Category: Peak Stuff

How do we dig our way out of this one?

Treehugger posted a story saying that all is lost, using the sales stats of the Ford F series trucks as an argument…and am admittedly compelling one, as they sell one every 4.5 seconds! It just adds to a similar train of thought in my life lately though..how do we dig ourselves out of this pit we’ve created for ourselves…how do we transition to a sustainable society? The Global Footprint Network attempts to calculate the difference between how much natural resources we use, and how fast nature can replenish that. If you hadn’t figured it out already, that date falls on August 2nd this year, and has been getting worse every year (follow this link for more on that). We’re on a dead-end path here, robbing from future generations so we may live lives of luxury.

So what’s the solution? There’s is insufficient public willpower to effect change, sadly. Change of the magnitude needed will only happen if there is a sizable natural disaster of global proportions…otherwise these days will go down in history as the peak of this civilization and perhaps even of this species. If anyone is left to record this history, that is. This frustrates me…I feel we have the technology and the ability to change the course we’re on…but how to reach people, that’s the challenge…

Too Many People, Too Little Water (peak water)

The news of droughts in the West this year has surely escaped none living in the US…and with global warming forecast to increase severity of droughts, and population continuing to grow, we need to take a long, hard look at water usage in this country.  The title of the video below, ‘The Drying of America: Too Many People, Too Little Water’ sums it up extremely well.  So what can the average citizen do?  Well, you can start with reducing household water consumption – replace lawns with xeriscaping and take shorter showers to begin with.  That will be a great start…though water consumption of food production will need to be improved, as well as energy production.  For example, powering a 60W incandescent lightbulb for a year requires 3,000-6,300 gallons of water (source).  Things like fracking put additional strains on an already short water supply.  So in summary…things are looking bleak, and you can expect this issue to only get worse in coming years.  Don’t be an idiot and plant a new grass lawn!

Peak Stuff

Until we learn to live more sustainable lifestyles, we’re going to be faced with more ‘peak stuff’, where demand for a particular resource exceeds supply.  Fast Company has a nice article on this subject if you want to read more.  One example is clean water.  More people equals greater demand, but resources are diminishing as glaciers melt and some aquifers are depleted.  Food is another one, though the system is so wasteful (in this country at least) that I’m optimistic we can make some big improvements there.  Or at the least, stop burning food (turning corn into ethanol to power cars).

Where is Peak Oil?

The idea of Peak Oil, where demand exceeds supply, threatened us for a long time yet continual advances in oil extraction techniques keeps pushing that date farther and farther out, as explained in a recent article over at FastCompany (worth reading if you’re into this stuff!).  Instead, we’re facing a new dilemma…we’ve gotten so good at extracting fossil fuels from the ground, that we now face the grim reality of the environmental impact of consuming the known and accessible fossil fuel reserves.  If we want to stay below the internationally-agreed upon 2°C of global warming, we can dump about 565 gigatons more CO2 into the atmosphere.  The problem is that current fossil fuel reserves, ignoring any future discoveries, contain about 2,795 gigatons of CO2 (source).  Yeah.  Not good.  Either fossil fuels need to get so expensive that people stop using them, or we’re going to really mess up this planet.

Unsustainable shark fishing

The BBC reports that globally, around 100 million sharks are being killed each year.  This is a mind-boggling number and anyone who thinks we can deplete the numbers of an apex predator at that rate without consequences is a fool.  I’m scared of what the future brings to our society when we are so blatantly altering the ecosystem that future generations will depend upon, without being able to really understand what these changes will actually mean.  It’s stupid and selfish.

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