The Environment: Introduction

I made a post on my Finnish-language blog about how I thought Earth Hour was rubbish. Not because I don't believe in global warming or I don't believe we shouldn't be doing something about it, but because I firmly believe that trying to get people to switch their lights off is a horribly inefficient, even counterproductive way to mitigate global climate change.

So far, expressing that opinion has cost me one friend. Several other people have disagreed with me in less drastic ways, and I want to explore this issue further.

Around the same time, my good friend Aaro wrote in his blog about how overpopulation threatens the Earth: if we don't change our lifestyles, he says, our children will be "really screwed" by 2050 when the world's population may approach 11 billion. I also think he's being very silly, but we're still friends (I think!). Of course, just saying he's being silly isn't very constructive criticism.

These are by no means the only debates I find myself in on the topic of the environment. After all, these are complex issues we're talking about here. I and my co-bloggers want to properly address them, so we're starting a series of posts titled The Environment. We hope to cover several broad topics, including:

The limits to growth
Probably not the book, but the topic in general. What are the limits to the growth of the human population? Is overpopulation a real threat to the ecology of the planet and our welfare in it? Are we running out of resources?

Climate change
I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we agree that global warming is happening, and it is strongly affected by human greenhouse gas emissions. We want to look at this topic in some detail. How much greenhouse gas are we emitting? What human activities are contributing the most toward climate change? We may even take a brief foray into alternate history.

The forgotten environmental issues
It feels to me like most people today equate environmental issues with climate change. During the course of this series of posts, I also want to pay attention to some of the "forgotten" environmental issues. Even though global warming is very real, it doesn't mean that we can afford to ignore other pressing issues like overfishing and air pollution.

What can we do?
Interspersed with all this is the most interesting question: what are we going to do about all this? The ambitious goal of this series is to try to figure out what kind of environmental policies we should be advocating in our communities. Should we all become vegetarians? Should we participate in Earth Hour? How should we generate electricity?

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So, to sum up, this is the first post in a series under the label "The Environment". Over the coming months, several of us will be posting about a range of environmental topics. Our goal is to eventually create a series of summaries on the topics I've listed above. At first, the posts may be somewhat random, because we will do this using hypertext. Some of our first topics will be an overview of CO2 emissions, a look back at the Montréal Protocol that banned CFCs, and some hard limits on human population growth. We'll be working from the bottom up to put together a comprehensive look at the large issues. The first summaries will follow, um, later.

So stay tuned!