The Oil Drum

Interesting, so who has the cleaner environment, the US or China? How about East or West Germany? Japan or India?

Come on, you know that argument is totally bogus. For at least two of the pairs you have cited, one party is able to export most of its environmental degredation elsewhere. For example, I was struck recently when I re-read Diamond's account of forestry in Japan - for one or two milliseconds, until I remembered that they preserve their forests by logging native forests in my own country. Whatever you want to say about India, at least those people are destroying their own environment and not some distant one.

East Germany and West Germany? Same argument I think. West Germany was a major economic powerhouse, East Germany was a small nation of little world consequence except in the Olympics and the manufacture of funky little motorcycles (ah, my MZ250!) How much has the environment of the East been destroyed since the Wiedervereinegung? (the reunification - my apologies to all German speakers for mangling that word). This is a question where I bow to those who know (Expat?)

And China's environment is becoming ever more rapidly screwed since that country's integration into the capitalist system. However much of a nightmare it might have been in the past, it is worse now, and there is unlikely to be any salvation from the destruction as long as the Chinese economy is tied to manufacturing most of the world's goods (for the profit of foreign companies), and taking a large fraction of the world's rubbish.

Can you give me a link to that article or one that discusses the matter in full? Would be great!

The "cornucopians"--or at least the serious ones who put their beliefs into empirical practice--are commonly known as the Ecological Modernization theorists. Their basic premises revolve around the Kuznet's Curve, which essentially posits that a country/society will denigrate its environment until it reaches a certain point of economic and technological development, at which point it will begin (for a variety of reasons) to reduce its ecological footprint.

Reducing the ecological footprint is good PR, but really its about reducing ecological dependance.

Also, you've watched too much nightly news, it's wrecked your ability to reason. This whole A vs. B thing just doesn't work. Just because I'm not a doomer doesn't make me a cornucopian. Even if I was a cornucopian, that doesn't make me an EM guy. It's not the case that either EM or whatever else must be correct, you're setting up a false choice.

The primary position of doomers is that unbounded population growth (which they think we have) automatically causes resource exhaustion. That would be true, if we had unbounded population growth, which we do not. Noting that they are wrong doesn't mean I think the EM crowd (whoever that might be) is right.

The worst mistakes come not from faulty logic, but from faulty premises. Put another way, it isn't what we don't know, but rather what we know for sure that just aint so.