Earth at 8 billion: Consumption not crowd is key to climate

[hunter]

4. The size of you environmental footprint is most closely related to your income.

Most of us have jobs that are not making the world a better place and whatever money we spend on ANYTHING eventually makes its way back to the fossil fuel industry and into the air as greenhouse gasses.

The most effective way to reduce one's environmental footprint in today's economic system is to make less money.

When we truly decide to quit fossil fuels, to save the world, we'll simply have to ban them outright and let the economic cards fall as they may. We could probably quit fossil fuels over the course of twenty years without too much economic pain. We have the technologies, we know what we have to do.

We could start today, replacing coal fired power plants with nuclear power plants until no coal plants were left, and then move on to gas power plants and the transportation sector.

Currently this thing we call economic "productivity" isn't productivity at all. Rather it's a measure of the damage we are doing to the earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.