We we'rnt "Green" in the old days.

[Varn]

Shovel, Look at the big picture.There are countries that have mothers have 8-12 kids . Why do they do that? It is in part to guarantee that when they are old and can not work that someone will take them in so that they will not die on the street. So you don't breed, your loss. What if your parents had that attitude, where would you be, in some used condom.

Originally Posted by shovel

The story's cute and all but I'm unmoved. 1960's 3bn people made today's 7bn people, there's nothing at all "green" about that.

I have no kids (deliberately), so no diapers, no tv in the kids' room, no transportation to/from school, no extra food or clothes for kids, no school books, and no future cars or houses or sequelae of my kids' kids etc.

[Varn]

Well now that we are enlightened The average family burns about a 1000 kwh of electricity. Probably eats twice as much food as in the 60's

Around here the average car is a truck or SUV 4wd with 300 hp. Kids don't walk or bike to school but pile in mom's vehicle and ride the 2 blocks. The flat head briggs push mower of the 60's has become the riding mower of today.

My first car was a AH Sprite, went to a Toyota, Renault, Austin Healey another Renault. Just over 300 HP for the 5.

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Right. And if you account for inflation, that $15 in 1976 (the calculator I used doesn't go to 2012) is now worth $59.30, and the $0.04/KWh would now be $0.16/KWh. My bill's typically around $40, and I pay about $0.11/KWh.

Same applies to a lot of that "we weren't green back then", unless the article was written by someone well over 100. If you're talking late '50s to early '70s, as seems likely from some of the examples, people DID jump in their 300 HP cars (remember Mustang, Camaro, GTO, and the other muscle cars, not to mention family cars with 389, 409, 427, 454 cubic inch V8s?) to go short distances. They did use gas engines to mow lawns, and those engines were powered by dirty 2-cycle engines.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Varn

My first car was a AH Sprite, went to a Toyota, Renault, Austin Healey another Renault. Just over 300 HP for the 5.

Kind of like most of my first cars (we'll forget the GTO, as it's what I could get, not what I wanted): Sprite, Volvo (the old '60s one that looked like a miniature '40s Ford), one of the first Toyota pickups... But I was never an average person. Most people back then had either the muscle cars or the family land barges, like for instance the '59 Chevy. (Family had one when I was a kid, and every time I looked at it, I was thinking how much weight I could take off with just a cutting torch. I guess ecomodding starts early :-)) Those of us who drove, or wanted to drive, small cars were the oddballs, just as we are now.

That lawn mower? Well, for some people that dirty 2-cycle B&S mower may have morphed into today's Honda-powered riding mower, but I wonder about comparative fuel use & emissions per acre of grass. And I'll also note that others of us have electric mowers these days.

[meanjoe75fan]

Dirty 2-stroke Briggs?

Thought they've been flathead 4-strokes since (seemingly) the dawn of time...

[Varn]

A Goat is all that you could get....LOL What is the story there.

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Kind of like most of my first cars (we'll forget the GTO, as it's what I could get, not what I wanted): Sprite, Volvo (the old '60s one that looked like a miniature '40s Ford), one of the first Toyota pickups... But I was never an average person. Most people back then had either the muscle cars or the family land barges, like for instance the '59 Chevy. (Family had one when I was a kid, and every time I looked at it, I was thinking how much weight I could take off with just a cutting torch. I guess ecomodding starts early :-)) Those of us who drove, or wanted to drive, small cars were the oddballs, just as we are now.

That lawn mower? Well, for some people that dirty 2-cycle B&S mower may have morphed into today's Honda-powered riding mower, but I wonder about comparative fuel use & emissions per acre of grass. And I'll also note that others of us have electric mowers these days.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by meanjoe75fan

Dirty 2-stroke Briggs?

Thought they've been flathead 4-strokes since (seemingly) the dawn of time...

OK, I don't know about B&S specifically, I just remember having to mix oil & gas for the lawnmower when I was a kid, and I don't know why you'd have to do that if it wasn't a two-stroke.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Varn

A Goat is all that you could get....LOL What is the story there.

Got out of high school and had saved a couple of hundred bucks. Wanted to buy a car, spent lots of time driving to (relatively) nearby cities (this was long before Craigslist, you understand, and I lived quite a ways back in the hills) looking for something like MG, Triumph, etc, but everything was way more than I could afford. Finally a guy I knew was getting married, and wanted to sell the GTO cheap - it was 6-7 years old, which was pretty well used for those days.

[shovel]

Originally Posted by Varn

Shovel, Look at the big picture.There are countries that have mothers have 8-12 kids . Why do they do that? It is in part to guarantee that when they are old and can not work that someone will take them in so that they will not die on the street. So you don't breed, your loss. What if your parents had that attitude, where would you be, in some used condom.

Call me a socialist

Where would I be if I hit the inside of a condom? Not stuck in a world where random chance can lead to injury and handicap, but never to superhuman strength, where "O-faces" last seconds and toothaches last days.

I'm not suicidal or anything, but if life was a video game nobody would voluntarily play it - frankly the reward balance is rubbish!

One thing's for certain, the siblings-(not)to-be that ended up in condoms or elsewhere, aren't missing anything.

As for the population explosion, I could drive a different Hummer to work every day of the week and leave them all idling on their days off, and still be "greener" than any family with children. 7 billion is a lot of people... I doubt there'd be an ecomodder.com or much eco-anything if we were 'only' 1 billion strong. Disappointingly, there's no elegant way to rapidly drop population so the best we can do for a smooth reduction is to spread out 4th dimensionally, waiting a few years longer to reproduce rather than trying to be teen moms or whatever.

[Arragonis]

See those families with 7-8 kids - where are they ?

In the developed world ? Not really
(que a photo of a US ginger family of 19 kids).

In fact in the "developed" world the population is getting older - fewer kids born and more people living longer.

Those people with 7-8 kids are in the "other world", the one we don't want to have the things we all have because it might hurt Mother Gaia in some way which is kind of not proven, but might be a risk - maybe, kind of.

But at the same time we don't want to give anything up, like our cars, our TV, our internet, or indeed our houses.

Not one of us chooses to give these things up. Actually when someone suggests taxing these things to make them less popular or restricting access to them in some other way, we bleat about free markets and big government.

They - the ones in the other world - don't have these things.

They don't have reliable water supplies which are clean.

They don't have reliable food supplies which are affordable.

They don't have reliable medicine and healthcare.

And they don't have reliable power so that if they got the above, they could preserve the produce for when they need it.

You know like your local hospital stores drugs or your local store keeps food so you can buy it when its cheap and put it in the freezer.

They live one day at a time, every day.

So they have a life expectancy of 50-60, infant mortality is 20-30% (its 75-90 and 2-4% where you are).

So they have loads of kids because few survive, and those that do grow into adults, well they don't live long.

Above all they don't have the rule of law which protects them and what they own.

You want to pursuade them to have fewer kids ?

Simple - make them more wealthy

People confuse wealthy with being "rich" in western society - no. I mean basically wealthy. Wealthy enough so that their countries are stable, and have the rule of law, so their kids go to school, so they can afford and have access to food, so they have access to clean water. And they have access to reliable power.

Just the basics.

The stats ?

Wealthier societies have fewer kids, they have those kids later and those kids tend to be healthier (at birth) and live longer.

Populations stabilise, population boom ends.

The key is surely how to acheive this, but it should be a priority if we really cared.

OR

We can try and advise (i.e. force) people in the 3rd world who have no money for food, and little or no education to put on a condom and learn the morals of controlling population growth and resource usage whilst they continue to live in a society without the basic resources we have and no chance of getting them.

And when they don't like it, someone else can pursuade them that we hate them and we are their enemies, we want their resources for nothing, and they will hate us.

And in some cases will try and kill us.

Genius plan.

How much are Lockheed shares just now ?

[Varn]

Hi Arragonis, Welcome Back.
Yes we are fortunate to be born in countries that that teaches the value of capitalism. I work harder, I make more money. For me to be richer doesn't make my neigbor poorer.

People in poorer countries many times have large familes so that there is someone alive to take care of them in their old age.