This is dumb. First, we have thousands of people already living in Antarctica and they aren't melting ice, especially enough ice to displace thousands of people.

That still makes it a dumb comment since your example was of colony-based insects who are notoriously colony-focused. They are far more racist than humans, viciously competing with even with their close kin in other colonies.

It's pretty clear that you are blinded by your opinions and merely assume that approaches which you deem bad, like terraforming the Sahara are automatically bad and approaches you deem good, like moving a vast number of people to England (and overwhelming its infrastructure), are automatically good. The real world doesn't operate that way.

Again, coal doesn't fall in that category. Sure, we would be running out of coal, but not by 2100.

Capitalism is merely private ownership of capital. It doesn't "dictate" that you go for anything in particular. Nor does it dictate that things have to go "downhill" merely because the absolutely cheapest resource is no longer present.

There's also this thing called "invention" which tends to change the game. I think by 2100 we'll have figured out adequate replacements for cheap petroleum while retaining our vast transportation network. And I think we'll find out then that we've had those alternatives around for a number of decades now.

But that's not the case. There's nothing magical about living in Antarctica that would cause millions of people to lose their homes elsewhere.

No, those species are quite notorious for exhibiting behavior that strongly favors their own species at the expense of pretty much everything else aside from a few symbiotes. Even honeybees only help plants pollinate because they get in exchange food and building material (for their beehive wax).

Unless of course, they'll go bankrupt faster if they don't. But then I guess that would be a case of more incentive to change than you would allow for.

Only as long as those franchise agreements continue to exist. Ford or Toyota didn't agree to uphold car dealership franchises till the end of time. If Tesla is able to turn this into a competitive advantage, and I think they will, then most of the car companies will have to follow suit or lose market share.

Because once there is a leak in the dike, it will grow. The existing car companies will be prevented from selling directly, only if the existing franchise agreements remain in place.

It's not the 1% who are making all those people.

Well, there is coal. That's not going away by 2100 despite your assertion.

Which is incorrect. As the paper notes, most of the population growth comes from Africa and Asia. The developed world actually is a population sink - the overpopulation problem has been fixed there. What responsibility am I supposed to have for population growth elsewhere in the world? And what power am I supposed to have to fix that?

A couple of remarks here. First, there are 3000 dead now from Ebola, which is more than it has infected in all previously known infections (though obviously, it may have killed more in the past before we were aware of it). What it has done in the past is not necessarily what it will do in the future, and we're already in uncharted waters with Ebola having reached large urban areas.

WHO is projecting hundreds of thousands of infections over the next year and a half. If it's lethality doesn't go down, then that's a lot of deaths too.

Second, Europe didn't lose a quarter of its population to the 1918 influenza pandemic. A better guess is 2%.

No, it doesn't. Just because there is a disadvantage to a choice, doesn't mean that it is "almost" zero sum. You still have to consider the advantages.

What species would not be a selfish species in your sense? And this overpopulation problem isn't being caused by the rich. It's being caused by the teeming masses of non-rich.

Even in good times, astronomy as a career choice will suffer due to the considerable overproduction of PhDs in the field.

Again, I see no evidence for the "create jobs" aspect or why it's even worth discussing.

No, when the government funds the companies that serve government, then a lot of resources, not just the companies themselves, become unavailable for the private sector, "free" markets, etc.

I guess you ought to leave the thinking to grown ups. So why would "neo-cons" want to foreclose on a zillion underwater (in the sense that the debt owed is more than the price the home can be sold for) home loans? That turns a temporary shutdown of the loan repayment revenue stream into a large permanent loss. They haven't bankrupted themselves enough that month?

Again, that's not what he's doing. Public funding is potentially a huge profitable gravy train. This has little to do with creating jobs except incidentally. The only people who would be fleeced are taxpayers, which is already rather easy to do.

Further, while I haven't brought it up before in this discussion, what is supposed to be the benefit to just "creating jobs"? Hiring people for make-work means that they aren't available for more productive work.

Well, you have a plan? Because right now, taking over the bad countries and making them good countries that don't starve their citizens doesn't seem to work. I suppose we could create a dependent, exponentially growing dependent class of people who need our continued munificence to survive. But last I checked our resources weren't similarly exponentially growing over the rest of eternity.

Or I suppose we could just kill the starving people. But that's not in the spirit of the thing.

Ultimately, it's going to be those starving people who have to help themselves. And they are, depending on location. The developing world is in a far better state than it was in 1950, which seems to be a low point for what was at the time, the Third World.