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vote no to nukes
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grufty jim
grufty jim
1978 posts

Re: vote no to nukes
Jul 31, 2002, 14:06
i recall reading (don't have the reference to hand, but it's probably somewhere on http://www.dieoff.org/ ) the area of land that we need to devote to growing the raw materials for bioplastics if we wish to replace our current plastics usage... i think we require a couple of extra planets.

FourWinds, there is a *major* problem facing us globally with regards to arable land. Pollution, desertification and the impact of climate change are going to really heighten this problem soon (China is the tip of the iceberg).

Those who plan to replace plastic with bioplastic, or coal with biomass fuel have never - it seems to me - run the numbers on required land area. Do we want to stop growing food to provide biomass for power plants?

i used to be a hemp evangelist - a real hardcore "hemp will save the world" guy. The more i researched it, the more i realised just what a pipe-dream it is (pun, very much intended). Hemp has a part to play - and if we'd started using it (and other biofuels) earlier then we probably wouldn't be in the predicament we're in now.

But it is my firm belief - the essence of my thesis - that the human race has become basically dependent upon fossil fuels (primarily oil), and there is no practical solution, no potential replacement.

We're fishing the seas empty, we're cutting down the forests, destroying biodiversity and dramatically reducing the planet's ability to sustain life. What the solution is...? i honestly don't know. But the uniqueness of fossil fuels and their derivatives really should not be underestimated.

i'm sure i've expressed my rather fanciful theory about oil on this forum before... but here it is again, for the benefit of the new and forgetful.

Oil can be viewed as the blood of Gaia. It is organic matter that acts - from a practical standpoint - as a storage medium for millions of years worth of solar energy.

In a vision i had whilst watching an oil pump extract this blood, i saw the oil as earth's gift to humanity. It is a fantastically useful resource... perhaps more so than any other single resource (save water and air). In my vision i saw the planet as having stored enough of this precious fluid to provide humanity (or whatever species it was that achieved our position) with the tools required to develop a complex culture and eventually leave the planet.

Oil was bequeathed to us by the hundreds of billions of tiny organisms that lived and died over the hundreds of million years. It provides us with the energy and the tools to achieve almost any goal. It could get us to the stars.

But instead we burnt it, spilt it, and used it to fight huge wars with each other and with the planet itself. We wasted this precious resource, and Gaia didn't provide us with a substitute. And for a very good reason. A species willing to blatantly waste it's most precious resource is clearly not one with any wisdom to take out to the stars.

It's a crying shame, and one that makes me dreadfully sad.

[please note, my use of the word "Gaia" may be contentious. It's a word that has been tainted a little by 'the new age'. However, i firmly believe that viewing our planet as a single organism is an extremely useful method of visualising the complex systems that make our ecology and superecology work as well as they do).

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