Little Green People; The Next Generation; A Planet's Distress Call

BOOK RECOMMENDATION:

Environmental Economics & Indicators: The Little Green Data Book,
published by The World Bank.
ISBN: 9780821369678
This is a book of figures that comes out every year and provides economic, political, and environmental data upon which analysts and common citizens can draw conclusions. In it, you can find figures on all things relating to economics and the environment. It seems that professionals in many differing fields are beginning to clue in to the data presented in this book and use it in their own reports. This year, carbon dioxide emissions stemming mainly from the combustion of fossil fuels and the manufacture of cement stood out. This was true especially for industrialized countries and for quickly developing economies like China and India. To find this data is like looking for a needle in a haystack, though. The book has a section on fossil fuel use by region of the world. That particular report found that emissions have been growing faster in countries with lower GDPs, with a higher concentration of them occurring in Eastern and South Eastern Asia. The United States and Japan show very high increases in CO2 emissions also, thus throwing the environmental Kuznet’s curve into a tailspin. Rich countries, as a group, are on track to miss their 2012 Kyoto commitments. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, emissions have decreased due to the recent recession there. There is so much data in a book like this.

The writing is on the wall; it could not be any more clear, yet the waste and pollution from our global society keeps piling up. Solid waste can now be considered a renewable resource in that it is a reliable feedstock for the foreseeable future; the marine ecosystem is on the verge of collapse from overfishing and CO2 poisoning; the world’s glaciers are melting and the polar ice caps are breaking apart; an unprecedented variety of natural disasters seems like a perennial occurrence; we are in the midst of an accelerating mass extinction event. Every ecosystem in every corner of the globe is using all of its faculties to communicate to the human race the need for them to change their economic policies and their consumptive ways.

The fact that solid waste is a renewable resource is a comically ironic concept, but when you realize that solid waste also has the potential to be converted into electricity through waste-to-energy processes, the potential for turning trash into cash becomes a realistic scenario. After landfills are equipped with waste-to-energy facilities, success in the world’s waste industry depends upon generating waste. There are some hypotheses out there that say if we develop waste-to-energy, theoretically, conservation practices will decrease. Reality, most probably, will be more in line with what we are doing today.

In terms of air pollution from burning coal to generate electricity, America and China are the worst. Coal is not only dirty to burn, but it is also dirty to get. Mining practices surrounding extracting coal devastate the environment where it is located. The idea of sloughing off hilltops into valleys below so as to get at the sedimentary layers of coal located below the surface, though, seems less destructive than burning it. The pollution from burning it is causing the largest ecosystem on the planet, the ocean, to begin to show sign of distress. Now, coal advocates want to bury the pollution underground; didn’t that stuff poison the air and the ocean? Wouldn’t it poison the soil and the ground water?

Speaking of the land, agriculture has been on the rise since the dawn of civilization. The problem we are encountering today is a result from an excessive prolonged use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. By spreading these substances across the planet, we are killing the very life that supports us. As rainwater washes the farmland, chemical fertilizers and pesticides enter into the natural drainage systems. The toxins are carried and concentrated in to their resting places, the river deltas of the world. Here, they kill off plants and animals with no discrimination.

Some oil executives are content to run all of the oil reserves on the planet dry even though air pollution from burning it causes health problems and is at least partly responsible for melting glaciers and melting ice caps. For the time being, oil executives have their attention directed at price, and environmental regulations seem to have fallen by the wayside. Drill, drill, drill is the slogan.

In the present, oil pays out handsome consistent multiple billion dollar quarterly profits. Pressure to drill for more oil seems to generating along a crescendo curve. In the meantime, the environmental future of the planet gets dimmer for the younger generations like a function heading toward zero. The younger generations are generally more hopeful and, therefore, more innovative. The older generations are better funded.

The assault on the environment by the oil industry stands out in many ways, most prominently in regards to their infringement upon basic human rights of people all over the globe. The effects of the oil industry’s disregard for an individual’s basic right to clean air, clean oceans, and a federal land system that has room for wilderness. The current energy policy that the United States employs is threatening the entire global population for several succeeding future generations. Some day, these people should be held responsible for their crimes against humanity.

If an individual conducted the same actions as the coal, fertilizer, or oil industry has as a whole over the duration of their history, they would most likely be in jail, or more probably, if they were convicted of some of the more grotesque offences, put to death. Oil spills alter the ecosystem where they occur, burning coal poisons the air and causes respiratory disease and slower cognition in people who live near the power plants, nuclear waste is radioactive and in cases where it is not has to be stored underground, and chemical fertilizers are poisoning our fresh water sources like never before creating dead zones at the mouths of most major rivers. An individual who would poison the water, air, or land on a similar scale to what fossil fuel firms have would be considered a societal deviant and would be dealt with harshly, more in line with criminal prosecution. Why then do we allow our corporate executives to conduct business in ways contrary to what we allow individuals? Why would we permit the destruction of our most valuable resource for successive generations?

In the case of spills, oil executives have asserted their corporate rights, and since they have always been protected from personal liability to an extant, and their responsibilities have been minimal in terms of dollar amounts spent on environmental protection and clean-up, the general public will continue to suffer downgrades in their quality of life while fossil fuel, and perhaps nuclear supporters become more wealthy.

It is easy to find a picture of an oil spill from every corner of the globe. It is just as easy to look up the effects of mining for coal and of burning it. Likewise, the public can observe the effects of fertilizers in delta regions and those of excessive levels of CO2 in the world’s oceans. Individually, some of these images can look worse than others, but what hurts all of the life on earth is the accumulative nature of our actions. All of the spills put together over time, all of the fertilizers we spray off of the world’s farmland, all of the coal that we burn, these have a substantially negative effect on living creatures and plants on earth. It will take a long time for our ecosystems to begin to recover, if that is something that we begin working toward.

It is becoming obvious to the average global citizen that the planet is entering a state of distress. What we do about that is up to us. Energy service providers will make the switch to renewable energy sources only if the public demands and ultimately funds the expensive cross-over of technology and operating systems. In the meantime, all life on earth continues to cry out, hoping that we hear the desperation in its voice. It is we, the little green people who are the ones that ultimately will hear this call; the call of a new generation of optimists who take over the reigns of politics and economics and drive this world toward sustainability is this latest phase of our global civilization’s last best chance for survival.

Business and making money was invented as a way to make one’s life better over the long-term. In today’s world where money is made at the expense of our basic resources, water/air/land, it seems as though something has gone horribly wrong with the design of our economic system. How can life be better in a world where everything is polluted and toxic, or where only the rich can afford a clean environment? How can this possibly be better over the long-term?

We now live in a world of serious environmental consequences thrust upon us by the governments and businesses of the world over the entire course of history. Exploiting people and the environment in pursuit of economic profits has been a part of every society, but not until the late twentieth-century, did global population reach a tipping point. The accumulative effects of the planet’s growing global population together with the spread of capitalist economic principles has had a predominantly negative impact on the environment in virtually every square mile on the earth. Our species is in danger of tipping the natural ecosystems of world out of balance. What shall we do then…try to survive? How is that better in the long-term? Shouldn’t our money be used to fund a world that is worth living in?

There are many choices to make in the next few decades. Human civilization has evolved over the course of the last 10,000 years or so and will continue to do so after us. This global society we have created can only survive through sustainable practices. There are just too many people and too much waste that will be produced if we do not close our manufacturing loops so that they approach the point where they are producing zero waste…zero waste is sustainable!

Many civilizations have come and gone over the course of human history, and likewise, this one too will fade into dust. We are, however, being offered an opportunity to give our economic engine an upgrade and continue running this classic for another hundred years or so. Hopefully, we will seize the opportunity we are being offered; life ‘as we know it’ depends on it.

_______________________web recommendation
World Population Awareness
www.overpopulation.org
The goal of this website is to preserve the environment and its natural resources for the benefit of people, families, and future generations. Unfortunately, with exploding population growth, excessive consumption is on the rise. The environment is in trouble and the sustainability of the people of our planet is threatened. The solutions seem simple, empower families to have fewer children, have people develop simpler lifestyles, tax pollution of any kind, and set up government programs to enable these things to happen. Overpopulation is a serious problem getting worse every year. If we continue at the current rate, population will double to over 11 billion by 2035. Overpopulation is the root of most environmental and many economic issues including timber harvesting, loss of arable land, ocean depletion, food shortages, water shortages, air pollution, water pollution, flooding, plant and animal habitat loss, global warming and immigration. We are the most powerful force on the planet.