Consumption

I've often thought about overpopulation, since I was little. That was during the time of the first energy crisis and people were seriously concerned about whether we would be able to feed and provide energy for everyone. Part of the equation, besides the fact that there is this much oil reserves and this many tons of coal mined annually, and this many kilowatts used every year, is that there are x number of people in the world doing this consumption. On top of all projections was a factor of increased use due to an increasing number of people using. That is sometimes multiplied by the fact that each person uses more than their parents do, in fact more than they themselves did earlier in their life.

The projections showed that this was not sustainable. Those projections that I remember were centered around energy use, but they could have been food used or trash produced.

The problem is that people have a certain degree of greed, selfishness, gluttony, and entitlement. They want, they want for themselves, they want a lot, and they feel that no one can tell them no.

Conservation is never discussed when we talk about energy use. Over consumption is not regulated at all. You have the right to use as much as you want to.

Energy is not the only commodity that is overused. People habitually eat more food, smoke more cigarettes, drink more alcohol, or take more drugs than what is good for you, and they don't want to be told by anyone to stop. Thing about if you lived on a space station and you got a kick out of venting the atmosphere a little bit at a time through an interesting device out into space. You're on the station with other astronauts and they all agree that this is a bad thing and that the space station is going to be in deep trouble if you continue to do this, but they have no right to tell you not to. Since you are too short sighted to realize that you have to forego the pleasure you get from venting the atmosphere in order to survive indefinitely, you will quickly vent enough atmosphere to start hurting or killing the people on the space station. Can you imagine a situation where the other people in the space station would not stop the idiot from venting their air?

We often talk about the fact that a new health care plan would not be truly useful in cutting costs without a preventative component that would encourage and monitor people to lose weight, stop smoking, and reduce their consumption of drugs and alcohol. People would scream about the violation of their basic rights, and I must admit that I feel that way, too. However, if you could successfully limit people's self destructive behavior, there would be great savings in the amount of car you would have to provide for people. Consume less vices and you could manage to consume less resources in providing health care for all.

This over consumption is mainly noticed in things like oil, minerals and metals, plastics, wood, and other natural resources. Many things, some simple things, like glass, could easily be recycled at a fraction of the price it takes to mine new materials and create them from scratch. On a global scale on a long enough time scale, everything is recycled. It makes sense to think of the things that we use as needing to be recycled and reused. We should not be using land for landfills, ever. The thought of locking things up under the earth in order to dispose of them makes no sense in the long run. I like the way they do it in Star Trek Next Generation where everything is ran through a replicator, which is basically no different than a transporter that rearranges the molecules as it reconstructs them.

We even consume information at an all time high rate, although I would argue that we consume more worthless information than useful information. Look at the media frenzy surrounding Michael Jackson. Before that it was OJ Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith, Jean Benet Ramsey, the college student that disappeared while in Aruba for spring break, or the arrest of a black college professor by a white cop. None of these circus events matter in the long run to society, but we suck up precious air time and people's short attentions and scarce personal time absorbed in these non-events.

I think that if you want to consume something without limits, you should consume knowledge. We should encourage people to go to their public libraries and read as many books as they want. We should encourage people to utilize their public parks. They can go out and run or walk as much as they want. It's an unrealistic dream, but who knows, maybe people will come around, eventually.