Dave,

Your conclusions are logical.  We have to apply logical solutions to very complex problems or our way of living will not be sustainable.  America is a powerful economic engine.  Our cultural and racial diversity makes us inventive and strong.  Our moral compass will hopefully remain in a lofty place instead of a pagan place.

I do get frustrated with my environmental colleagues when they take flights of fancy and want to turn America into some kind of central planning, inner city highrises, everybody rides the bus, no electricity using commune.

Environmentalism is a religion for many young environmentalists who have not taken the time to examine other sources of information.  It is not hard to see why -- nature is a powerful creation that can take your breath away. Just standing alone in a forest can be a 'religious experience.'

Anyway, it is good to know that there are enviros out there with open minds willing to look at the information and let the conclusions fall where the facts take them.  

Norris McDonald

You're all soooo lost.  I'll take these in the order they appear above.

First, all enviros should oppose BOTH poisoning of our water with flouridation and GM anything, the former because it's an unnatural chemical poison in the amount put into our water, the latter because it's an affront to nature.  Any ten year old living in a traditional indigenous culture can see this, and there's absolutely no need for scientists to offer meaningless details on one side of the argument or other.  (The reason some of you can't see the latter is that you have no connection or empathy with nature.  Try opening your hearts and minds to something outside the human race for a change!)

Re ironmanbretta's comment that "[t]here are definitely arguments to be made on both sides of nearly all environmental issues, and enviros who refuse to hear arguments from the other side are simply going to be left out eventually": Yes, the two sides are that we either respect nature and all forms of life, or that we think we can just use them for whatever means we wish.  There are many levels of extremeties and moderation of these two sides, but this is what all environmental issues boil down to.  Personally, I side with traditional, indigenous people who respect the Earth as much as humanly possible.

Picture a future with 9 billion people heading for 8 billion. 90% of us are living in large, to middle sized, well run cities. Thanks to improved agricultural technology, we did not need to take more of the planet for cropland. Many rural parts of the planet are now depopulated and healing, like the no-man's land between the two Koreas. From Poison Darts:

"The transition from fossil fuels to hydrogen is almost complete. Back in 2004, it looked like hydrogen had no hope of replacing oil because, unlike coal and oil, there are no vast reserves of it just waiting to be collected and disseminated. Hydrogen has to be created first and doing that took more energy than you got back. The Holy Grail of energy production has always been a fusion reactor. Surprisingly, we still have not perfected that technology. All energy today comes from fission reactors. They generate the electricity that converts water into hydrogen. The key to safely using fission came in the form of new technology that allowed us to neutralize radioactive waste. Decommissioned reactors are now torn down and completely de-radiated. All radioactive waste is treated on-sight thus giving us fission reactors that do not generate radioactive materials that need to be transported or stored. As far as safety is concerned, the same frictionless, superconducting containment fields that make my modern Sentinel suit impervious to everything from dust to grizzly bears also protect nuclear plants. The probability of meltdowns, leaks, and fires is so low now as to be essentially impossible.
Today, a Sentinel suit looks like a highly reflective, person-shaped mirror. The suit seems to disappear while standing in jungle foliage because it reflects everything around it.
Advances with superconductors created a surge in novel technologies. People in 2004 thought technology was growing rapidly but they had no idea. A power plant in Los Angeles can send its surplus electricity all the way to New York without any loses. Power plants can now operate at peak efficiency twenty-four hours a day. Because there are negligible transmission loses in the wires, fewer plants are necessary, and when they are not meeting peak requirements during the day, they are making hydrogen at night.
The machines that transport us today make the old combustion engine cars look comically inefficient. A spider had been found in Central America that has a web five times stronger than any other. Scaled up, the synthetic version of this web was used to make materials that are 25 times stronger than steel. This was a breakthrough for flywheel technology. The problem with storing energy in a flywheel is that you need tremendous rota-tional velocities. The problem with these high rotation rates is that they put extreme stresses on the flywheels. When a flywheel breaks, it is like a bomb going off. The spider web allowed engineers to build super strong flywheels and an encasement that could contain one should it fail. Now our vehicles get their energy from flywheels that turn at ungodly velocities inside vacuums on frictionless bearings. The energy from the flywheels can be converted into electricity or kinetic energy. The flywheels are kept up to speed with a tiny ceramic turbine engine that, of course, burns hydrogen.
The Sealth preserve owes its existence to the Chernobyl ef-fect. The radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl incident had acted as a species-specific biocide. Long-lived, slow breeding species could not exist there anymore--people for example. Birth defects and sky-high cancer rates kept them out. However, high cancer rates and a few birth defects have little impact on wild boars, wolves, and deer. They do not live long enough for cancer to affect their populations. In addition, their birth rates are high enough to overcome stillbirths caused by deformities. As a result of having no human beings in the area the Chernobyl dead zone had quickly become rich in wildlife.
On September 1, 2007, it was announced on the evening news that a terrorist organization may have hidden a nuclear device near Seattle. The president made a special appearance to explain that the CIA had reliable and detailed intelligence con-firming this as an elaborate hoax meant to cause panic and disruption. In a reassuring tone, the citizens of Seattle had been told to stay calm and go about their daily business. Public confi-dence in CIA intelligence and presidential assurances being at an all-time low, the exodus had started immediately. Two days later Seattle was a ghost town.
The National Guard was called out to search for the weapon that did not exist but might be detonated at any time. Under-standably, the desertion rate exceeded 90 percent. However, the effort paid off. The bomb was discovered and defused on September 10th. In a move to instill confidence, and to get the citi-zens of Seattle back to their jobs, the president flew to Seattle on September 11th, landing on an aircraft carrier in Puget Sound. In a live broadcast, with the Seattle skyline in the background, he assured the world that America could not be cowed by acts of terrorism. As the president continued to talk, a second window popped up with a live camera shot of a huge and growing mush-room cloud. A thermonuclear device had been detonated in Seattle's harbor. The terrorists had planted a second bomb just in case. Ah, human nature. Fortunately or maybe unfortunately for the president, the entire aircraft landing had been staged the day before. It hadn't been live after all.
It was eventually learned that these bombs had been bought for ten million dollars apiece from the Russian Mafia. Russian authorities had been aware of the thefts but chose to keep the information quiet, confident that they would be able to find them before it was too late. Following the law of unintended consequences, Iraqi terrorists fueled by instinctive predilections toward hatred and revenge had obtained the weapons using funds provided by a deeply religious and wealthy individual who had been told by his God to destroy evil. Yet another dull-witted and religiously devout heir to oil money had made a huge mess of things after consulting with his higher father.
People have not changed, but at least the sixth mass extinction has been halted."

The laws of physics and karma in this universe hold that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  In other words, you can't have your cake and eat it, too.  Most of the ideas above will never come to fruition, because they are simply not physically possible.  Even those that might be, such as radioactive-free fission reactors, would still create much ecological and environmental damage (in this case by mining uranium, in the case of the car story by drilling and refining oil to make the synthetic spider web).

Newer technologies sometimes mitigate environmental or ecological harms, but they always come with another ecological or enviornmental cost that's never mentioned by their promoters, as in the way the promoters of nuclear power never mentioned the extremely harmful effects of mining uranium or creating dead zones of radioactive waste.

The only way to live in harmony with nature is to greatly lower our numbers and to live far more simply.  Evolution at this point in time is mental and spiritual, not physical or technological.  Environmentalists should be leading the way for this new evolution.  As Dennis Kucinich said when running for the Democratic nomination for president, "t's time to change the world!"