It was the younger folks who were the fatalists.
Game theory says that it is very difficult to escape the tragedy of the commons (race to the bottom, prisoner's dilemma or whatever else one calls it), so maybe those younger folks are just accepting a reality that we older people choose to ignore. I take a little comfort in knowing that humans are able, in some situations, to organize cooperative social structures that can get around the tragedy of the commons, but it is hard to imagine how to do this on a global scale, as we would need to tackle the global tragedy of the commons.
This leaves me grasping for the remaining hope that, when the dust settles, it will turn out that the payoff matrix for some of these dilemmas does not really lead to a tragedy of the commons situation. For example, it might turn out that the cost of extracting the energy contained in the remaining buried hydrocarbons is too great compared to carbon-neutral resources, so economics will save the day, in some cases, perhaps, maybe.
Still, it is hard to deny that people have the urge to reproduce, and without the kind of draconian measures that China undertook (and for which it was vilified) the global population will grow until global population carrying capacity is again reached. I say "again", because during nearly all of history the human population was presumably at the maximum that could be sustained given the level of technology available. Technological advances fueled by the exploitation of fossil energy stores have led to a rapid increase in population (
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2009-04-20/peak-people-interrelationship-between-population-growth-and-energy-resources), but unless we continue to find new energy sources we soon will be back at the population carrying capacity, and the hand to mouth existence that comes with it.
It this necessarily so bad, given that our ancestors mostly led this type of existence? It ain't the way I want my children to live but, hey:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG5GOH2CO1kOne worrisome thing is that our technology now provides the opportunity to do more widespread and long-term damage to the planet than was previously possible. To make matters worse, some of the global damage that we inflict takes a very long time to manifest itself, which, as any engineer who designs feedback systems knows, typically leads to instability (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_margin). Perhaps we have already greatly overshot the steady-state carrying capacity ...
And speaking of steady-state, how can it be that mainstream economic theory is based upon the assumption of perpetual growth? Isn't the absurdity of this assumption self-evident?
http://steadystate.org/discover/definition/It's starting to look like I'm just another fatalist gloom-and-doomer. Well, they say that 60 is the new 30 (or something like that), so I think I'll just kick back and enjoy the ride. Yeeeeee haaaa!!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/24/dogs-in-cars_n_5611379.html