Thursday, May 17, 2007

We have met Big Foot(print) and he is us

In 1992, Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees developed the concept of the "ecological footprint" that humans have, meaning the amount of land that is used for all economic consumption per person. For instance, we now use at least 25% more of the Earth's sustainable resources than exist on Earth. In fact, it would take 5 Earths to allow the entire human population to live as the U.S. lives; if China lived as the U.S. lives, they would have to use the resources of the entire planet. In other words, the Earth could only sustain something over one billion people at the U.S. lifestyle, the rest would have to...er...well, it's obviously not a good situation.

Two recent articles, one by Inter press service news agency concentrating on the work of Rees and Brian Czech, president of the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, a Washington, DC economic think tank, and one a guest article by Professor Francois Cellier at TheOilDrum.com, focus on the footprint problem. As Cellier points out, the first major work done in this area was global modelling by the "Limits to Growth" authors such as Dennis Meadows. The most recent "Limits of Growth" study, recently revised to 2004, is one of the great books of the last few decades. It shows as well as anyone else the sheer folly of using up all of our resources the way we have been doing it. One of the most depressing aspects of the models, which Cellier points out, is that the sooner the resources run out, the better, because the longer the "party" of using resources like there is no tomorrow keeps rolling, the more people are around to eat shit when it all runs out...of course, they were much more articulate than that.

Anyway, the main point of this blog/rant is this: human civilization will not end if we do not drive cars. Human civilization was doing OK until the 1920s -- Ok, not great, considering things like WWI and imperialism -- but at least in the U.S., we were not busy, if you will excuse the pun, driving toward the cliff, because cars were basically a luxury. Unless you were a farmer you lived near enough to a town or city center that, at worst, you had to take a streetcar to go shopping, go to work, etc. By the end of the 1950s, and through to now, that all changed, and if most Americans all of a sudden lost their cars, they might die of starvation.

Without oil, there are no cars, and without cars, there is no suburbia. Therefore, without oil, there is no suburbia. QED. However, suburbia does not equal civilization. Therefore, without suburbia, civilization does not come to an end, QED.

I therefore request that, when these fine scholars (and there are many others) try to figure out what a world without fossil fuels looks like, they simply eliminate, not only the oil used for cars, but also all the materials that go into cars, highways, parking lots, refineries, tankers, etc., etc., as well as the medical expense of, in the U.S., 40,000 + deaths and millions of injuries a year, and figure they could use the metal from the cars and the materials from the suburban homes and build intra- and interurban rail systems and comfortable apartment complexes (which would include stores and offices) within walking distance of said rail systems, and then figure out what the footprint would be, and would billions really have to die so that we can keep using cars? Not that I'm accusing said scholars of implying that, we might still completely screw the pooch, as they say.

For instance, Cellier mentions that the Swiss have a world-class public transit system, but most Swiss still own cars. That's nice. What if they didn't have cars? Apparently there is a functioning organization in Switzerland that is attempting to decrease energy usage there radically. Apparently they can't figure out how to do it, but it is unclear whether they have considered a car-free country.

The one place that Cellier calculates has actually figured out how to live sustainably is, believe it or not, Cuba. Cuba was cut off from its oil addiction quite brutally one day when the U.S.S.R., which had supplied all of Cuba's oil, collapsed. They are doing decently, and if memory serves me, hardly anyone drives a car. And the country did not collapse!

However, cars are only about half the problem of fossil fuel use, the other major problem being electricity generation, driven mostly by coal, some by natural gas, some by nuclear, less by hydropower, and teensy weensy bit by solar and wind. Solar and wind are maybe a few to many cents more expensive by kilowatt hour. That's all??!! We're torching the planet and stinking it up and making it radioactive over a few cents per kilowatt hour, when an honest accounting of the health and other effects of coal would probably make it about twice as expensive as solar and wind right now?

So here's another assumption we could try in the models: Say the governments of the world decided to use a particular percentage of the economic activity and resources of their respective countries to put solar energy systems on every conceivable building, to put up concentrating solar power systems in every desert, wind farms on every windy plateau and mountain, rebuild their energy grids to handle all this stuff, build storage systems to try to smooth out fluctuations in wind and sun, so that at the end of a certain number of years, solar and wind power would be much cheaper than coal, nukes, even hydropower (which is often quite harmful), and then, the market could make its grand statement: whaddaya know, coal and nuke companies should go bankrupt, renewables are cheaper! (after all, the market has no memory of how it got to where it is now). And our footprints would be teeny, and people could still go around pounding their chests about the miracle of markets.

We would probably free up so much material that we could get by recycling industrial materials for quite a while without even mining, and if we actually put permaculture/sustainable agricultural farming around and within the walkable towns and cities, footprint shmootprint, I wouldn't have to worry about my grandchildren surviving and the food would taste better!

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