Either less drivers on the road or more accidents ... looks like a very powerful feedback loop for me. I think you wildly overstate the impact of a whale-oil s

Either less drivers on the road or more accidents ... looks like a very powerful feedback loop for me. I think you wildly overstate the impact of a whale-oil shortage on traffic. Regardless, unless the horrible maiming of a few thousand distracted drivers would somehow save the whales, we're not talking about a loop. Huh? who was driving automatic transmission cars? Humans were, of course, but demand for whale oil was a function of the number of automatic transmission cars on the road, not a function of the human population count. And the places with the strongest population growth at the time (China and India, I would guess) weren't the places buying up all the fancy new auto-transmission cars. If there were a strong relationship between the population and the demand for this commodity, then demand would have risen relatively smoothly with the population, rather than exploding with the rise of the American suburb. We'll see how we escape global warming. I don't know what will happen, but I'm confident quite a few animal species are going to be a lot more screwed than humanity as a whole will be. As long as there's a way to keep humans comfortable by strangling the ecosystem, some of us will do so.