I’m starting to believe the only permanent solution to these problems is reducing the global population. We just can’t keep using natural resources at the rate we are today.
Go live in a hut in the middle of nowhere if you're so concerned about resource use.
For me, I fucking relish the day when everyone on the Earth can be as wealthy, or indeed wealthier, as I am today. Can live comfortably and look forward to sumptuous and delicious meals instead of living in fear of starvation or disease or war.
You can to almost anywhere on this planet and you can see human settlement encroaching on and damaging natural habitats. The magnitude of these effects are in direct correlation to human population growth.
It's easy to imagine that we'll "run out" of "resources" because in theory many resources are in finite supply. But in reality the hard natural limits are so high as to be effectively infinite over extremely long periods of current levels of use and historically humans have gotten more and more clever about finding new methods to extract or produce resources that previously were not available.
Moreover, our increasing wealth and technological capabilities have made it possible to reduce and reverse our environmental impact and encroachment of habitats.
Personally, I like my life and I think it's worth living, and indeed even justified, and I think that denying the ability to live a similar lifestyle to others simply because they were born into a different part of the world is just know-nothing nonsense and veiled racism.
For me, I fucking relish the day when everyone
on the Earth can be as wealthy, or indeed wealthier,
as I am today.
- heavily taxing gasoline vehicles and subsidising electric vehicles to encourage adoption.
- heavily taxing non-renewable sources of electricity generation, subsidising solar, wind etc.
- Use carbon taxes to fund more research into renewables and maybe Thorium, advanced battery technology etc.
You could have a gradual ramp up of taxes to ease the burden of shifting to renewables.
The biggest problem is getting people and governments to change their old mindsets. Politics, not technology is holding back progress.
It's ridiculous.
Eventually the population will stabilize by itself and possibly also start decreasing as the countries that have the largest population growth continue toward full industrialization and modern ways of living.
and the main mechanism is, counter-intuitively, reducing child mortality in the poorest areas.
wealth.
Personally, I'd try giving away education and birth control first.
We could start by working less: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/21-hours
I am also convinced that in order to "do more with less" in the future, we will need to actually solve the basic problems that keep prices high on food, clothing, shelter, and knowledge. I'm not sure how to do that when science is a prisoner of copyright, for example, and education costs as much as a house, for example; I just don't see how to solve the physical problems, even for myself, in any big way when we can't collectively solve even the self-inflicted/social ones like copyright (and superstitions, and violence, and, ...). I think working less would be a sign of success, but I'm not sure how to get there from here. People won't do it voluntarily (nor should they be forced to). The government can always tax the wealthy and redistribute, but I'm leery of promoting that and just giving the government more power. (Now they want my guns too.)
It doesn't help that the U.S. defaulted on it's gold debt in the 70's (brilliantly calling it "going off the gold standard") and now U.S. money is just an interest-bearing loan (as opposed to you, the government, just printing paper...), which means people pay interest on public debt, the rich get richer, keeping the pressure on and prices going up. (Most of the world's currencies are U.S. dollar backed, so it's not limited to the U.S..) It's musical chairs: ie, every now and then someone has to lose big (one chair is removed, in the form of interest payments), and the pie gets divided among fewer and fewer (and their children). No one's going to work less with that gun in their back.
That's why, as unpopular as it can be around here (hey, everyone has to make a living), I think we have to fix this idea that we can charge for knowledge (or patent it, or copyright it), because we're really not (IMHO) going to be able to get to the important stuff if we keep fighting over the "how" (most food plants are sterile for goodness sake). I can't justify giving an inventor, even if it's me, a monopoly on an idea if it just means the whole world needs my permission to solve their own problems.