Monday, July 8, 2013

Avoiding the Fossil Fuel Sinkhole

 With cheap and easy access to the fantastically concentrated forms of energy known as fossil fuels we have super-charged our economies, growing exponentially for the last two hundred years.  Fossil fuels have made possible global and national transportation,  national and international electrical grids,   industrial home heating, industrial mining, industrial agriculture, and the global mass production of goods and capital.  

There is a problem with this scenario however.
If global demand for fossil fuels increases exponentially, which is implied in the idea of continuous economic growth,  and  supply increases arithmetically, as is implied by the finite amount left, energy will start to cost society more and more.  

As more of society’s resources are devoted to extracting, refining, and distributing fossil fuels there will be much less resources left over for everything else.   Vital functions, such as health care, education,  and clean air and water, will be neglected as resources, infrastructure, manpower, and energy are  all sucked into the sinkhole of fracking and tar sands expansion.

At the same time degraded output in the form of particulates, greenhouse gases, polycyclic hydrocarbons, and other biotoxins are exponentially increasing in the atmosphere, and some toxins are becoming biologically concentrated in top predators and humans.

In order to extract ever more distant and degraded sources of fossil fuels, massive capital spending must ensue, capital spending that could have gone  into developing an infrastructure for extracting renewable energy.

Once spent on pipelines and bigger tar pits extraction facilities,  refineries and distribution networks, and in cleaning up and compensating for the pollution that is generated from all these sectors of the fossil fuel industry, there will be little left for development of renewables.  Time and resources will have been wasted on the dead end of fossil fuels, and the possibility of surviving on less energy-wasting and cleaner renewable sources will be denied to future generations.

      As I write these words Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister has set into motion a shrinking of science from the public sphere in Canada.  Environmental Science, Sociology, Biology, and Climate Science  are all being targeted  for major pruning in favour of the needs and wishes of the Fossil Fuel Companies.

 It is puzzling that at this time we would require less scientific knowledge about keeping air and water  clean, conserving the soil, tapping  renewable energy, and keeping biodiversity at healthy levels.  It is this body of knowledge which will be  the basis for our continued survival.  

There is a fork in the road ahead.  One road leads to extinction and the other road leads to our survival.  As a society we have to make this choice.  We can choose business as usual - a momentary abundance of power, dominance and Inequality  for one big last “send-off”,  or we can choose a life that ensures the continued existence of humanity for the foreseeable future. One precludes the other.  One is a  dead-end.  Toxic, non-renewable and non-sustaining.  While we still have the chance, let’s choose life.