How will the energy issue impact Earth?
Image Credit: theowl84
Another student asks the scientists..
Morgan: I’m Morgan and I’m from Britain. How do you think the energy issue will impact our planet?
Earth & Sky asked Arnulf Grubler, a Yale professor and an “energy futurist.” He creates future scenarios – which use scientific thinking to create stories about more efficient global energy use.
Arnulf Grubler: Energy is already impacting the planet. And if we don’t change our energy system, we will impact our planet even more in the future. We have too little clean energy for the poor of this planet, and we have too much energy from consumption of the rich, that pollute the environment.
Grubler said fossil fuel burning causes air pollution. Plus greenhouse gases from fossil fuels are said to be causing global climate change. Grubler said young people like Morgan can help.
Arnulf Grubler: They have to bear the consequences of our inaction, so they should beat their parents and say, do something about it! Say “I don’t need to be picked up after the soccer game in an SUV.” Because the parents will not get it, otherwise.
Grubler believes that when kids take action, it offers a unique opportunity to rescue the environmental future.
Our thanks to the Monsanto Fund, bridging the gap between people and their resources.
Limits to greed…………….
A remarkable amount of mental energy has been exerted by many ‘experts’ (and wealth distributed to them by their benefactors) over much of my lifetime in a concerted effort to widely share and consensually validate the specious idea that there is no such thing, of all things, as the most obvious of things……..limits to growth in a finite world. Most recently, Schellnhuber in Germany, Rapley in England, Rees in Canada, Hansen in the USA, McMichael and Butler in Australia…….the list goes on and on……..good scientists all, have been noting over and over again that the human species is approaching ecological limits evidently, obviously imposed by the biophysical reality of the planetary home we are blessed to inhabit. To put it another way, rampant overproduction, rapacious overconsumption and unregulated overpopulation activities by the human species now overspreading the surface of Earth will lead to an ecological “tipping point” of some, perhaps unimaginable sort.
The question seems to have been, Which biophysical limit will be exceeded first? Precisely what will it mean for the human species to overreach and by so doing “give rise to” or “produce” some sort of ecological tipping point? What will happen then? What kind of global wreckage might ensue? What will that moment in space-time look like? Many scientists seem to have been thinking that the unbridled overgrowth activities of the human species would literally and eventually overwhelm the Earth and its environs because the family of humanity has chosen to recklessly ignore the reality of human species limits and Earth’s biophysical limitations. For example, recall the ruthless derision of the great work of the Club of Rome regarding ecological limitations to the growth of absolute global human population numbers.
Even so, despite all the attention, the warnings and the good scientific evidence, an ecological tipping point may not be the source of the greatest, most imminent challenge to human wellbeing in these early years of Century XXI. The most pressing, most forbidding threat to human wellbeing may not be ecological in its nature.
For a long time, I have been haunted by the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) that are emblazoned in a sonnet about Ozymandias.
” I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away. ” —Schelley
What was the “colossal wreck” this “king of kings” observed and how had it happened? What caused the destruction of the world?
The calamity Ozymandias witnessed may not have been more or less than the incredible consequences of human greed having exceeded limits to its growth. That is to say, the adamant and relentless greediness of kings and self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe precipitated the gigantic, distinctly human-driven catastrophe to which The King of kings makes reference.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Everyone talks about energy, but no one wants to make a more effieient internal combustion engine. Right now about 80% of the energy in gasoline goes out the tailpipe!
your article is so interesting and keep up the good work!!