The Mahatma commenting on what it would take to lift India out of its poverty noted that the British had marshalled the energy and wealth of half the globe in order to create their seemingly imperial life-style. The Mahatma's point was not that mankind was going to go extraterrestial in pursuit of energy or in pursuit of wealth. Rather, the Mahatma was looking at how much energy and wealth and the distribution of that energy and wealth, it would take to elevate the lifestyle of his people, the people of India.
Now, with our increasing awareness of the climatic changes wrought by our choices in energy, we are seeking alternative fuel sources.
We need to conduct a thought experiment and transport ourselves onto a rocket headed to the space-station and peer back at the planet earth. Think long and deep about our life on the space-station and how it's related to our life on Spaceship Earth. Should machines consume carbon? Do we use up all our fossil carbon resources and our renewable carbon resources...creating a Dustbowl Earth before moving on to greener pastures elsewhere in the solar system or in some other solar system?
When Vijay Vaitheeswaran addressed the National Governor's Association last week during it's forum on States and Energy Policy, he amplified the message of his recent book, 'ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future'. His message was that globally there are 3 pillars of irritability: 1. Energy & Poverty, 2. Energy & the Environment, and finally, 3. Energy and Geo-Politics. He explained that as both India and China move billions of people into the fossil fuel age we increase global instability in those 3 aforemention areas, poverty, environment, and geo-politics. The Governor's gave rapt attention to Vijay. Corzine piped up, "break the paradigm!" The Governors were unanimous in their support of "clean energy" and "renewables".
I see a slight problem here. While it is true that we can, for the time being, make use of renewables, even renewables are a limited resource and is in fact NOT renewable. The substrate from which the renewables are generated is finite. Let me explain. Go to a quarry or rent the movie, "Breaking Away" filmed in a limestone quarry near Bloomington; it's been abandoned and is now a swimming hole. What you will notice is that there is a thin layer of soil/earth and then rock down-down as far as the eye can see. In fact, life is nothing but a thin layer upon this ball of rock moving through space, called planet Earth. There is a limit to how much earth/soil we have available. No one has measured how much life can be sustained with the supply of earth/soil, water & air that SPACESHIP EARTH has available at our present rate of consumption and poor husbanding of our resources. The idea that life, on earth, is not eternally guaranteed and not as renewable as we think, is something very few people have commented on.
Do you think that regardless of what we do, the earth will always be able to sustain us and life in general? Do you think that the Earth can endlessly regenerate itself without any sustanence? Put yourself outside of the planet and look at it objectively. What are the limits, the life-load capacity of earth? How many more people, how many more cars, how much more irresponsible behavior towards the Earth, can the Earth sustain?