The fundamental basis, at this point, underlying the argument for maintaining the status quo, is that we're not really fucking things up altogether. Now, this is a lie. It is not to say that the Earth is doomed, because I suspect it is not, though only in the limited sense (say thirty-five million years) and that's really just an opinion. And that's not to say that it essentially matters, in the really long run. And that's not to say we're incapable of restitution. I think we've got another forty years before we're on a course we're really quite helpless to reverse. Again, that's very much an opinion. But at the moment we are fucking things up altogether. Our energy needs are not sustainable, by definition because they exceed what we are currently capable of collecting from the sun, the only energy source we can rely on to keep up with us. And whatever global scale business or utopian scheme you wanna dream up, it's gonna take a lot of energy. We don't produce goods sustainably, we spend huge sums of our labor constructing stupid and unimportant crap that we then merrily claim the right to consume because of the "value" of our labor. The lesson of physics is that walking around in a circle to come back to where you were means work equals zero. Pulling oil out of the ground and sending up a big column and splitting it up into components and isolating one of those components (don't you just hate chemistry) and then polymerizing one of the components in great big reactor vessels and then chopping that polymeric mass into little tiny bits and loading the bits into fifty gallon drums and then driving them across country, loading them into a big cooker with all sorts of crazy additives and dyes, and injecting them into a mold so that my fucking razor blades can come in a neat little cartridge holder that allows easy snapping into my razor handle, so that I can empty that cartridge in about two months and then throw it in the garbage, is not sustainable. It's a whole hell of a lot of wasted labor. In the basement of a house I lived in in college I once found a pack of old razor blades in a coffee can full of receipts dating from the sixties. They were packaged in wax paper sleeves, bundled in a single cardboard sleeve. Not a spot of rust on them.
No, it's clear that we're spinning into some crazy post-modern lunatic rush to societal oblivion. The thing is, they always say, hey, you keep predicting doom and it hasn't happened yet. What they do not tell you is that we have been on the same course for centuries, our sins piling higher and deeper, the forest shrinking faster than we can plant them, pulling fish outta the sea faster than the sea can provide them, pulling oil and coal and natural gas out of the ground much much faster than things can grow and die and be buried for hundreds of thousands of years. Our population continues to grow more or less geometrically, nearly every race of people on earth strives for material abuse and accumulation on the globally insane scale of ameriCo. The Crash has got to come. Maybe in fifty years, maybe in five hundred. It's all the same to me, I'll likely be dead in any case. But I'm not afraid to see the curve and to trace its path, which we have not deviated from in five hundred years, not for a fortnight. Chew on that.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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