Pretending to save the planet

By RANDY ALCORN — April 28, 2009

Earth Day 2009 was observed with the usual carnival-like festivities, resolute speeches, and displays of ecologically responsible practices and products all directed at saving the planet’s complex interdependent ecosystem. In Santa Barbara, the community often cited as the nativity of environmentalism, the Earth Day festival included displays of solar panels, electric cars, scooters, and a “green built” house. There was even valet parking for bicycles.  A crowd of 15,000 people wandered among a hundred booths where earth-friendly information and products were available—everything recycled, organic, and biodegradable.

These annual displays of environmental concern, ecological consciousness, and green practices foster the hope of salvation from a future too bleak to contemplate. But, millions of people attending Earth Day celebrations—like Christians packing churches on Christmas Day—is no assurance of ecological salvation. Once-a-year devotion still leaves 364 days of sinful indulgences that are virtually unavoidable in the quotidian reality of modern life.

Avoiding the consumption of fossil fuels, paper products, water, chemicals, electronic gadgets, and processed food would require the asceticism of a monk, or the Luddite lifestyle of the Amish. How many people will renounce the comforts of modernity for ecological salvation?

While it is well and good to tread more lightly on the planet by being more efficient with natural resources, by practicing ecological hygiene, and by using energy alternatives that are less environmentally destructive, such ecologically conscientious behavior, even if practiced by every person on earth, would not be enough to prevent continued destructive changes to the global ecosystem.

Ecological salvation or destruction is ultimately a matter of numbers. There is a sobering truth in numbers that betrays all the false hopes of technological miracles, dedication to green practices, and feel-good rhetoric. The greatest cause of environmental degradation is human activity and humanity’s constant, growing need for natural resources. In the past 60 years the population of the planet has grown from 2 billion to over 6 billion. The magnitude of such continued multiplication portends inescapable consequences that no known green practices or technologies can overcome.

For example, decarbonizing the atmosphere to combat global warming, while simultaneously maintaining modern advanced lifestyles, requires replacing fossil fuels with non-carbon producing energy sources. However, an objective analysis made by Cambridge University physicist David McKay and published in his book “Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air” exposes the troubling realities of implementing that solution.

McKay calculated that the entire land mass of Great Britain would have to be covered with wind turbines in order to meet that nation’s energy needs. Devoting all of Great Britain’s agricultural land to bio-fuel production would provide only 12% of total energy needs. He arrived at similar conclusions for off-shore wind, tidal and wave energy, and for solar power. To generate enough solar energy to even modestly reduce fossil-fuel consumption would require country-sized solar arrays transmitting electric power from far distant sunny climates. And, McKay did not consider the enormous financial cost of such alternatives, only the laws of physics.

Meeting the energy demands of the nearly 61 million people who are crowded onto the relatively small land mass of Great Britain leaves nuclear power as the only carbonless alternative that might provide enough energy to supplant fossil fuels. But nuclear power has its own dangerous environmental negatives.

The unavoidable implication in McKay’s clinical study is that the only practical approach to avoiding the wrath of Mother Nature is to reduce the numbers of humans on the planet to ecologically sustainable levels. Serious solutions to environmental destruction must include global efforts to reverse population increases.

Yet, rarely is this reality included in the discussion of “saving the planet”. Of the one hundred plus booths at the Santa Barbara Earth Day festival, only one was devoted to the critical problem of over-population—the ultimate cause of ecological disaster. When it comes to this reality there seems to be a deliberate suspension of critical thinking that is nearly pandemic.  

Perhaps is was this same intellectual deficiency that led to the drowning deaths of 80 people some months ago in Malaysia when they crowded onto a ferryboat built to carry only 12 passengers. How else could such an obvious danger be ignored?

Even if that passenger boat ran on solar energy, was built with recycled materials, and was painted green it could still carry only 12 passengers. That same reality applies to earth and human population. Be as green as you like, but the planet and its resources are finite and can sustain only a finite number of passengers.  Overload it and everyone perishes—no matter how devotedly “green” they are.

When we ignore the growing numbers of human population, we are only pretending to save the planet. We may fool ourselves, but we cannot fool Mother Nature.

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: 4/28/2009

well then thank goodness for swine flu...

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love this article : 5/1/2009

true and sad, and very well put.

LC

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Right on Randy : 5/3/2009

Isaac Asimov, the prolific science fiction writer, wrote a very telling essay once about the danger of over population. Asimov was a biologist and scientist before he took to writing and shared his insight into the “limits” of our planet. In summary, the essay spells out that the biomass on the planet is sort of fixed by the amount of solar radiation that the surface of the planet receives (1200w/m2). Given that and a dozen or so assumptions by the author he notes that for every pound of human flesh increased, a pound of other living tissue must be sacrificed somewhere to keep the balance. He then loosely extrapolated what would have to happen if humans were to continue to grow in number and where our theoretic limit would be. He left to technology the inherent problems of such a scenario but it ended with humans occupying all land masses in giant dense cities where roof tops became algae farms (for food) and the population topped out about 35 billion. Ok, he definitely did not paint a rosy picture but made the point beautifully as Randy has with this excellent piece. We simply cannot ignore the limits of our natural environment. We can do all sorts of “transfers” which allow us to live beyond the local environment’s ability to support us but in the end we have what we have and that is it. When all the hydrocarbons have been mined (millions of years of stored solar energy), all the uranium has been cooked and all the solar energy scavenged (solar is really all renewable energy sources in one form or another) we are then left with Asimov’s conundrum. We either have to do what all other life does and die off or do as humans have always done and breakout.

AN50

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