A good primer on the fables we tell ourselves about solving climate change. The problem is not that we dont use enough renewable energy, or that our cars are too inefficient, or that we dont tax carbon. The problem is that we seem to believe that we have the god-given right to expropriate the suns energy and the planets finite stores of energy for ourselves, even at the expense of all other life on this planet. Excerpt Because we have come to take the power and energy-concentration of fossil fuels for granted, and see our current lifestyle as normal, it is easy to ignore the way the average citizens of industrialized societies have an unprecedented amount of energy at their disposal. Consider this for a moment: a single $3 gallon of gasoline provides the equivalent of about 80 days of hard manual labor. Fill up your 15 gallon gas tank in your car, and you’ve just bought the same amount of energy that would take over three years of unremitting manual labor to reproduce. Americans use more energy in a month than most of our great-grandparents used during their whole lifetime. We live at a level, today, that in previous days could have only been supported by about 150 slaves for every American—though even that understates it, because we are at the same time beneficiaries of a societal infrastructure that is also only possible to create if we have seemingly limitless quantities of lightweight, relatively stable, easily transportable, and extremely inexpensive ready-to-burn fuel like oil or coal.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:52:39 +0000