Let's hope James Lovelock is wrong.

'Enjoy life while you can'

Climate science maverick James Lovelock believes catastrophe is
inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So
what would he do?

By Decca Aitkenhead

The Guardian, Saturday March 1 2008

In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look
like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who
speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful
technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James
Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the
environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will
seriously affect their business," he said.

"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's
almost exactly what's happened."

This article from The Independent may be of interest:

By David Usborne in New York
Saturday, 1 March 2008

They used to call it the land of the free, but a new report shows that
the United States is nowadays more a nation of the incarcerated. For
the first time in history, more than 1 per cent of the US adult
population is now behind bars. For minority populations, the rates of
imprisonment are much higher.

The report, published by the Pew Centre using data partly supplied by
the US Justice Department and Bureau of Prisons, acknowledges that the
increase in the incarceration rate coincides with steep declines in
violent crime, but questions whether the correlation between the two
phenomena is direct.

It says that nationwide there are now 1.6 million people in prisons,
translating into one in every 99.1 adults. It has never been so high
and can be traced back to a surge of prison sentences handed down
through the 1990s, although the rate has continued to trend upward
since 2000.