My comment on George's insightful awesomeness:
George rules .
Addition 29-09-09:
Please also read what this guy wrote elegantly criticising George's argument. Nice.
"the priority given to population issues has diminished compared with concerns about development. If population growth continues unabated, we fear the problems of development will be "solved" by rises in death rates. For this reason, efforts to slow population growth should be treated as a human rights issue."
'The death of a democracy is not likely to be an assassination by ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference and undernourishment'."The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens"
--Robert Maynard Hutchins" . . . from this fractured society come the feral, illiterate, innumerate children of those broken homes, who have seen what society served their parents and are now so filled with hatred and confusion and incomprehensible rage, that they wander the streets in gangs looking for something to fuck or fight . . . "- errorgorilla“Ignorance is like cholera, it cannot be controlled by the individual alone: it requires the organised efforts of society.”
-- Sir Muir Gray
“ The affair seemed symptomatic of the dumbing-down of public life in this country and the collapse of education, which has turned large swathes of the populace into pap-brained, illiterate TV-addicted hysterics.”
Bruce Anderson
The Independent
"It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice."
"if catastrophic global warming is to be averted people need to act now to avert terrible things which will otherwise happen after their deaths"
This is absolute rubbish. Terrible things have been happening as a result of climate change for decades. 95% of the coral in the Caribbean was killed off in the El Nino of 1998! Only an ignoramus could pen such a sentence.
You can go as far back into history as you like to find examples of humanities idiocy when it comes to abusing the ecosystems they inhabit. The Dust Bowls of Canada and the USA in the '30s are a perfect example.
If people like Andrew Brown continue to be allowed platforms from which to broadcast such absurd statements then the climate change debate is going to continue to be dominated by ignorance and bigotry as people struggle to ascertain the facts in the face of mass media propaganda. The first war in the battle to save our civilisation is being fought in the media. I truly hope George Monbiot serves Brown a deservedly fact-laden kicking in return.