Where just a few years earlier, Malthusians had demanded limits on energy consumption by claiming fossil fuels were scarce, now they demanded limits by claiming the atmosphere was scarce. “It’s not that we’re running out of stuff,” explained McKibben in 1998; “what we’re running out of are what the scientists call ‘sinks.’ Places to put the by-products of our large appetites. Not garbage dumps—we could go on using Pampers till the end of time and still have empty space left to toss them away. But the atmospheric equivalent of garbage dumps.”109
