I am copying a post from another thread that I felt got lost in the debate between Rockdoc and Dissident who where at horns with each other. Note that copying the same post to a new thread is not something encouraged here, I am doing it because I felt strongly about the point made.
It has always been worrisome to me that every so-called solution to global warming subverts rather than enhances human freedom and advances the power of the state to regulate energy, industrial activity, and individual behavior That seems to me, a denier, or whatever term you want to use, a potentially greater threat to the future of human welfare than even climate change. Václav Klaus, the former president of the Czech Republic, made this same point when he declared: “What is at risk is not the climate but freedom.”
----Thomas Smith
Remember Asimov's bathroom analogy which has been quoted on this site dozens of times but addresses this.
Isaac Asimov on dignity
Q: What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?
It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor: If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want to and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom; it should be right there in the Constitution.
But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door: “Aren’t you through yet?” and so on. In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.
— Isaac Asimov, American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books (1920-1992),
There are entitlements on the political left and right which will be severely challenged by the upcoming physical constraints whether caused by climate change or peak oil, both of which most of us here agree are two symptoms of over population.
The entitlement of social justice for all is about as absurd as the idea of unlimited and unregulated individual freedoms in an over populated world. Both are quaint ideas that can be nurtured and enhanced in times of opulence, both become under siege when external physical constraints start to bite.
This is why the current political divide is really about both parties whining over an ideal of a past that wont cut it in the future when you see where we are heading.
All of this explains of course why climate change became a political issue. To a lesser degree peak oil as well.
The friction around these topics is really about the lack of space as apposing ideologies get moved by constraints toward the bottle neck.
In times of opulence you can have two ideologies standing side by side and cohabitating the same space. The political left and the political right can indulge in their respective ideologies and there is enough wealth and space for both to be emboldened.
We should pay attention why all the growing heated polarity in our culture and politics that seems to be growing.
I define this as ideologies under siege from forces external.
Forces that will continue to heat up the divide but that will also one day break it.