Getting Blocked On Crooks And Liars

Hehe, I just got my IP blocked on Crooks And Liars for making fun of trolls. I guess my sarcasm wasn't obvious enough.

Anyhooo....

Check out this article there on GreenPeace.

Or just watch the video here:


It is a great ad, except as the Great ArchDruid reminds us, it is way late.

For one thing, 90% of the large fish in the oceans are gone. And if we don't catch the last 10%, how are we going to feed all of the new babies?

Our topsoil is blowing away. Our petroleum production has peaked and is in decline. With diminishing fossil fuels, comes a diminishing food supply.

We are standing on the edge of a population crash.

Mr. Greer argues, still people want to believe that there is still time to turn this around, that it isn't too late. But this is an argument I've heard all of my life. And the 11th hour has come and gone. No savior has stepped forward with a plan that allows infinite growth on a finite planet. And none is coming. It is impossible to expand our population and consumption indefinitely on a planet with a finite energy input. Just as it is impossible to expand spending forever on a fixed income.

Our planet has been endowed with a limited energy input for as long as it has been here. Hundreds of millions of years of vegetable growth has been inefficiently fossilized to produce coal, oil and gas. At the rate of one million years of fossilization, per one year of consumption, we've burned more than halfway through our endowment. An every year, we try to burn it faster.

Now we'll likely burn through what is left in half the time it took to burn the first half. In fifty years, we'll probably down to near zero. In theory, a person of my age could live long enough to see that happen. So what I'm discussing isn't for me, some sort of rhetorical exercise. If I'm lucky, I can expect to live through a decade or two of this mess. My youngest relatives, will grow up in a worsening environment. They'll see the food quality and quantity continue to decline.

And don't think that this Chinese scare on food is the end. It is just the beginning. As food becomes more expensive to produce, food manufacturers will be pressured to keep sales volumes up. They will have to find alternative things to put in food to bulk it up.

Back when I was in grade school in the 1970s, we learned about all of this stuff that is happening now. We learned about oil running out, fish running low, pollution being spread everywhere, water supplies declining... We had kids doing what this kid is doing. Except we did it with poster board and school displays. Our parents helped. And still, time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin, into the future (apologies to Steve Miller)...

Malthus explained it all. He was the first to make sense of all of this. If we were a rational species, we would've heeded his call and cut back on birthing babies so quickly. After all, a smaller population consumes less food and produces less pollution. Ideally, our population from the 1930s would've been the top end. Had that occurred, we could've continued our increasing technological lifestyle for at least another hundreds of years without worrying over Peak Oil or Peak Energy.

Even in the 1970s, when the "Limits to Growth" report was published, there was still time to push back the clock. Curtailing population and consumption growth might have helped to turn this around. I have some doubts, but I think if there is a time to pick last chances, that was probably it.

Now it is after midnight, and we're still acting like it is the 11th hour.

As others keep suggesting. Take this time to find ways to live with less, so that when you have no choices left, you'll already be comfortable with the new way.

Learn some hand skills. Start a garden. Learn an acoustic instrument.

I agree with folks that say we can cut 20% of our energy usage without losing much of our quality of life. But I expect to see a 95% cut in my lifetime. How will I survive that? I'm not sure I will, but I'm not going out without trying.