But this post is the reason I wish more people read my blog. No one knows how important so much of this is... The fate of teh world depends on it.
Remember when I go to go see the interview by Miyazaki? Well, one of the things he said was that he found the end of society very interesting (hence stories like Nausicaa) and he'd like to see the end of this society. Hmm. I'm starting to agree with him.
This is the first semester that I've really taken classes for my environmental science major. Before now, I'd really only taken a couple. Now I have pretty much all environmental classes. I'm usually a very optimistic person, but my major is incredibly depressing at times...
Our society really kinda sucks in a heckuva lot of ways. It needs to change. If we'd started that change a couple decades ago, we wouldn't have had a problem. But we didn't. And now the possibility of a smooth transition is rapidly fading. Humans think that we can continue taking more: more energy, more money, more food, more water. We can't keep taking more forever.
When you think about fossil fuels, you think "eew! Dirty, polluting energy, and oil companies that are trying to take over the world!"
That's not the whole story.
For one of my classes, we read a book called "The Party's Over" by Heinberg. And we also watched a documentary called "The End of Suburbia" that talked about this too. Most of what I'm about to write came from those 2 sources.
OK. So there's this thing called Hubbert's Peak. The graph involved shows how many fossil fuels we've gotten out of the earth every year. So, for the past many years, advancing technology means that we've been able to get more and more fossil fuels. But recently, that amount hasn't increased by as much. In fact, it's going to be decreasing very soon. There aren't enough fossil fuels left in the ground for us to keep increasing how much we take. Hubbert's peak is the peak amount of mined fossil fuels. And once we hit the peak, the only place to go is down. Here's a graph showing what's happened and what will probably happen.
Notice the time period. We're hitting the peak right about now. Starting in the next few years, we're going to be mining less and less oil, coal, and natural gas. And soon enough, it will take more energy to remove those fossil fuels than we will actually get from burning them (Mining includes building all of the equipment involved - trucks, machinery, so on). Even coal, which we think to be abundant.
As mentioned earlier, we could have made a smooth transition to renewable fuels if we'd started a couple decades ago. But we didn't. We're running out of time. Unless we do something, this country that's entirely based off of everyone owning cars and driving miles to work and shop, is going to collapse on itself. The transition will be rocky enough even if we start changing NOW.
We ship in so much stuff from China. That shipping takes huge amounts of fossil fuels.
Wal-Mart and other huge chain companies take over the smaller local companies. These big chain stores ship their goods from far away too.
We'v replaced sooo many trains with big polluting trucks.
Our public transportation system is absolutely dreadful compared to that of other countries.
We grow food with pesticides made from fossil fuels.
All our computers rely on energy fro fossil fuels. What happen if the computer system crashes? What about all the data stored electronically?
There are a few million people on the planet who are only alive because of the existence of fossil fuels. What's gonna happen to our population when fossil fuels are gone?
Did you know that one of the presidents installed solar panels on the roof of the White House? And the next president promptly tore them down. What one president does to try to help the environment, the next president will undo completely.
Oil companies are trying to stop us from making this transition to save the freaking planet.
The US is WAAAY behind other countries in a lot of these issues.
There are already signs that we rely far too heavily on what fossil fuels give us. There have been massive blackouts in parts of the world. There was one in Canada not long ago. Most of society was completely disrupted for several days. That was a warning. A warning we ignored.
And when there's an election, you'll get a candidate that tells you all these problems that have to be fixed. And the other candidate tells you that everything' perfectly all right. Guess which candidate won? The one that tells people what they want to her.
No comments:
Post a Comment