Should we even care about the environment anymore?

[Codeblue]

I saw something on another thread where someone mentioned that because of Peak Oil, caring about the environment is extremely optimistic.

I don't think that's true, but how do you all feel about it?

[FloridaPat]

1. Based on peak oil thesis, the skies should start cleaing up in 10 years

because there will be a lot less gas for cars. Population control won't be needed because we feed a lot of people with fertilizers that come from oil - so they will just starve to death. Since little to no effort has been made to find alternative energies, electricity will be scarce. Heating costs will sky rocket. Plastic is made from oil, so garbage will disappear. So basically, no oil will be good for the environment!

[malakai]

2. I imagine some will still care

but many will be more concerned with replacing oil in their daily lives. Billions of people will try to use wood for heating, cooking, etc. That alone could be devastating-clear cutting ruins watersheds and disrupts evapotranspiration.

People will also struggle for food. If it can't be farmed, then it will have to come from wildlife. Just to refresh memories, this is how bison and passenger pigeon populations went from 60 million and 5 billion, respectively, to a few hundred and zero. And that was with a much smaller population in America. Imagine the destruction with the current world population scrambling to subsist.

[cprise]

6. Fertilizers depend on Natural Gas

And hardly any of our electricity comes from oil.

Although heating-oil consumers will be hard hit, solar heating is very economical now. GM crops will suffer badly because they're reliant on large quantities of oil-based pesticide and herbicide, but we do not need this technology to be productive.

Having to park their butts on a bus will seem like the end of the world for the SUV-set, however.


I am very disappointed in the amount of misinformation circulating on DU about this subject. The attitude that peak oil is "good for the environment" is revolting and completely backwards: We have already created an environmental crisis by burning oil upto this point, so lets burn that amount of oil again on the downside of the peak and then the environment will be saved when we run out.

That's idiotic.

And if you whine and agitate for "alternative energies" for the wrong reasons, you'll get hackneyed, non-renewable alternatives like hydrogen-from-coal.

You want to go flappin your arms over 'the end of civilization' and create another ridiculous Y2K scare? Be my guest but you won't get the scientific community to agree that it a) will cause a cataclysm, or b) is as important as our impact on the environment.

[NNadir]

9. Fertilizers do not "depend" on natural gas.

They depend on hydrogen. It happens today that hydrogen is produced from natural gas, but there are many other ways to make hydrogen, including high temperature thermodecomposition of water, and, in the presence of cheap electricity, electrolysis. I note that when Haber invented his process, coal heated with water was the source of hydrogen. That natural gas is used and that it is cheap is simply a function of the fact that there is no carbon tax to reflect the risks of greenhouse gases.

(Fertilizer requires more than nitrogen and hydrogen. It is interesting to note that one of the largest industrial carbon dioxide fixing applications in the world is the manufacture of urea for fertilizer from carbon dioxide and ammonia. Industrial hydrogenation of carbon dioxide is well understood, and has been proposed as a perfectly accessible strategy for the production of motor fuels for instance. The subject is reviewed in "Carbon Dioxide, Chemical Environmental Issues," published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, 1995, Jan Paul and Claire Marie Prodier, Ed.)

As a functional idiot, I would like to report that I agree with the premise that peak oil is good for the environment. It forces the trial of alternate solutions. I have been pressing for many years for a huge tax on all fossil fuels to reflect on their environmental cost. I will go one step further and press for a huge tax on all forms of enterprise that generate pollutants, be they CO2, NOX or particulates.

Some of the most hackneyed "alternative energy" solutions are indeed combustion options, particularly those that insist on the impossibility of minor modifications to infrastructure. I would include many completely unrealistic assessments of what constitutes "renewable energy" as examples of hackneyed approaches to environmentally benign strategies. Some of the most polluted places on earth have been using "renewable" biomass strategies (wood burning) for millenia. Frankly many of these self same strategies have inordinately negative health effects, very similar to those observed with tobacco smokers and profound ecological effects as in deforestration and soil depletion.

The misinformation circulated on DU is not particularly worse than it is anywhere else. Ignorance has enormous power everywhere, left and right, up and down, past, present, and most assuredly the future. The term "Luddite" dates from the early 19th century when the depredations of the Industrial Revolution were under attack, as agrarian self-sufficiency was seen as the only hope for the future. Today we experience Ludditism in other forms. The basic source, as I see it, is that a subset of any human population is uncomfortable with change and new approaches to problems, particularly those they are technically incapable of understanding.

As I see it, the reality of DU in particular and the internet in general, is that dumb ideas get more exposure than they would otherwise. I'm quite sure that the existence of various kinds of myopia is not a recently developed phenomena I have long stopped wondering about how some of the nonsense I hear is taken seriously.

[cprise]

10. Peak Oil is supposed to take care of the CO2 problem

...because we aren't, according to the post I replied to. That implies we will double our CO2 emissions so far, before the pollution lets up. That is backwards and suicidal. We must start reducing our CO2 emissions now as a matter of avoiding long-term environmental destruction.

"...but there are many other ways to make hydrogen, including high temperature thermodecomposition of water, and, in the presence of cheap electricity, electrolysis..."

I recognize those two methods as being driven by nuclear energy, as sold by the Bush "hydrogen economy". Other energy sources can more directly be turned into hydrogen so it wouldn't make sense to use them to drive thermodecomposition and electrolysis to then make fertilizer.

A switch from NG is likely to drive up the price of fertilizer, negatively affecting our food supply. Allowing the price of transportation to rise instead will encourage demand for locally-grown food that is more energy efficient, while discouraging CO2 emissions from transportation in general.

Labeling someone a "Luddite" is often like calling liberals communists. Everyone should be uncomfortable with new (and existing) technologies being implemented at this scale, until their consequences and risks are well understood as acceptable. An eagerness to don any big, new technological scheme like fashion is as bad or worse than Luddism. What term shall we use for this opposite mindset?

[NNadir]

11. I didn't specifically call anyone as a Luddite.

I simply noted that Luddites exist.

Do you disagree?

As for what to name people who believe that economies of sometimes make scale make sense? Some people call them "economists." Other people call them "scientists." Some people call them "engineers." But if you prefer, we can call them simply "evil dunderheads without an imagination."

Thank you for enlightening me on the ideal processes for the production of fertilizers. I clearly know nothing of the process and I clearly understand nothing about hydrogen economics. I note for thousands of years, people practiced crop rotation to provide 100% of the fixed nitrogen in the human food chain. This produced sufficient levels of food, but now of course, we need far more agricultural production than ever, owing to the necessity of fueling Volkswagens. Today we've reached a point where up to 50% or more of the proteinaceous mass on the planet has nitrogen fixed in chemical plants rather than biological plants. If a scheme for using solar energy results in costs of production of hydrogen that corresponds to the solar: nuclear electrical ration of costs today (roughly 10:1) and fertilizer gets too expensive for anyone than the rich, we shall certainly be justified in reminding some people that they should not have been born in the first place.

One possible option to remove the necessity for peas and beans, which are like sequoias, not oil plants, and which used to be thrown away because they cannot be stored, would, of course, be to insert rhizomal genes into the roots of non-leguminous plants. This however is unacceptable. Although viruses have been inserting genes into cells for billions of years, so much so that huge number of the sequences of the human genome consists of material known to have originated in viral particles, it would be very, very different if this was done in a laboratory, very, very bad, the practice of a "evil dunderheads without an imagination."

"http://www.aegis.com/news/hhmi/1999/HH991101.html

http://www.nature.com/nsu/010215/010215-3.html (Scroll down.)

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/science/genome.shtml

Although as many as 15 naturally occurring nuclear reactors existed at Oklo in Gabon and ran for hundreds of thousands of years without leading to mass extinctions, it is nonetheless very, very, very, very bad when human beings do mimic this process because well, Ghandi wore homespun. By remaining absolutely committed to Ghandian principles, India, formerly the victim of famines, has begun to export wheat. (Scientific excellence was not involved.)

http://sdnp.delhi.nic.in/resources/wto/news/ho-29-3-01-wheetexport.html

http://www.curtin.edu.au/curtin/centre/waisrc/OKLO/Where/Where.html

http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/oklo.htm

Many of us can be perfectly comfortable being home spun, and if, perchance some people need to starve to death in the practice of our noble homespun economy, so be it. We won't have to use that terrible word, "corporate" at least. I have been made aware in the last several years that you cannot be liberal and still believe that 100% of the people in corporations are evil people bent on destroying the world for naked profit in service to Christ. All this stuff about war, and justice, and human rights - including material rights - health care, and the minimization of the need for war - don't count. Somewhat naively, I actually thought that liberalism involved silly concepts like the elimination of poverty (rather than a vow of poverty), the provisions of preservation and education, the extension of human vision and knowledge, the right to a secular approach to human ethics, a respect for human co-operativity on a large scale, provisions for health and the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and that (gasp) science could be a force for good. Clearly though, I am not a liberal at all. In fact, I'm a radical right wing asshole: I believe that large industrial organizations sometimes do things quite well. I am an "evil dunderhead without an imagination."

We had an economy of locally produced produce for several thousand years, and a population under a few hundred million world wide. Like I've been saying all along, we only need about 5 billion of us to kill ourselves. Although I, being much like George Bush, who gives lip service to things on which he actually takes no action, and encourages others to bear the burdens of his wealthy elite friends, decline to volunteer myself as a suicide. I am after all, "an evil dunderhead without an imagination."

I used to think that being reactionary involved the attempt to enforce the reversal of history's trends by fiat. Clearly I was wrong. I apologize for my thinking.

[cprise]

13. Perhaps you read too much into that

But many of those liberal qualities you cite strongly imply the application of the Precautionary Principle. This principle is incompatible with corporate motives under a system of extreme capitalism that is merging private production interests with the career interests of politicians and their appointees. Under this emerging system, competition is a temporary annoyance that gets in the way of "efficiency" and "freedom" (to conduct mergers and bring financial power to bear on government); Misinformation is rife in the face of mounting disagreement with world opinion. The concept of avoiding conflict of interests is becoming as extinct as it was in the Soviet Union.

Do I trust corporations as we know them to benefit the many with such concentrated power in the hands of the few? No! The urge is too great to leverage, pry, abuse, twist, lie, monopolize, conceal and other vile writhing --to effect every last bit of profit and the peace of mind that control brings to a small set of shareholders. They are LEGALLY BOUND to behave this way in the absence of regulation!

You seem to demand that my liberalism must translate into Libertarianism and that an open mind must result in one's brains falling out. All of that liberal sentiment you conjure up doesn't work correctly without public accountability; In fact, it has a way of oblitterating democracy and human kindness when people get fed up with the lies and mismanagement and deteriorating conditions and blame it on the Libertarian purveyors on "liberalism".

Repeat Treepig's religious blather about GE's soundness and nobility. Be my guest. It's pretty questionable how many people the both of you will manage to convince that occasional uptake of genes from foreign species over billions of years is equivalent to the aforementioned connivers inserting new genes into organisms in a matter of months in such a way as to maximize profit while polluting the environment with unwanted congenital 'features'... often without EPA or FDA testing.

"an evil dunderhead without an imagination."

Quoting yourself in protest to my position isn't adding much to the discussion.

[NNadir]

14. Oh

[jmcgowanjm]

16. I love that we're going to find out soon

Because w/out researching, (Whooa I'm wide open here!)
I think that the vast majority of fertilizer in US is made using
hydrocarbons.

For Asimov, science was, more than anything, a
rigidly formalized procedure for ensuring and satisfying
doubt. Echoing Karl Popper, he pointed out that "All this
is nothing more than the setting up of a system of
`natural selection' designed to winnow the fit from the
unfit in the realm of ideas, in a manner analogous to
the concept of Darwinian evolution. The process may
be painful and tedious, as evolution itself is; but in the
long run it gets results, as evolution itself does."22

[OneBlueSky]

3. humans cannot kill Mother Earth . . .

she'll be around long after we've managed to destroy ourselves . . . and probably do a lot better without the parasites . . .

[ramapo]

4. Yep...stupid, arrogant humans

People think there will no consequences from us fouling the world and destroying species upon species.

Mother Nature will have the last laugh, sooner or later. Remember the saying, "You can't fool Mother Nature". Well she doesn't take kindly to her world being screwed up by unappreciative humans. But she is very patient and over time will repair the damage (after we've been taken out of the equation).

[Viking12]

5. It ain't looking good

but I refuse to take a nihilistic attitude. Keep fighting the good fight and living a simple life and there is always hope. :) Corny? Maybe, but it beats the alternatives.

[NNadir]

7. This question should be rephrased.

Should we all just kill ourselves?

That's what it's coming down to in the 21st century, caring about the environment or committing mass suicide.

The seriousness of the matter does indeed border on the extreme. However, if we can educate ourselves and engage in some serious critical thinking, and decisively engage our best options, we can step gently away from the precipice.

At the end of the day, the matter of the environment comes down to the earth's carrying capacity for human beings, which right now is exceeded. It is very clear that, as in most such cases of exceeded carrying capacity, the capacity itself will now fall. I'm still optimistic that we can meet this challenge rationally, more or less.

I choose rational approaches over hysterical indifference every time.

[Codeblue]

8. Thanks everyone

[Codeblue]

12. The big reason I posted

is because will any of us even be around to care about the environment? With over 90% of the population of Earth expected to perish because of Peak Oil, the last thing people will be worried about is the environment for a while.

And will you or I even be alive then? We could all die. Then the environment wouldnt be very important to us would it?

That was what my question was meant to imply.

Oh and lastly, even if we implement measures to ensure the environment is healthy, won't the wars ensuing the oil crash basically undo everything anyway? If nukes and bio weapons are used, as they most surely would be, then radiation would be spread all across the world. That's not very healthy for the environment.

[Boomer]

15. It's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better

I try not to let my actions be governed by the bleakest view of the future -- there's always hope that the dire predictions will be incorrect, after all. And meanwhile, each day that we can keep some aspect of our environment protected is a day to be savored. That view is no different than trying to live each day to the fullest, even knowing that someday we're going to die.

But, that being said, I also realize that the impending upheavals from Peak Oil and global warming will probably lead to some incredibly harrowing times. Any concern over the enivronment will be swept away by the immediate demands of oil-dependent nations and their hungry populace. Eventually, starving people will probably strip the landscape of vegetation and eat any animal that moves.

The recovery from this scourge won't begin until the human race is sufficiently reduced in numbers to leave large tracts of land uninhabited. And it will probably take millions of years for the world to recover some measure of species diversity. Next time around, with so many valuable resources missing from the equation, there's the possibility that humans will stay in their ecological niche and not become the vermin we are today.