Everyone has gone crazy.
Seriously.
I’m mostly talking about waste, but, really, it’s everything.
Before the nineteenth century, middens made sense. All our garbage was biodegradable. Not that it necessarily degraded in rapid fashion. Archeologists are still finding deposits of mollusk shells discarded by humans thousands of years ago that have never fully decomposed.
What does that mean for the 27 million tons of plastic we are burying each year?
It’s lunacy, when you think about it. I can only assume no one does.
It’s not merely plastic, either.
There are also the quarter of a billion car tires. That’s nearly one tire for every person living in the United States. Per year. In the US alone.
This isn’t secret information either, or numbers twisted by some environmental agenda. I lifted them from US government websites, where they are presented in matter of fact, we know this is not sustainable fashion. So, it’s not that people don’t know these things. Which makes it all the crazier.
Half of all scrap tires are dumped in landfills. People will be digging them up ten thousand years from now. Another third of used tires are burned as fuel in cement plants and industrial boilers. I guess that’s a better option than using virgin coal.
Ever seen a German coal mine? The machines that excavate them are among the largest in the world. The biggest of these can strip 8,500,000 cubic feet of overburden daily – the equivalent of a regulation soccer field dug 100 feet deep. Each one unearths approximately 240,000 tons of coal per day. We’re digging this up and then lighting it on fire. It is truly absurd.
Coal accounts for 27% of global energy consumption. It is still the primary source of electricity for many countries, China and India most notably, and a necessary component in the production of steel and concrete. Oil, not surprisingly, is the largest source of energy worldwide.
Ever wonder why nature makes crude oil? Or what purpose in the earth system might it serve? I’m guessing burning it all might have adverse effects.
I was cooking chicken on our propane grill the other day. The sun was beating down, the air temperature was 80° F, and I was sitting under the shade of a tree to avoid the heat. At one point, I glanced over at the grill, suddenly mesmerized by the shimmering waves streaming into the blue sky above. What fools are we who fail to recognize that this is highly problematic, eight billion of us, all producing that much heat? In that moment, I didn’t need the IPCC to tell me about global warming. I could see it happen right before my very eyes.
Hydrocarbon gas liquids, like propane, are consumed predominantly in industrial settings. Over half the oil the world uses, on the other hand, is used in transportation. What they have in common is the amount of excess heat produced creating the energy they supply.
Most of the energy generated in the combustion of sequestered carbon is released as waste heat. Great if you’re sitting around a campfire; less so when talking thermal power plants. The losses for gasoline powered automobiles, which comprise the bulk of petroleum consumption, are even more acute than most. The fact that there are 1 billion cars on the road, burning nearly half of all the oil, enshrines the automobile as the most wasteful human activity on the planet.
We are, in effect, driving around thoughtlessly broiling ourselves. It’s complete and utter madness.
When it comes to wasteful inventions, electronics, computers in particular, lag not far behind. Operating and maintaining the Internet requires an estimated 250 gigawatts of energy per year, nearly a quarter of which is used simply cooling the massive data centers that support it. Waste heat from the servers those centers house accounts for approximately another 20 percent. The remaining energy powers computation and the production of the hardware itself.
50 million metric tons of e-waste are discarded annually, only a small portion of which is recycled. That’s a footnote, though, to the billion or more tons of dry solid waste generated by humans each year, seventy percent of which is either buried or dumped openly on the ground. Nearly another billion tons of food is discarded.
It’s crazy to think about. Who would deliberately participate in such obvious folly?
Basically, every person on Earth.
The thing is, some of these people can be forgiven. Like our ancestors who built literal mountains out of mussel shells, the residuum of their actions is beyond comprehension. Like native Americans, who unknowingly signed away their hunting grounds for blankets and ironware, they cannot be blamed for failing to grasp that a motorcycle or a cell phone is essentially a death sentence. For those of us in the so-called “developed” nations, however, our continued denial is more akin to delusion.
When the final judgement comes, perhaps we can all plead insanity. It should work, since, clearly, we are deranged.