Paul Krugman - Economist.
"Eric Swanson" wrote

Forget global warming - think boiling oceans
The end is nigh, says Gaia scientist James Lovelock
By Mark Ballard
Published Monday 16th January 2006 11:59 GMT
Humankind will be nearly extinct by the end of the century and there is
little we can do but prepare for the worst, says James Lovelock, the
scientist famed for his Gaia hypothesis of earth science.

"Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding
pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains
tolerable," warns Lovelock in today's Independent newspaper.

"Each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have
to sustain civilization for as long as they can," he says.

His warning reads like the plot outline of a classic science fiction tale
like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, in which the rise and fall of not
mere civilisations, but species of man is charted over millions of years.

It is in fact the plot outline of Lovelock's own book, The Revenge of Gaia,
in which he proposes that many of the earth's species will become extinct as
global warming gathers its own runaway momentum.

But the idea is the same: desperate conditions eradicate humankind and those
few people who survive have to start all over again, as though they've
thrown an unlucky dice in a game of evolutionary snakes and ladders.

He's a sweet old man, Lovelock. At 86, he is still hopeful that the last ten
thousand years of civilisation's sustained flowering have not been in vain.
As well as "powering down" western civilisation and learning to live on more
meagre rations than those to which we have grown accustomed, we should do
what we can to preserve our knowledge for future generations, he says.

To do this, all the world's accumulated scientific knowledge should be
stored away on special, long-lasting print and paper.

It is an idea that evokes another classic science fiction tale, George R
Stewart's Earth Abides, in which humankind is indeed reduced to a few motley
pockets of blinking survivors. The hero - a former geologist, as it
happens - tries in vain to preserve the civil traditions and sustain some
semblance of scientific progress.

The proto-civilisation he helps spawn from the dregs of the last is savage,
ignorant and certainly cannot read, even if it did have any interest in
reading about the scientific advances of a past civilisation.

In other words, unless you have a pass to an underground bunker in the
Nevada desert, you have only two courses of action: enjoy it while it lasts
or help "power down" our guzzling civilisation so it won't have all been in
vain.®
--
"We must create a economic crisis in order to ensure that there is no
alternative to a smaller government." - Bush - Imprimus Magazine 1995.


"We seek to remove resources from the control of the state, thereby starving
it." - International Society for Individual Liberty - NeoCon Libertarian.

"Throughout his term, Bush has implied tax cuts would starve the government,
paying for themselves by causing budget deficits that, in turn, would place
heavy pressure on Congress to lower spending." - Jeff Lemieux - Senior
Economist - Progressive Policy Institute.

"They have an agenda which is to starve the government of revenue. But in
order to get it through, they keep on having to pretend that the tax cuts
are affordable, and so they've been suppressing the likely cost of
everything, including the war on terror." -