Liriodendron Tulipifera

Inspector, I love the way you drop context and assume that I define environmentalism as anti-man. Which I don't, and haven't. I define it as a need, at this point in human history, to preserve basic ecosystem function for humans to not only survive, but thrive. That is all.

I generally enjoy Shakespeare's comedies. Much Ado About Nothing is a good one. Well, the statements re: Shakespeare's ideology may be true, but there are other things to appreciate about Shakespeare, like iambic pentameter and his unique sense of both humor and irony. As for the former, I don't think his use of words and their complexity on a variety of levels can really be matched by any other author. There are a variety of things to appreciate when it comes to plays, and his are very poetic. Anyway, in the society we live in now in the western world, we are perfectly free to have Rand festivals! And in a truly Objectivist society, which would be even more free, I don't presume that festivals of any literature would actually be banned (I'm not presuming this is what you meant, Lance. Just saying.).

Better late than never, so here I am! I lurked here for a long time and recently started posting quite a bit. I was actually introduced to Objectivism by a neighbor, a fortuitous event for which I am very grateful, because I've now read Atlas Shrugged, some of Ayn Rand's non-fiction, and part of The Fountainhead. I found Atlas Shrugged to be a very moving book. I'm fascinated by the philosophy, and am interested in learning more as I have time to read. So far, I have not found anything, really, to disagree with in Objectivism, but I am still examining the philosophy. I was raised in a very religious family. We skipped around from church to church when I was growing up, too many to count! Most of my Sundays were spent in the faith-healing-holy-roller-speaking-in-tongues-feel-good types of churches. It wasn't all bad. We did attend a Presbyterian church for a short time where people did not faint in the aisles and laugh uncotrollably, and during that time I was the church organist, which I rather enjoyed! (Alas, my family's stint there was short-lived; it was much too mundane for my parents!) In any case, I spent four years at a Christian college where I took philosophy classes that, strangely enough, were partly responsible for helping to lead me out of the Christian swamphole!! Of course, being a biology major and having exposure to reality helped. I am almost done with my PhD in biology. I study fungi that attack insects. I hope to be done with my student career soon so that I can make some real money and get out of Syracuse, the armpit of New York State. Well, that's about all!

Strangelove, it sounds like you're crazy about this girl, but she is either 1) not interested in you romantically and trying to let you down easy as Kevin suggested, 2) afraid of hurting you or herself by getting involved in a relationship only to have it come to an end because she is on the rebound, or 3) not ready for a relationship at all due to the other circumstances in her life. She doesn't want to date you right now. Things might change, but right now she can't be forced to be ready. Also, you have only known her a little over two months. It takes a long time to really get to know someone. Longer than two months! You see this girl all the time, so I assume you will remain friends, right? After all, you live in the same dorm. Give her some space and let her come to you. If she wants to, she will. It's hard, but you have to try to let go of these thoughts of you and her together, for the time being, at least.

I concur! Let's hope it doesn't mutate, and if it does that it will be contained and/or not too virulent.

I was under this impression, too, Unconquered, that this was a hemorraghic fever. These bird flu viruses are a dime a dozen, and there are new strains evolving all the time. There is no reason to think that eventually one of these viruses mightn't mutate to a more transmissable form: this trait would undergo rapid positive selection. The evidence is not that viruses remain genetically constant, but that they are constantly changing. Pathogens evolve to high virulence when they are allowed to. That's the reason these virulent strains usually evolve in southeast Asia: high levels of crowding. It matters not to me, as a pathogen, whether I kill off my host, as long as I can transmit myself to another organism before my current host dies. Conditions in these countries are perfect for the evolution of extremely virulent organisms. Eventually, with sanitary conditions, quarantine, and low host density, a very virulent virus would be forced toward lower virulence, or else it would go extinct. That's the good news. HOWEVER, this kind of evolution toward lower virulence doesn't happen immediately, and with the extent of globalization these days, this could be a huge disaster if the virus becomes transmissible from human to human. Hopefully this would be counterbalanced by access to information about where the virus has spread, such as happened with SARS, and was presumably lacking in the 1918 pandemic. But remember SARS and the effort it took to keep it contained? Just one infected individual on a plane from China, and it spread to something like 25 people in Toronto. The results could have been disastrous had effective measures not been taken. Sure, such a virus as the 1918 flu would likely not arise in the US today, but this is hardly the point. Any virulent virus could kill off millions all over the world before it mutates again into a less virulent form and that form is selected for, regardless of where it arose, because it would initally "see" no difference between filthy and clean conditions, so long as host density was reasonably high.

That's INCREDIBLE.

Right! Probably more like a billion....... Assuming the technology to extract it will be developed and continue to increase in efficiency, yes. But I really doubt we'll have an oil-based economy for that long...

This process happened over a span of 500 million years, before the age of the dinosaurs. If oil were being formed faster than we were using it, we'd also be finding it faster, no? Since the technology for finding it and pumping it out of hte ground improve constantly! All the evidence, biophysical and economic, points otherwise. Simply read the posts above and the posts in the Peak Oil thread. I've learned a lot in that thread. If people made new technology that was cheaper than the internal combusiton engine, THEN it would make economic sense! And eventually, I think this will happen.

The laws of physics haven't changed, that's the problem! It's probably possible to produce oil from a partial artificial process, but I'm guessing it would be pointless, because the point isn't to use energy to create food or pretty jewelry. It's to use energy to transform matter into another source of greater energy, and that isn't possible thermodynamically. The question becomes: why do we need THIS particular energy source? Why wouldn't we just use THAT source of energy to do whatever it is we want to do (drive cars, heat our homes, whatever), rather than use oil?? From a previous post in this thread, for those of you who want to know how crude oil is formed (AisA): Petroleum comes from dead plant and animal matter, deposited on the ocean floor, covered by layers of sediment over and over again over millions of years, the enormous heat and pressurefrom the weight of those layers in the Earth's crust turning them into oil and gas. It's a long process, one that is undoubtedly still in place but happening at an incredibly slow pace to what is being produced. We pump billions of metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, which are coming from the crude oil. To get BACK into the Earth's crust, it has to be fixed back into sugar by photosynthesis in a plant. About the only place in the world that is a sink for carbon dioxide are boreal forests... around which the atmospheric levels of CO2 are slightly lower than that for the rest of the world. The world levels, overall, are increasing each year and have been since we've been recording (I will find the graph for this). It matters not where that CO2 is coming from (I really don't want to get into a global warming argument!), only that its increasing. If crude oil is to accumulate at a faster rate, as AisA suggests, the CO2 levels at least must DECREASE over time, not increase! Even if it could be done, there's a tremendous energy input in order to get a smaller amount of energy. Think about it. First, you would have to have all this animal and plant matter and decompose it (ultimately, the source of energy for this would be the sun), then heat and compress it (with some other manmade source of incredible energy... like nuclear). This takes an awful lot of time and seems a lot of trouble to go to just to get oil. The more logical solution is just to drive a solar or nuclear powered car, since that's where the energy would have to come in the first place to do all this. IMO petroleum products should be saved for the really important stuff.... like PLASTIC for household goods, medical products, etc. NOT used as an energy source. If someone made a nuclear-powered car, I'd buy it. It makes a hell of a lot more sense. Well, anyway, this is where we'll end up eventually... nuclear and solar. I just wish we'd move to nuclear and solar sooner rather than later. Here's the Mauna Loa graph of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Yaaaargh! Shiver me timbers! Avast, ye scarvy scum! There be treasure in them thar hills! hahahahahha

David, Nah - 99% of the species that ever existed have gone extinct. Anyway, they are wrong: the atmosphere, temperature, and amount of forest cover - all of these things have changed drastically due to geologic and biotic factors. Temperature used to be much hotter than it is now. But we should care about species loss, because, as you know, these species could be of value to us. After all, there are lots of species that are useful! They could be of direct economic use, aesthetic value, or most importantly, IMO, play some role in ecosystem function, which our lives depend on. There are studies that have examined the usefulness of microorganisms to ecosystems when have very similar niches, and have concluded that ecosystem function can be maintained even with species loss, because there's a functional redundancy there. But unfortunately, the discovery of species does not coincide with the discovery of what is useful about them. We can't proceed that fast. Funny enough, though - the species which actually ARE useful (microogranisms), are not cause for conservation concern among so-called conservation biologists. It's all the cuddly stuff like owls, eagles, and the like that get all the attention. Which is totally ridiculous to me. Things at the top of the food chain (tertiary consumers like birds that eat animals that eat other animals) have very little use in maintaining a functioning ecosystem. They're simply pretty, and that's why people get all out of whack about them. yeah, me too. Why let these freaks monopolize the word??

Clearly, by reading the article, they have included probable reserves as proven. So this would include areas like ANWR, I assume. In any case, I asked Charlie a few months ago if ANWR would make much difference over the long haul, and he said no. Assuming the authors have things straight, they also state that public information on the size of the reserves is not reliable and there are large discrepancies in industry data. Anyway, they are very modest throughout the paper in assuming that the predictions could be wrong. I don't know the science behind figuring out how large an oil field is, but I presume if those data were available they would have used them. I suppose that it why they give a range between world supply peaking between 2004 and 2037. Obviously this is a huge range.

God, I know abut PETA, ELF, Sierra Club, and all the others. I don't ally myself with these groups, no self-respecting ecologist would.

These are good questions - and in his article in Nature (a diff. article) pretty much admits that past estimates by others have been wildly wrong, and that this does not include estimates of what can be extracted from shale. So obviously, not all of these environmental scientists are hiding behind ideology, which is as much a blanket claim on people doing perfectly good science as it is to say that all peopel who study evolution are motivated to point people away from God (they could probably care less, they are just interested in the topic!) I know nothing of Thomas Sowell, never heard of him so I cannot comment. But what exactly do you mean by "environmentalist ideology?" I know what objectivism's definition is, but my definition is that of a person who wants to preserve the environment both for man's benefit: either for economic or aesthetic benefit, but mostly, because we literally can't live without it at the present time. I would class myself in this category. I personally don't know anyone who wants to return to a state of digging with bare hands in the soil and wondering where our next meal will come from. I am sure there may be such people who claim it: if so, their errors should be pointed out and they should be told that they proof is in the pudding, to put their money where their mouth is.

I don't know if there are actual estimates from the people bringing out the oil. Anyway, if I was in a business that had 35-50 more years to go, I wouldn't be all that concerned! Maybe YOU can investigate this issue since I have already provided some data. Are there actually companies who have done such studies and made the research results available? I don't know. There is absolutely no monetary value in my research (which is govt. funded). I don't doubt for a second that someday - hopefully sooner rather than later - it will benefit human life in some way. Moving on to private funding, I know that there are rich individuals who are willing to invest $$ in the kind of biodiversity research I do, rather like philanthropists, but not because they can make $$ off the product. I don't see anything wrong in this, because there is really no way that all of this information could be productively used in our lifetimes. I tend to think much more long term, since we are just discovering the usefulness of species today that were described several hundred years ago.... So, I would see the lack of basic research as a tragedy because it is the foundation for applied research. I am not so sure that a decrease in public funding and an increase in private funding, however, would reduce basic research. I think there are far more people that care about what goes on here on Earth than there are that care about what goes on up in space, rocket man. But that is gross speculation, of course.

Hopefully this will help. It's a link to Hall's article in which he predicts when oil demand will exceed supply at low demand (NOT RUN OUT). Anyway, I will sum up the article in further detail later this week for those of you (I assume most) who do not want to read it. Hallock, J., Tharkan, P. ,Hall, C., Jefferson, M. and Wu, W. 2004. Forcasting the availability and diversity of global conventional oil supplies. Energy 29 (2004) 1673–1696. http://www.esf.edu/efb/hall/Hall_PUBS3.htm I assume these questions are directed at me. So: yes, yes, and probably not. Please see my post also in the Peak Oil thread. Not all. But companies like GE have been trashed on this forum as being "environmentalist" for doing just that: long-term planning and shifts toward other sources of energy. YES. This is like saying that people who work on campus labs on cancer research are altruistic and their research must be nonsense, because it doesn't produce a sellable product. Please.

Okay, so you are rejecting my argument based on the fact that these arguments have been wrong in the past. Let me ask you this: If a boy cries wolf three times and is wrong, he will necessarily be wrong in the future? This sounds strangely defensive and circular. Kind of like the Christians saying "Evolution is a theory believed and studied by atheists, so we know we can't trust them." Rather like the posture of the religionists who insist that evolution MUST be wrong (although they accept the rest of science and what it does for them) because they think it intereferes with their ideology. Evolution (replace with environmental science) is just some wacky idea cooked up by a bunch of conspiratorial people over the past two centuries!!!! Riiiiiiiiiight. And thanks for the advice on who I should hang out with, but having been brought up by a bunch of people who place their confidence in faith healers over doctors and having abandoned that sort of thinking long ago, I think I have enough sense to figure out for myself how to wade through mystical garbage, be it environmentalism or religion. In order to produce, man needs something to transform. His mind and body do not work in a vacuum. That i all I am saying. If I wish to produce a plastic bottle, I have to drill oil out of the ground. If I want to produce steel, or Rearden metal, I need some raw material. So what? I could put 100 goldfish in a 10 gallon fish tank, but assuming it is a closed system, even with the most marvelous filtration system, the fish will soon die. You have done little except to show how little you know about nutrient cycling. I certainly hope you are right about infinite productivity and solutions to problems. I have a lot of confidence in the scientific process. But we have a long way to go. So before you believe by faith Hollywood stories that other planets can eventually be "terraformed" let's actually see if we can do it. David: As for the 2039-2050 figure, this was produced by a prof (Charlie Hall) and a couple of grad students at my college. I tend to put a lot of confidence his work, as he generally challenges the popular beliefs in his field (energy issues and ecosystems) and has debunked certain supply-demand theories in ecology in the past. I will provide more details later. softwarenerd: we are generally limited in agriculture by the amount of nitrogen in the soil, which can be placed there by two processes, chiefly: nitrogen fixation by bacteria OR the addition of ammonia based fertilizers, which are produced by heating nitrogen and hydrogen gases (This requires a large amount of energy input by fossil fuels.) About a quarter of the world's nitrogen is fixed into useable form to organisms by this latter way. It comes with its own set of problems, such as surface runoff. The first is more energy efficient because the reaction is catalyzed by an enzyme that lowers the activation energy for the reaction. We have done some pretty marvelous things with genetic engineering, though, in getting plants to tolerate even the worst env. conditions.

Okay, David, I'll try! I'm busy now, but I will put some time into this later.

even if we did run out of oil, I think this would only cause a short-term energy crisis (say a few years?) We still have nuclear, wind, and solar power, plus biofuels. All except nuclear are renewable, and nuclear would last well into the future until we had to worry about energy again. it would just be the matter of switching everything over that would be the problem.

My argument "smacks of environmentalism" because I'm a biologist. I'll take this case by case. There is enough petroleum to go around until about 2039-2050, after which demand will exceed supply. Eventually, the supply will run out entirely. I can come up with the source for this figure tomorrow, if you wish. Petroleum comes from dead plant and animal matter, compressed over millions of years of geologic activity and deposited in the Earth's crust. The carbon in those molecules goes back into the atmosphere when we burn gasoline. In order to get it back into the Earth's crust as petroleum to use again, it needs to be fixed into sugar by a plant, the plant has to die or be eaten by an animal or a decomposer organism, and millions more years will be needed to form all that oil petroleum again through geologic activity. There is not an endless supply of any matter, as there is no such thing as an infinite quantity to an entity. So when you say there is "enough to go around" I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that. Perhaps you can elaborate. I seriously doubt whether the entire population of the world would be able to survive on 100% meat diet even if it was physiologically possible for humans (see my figures above on how much energy is lost as heat with each increase in trophic level), but I don't deny it might be possible. See the figures above on how many calories are consumed by humans in meat form: it's only 30% worldwide. People in the US do not need to eat less meat because we have plenty of natural resources here, enough to sell to a great deal of the rest of the world in addition to having surplus for ourselves. There is no food shortage and probably never will be with our rate of population growth, barring a massive outbreak of disease on our cereal crops, which is certainly not impossible - things like that have happened before. But if you think human population can grow exponentially and infinitely, that there is an infinite number of resources in this world, you are simply wrong. The difference between me and most environmentalists is that I think people can realize this on their own when they reach a crisis and when things become bad enough, rather than having to be coerced into action by governments. I don't do silly things like proclaim to know the actual number of humans that could live on this planet, but I will say, confidently, that there is a limit, and it is not governed solely by how much space each human takes up and how closely we could pack like sardines. Earth is a closed system, and if you think you can live apart from it at this stage in human history, like some character in Star Wars or whatnot (strangely, we never see these characters eat or are told where the fuel is coming from propelling them through space), then put your money where your mouth is and move to the moon or to Mars indefinitely, with no exchange of materials with Earth. What will you eat? Every single thing you eat, whatever animal flesh, can be traced back to a photosythetic organism (in the vast majority of cases, a plant). What will you fall back on if your artificial system up there fails (of course, NASA has invested lots of money in these biodome type projects because they are interested in knowing these things)? I hear this kind of nonsense all the time - than man can somehow live as a species apart from nature in some kind of vacuum. I'm not saying it mightn't eventually be possible, but at the present time, the idea is suicide.

Exactly. Which is the only thing I have really been arguing against at all in this entire thread, not whether meat or animal products are bad or vegetables are good. Thank you, Unconquered, for finally putting the last nail in the coffin of this ridiculous idea. Hopefully.

Please don't be daft. I didn't say any such thing. I don't even care if I receive a warning for this, so I'm going to say it. Instead of talking out of your --- and putting words in my mouth, go back and read again what I actually wrote. All I am suggesting is that there is a limited amount of suitable land in this world for raising domesticated crops and animals (is there such thing as an infinite quantity to an entity?), that we in the United States are lucky to have our nation on the land that we do, and that it is up to landowners worldwide to decide for themselves which is more profitable, either in cash or raw survival for those not lucky enough to live in capitalist countries: raising animals or raising crops. These statements were made in response to the constant assertions on this thread, not backed by any proof, that MAN NEEDS MEAT TO THRIVE. Here are some more facts about the relation of plants to people from Raven and Raven (2005). The genus Homo has been around for about 2 million years. Up until about 34,000 ybp, Homo species survived by scavenging dead animals (oooh doesn't that sound yummy), gathering roots and other wild plant matter, and limited hunting. About 34,000 ybp, Homo sapiens developed tools for hunting. About 18,000 ybp, humans began deliberately planting wild seeds. At 10,000 ybp, serious domestication of wild animals and plants occurred. The domestication of plants occurred independently around the world, is a global phenomenon, and was not a random event. Here is a partial list of what began to be cultivated in each area. Asia: soybean, rice Tropical Asia: mangoes, rice, citrus, taro, banana Africa: sorghum, millet, okra, yams, coffee Middle East: barley, wheat, lentils, peans, olives, pmegranates, vetch, grapes, flax The Americas: many beans, many cucurbits (squashes and pumpkins), corn, peppers, tomatoes, tobacco, cacao (chocolate), pineapple, manioc, quinoa, sunflowers, and avocados. This is, of course, not to mention all the scores of wonderful herbs and spices that make our meat and veggies taste good. Six species of plants alone account for 80% of the calories ingested by humans: wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc. 70% percent of the protein ingested by humans worldwide comes from plant sources. Ahh, reason and facts. They trump raw emotion, every time. Raven, P.H., R.F. Evert and S.E. Eichhorn. 2005. Biology of Plants. 7th Edition. W.H. Freman and Company. New York, NY, USA

Hunting is much more dangerous. I suspect at this point that this is the only reason I am arguing against all you men. Because you would rather be prehistoric and hunt with stones and sticks and assert your manliness, leaving us women to stay home to tend the corn. (just kidding) Well of course. But you are assuming that we can't plant something else there, beside the grass that grows there? That we can't plow the ground and plant something else there? Good God, what do you think grows in most of the American midwest? Prairie grass? Hell, no! Corn, silly. And corn is a grass. And wheat rye, and oats, sugar beets, etc. We could convert pretty much any fertile land that grows plants into agricultural land, at least in the US. There are whole genetic engineering projects going on to turn salty wastelands into a place to grow halophytic plants. The difference between life and death for a poor family living in the third world has nothing to do with the health benefits of vegetarianism? Talk some sense, man. That's your point, but I'm asking you, all of you that keep asserting this on this thread, to simply prove it. Scientifically. I don't know that it's not enough time, but considering that we are 99% similar to chimps and they eat mostly bananas, I think that that 0.001% difference in genetics over the past 10,000 years might be significant. In fact, the human race is incredibly young, only 60,000 to 80,000 years old.

I assume you guys are just teasing me now as you know I am not a vegetarian, and you are presenting your personal preferences in taste as a means of determining what is right for you, which we all know is silly. Bodybuilders, bah!.... I suspect that it is possible but the amount of beans one would have to eat in order to bulk up in muscle mass would make one a very unsuitable dinner partner or movie companion. hahaha. Felix, you are asking questions about why someone might be vegetarian, but I already answered these in previous posts in this thread. Clearly, the physical goals of a vegetarian (leanness, endurance, etc.) would be different than those of a bodybuilder. Personally, I can see no scientifically proven health benefit to eating meat, because B vitamins are available in veggies and other non-meat sources. I know many perfectly healthy vegetarians. (This is a purely intellectual matter, not a personal one for me, as I have no interest in becoming a vegetarian at the moment.) As for what is "natural" for humans, what is natural is not always what is good. Multiple female mates per male is probably "natural" for humans, but that doesn't mean I think it's good. I'd rather let my mind determine what is good. As for meat being easy to eat, in this day and age, I would agree with you. But as for humans being carnivores, we are not. We have been omnivores for at least 10,000 years because plant products were much more dependable and that is why we started to make the shift. Meat takes incredible energy to hunt, much more so than gathering or cultivation. Also, plants are a much more dependable source of food. You cannot cause a plant species to go extinct if it is dependent upon you for survival (most of our cultivated crop plants could not survive in the wild: it is physically impossible for these species to disperse their seeds properly on their own). Furthermore, ten times more biomass can be produced per acre by growing crops than by raising game. This is because at each increase in the trophic level, there is a 90% loss of energy as heat. So, only 10% of the plant biomass that an herbivore eats (such as a cow or a deer) actually winds up as MATTER in animal flesh. (kind of like not all the gas in your engine is transformed into power when it's burnt, a lot of it is lost as heat.) THis is not a serious issue for us in the US, as we have bountiful natural resources. But it is definitely an issue for those in third world countries as to getting the best nutrition out of small, nutritionally impoverished plots of land. Would you rather have one 50 pound goat or 500 pounds of vegetable matter if you have to survive for a year off of what you did with your land? As for vitamin C, I guess you're just using that as some sort of example? Because as far as I know, vitamin C is found only in plants, at least in sufficient quantities for the human diet. As for man needing meat because he adapted TOWARD it, no! Man has been moving away from it for the past 10,000 years!