>From : How The West Was Lost by Dambsa Moyo “We stamp them out Engineering gets stigmatized and we encourage our kinds to become ‘professionals’ lawyers, accountant, doctors. Engineering is almost a dirty word. We are told it’is ‘old industry’ and that we are a post industrial nation……. Never minds that China produces fourteen times as many engineers as Briton. This lackadaisical attitude towards science and engineering permeates the political structure in the industrialized West…….In contrast Hu Jintao, the current Chinese president graduated in hydraulic engineering …and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, is a postgraduate engineer… western society has spent thirty years attracting the best and the brightest into consulting, financial services and banking…but now that these businesses have imploded what skills the new generation of the best and brightest be equipped to do, have been raised in a world that have valued service skills or the attributes that drive manufacturing, innovation, and which have made the West that industrial giant it has been?” And from Frank Znidarsic, “The right in the US is putting forth candidates who do not believe or understand evolution or global warming. It is easy to learn a set of dumbed down things and then label these things as your values. From: The coming population CRASH by Fred Pearce “If population was the only thing we had to worry about, we might okay. The trouble is that, as population growth has slackened. Ehrlich’s second factor in humanities’ impact on the planet has come to fore. Rising consumption is now a much bigger threat to the planet. It is responsible for almost all our increased ecological footprint in past thirty years, the period when analysts say we have overshot the planet’s carrying capacity. Despite the rise of economies like China’s. that increase in consumption is mainly in the rich world, among those already consuming the most. The average bill for public pensions and health care for the elderly is approaching 20 percent of GDP in France and Germany. By 2030 Italy will be above 30 percent. Tis cannot fail to be a drag on economies… Fertility peeked at between five and six children per woman in the 1950;. Since then, having babies haven going out of fashion and growing old is the new thing. ” I can only offer a few quotes here but both books provide a good perspective of the state of things and why we need new energy now. Frank Znidarsic
