Things on my mind

I read the Economist's Survey on Climate Change. The most interesting takeaway for me was that cars consume relatively little fossil fuels. The real culprit and the greatest polluter is industry (e.g. production, making "stuff," factories, etc). China is well on its way to being the largest producer of greenhouse gases.

Some stream of consciousness / things going through my mind: Does economic growth, globalization, and technology contributes to global warming and the depletion of fossil fuels? What does that say about our current capitalist infrastructure? Is capitalism bad for the environment?

For the most part, markets are efficient, more so with less regulation. Businesses are better at adapting to changing conditions and solving problems than government. However, when it comes to negative externalities such as global warming, why do markets fail

Is the marketplace only good at developing mid-to-short run ideas but not so good at dealing with long run issues like the environment because there's no immediate upside? That means regulation needs to solve the issue, but...governments are pro consumption, pro economic growth. There's no incentive to regulate in a way that might stifle industry...

Everything moves in the confines of a consumer culture - myself included. I have to think about this more.

Also, I've been reading Peak Oil: Life after the Oil Crash. The website claims that oil production peaked in 2005 and from that point onward, we've been on the downward sloping side of the oil production bell curve. It argues that global economic growth is based on consumption, which in turn is fueled by production, which are all grounded on the availability of oil. Once oil becomes too expensive or scarce (as it's started to), we will undergo a worldwide economic recession since no one has found an energy source that returns as much energy per unit as oil does. Some posts on this website go so far as to predict a return to an feudal / agrarian society once that happens.

Oh, and some of you might find this article interesting...