Post to Douglas Nuttall in ResearchGate

Doug,

Before I noticed that the Limits to Growth forced Powering-Down, a Simpler Way, in short, Dematerialism, upon us, I noticed that almost everything that's wrong with the world was caused by people trying to get more money - either because of greed or because of fear. There's a list in one of the appendices at the end of my open-ended (never-to-be-finished) on-line book https://www.dematerialism.net/ops.htm . (I guess by now, I might be tempted to publish it if I received a good offer - in terms of convenience, moral uprightness - not money.) What can be done to remove even the temptation to worship Mammon? In a word: Dematerialism. It removes the temptation. (I may be an atheist, but I am a Judeo-Christian atheist, if you know what I mean. The Book of Proverbs, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.)

I didn't care if AGW was occurring or not. Peak Oil was in our future no matter what. Only a person of extremely limited intelligence would argue that we would always have oil that could be obtained for less energy than we expected to obtain from it. So, if the powerful and privileged owners of the world could convince their minions that there would never be catastrophic global warming caused by industrialization, all they needed to do was create the illusion of an infinite supply of oil in a finite world, which they did by exporting peak oil to places where lives didn't matter - or, worse yet, convince the world that manned space travel for everyone was right around the corner - not in a galaxy far, far away. C. S. Lewis refers to the huge distances between heavenly bodies as "God's quarantine" of our predatory species.  [Perelandra] 

Now, really, Doug, you don't want even more urban sprawl, do you? (I don't think anyone wants epidemic disease to prevent urban sprawl.