which does not fit the profile of Bo_Sox48.

Actually, sarcasm can be really great if used correctly. It's just that that wasn;t a godo example for it.