Ron Paul says global warming is a hoax.

[The2ndWheel]

42. The roads are a debt yet to be repaid

Progress doesn't really move sideways from left to right on the graph. It builds upon what was already built. So we may not have been able to destroy life as we know it for every one of those thousands of years, but that's only because we weren't at the scale needed to possibly do so. What Monsanto, Exxon, Wal-Mart, etc, all do, this is just what humanity has been doing for a long time, just on a much smaller scale. Monsanto experimenting with the DNA of plants is just a larger scale of agriculture.

So I'd say our history is a pretty good guide. Another aspect of that history would be that with every increase in potential energy to use, we've increased the scale at which we cause problems. If renewable energy works the way we're hoping it does, its use is probably going to cause potentially larger problems. Then again, no matter what we do, we'll have problems to deal with. We can't escape physical reality.