Quote:
Originally Posted by why?
I believe in common sense. I love eating out, so I do it as much as possible. I love using electricity, so I do it. I see no reason to limit myself using a totally infinite resource.
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This is just a total joke. The premise itself is flat out wrong. The earth is not finite, not even close. The things we rely on for life are going to be around for billions of years. Foolish people have been claiming we are growing too much for centuries, yet we are still here and doing better than ever. The only thing that will limit us is thinking like this.
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You outlook is common, but there are some problems with it.
More than anything, being wasteful doesn't actually increase your quality of life nearly as much as you think it does. In fact, it likely dimensions it. Forget environmentalism, by looking at just gratifying your immediate desires, you are setting your own self back.
That's too big to get into, but read
Mr Money Mustache and you will see what I mean.
Now back to environmentalism. You may be too young to remember things like lead paint or asbestos or CFCs, may never have heard of the Cuyahoga River or London Smog Disaster, but regardless of your personal ignorance, environmental destruction is not just some liberal conspiracy.
And finally: the Earth is not finite? You obviously do not know what the word "finite" actually means. You are saying you believe the Earth is infinite. So, in other words, it is not actually a sphere in space, (and all space travel was faked), because the Earth goes on in every direction forever - is that what you are saying? Because there are only two possible choices: finite, and infinite.
There is a certain amount of land on the planet, and a certain amount of minerals and soil on the land. There is a certain amount oil and coal and uranium, and a certain amount of the gallium arsenide, copper indium diselenide, and cadmium sulfide that are used to make solar panels.
Human technology has not been around for billions of years. Life has been around for about 4 billion years, but multi-cellular life only about a quarter of that. Animals for 500 million. Mammals for 200 million. Human-ish hominids for 200,000. Homo-sapiens about 12,000. And modern technology? About 200 years.
That's about as far as possible from your implication that we have been using resources at the same rate for "billions of years".
Your absolute confidence that we could never run out of resources is based on the last 0.000005% of history.
You can be as wasteful and selfish as you want, but you should not talk with confidence on subjects you are clearly ignorant of.