The Copenhagen summit on climate change next month will see world leaders pay lip service to the crisis but agree on precious little that will make any difference to the global uses of energy.
They are unlikely to address what, in my opinion, is the neglected key issue. Waste! Waste of energy - for which every one of us is responsible.
And the same goes for that other global scarce resource, food, though our individual culpability here is even more glaring and inherently unfair. Waste of food!
We are all in such a swiz about capping the obscenely high salaries of those who "got us into this financial mess", (we all did our own bit to create the mess ourselves by the way) that we ignore our disgustingly wasteful system, still continuing, where we dump 1.6 million tonnes of perfectly good food into landfill every year.
And this takes no account of the much greater annual waste - equally disgusting - where we stuff millions of tonnes of food into "peoplefill" through gross unnecessary overeating. The results are plain to see waddling up and down every street in the country.
Appeals for voluntary restraint just have not worked nor will they work. The only long-term answer, which has a proven effectiveness in crisis situations, is food and fuel rationing.
I remember when I was a wee boy seeing my mother get the ration books off the mantlepiece and set off to buy the groceries.
There was no waste in our house in those days and yet we survived by eating just enough, throwing nothing away and growing our own food where possible. There was no alternative.
In that post-war time of severe shortages, this ration system was the only way the country could live within its limited resources and ensure that the distribution of food and fuel to individuals was reasonably fair.
We are arguably in as great a crisis today, so it should not be beyond the capability of our über-bureaucratic nanny-state to implement appropriate effective rationing.
Such radical action would save the vast amount of value in food and energy that is currently being dumped through profligate unrestrained waste and in the process is despoiling our planet and destroying our health.
I haven't been invited to Copenhagen, so if you agree that rationing would reduce waste please pass this blog on and maybe someone influential (like you) will read it.
If you don't agree, then post a comment. What is your solution to waste?
7 comments:
Will
I think your assertion is flawed. The planet has abundant energy resources, we just don't have the technology to exploit them yet.
Energy rationing is not only impossible as economies advance, it is dangerous and soon to be pointless. How do you tell emerging countries that they shouldn’t use their natural resources to build their economies because we used all of ours and broke the planet. How do you justify less travel when technology drives humans closer together and globalisation give us more reasons to fly and drive? How do you justify less waste when we are pretty sure that if we didn’t waste as much, it wouldn’t mean the economy would be better off or the hungry would be fed.
I think the entire solution to the problem you pose is found in advances in technology. There is more available power in a single glass of water than in a tanker of oil. The problem is that we can’t safely extract it.
Shouldn’t your argument be that we need to TEMPORARILY refrain from using energy until an alternative if found? Shouldn’t we concentrate all of our attention into finding a safe and abundant alternative? We are on the edge of finding it. It will happen in our lifetime.
Niall
Thanks Niall,
Great comment, much of which I agree with, but for me my rationing point still stands until we are able to feed everybody fairly while at the same time curbing the horrendous health threat of obesity (it is directly analogous to smoking).
Also my point about rationing energy was somewhat similar in that we need to cut the harmful emissions. ie The world needs to go nuclear big-time and quick. Meantime rationing.
Also rationing pre-supposes that China etc will pro tem have much higher per capita rations of carbon producing fuels than the US and Europe.
I do think your hopes for total resolution of the problems lying in technology advance and by implication, goodwill, as being on the naive side. History has NO precedent in this regard
Let the debate go on. This is good fun!
Will
I'll address the food point and give some more consideration to the energy one. In my view, there is a more fundamental issue that causes the food waste problem, both by landfill and peoplefill. And that issue is subsidised farming, or to put it differently, incentives to generate overproduction, and that reward uneconomic bulk production. In WW2 rationing worked because it was driven by lack of supply. The curse we live with is that farming grants lead directly to overproduction, price collapse and hence food available at prices that encourage overconsumption.
OK, as for fuel, lack of supply must surely drive us toward rationing, and I don't believe we will sort this anytime soon with cold fusion. Our population is growing too fast for us to sustain food production on a finite land area (which is moving and shrinking due to climate change). If we don't ration food and energy (which can be treated the same) then in only a few decades, it will be lack of supply that will drive the power cuts and widespread famine which ultimately force rationing. Amen. Bugs.
Food wastage is a huge problem golbally and used to be in our household but we have tackled it and must say its great to see the fridge empty by friday evening! We take great pride in both our buying and using regime now. we now constantly challenge to only buy barely what we need...... it certainly impacts on our grocery bill or at least on what we buy we chose local high quality products where possible.
But the solution? most probably lies in education and teaching people how to shop, how to cook and even how to be realistic about best before dates! the last generation probably lost out in not having good housekeeping past on from their mothers. The old addage ' the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world' comes to mind.
The is one other possible solution...more expensive food then people wont waste it as they will not be able to afford it....food has never been so cheap and is now a small percentage of income. Increase and the price and people wont be buying unnecessarily....
Technology to generate energy (and food etc) sustainably will not emerge from a vacuum (unless we learn how to tap zero point energy, which would be cool and end all our problems). There needs to be an incentive, hence some degree of rationing is actually a good thing to provide that incentive.
It's not even that it's "unfair" to China or India or whatever - we are where we are, and it isn't realistic to think that the advances in their economies from unfettered carbon emission or whatever will not be drastically offset for them *and* everyone else by the consequences of climate change in the wider sense.
There are too many people on the planet who all want first world lifestyles. We need to reduce population growth, engineer the "first world lifestyle" to have less environmental impact (which may mean concentrating human population in *cities* - cities are actually one of the "greenest" ways to support large numbers of people), AND explore technologies for energy generation, dealing with waste, and - wait for it - getting as much of our footprint OFF-WORLD as possible.
"WTF does that mean, Jimmy?" I hear Willo cry. It means The Final Frontier. There is a Vast source of energy in space; the prime example is of course the sun. There is water on the moon and on Mars. There are raw materials in the asteroids.
So if we're talking about making things nice in the short term, heck yeah, Copenhagen. If we're talking the *long* term, it's Olympus Mons.
To infinity and beyond!
Cor Jimmy, that's deep! (deep space?)
Willo, I only do deep.
Drink, feck, arse!
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