“Environmental Organizations… that are having everybody buy wind plants and solar plants, andall this other nonsense.”
Nonsense
, he says! Building energy plants based on renewable resourceslike wind and solar energy, cutting down dependence on non-renewable resources like coal and oil,and in the process, reducing waste and pollution output; where is the “nonsense” in that? From aspendthrift’s point of view, the nonsense would be the cost of building these plants relative to theenergy output. But let’s face it; we’re in an “environmental age”. People would not just stand downwhile their planet is being “trashed” (as Annie said) just to increase profits. It might even be better for countries to switch to renewable energy than find more oil sources, since we’re running out of oil, after all.~~~ “Yes, we cut down trees and replant them to make life possible for most of the people onthis planet… Waters have been cleaner than they’ve ever been in the last couple decades. And yes, people who eat meat do it to increase their standard of living and also to make life possible for people on this planet.” ~~~He’s been saying that Annie’s words can be easily misinterpreted. He should have beenmore careful about his own words then. “We cut down trees
to make life possible for this planet
”?And again, “we eat meat also
to make life possible for this planet
”? He seems to have some sort of twisted perception that “life” refers only to “human life”. First, yes, we once needed, and for theless developed countries, still need, trees for wood to build our homes with. But just saying “we cutdown trees” takes for granted the sheer
magnitude
of the logging industry. He even added “andreplant them”, yet we can never replant enough to counterbalance the staggering amount of treescut down around the globe in a year. Just to share some facts,From 1990 to 2000, the net forest loss was 8.9 million hectares per year.
From 2000 to 2005, the net forest loss was 7.3 million hectares per year - an area the
size of Sierra Leone or Panama and equivalent to 200 km
2
per day.
3
Experts
estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every singleday due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year.
4
Though the net rate has decreased in recent years, 200 square kilometers
per day
is just waytoo much! It’s much too much indeed just to make “human life possible” in the demise of theinferior, unimportant, “non-human” species.~~~ “As resources become more and more scarce, the supply of those resources decreases, andthen the price of those resources increases. That makes people naturally not buy those resourcesand look for alternative resources that are cheaper. That is what’s going to happen once we startrunning out of resources, and nothing needs to be done about it.” ~~~ Now this is the right time for this argument to come onstage. It really doesn’t mean much inthe context of the earlier part. I understand his point, but I still think something’s wrong. WhenSOS said “we’re running out of resources”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we will completely runout of particular resources. In fact, I also believe we would never run out of any non-biologicalresource. But when we say that a certain resource has become so scarce that it becomes so difficultto extract, and in turn becomes too expensive, wouldn’t we consider it much the same as when it iscompletely depleted? Next is the part about “nothing needs to be done about it.” Bringing back the critic’s modelof an “unscratched Earth, with tons and tons of natural resources”, how are we ever going to extractthose? He said that resources are not resources until we know how to use them. Yes, we know theEarth’s core’s composition, and we know that we can use it. But in this case, wouldn’t thedefinition of “resources” include “extractability”, or whatever term it is to describe any possibilityof acquiring the said resources? The resources we are dealing with here are resources up to only acertain depth into the Earth’s crust. Why? Because it is only up to this point that we have know-how of resource extraction
with a net cost lower than the resource’s worth.
And because we’redealing with a finite area of feasible resource extraction, we may just one day “run out of
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