Predicting the End of the World
To be honest, there are a lot of things we can do to help the planet, prevent global warming, ensure sustainable living for generations to come. The only barrier is, we are still holding on to the benefits we ripped off from abusing the environment. I am not proposing that you stop driving your car today, and start biking. Unlike conventional ostrich’s logic, I am asking you to pull your head out of the sand and start seeing the big picture. There’s only one way pollution can stop, there is only one way green house gas level will stop increasing, there is only one way we will not deplete our petroleum resources. — That is if we cease to exist anymore.
Say if 50% of us are hard-core carnivores such that we managed to cut having to raise 50% of the livestock (cattle like cows, chicken, ducks, pigs….) as we do today if half of us are dead, we can cut the global GHG emission of CO2 by 4.5%, NO2 by 33.5%, CH4 (23 times more effective a warming gas than CO2) by 19.5% per year as there will be less animals to shit and fart less, which is, no joke, a significant contribution to the world’s GHG. Those are some pretty impressive reduction. But if we let this ridiculously unethical logic to go on, that will mean when we say we have a vision to live in a completely self sustaining world, we ultimately need to kill ourselves (if we want to be a role model, which I do not encourage) or kill others (which I must say I strongly disapprove this approach even more). Of course we can also all be vegetarians starting tomorrow but let’s not dwell on that thoughts.
If there is one thing I learnt from my chemical engineering education, is the second law of Thermodynamics. There are many versions out there, but essentially it tells us entropy will only increase. All of what we do have irreversible effects. Things do not go away with a swish of the magic wand. There’s not even magic wand invented yet. Yes, we invented wireless technology, we invented the ipod, we invented a whole bunch of impressive crap that we do not want to give up. In the end, you need to know that being smart, being high tech, being connected, or simply being who you are today, takes a whole lot of toll on your planet. But don’t take this as a reprimand. Take this as a reason why we are all fucked and we don’t care, because caring is such a fruitless exercise.
What’s wrong with watching the earth, and our civilization dies away without doing anything? Instead of wasting our time, debating how to prolong our degeneration, we can just sit here and spend the rest of our time to celebrate that as thinking individuals, that we have predicted our demise, unlike the Dinosaurs, and come to terms with the fact that we will be wipe out by living as happy as we can (and start planting time capsules). It does seem like a purely philosophical debate than a real scientific one. — Because if you think about, assuming that all the promises we hear about microbes-derived for raw materials and fuel is 100% foolproof, when we have finally identified the right strains of algae or genetically modified them to produced the type of raw materials we need, learnt how to cultivate them in large quantity enough for the entire planet, established the facilities, the supply chain, the preservation system, the inventory system, changed any restricting laws on biofuel practice, worked out any legal issue on import and exporting biofuels, worked out all the issues on market competition and any unforeseeable issue not-aforementioned, optimistically it will take at least 30 years to resolve all of this if we start now. By that time we have about 60 years left until the 2100 when scientists predicted the average world temperature to be increased by 1.8 to 4 grad, which would have reduced between 30 to 70% of food’s world supply, which in turn can be interpreted as a do-away of 30 to 70% of today’s populations, or on average each person on earth eat 30-70% less (meaning some of us will eat nothing at all, and essentially die). It then becomes a purely philosophical discussion whether it is inhuman to watch ourselves die, slower than most horrific genocides that happened in the past 50 years (1 million Rwanda Tutsis, or 20% of its population died in a time span of two months), but faster than the extinction of the Neanderthals (which took about 20,000 years).
For crime of human greed, racial pride, avenges or madness, you can set up laws to prevent it from happening again. For crime of environment, which all of us commit, as you are doing now, simply by keeping your computer on for a minute too long to read this article, which I have written in 20, under the however-efficient-but-will-never-be-energy-neutral-table-lamp, in a gas-heated room to keep my hands from shaking lest I have to consumer more food to keep my body heat stable enough to function by consuming food items that are cultivated, harvested, packed and transported to my house through another whole series of energy dominos — I am afraid no law can reverse it. — You , or your advocate, can argue for days on end about energy policies, but in the end, the building that houses these debates need electricity to heat, to light, to ventilate, to keep the escalator running, to keep digital information flowing in and out on the computers , security system, on the television. I am not saying we do not do any of that. I will even venture to say that we should do all of that to our hearts’ content, but please, let me say it again, please, do not get your hopes up. Environmentalists or the common environment-conscious people like you and I, we are in one of the many industries where “one gets no recognition for doing good but a whole lot of criticism for doing anything at all”. If we survive past this period, there is no guarantee that the future generations will thank you, thanks to the invention of the so-called “backtrack legislation” popularized by the Romans, by which we may be prosecuted, denounced (if we are dead), for trying to do good by promoting the use of current best-in-class non-energy-neutral technology of our days, while the energy-neutral ones are being invented at the moment (to keep things honest) through the use of conventional petroleum base resources at all touch points.
We are in a death trap.
Though all is said and done, I would still prefer to make a dying struggle as the world is doing now, waste more energy and emit more CO2 as that is the only one way to show that we are the specie that survived our hairy, primal counterparts, than to die doing nothing. At least life is less boring that way when we ignore hard, solid facts that we are facing the interglacial periods where Earth’s temperature goes up temporarily in the natural climate cycle that occurs approximately 100,000 years, which will inevitably relapse into Ice Age in about 18,000 years. You can content the scientific predictions made by researchers’ whom exhaustive studies I have quoted here, but we both know none of us are Atmospheric Scientists. We can only pass hypothetical judgment in here about our earth as there is still so much to know but so little is known.