Heh, you bring upo a lot of what I would've brought up if you agreed with me.

You forgot though, that much of the western world is quite northern, and requires quite a bit more energy to live from that alone! Population density is also worth talking about.

Now, as to your pictures and your comment about what happens when energy is scarce . . .

Well, no.

When energy is scarce, first of all that means we're not burning much or harvesting much to burn, because otherwise that's in our energy count.

Second, that also means we don't have the energy to do sweet fuckall TO the environment. You need a lot of energy to run a strip mine. You need even more to make a cleaner mine, but if you don't have energy, you can't even strip mine.

If I wanted to counter your argument the way you presented yours, I could simply post pictures of the oil sands, or the Bakkan Shale, or the Torngat mines, or Nawgee's Bay, or coal mines in Wyoming, but . . . those aren't even the major sources of pollution the way that industry, farming, and people multiplied by 300 million are. They look bad, but it's all concentrated in one place.

What I would suggest is hinted at in my first post. We have a miracle cure for 90% of our pollution already: STOP BEING GODDAMN AFRAID OF NUCLEAR. Moving to a mixture of nuclear backbone and renewable peak with efficient large scale storage solutions, and a reduction in wasteful habits would reduce western pollution greatly without bringing us down to the level of quality of life, of say, Hong Kong (81.96 GJ/person/yr.).

We would still have a lot of atmospheric pollution issues with cars, and other uses of gasoline and oil, from farms, with cows and other livestock contributing to methane, from many different sources.

But we would reduce a lot.

Introducing nuclear energy to developing nations would also allow them to grow to our standards of living while only using clean energy, and hopefully that would prevent energy mining, and allow people to grow their standards of living without relying on polluting forms of resource harvesting.