||| FROM ELISABETH ROBSON |||
Today I received in my inbox an email from OPALCO extolling an affordable energy future powered by renewables and carried by electric vehicles. We get pictures of solar panels and an electric vehicle happy deal. They claim in this email that their vision of the future will help us “shift away from fossil fuels.” Let’s take a closer look at the vision of our future OPALCO is promoting, and see how green, clean, and fossil fuel-free it really is.
The email is topped with a photo of the community solar installation on Decatur Island. OPALCO is supporting and promoting the solar industry, which means supporting the mining, refining, and global supply chain industries. All modern technologies are based on non-renewable fossil fuels, and other non-renewable materials that are extracted from the Earth. Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is no exception. Each step in the production of solar PV requires fossil fuels — mining the quartz from which silicon is refined; mining the metallurgical coal required to purify silicon during the smelting process; mining the bauxite, copper, lead, indium, zinc, gold, and silver all required to make various components of solar panels, inverters, and grid lines; cutting and shredding the hardwood trees required for refining silicon; powering the energy-intensive process required to refine 99.99% pure polysilicon; making the concrete and aluminum required to frame and mount the panels; clearing and bulldozing the land for industrial solar farms; and of course, powering the global shipping industry required to transport all these materials required to build solar panels, usually in container ships and trucks powered by fossil fuels. Every step in solar PV requires a continuous input of fossil fuels. This is not fossil fuel-reducing technology by any stretch of the imagination.
They are supporting and promoting the electric vehicle (EV) industry, which, like solar PV, requires a huge global supply chain of materials mined, refined, and transported using fossil fuels. And, like solar PV, EVs require batteries. Lots and lots of batteries. For solar, the batteries are used to store energy so that power can be available on the grid when the sun doesn’t shine. For cars, the batteries provide the power to move the car, and currently make up 50% of the cost of an EV. Leaving aside the “car” part of an EV, which has all the same issues as an internal combustion engine (ICE) car (meaning cars require materials and roads (made from fossil fuels!), and enable unsustainable lifestyles, etc.), let’s focus on the batteries. EV car batteries are primarily Lithium Ion (Li) batteries, and a core component of those batteries is lithium (in the form of high grade battery-quality lithium carbonate).
Because I’ve been working recently to fight a massive proposed lithium mine in Northern Nevada, I have statistics at hand about what such a mine entails. For the Thacker Pass Lithium mine, a 2 mile by 1.5 mile pit, 400 feet deep, will be blasted into the side of a mountain, in an area now considered one of the last best sage-grouse habitats left in the United States. Giant piles of waste rock and toxic tailings will take up a further few thousand acres of ground in a wild and stunningly beautiful place that currently supports 300 or more species including the threatened pgymy rabbit, golden eagles, old-growth sagebrush, and wildflowers galore. A sulfuric acid refinery will be built on site, to which 100-200 truckloads a day of molten sulphur — a by-product from oil-refineries — will be trucked through a small community, right next to the community school. The mine will use 1.7 billion gallons of water annually from an already over-allocated aquifer in the driest state in the nation, and leach arsenic and other toxins into the ground, in an area where the endangered Lahontan cutthroat trout still, for now, thrives. And, overall, the mine will produce 152,713 tons of CO2 each year, equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of a small city. “Fossil fuel-free”? I think not.
Along with lithium, batteries need metals like graphite, nickel, manganese, copper, and cobalt. All of these materials are mined from the ground using some of the dirtiest, most polluting extraction processes known to humanity, processes that destroy habitat and human health wherever they are found. Mines, once dug and built, require “perpetual remediation” as Joan Kuyek calls it in her book Unearthing Justice, meaning all mines require pollution remediation forever. Forever. Let that sink in. Cobalt, for now, comes primarily from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which, by some reports, uses up to 40,000 child slaves for cobalt mining. Because the DRC cobalt supply is so limited and so disturbing, there are many companies looking to mine cobalt from the sea bed. This will, of course, utterly destroy the sea bed where mining occurs. We don’t know how far this destruction will spread, or how long this destruction will last because we haven’t, until now, had the technology to mine materials from the sea bed at scale. Most scientists who have looked at the prospect of mining the ocean floor have recoiled in horror at the possible implications for marine life. Fortunately, WA state has recently passed a law banning seabed mining in state waters, but of course that doesn’t prevent seabed mining just outside the too-small state jurisdiction area offshore. Nor does it prevent seabed mining elsewhere, so that, just like most of the mining required to supply the solar and EVs OPALCO champions, it is out of sight, and out of mind for most WA residents.
Of course, for EVs to generate no CO2 when they are driven, requires that what powers EV batteries generates no CO2. So, implicitly, OPALCO continues to support the many dams that have killed WA state rivers, from the Skagit to the Snake to the Columbia, since most of our county electric power comes from those dams. We all know by now the consequences of damming a river, including slow moving over-heated water that kills fish, sediment buildup behind dams that damages river life below and destroys estuaries, and that dams block fish passage, and decimate wild fish populations. Let’s not forget that dams can release up to three and a half times as much greenhouse gases per unit of energy as is released by burning oil, in the form of methane, a greenhouse gas with 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over two decades.
Despite my repeated pleas, OPALCO has yet to consider or even discuss a county-wide energy reduction plan as the primary and most important strategy to reduce our impact on ecosystems, landscapes, rivers, natural communities, and the climate. We know that the top 10% wealthiest people in the developed world contribute more than 50% of the damage on the natural world, and yet no one seems willing to discuss how reckless it is for SJC to allow the people of this county, which include some of the wealthiest of the wealthy, to continue to build houses that require massive amounts of energy, and for OPALCO to plan for even more growth based on that projected energy demand. We citizens of San Juan County are the ones creating the demand that OPALCO has to plan for. So ultimately it is on our shoulders to reduce that demand so that we use far less energy, and in the process, do far less damage to the ecosystems we cannot live without.
Greenwashing has become a key component of big business, because industry has seen the writing on the wall for fossil fuels. These companies know that if they want to sell their “green” products, they must make sure consumers of these products never find out that underneath that green veneer, it’s fossil fuels, dirty extraction, and Earth destruction all the way down. Public utilities like OPALCO fall prey to the greenwashing because they are mandated to provide the power that citizens demand.
When are we going to get real about cutting back; about environmental justice for all of nature and for people and natural communities who are displaced by mines elsewhere; about stopping the greenwashing, and starting to take seriously the crises we face? That time must be now, because we have limited options as humanity continues to grow by leaps and bounds every year in consumption and demand, further decimating the natural communities on which we depend for life. We will soon find out the Earth is finite, and an infinite extraction, infinite growth plan on Planet Earth is a suicide mission.
Thanks, Elizabeth, for helping point out that ‘making things’ (buildings, cars – even EV cars, batteries…you name it) is often overlooked and is the chief contributor to the 51 billion tons greenhouse gases released globally into the atmosphere each year. It’s the beast which must be tamed. Then as far as electricity is concerned, we should bear in mind that currently Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is the source for most of OPALCO electricity and remains to this day heavily derived from unsustainable sources: 42% hydro, 21% natural gas, 14% coal, 4% nuclear. **We** are OPALCO of course since it is a cooperative and **”we** all need to get serious now about curbing our enormous appetites for all forms of energy unless or until technology might make electrically-powered machines the solution they’ve been advertised to be.
The only perfect solution is the elimination of the human race, or at least those portions insistent on a high energy consumption lifestyle. Alan Weisman in his book “The World Without Us” describes how nature would recover [Plastics are forever]. Given human belligerence, we might manage that.
Short of that draconian solution, nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to be perfectly clean. “It’s not perfect” is not an argument; nothing is. We are left with the choice of the lesser of two or many evils. Those who, driving fossil-fueled vehicles, criticize EVs for their embedded impact on nature might compare the embedded damage to nature inherent in their vehicles. We haven’t tolerated brutally oppressive regimes for electric power as have and do with respect to petroleum.
Like it or not (and many might not (the familiar usually gets priority a thumb on the scale), we’re heading into a different era.
Given that in 2017 fossil fuels generated 65% of electricity worldwide, the statement “we haven’t tolerated brutally oppressive regimes for electric power as have and do with respect to petroleum” makes no sense given that electricity still largely comes from fossil fuels.
Also, electricity involves a huge amount of mining (e.g. lots of copper, aluminum, and iron ore and coal for making steel, all of which are crucial for the massive electric grid that crosses our country), and I’d suggest that most mining (and the devastating pollution it creates) is indeed perpetrated by brutally oppressive regimes, regimes that take land from indigenous people with impunity, and proceed to then poison land and water with few consequences, all around the world. How is that not brutally oppressive?
In addition, most dams are also perpetrated by brutally oppressive regimes. Just read any of the histories of the large dams in the United States and all around the world and you will find displaced people and oppression. As just one of thousands of examples of the ways the brutally oppressive US regime perpetrated crimes against both humans and a river, you can read my friend Will’s stories of the Kinzua Dam on the Ohio River:
https://www.theohioriverspeaks.org/ohioriverjourney/truths-submerged-by-the-kinzua-dam
https://www.theohioriverspeaks.org/ohioriverjourney/there-must-be-settler-colonialism-in-the-water
Almost every large dam will have stories just like that.
Extracting “resources” from the Earth requires brutal oppression — because the people doing it are taking the land from someone who lives there, and most humans and non-humans do not give up their land without a fight. Extraction always poisons the land and the water and the air, and most humans and non-humans would prefer that not happen, and so it requires a “brutally oppressive regime” in order to get them to comply, to let the regime poison their land, water, and air.
A new IEA report just out describes the massive increase in mineral and metal extraction that will be required to “transition” away from fossil fuels, stating:
“a concerted effort to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement (climate stabilisation at “well below 2°C global temperature rise”, as in the SDS) would mean a quadrupling of mineral requirements for clean energy technologies by 2040. An even faster transition, to hit net-zero globally by 2050, would require six times more mineral inputs in 2040 than today.”
I read this report as a prediction for a litany of horrors perpetrated by brutally oppressive regimes on humans and non-humans alike, all around the world.
Humans have existed for 300,000 years as homo sapiens, and it is only in the last 10,000 years that we started drawing down non-renewable resources in large quantities, and only in the last 400 years at head-spinning rates. No, nothing is “perfectly clean”, but starting down a path that will require six times more mineral inputs is a morally bankrupt vision of our future. We must find another way. Europeans use 50% of the resources Americans do. Why not start there?
I think we’re in agreement about excessive consumption, including energy. And you point out correctly just how imperfect any “solution ” is. The issue is which is least imperfect, which is a Hobson’s choice because they’re both imperfect. Close examination of anything we do will, like Gulliver’s examination of Brobdignagians in “Gulliver’s Travels” will reveal ugly spots. We’ve dug a very deep hole and we’ve got to start somewhere. I find myself with EVs for two reasons:
(1) while certainly part of the electric power consumed n extraction, construction, manufacture and powering of EVs includes fossil fuels, ALL of that same power with respect to Internal Combustion Engine-powered vehicles is fossil originated.
(2) Both extractive processes desecrate landscapes. But (as an example) lithium and cobalt are reusable, petroleum is not. Recycling of materials is still a nascent industry but there is a future for it, promising a steady-state industrial sector. Not so petroleum, whose continuous extraction and oxidation only exacerbates the natural balance that makes Earth a “Goldilocks” planet; the only one known so far.
BUT: if you have another way in mind, I’d very much like to learn it. I don’t say this as a taunt; I am genuinely interested in your thoughts. My experience with these issues usually involves people with ideas about what OTHER people should do, their standards coincidentally involving their present activities as the norm to continue.
I don’t pretend to have the answer. Personally, I’m taking it a step at a time, one of my steps having been three years ag, after my own study, to buy an EV.
A small example of “Greenwashing” is promoting “energy efficient” light bulbs –
Power companies have been handing out these “free” CFL or LED bulbs:
From Paul Wheaton’s “Building a Better World In Your Back Yard” (Permaculture)
“If the goal is to save energy, the power company would save a lot more energy providing you with a clothes line. So why do they do that? The answer is what you would expect: profit. The light bulb companies have so many subsidy programs coming from so many places that they are making serious bank per bulb. The trick is to move the bulbs. And this is the reason the light bulb companies lobbied to ban incandescent light bulbs – their own product.”
Wheaton suggests you are paying for the bulbs in your energy bill and taxes anyway.
“Greenwashing ” is the “astroturf” of environmentalism.
Recycling lithium-ion batteries is rarely done in practice because it is complex, hazardous, expensive and isn’t cost competitive with mining new lithium. Newer battery designs which incorporate more iron, manganese, and titanium, are even more difficult to recycle. Recycling rates have barely changed, running 1-3% depending on the part of the world. In addition, given there are 1.2 billion cars in the world, and growing, and massive build-outs of battery storage happening, recycling will be a tiny drop in the massive growth in demand and will never keep up with demand if we build out an energy infrastructure that requires lithium (along with all the other metals and minerals required). Other metals have their own complexities for recycling, and for many, a lot of the original material is lost in the recycling process, or is bound up in composite materials that are simply not recyclable at all (e.g. wind turbine blades). In addition, many of these require energy intensive highly polluting processes to recycle.
Recycling solar is the same: energy intensive, and extremely toxic.
We all know that high tech (EVs, smart grids, etc.) recycling is also a human rights nightmare, with e-waste being sent to the poorest parts of the world for people there to be poisoned as they pull apart and burn electronics to make a few pennies a day.
I’m not concerned whether you personally have an EV or not. What I’m concerned with is that we are heading down a path of increased energy demand, rather than less, and that we will destroy what remains of the natural world to meet that demand, no matter what form of energy we use to power it. The culture always demands more, because it’s designed that way. So we have to change the culture.
We know what the solutions are; it’s just that no one likes them.
* Stop subsidizing environmentally and socially destructive activities and start subsidizing eco-restoration and local self-sufficiency.
* End all extractive and destructive activities: fracking, mountaintop removal, open-pit mining, tar sands production, nuclear power, offshore drilling, industrial fishing, etc.
* Protect all remaining native forests completely.
* Restore damaged land.
* Stop drawing down aquifers.
* Remove all dams.
* Stop all industrial agriculture, moving away from crop mono-cultures and towards poly-cultures.
* Cease funding the military industrial complex and war machines.
* Stop economic growth, and start contracting instead.
* Ensure reproductive freedom for all women everywhere, and encourage population de-growth with incentives for fewer children.
* Enact the Rights of Nature into law at all levels — local, state, federal, and international law.
Telling the truth about the situation we’re in is a good first step.
John, I love that book!
For everyone who might want to read more about these issues I highly recommend two books:
1) Overshoot by William Catton, from 1980. 41 years old, but absolutely relevant to today, even more so. This is a view of humanity and human culture from an ecological perspective. I sometimes wonder: if only every high school senior had read this book since 1980, we might be in a very different position now, or, at the least, have more people with a better understanding of the current situation.
2) Bright Green Lies by Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert. Just out in March, this book will dispel all the “green” myths we are being fed from corporations.
I really appreciate this discussion so thanks for starting it through your opinion piece, Elizabeth. The extent of and facts surrounding the problem need to be crystalized for the average consumer and this has not been done (e.g. plastics are not quite “forever” and moreover sequester very large amounts of carbon used in their manufacturing process compared with other ubiquitous goods like cement and steel. And please do not take this comment as my refusal to acknowledge that plastics are both a fossil fuel problem and a pollution problem. I do so acknowledge.) It will take the entire globe, working together at a very high level (local, state, & national governments, top universities, special think tanks, the corporate world) to get us to zero emissions. No one expects to see a perfect solution via only consumer choices. I’m not only hoping but expecting (!!!!) that we can tackle the greenhouse gas emissions problem through technology and broad consumer mindfulness of the problem. That is, have all the facts, relativities and paths forward presented to us and agreed on. I took Elizabeth’s opinion piece as a reminder that electric cars and appliances are not a solution as is possible some may believe, not quite yet. They seem a great start, though. On a local level, on 5/17, Gov Inslee signed several pieces of climate legislation, one of which (Climate Commitment Act) will create revenue for investment and climate change R&D. We can urge OPALCO through calls or emails to use their political might together with other area electric utilities to channel funds like this into energy storage and generation technology R&D. Perhaps they are already onnit. Perhaps not.
Good discussion! And a big ‘thank you’ to Elizabeth Robson for the excellent opinion piece that started it! I agree that it is the height of foolishness to think that renewable energy will be able to provide the American “middle class lifestyle” to the 8 billion people living on the planet at this point in time. I applaud the courage that Robson shows in pointing out to the “comfortable” class that our lifestyles are unsustainable. Period. Sure, driving an EV saves the fossil fuel required to push it down the road, but, as was clearly pointed out, creating the EV in the first place is an environmental disaster. The one question that needs to be asked about EVERYTHING is, “Do we really need this in the first place?” And by ‘this’ in this case, I mean personal automobiles. There are approximately 270 MILLION automobiles in the US alone. Does that make any kind of sense, to anyone? A genuinely SUSTAINABLE life on planet Earth does not include a personal automobile, casual airplane travel, nor giant, climate controlled houses. It does include a lot of walking, a simple diet and a whole lot of doing without the dubious advantages of most labor saving devices and luxury items. The simple truth is that there IS enough for everyone to have a decent, humane life, but NOT if we all expect to live ‘the American Dream’.
EVs won’t seem to be “a great start” to the humans and non-humans whose land is being taken from them and poisoned — yet again — for the next technology that will only speed up the exuberant but very temporary party we happen to be living in right now. What would you have me tell the Paiute-Shoshone people whose ancestral lands are being taken from them right now, as we write these messages, for a giant lithium mine? What comfort can I bring them that “EVs seem like a good start” as their ancestral burial grounds are unearthed, their hunting grounds destroyed, and the wildlife and plants they revere are stolen from them, destroyed, and poisoned… *again* (after this has already happened to them when previously their land was stolen, turned into mercury mines, which then poisoned and killed many in their tribe)? What comfort can I bring the threatened and beautiful sage-grouse whose populations have been reduced 95% as Western lands are blown to bits for mines wherever we look?
New technology simply allows us to extract a set of finite and non-renewable resources faster, bringing more quickly the inevitable crash when the party ends — which it must… we live on a finite planet after all.
It’s like saying “We know our party is completely destroying the house, but no worries – bring more beer and we can all just go on ignoring that fact a little bit longer!” Of course “the house” is the poor and the non-humans of the world, who have no voice and no way to say no to the corporations who come in to take their land and destroy it.
As I said earlier: we know what the solutions are — to drastically cut back on our way of life. “But but but I don’t like that!” everyone says, “so I’ll pretend that imaginary technology that magically makes stuff out of thin air and doesn’t actually destroy the only planet we can call home will solve all problems, and call it R&D.”
ALL technology requires extraction and ALL extraction requires taking land from humans and non-humans who already live there and therefore must be taken by brutal oppression as Bill so aptly noted.
The only question is: are we willing to keep pretending otherwise? Or will we face up to that fact and start looking seriously at how to massively de-energize our lives? That is the choice before us.
If only governments and environmental groups had taken zero population growth seriously when it was discussed in the 60s and 70s. Instead, we subsidize reproduction through our tax codes, leave our children ignorant of family planning, and force pregnant women to carry to term.
I’m down for a meaningful reduction in the military budget and ending subsidies for extractive industries. I’ve always wondered about the unending focus on economic growth, as if we face no limits, and am all for incentives for fewer children. As for stopping drawing down of aquifers, removing all dams, and stopping industrial agriculture, i.e., food and water, I don’t see how that can happen without eliminating a substantial percentage of the population of the earth. We are blessed to live where we can get clean water and locally produced food. Most of the world cannot.
As for the claim that the top 10% wealthiest people in the developed world contribute more than 50% of the damage to the natural world, I’m fairly certain that means the unenlightened First World, not the wealthiest 10% in each county. Most of the people I know who have built homes in the County seem to be building with a real concern for the environment, using the more expensive components that save energy in the long run. We used Insulating Concrete Forms are structurally strong, energy-efficient, sound absorbent, non-combustible, and resistant to high wind. They use recycled materials, rebar, and some concrete. We considered wood and metal framing, but decided against them after weighing all the issues we could think of. We spent a lot for high In any event, that observation is interesting because one of the barriers to addressing these concerns is money. It cost a lot more to build our home with triple-paned low-E rated windows, also. The cost of building is already near prohibitive so that carrying the extra costs like this could prevent many families from building at all.
Finally, regarding the Rights of Nature–even if they were universally acccepted as proposed iand enacted into law, the question would remain: who speaks for Nature? It would be pretty difficult to get a power of attorney from Nature, and I’m sure not comfortable with self-appointed guardians.
Put more funding into Green Chemistry?
Green chemistry’s 12 principles
These principles demonstrate the breadth of the concept of green chemistry:
1. Prevent waste: Design chemical syntheses to prevent waste. Leave no waste to treat or clean up.
2. Maximize atom economy: Design syntheses so that the final product contains the maximum proportion of the starting materials. Waste few or no atoms.
3. Design less hazardous chemical syntheses: Design syntheses to use and generate substances with little or no toxicity to either humans or the environment.
4. Design safer chemicals and products: Design chemical products that are fully effective yet have little or no toxicity.
5. Use safer solvents and reaction conditions: Avoid using solvents, separation agents, or other auxiliary chemicals. If you must use these chemicals, use safer ones.
6. Increase energy efficiency: Run chemical reactions at room temperature and pressure whenever possible.
7. Use renewable feedstocks: Use starting materials (also known as feedstocks) that are renewable rather than depletable. The source of renewable feedstocks is often agricultural products or the wastes of other processes; the source of depletable feedstocks is often fossil fuels (petroleum, natural gas, or coal) or mining operations.
8. Avoid chemical derivatives: Avoid using blocking or protecting groups or any temporary modifications if possible. Derivatives use additional reagents and generate waste.
9. Use catalysts, not stoichiometric reagents: Minimize waste by using catalytic reactions. Catalysts are effective in small amounts and can carry out a single reaction many times. They are preferable to stoichiometric reagents, which are used in excess and carry out a reaction only once.
10. Design chemicals and products to degrade after use: Design chemical products to break down to innocuous substances after use so that they do not accumulate in the environment.
11. Analyze in real time to prevent pollution: Include in-process, real-time monitoring and control during syntheses to minimize or eliminate the formation of byproducts.
12. Minimize the potential for accidents: Design chemicals and their physical forms (solid, liquid, or gas) to minimize the potential for chemical accidents including explosions, fires, and releases to the environment.
https://bcgc.berkeley.edu/
BERKELEY CENTER FOR GREEN CHEMISTRY
TRANSFORMATION TO SAFER MATERIALS
Not sure how green chemicals helps at all if we’re still building 1.2 billion new EVs to replace ICE cars, and still building the roads for them to drive on, and still living the completely unsustainable lives that cars enable….
Similarly, I am not sure how green chemicals help us reduce high energy lifestyles, and the one-time drawdown of non-renewable resources party that we’re in. More efficient technology always leads to faster use of a finite amount of resources.
Also, some chemicals, like copper, aren’t themselves particularly toxic, but the processes to extract them from the ground are incredibly toxic and destroy copious amounts of habitat.
Based on the responses to my post, I am guessing most people have no real interest in reducing energy use on a large scale, changing the direction of the county and the demand that OPALCO is planning for… especially since I saw just yesterday via Orcas Women’s Coalition, the build-out plan for the county is 134,000 people. Even if we all managed to reduce energy consumption by an average of 10%, if the population of the county quadruples, that will mean nothing.
Infinite growth on a finite planet will lead, probably this century, maybe next, to total collapse. Just so we all know that’s where we’re choosing to go. Super glad I’m “old”(ish) – if I was 20, I’d be pissed as hell. I mean I am pissed (at myself, too, don’t get me wrong), but hopefully I’ll be dead before the worst of it.
A little background: I became motivated to look at the growth that OPALCO is planning for because I learned that while I work hard to keep my monthly electric bill < $120 (used to be < $100 until OPALCO raised rates a couple of years ago), I found out that a house (okay, let's call it an estate) down the road from me has a monthly electric bill of about $16,000. Not that I'm bragging about my low bill, but that knowledge did help put my efforts into perspective.
Gosh, a monthly electric bill of $16,000.
I think there needs to be an escalating rate structure to incentivize those who use electricity extravagantly to take notice and implement conservation measures.
Responding to: “Finally, regarding the Rights of Nature–even if they were universally accepted as proposed and enacted into law, the question would remain: who speaks for Nature? It would be pretty difficult to get a power of attorney from Nature, and I’m sure not comfortable with self-appointed guardians.” – thank you Peg.
I think nature can speak for nature for the most part. For instance, I think everyone reading this thread knows what the whales would say if we could ask them, what do you want?
My guess is:
* Stop shipping anything through the Salish Sea, so we can hear ourselves think, and hear each other sing. Maybe start with the oil tankers because if one of those crashes, we’re toast. Super toast.
* Stop damming the rivers and restore the wild salmon, and take out those damn salmon farms with their poisons and their lice so that our favorite food can recover, and there’s enough to go round for everyone (including humans, and seals and sea lions so the transients get a good dinner too).
* Stop dumping your pollution into the Salish Sea, like storm water runoff and ag runoff and everything else you dump in here.
* Stop developing the shore lines and start tearing down the sea walls and restore the beaches and the forage fish.
* Stop chasing us around in those damn motorboats! (When I try to imagine what it’s like for the whales, I try to image 4 or 5 or 6 drones following me *everywhere* I go throughout the day. I’d lose my mind and be shooting at them within a few minutes…. the whales have a heck of a lot more patience than I do!)
Etc.
Not really that hard to figure out. Does anyone disagree that the whales would say at least one or two of the things in this list? :-)
Thanks Elisabeth for spawning the thoughtful dialogue. Perhaps the Club of Rome actually did have it right, that there are Limits to Growth and finite resources on this planet we live on. Since Limits to Growth was first postulated in the 1970’s, and at the time dismissed by mainstream economists, almost all of the projections have come to pass with startling accuracy. One of the “early warnings” predicted were water shortages, which of course are increasingly hitting the radar screen in many areas in a myriad of ways. Of course since the 70’s the human population has doubled…as predicted. Any “Sustainability” may hinge on whether humans can collectively adjust to limits cooperatively – or else limits themselves will dictate the human arc in more drastic ways.
Thank you Andy, yes I think the people behind Limits to Growth and Overshoot had it right. We overshot carrying capacity a long, long time ago and we’re living on borrowed time and dipping ever deeper into the non-renewable savings account of the Earth, calling it “production” instead of “one-time only extraction”. A recent new study showed we’re driving gastropods into extinction at 3x the rate the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs, and suggested that this is a benchmark for the impact humans are currently having on the living world. We’ve emitted almost 1/3 of all CO2 emissions ever emitted by humanity since An Inconvenient Truth was released. We’ve negatively impacted all but 3% of the Earth according to another recent study. The news about the environment is relentlessly bad and yet we carry on as if we aren’t in the middle of an emergency, unwilling to even consider — apparently — even the most minor of changes in the ways we live our lives.
I think of all the young people whose future is being stolen out from under them, and in that light, the fact that adults can’t even conceive of the idea of maybe considering that there must be a limit to growth is simply a crime. There’s no other way to describe it at this point.