Which leads into the question of whether we’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Rather than trying to meet the supposed and ever growing ‘need’ for energy, shouldn’t we be asking people who use energy to justify unnecessary or excessive use?
A pet peeve of mine, which illustrates a larger problem, is those bloody roof air conditioners down here cooling an empty 30 or 40 square open plan house all day so the occupants can be comfortable when they get home. I’ve survived just fine for close to 60 years by opening windows and using an electric fan. There’s plenty of other examples, such as domestic tennis courts and swimming pools and endless Tuscan patios illuminated all night and mains power driveway and path lights on all night in houses that nobody visits after dark. All because it looks nice.
Why not work out what’s a reasonable amount for a dwelling and ration power, with anything above the ration at a prohibitive cost, and a cost proportionate to occupants’ incomes so the rich can’t chomp up all the power they want? Obviously need exemptions for people with special needs, e.g. home business, disability.
Same goes for commercial buildings. For example, why are empty office towers illuminated all night? One empty one consumes more power than a town full of several thousand people.
Then there’s the wider issue of the world running on the cheapest production cost rather than what’s best for the planet and long term survival of the human species.
Remember cobblers? Remember mum turning collars on shirts to double the life, and darning socks and pants? Now it’s all throw away stuff. All that stuff puts a drain on the planet being produced, and decomposing.
Remember Sunday roast lamb and cold lamb and mashed spuds and peas on Sunday night and shepherd’s pie on Monday night? Remember the pot of soup that seemed to stay on the stove all winter and had bits of vegetable peelings and scrap meat and barley and rice and whatever else happened to be around thrown into it, that we now throw into the bin? Ever buy a tinned soup that tasted half as good? Why don’t we have it now? Because mum’s too buggered when she gets home after a day’s work to pay for the mortgage and power bill on the McMansion with the bloody air conditioner on the roof that’s been pumping away on an empty house all day while she’s at work, and the bloody gale of cold air from the air conditioner would blow out the gas under the soup pan.
So if mum (or, to comply with equal opportunity legislation and principles, dad)cooks at all she slips into the local supermarket and picks up a bit of meat sitting on a butcher’s equivalent of a thin plastic wrapped sanitary napkin on a polystyrene tray covered by cling wrap. Fifty years ago the butcher would have put the meat into new greaseproof paper and, like the fish and chip shop, wrapped his product in newspaper he bought from kids for a few pence. Local recycling. Then some bureaucrat decided that newspapers might transmit disease so now we level vast forests just to make paper for fish and chip wrappers. But mum won’t buy meat at the butcher’s where it’s about twenty per cent cheaper than the supermarket, and about two hundred per cent better quality, because the butcher shuts at the same time she leaves work, a couple of hours from home.
Anyway, she doesn’t have the time after driving the kids all over the local geography to their sporting events etc. Who ever got driven anywhere by their parents in the 50’s or 60’s to anything except family events and other things we didn’t want to attend? Reason it happens now is because every family has at least one car and we have the idiotic situation of kids playing competitions that require parents to drive for anything up to an hour or more to get them there. When everybody didn’t have a car, kids did everything in places they could get to on foot or by bike, with about zero negative ecological impact.
Same with work. Go back to the sixties and seventies and you’ll find, here anyway, newspaper ads for homes for sale and rent with statements referring to local employment opportunities. Then, hardly anybody would contemplate today’s common hour and half to two hour each way commute by car, or public transport, to work.
All our modern ‘improvements’ are like freeways. Build them to solve traffic problems and in no time the bloody freeways are clogged, along with the roads they supposedly unclogged. Crap always expands to fill the space available.
There’s never been anything like all the labour saving devices we have now, and there’s never been, in developed countries, people with so little free time. Because they’re all flat out working to pay for the great homes and labour saving devices and other stuff that they’re too busy to enjoy so they live on take away food and McDonalds and frozen meals because they get home too late and get up too early to cook.
Anyone who spent time on a farm, in Oz anyway, will remember the slop bucket in the kitchen. Everything that couldn’t go into the soup pot went into it. Egg shells, stale bread, off milk from the cow, meat bones, vegetables, plate scrapings. Take it up the back and feed it to the dogs whose kennel was a 44 gallon drum on its side under the pine trees, not far from a shed clad in flattened kerosene tins. Everything was used and recycled by resourceful people, many of whom learnt thrift in the 1930’s, even the 1890’s, Depression, and who didn’t have the luxury we have now of throwing away anything that’s a bit worn or approaching its use by date.
Dogs loved the slop bucket tucker, like they love anything that could be food. Kelpies and blueys and border collies would run miles all day on that tucker, working sheep and cattle. Now we have to have specially formulated tinned and dried food to get the exact dietary balance or the poor pooch will curl up its tootsies and die. My dog gets some dry food, but it lives on a lot of dead food from the darker parts of the fridge. It’s still healthy, although on the rare occasions I take it to the vet I get a bollocking for not giving it heart worm medication. I’ve never heard of a dog dying of heart worm, outside posters in vets’ surgeries, but I wasted a lot of money on the last dog shoving a tablet down its gullet every night. Meanwhile some poor kid in Sudan or Chad is dying because even simpler technology and skill could have been used to give them clean water.
Every year or two we have publicity about fruit growers here dumping thousands of tons of fruit, because it’s cheaper to bring in oranges or whatever from California or Brazil or somewhere else on the other side of the planet. Does that make sense, in the total picture? What’s rotting food going to produce? Stuff we’re trying to keep out of the atmosphere.
So, after that rambling stream of consciousness rant, the common theme is: We have got our priorities so back to front under the pressure of profit driven economies that I think it’s an irretrievable situation until the politicians and big money men work out that the planet and people come before profit. Don’t hold your breath. They’ll only work it out when we’re all gasping for breath, by which time it’ll be way too late.
Also has anyone seen how much methane just ONE family of 4 will produce from their own poo?
If my personal beer to methane conversion rate, without poo, is any guide, the planet hasn’t got a chance. 
And that’s the opinion of my family of four.
