There Are Limits To Technology’s Ability To Reduce Waste; Let’s Hope They Aren’t Fatal

Of all the defining characteristics of modernity, perhaps this is the most important: how far technology has taken us, and how little waste remains in many of the actions we see performed each day in the world around us.  Those of you who take the two minutes required to watch this video will see exactly what I mean.

Yet when we look at the world of energy and the environment, we somehow fail to see this process in action.  Yes, technology is providing us better ways to get at pockets of fossil fuel reserves that, up until recently, were not even known to exist.  And yes, the silky-smooth super-dominance of the oil industry on the worldwide stage has enabled them to drill in fragile ecosystems and construct pipelines all over the globe to transport each barrel of the precious fluid to the most precisely located refineries and distribution centers.

But, unlike the improvements in some technologies, the fossil fuel industry will never be able to get beyond the physical limits associated with what they are doing: carving up the planet, extracting the materials that hold the chemical energy associated with hundreds of millions of years of solar energy, and burning it, and releasing the resultant products into an atmosphere that has certain unalterable limitations in terms of its size and its basic chemical properties.

When we run across stories of vast stores of petcoke blowing across our cities, or carcinogenic pollutants that reduce the visibility in our cities to near zero, or global temperatures rising and climate conditions changing radically in short periods of time, we need to realize that certain of our practices carry with them horrible physical consequences that are simply unavoidable.