love and waste

I wondered about the good reader from Florida, who claimed, "it is not that we are wasteful," when addressing carbon taxes as a solution to global warming. It occurred to me that many good citizens may feel this way and would be indignant at being called wasteful. Yet wasteful they are. All of us live an enormously wasteful life-style. So wasteful that it is unsustainable and will lead to our early demise, unless we fix it.

So what is wasteful? According to my dictionary, (a person, action or process), using or expending something of value carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose. As an example the dictionary lists: wasteful energy consumption. Well clearly, things like petroleum, other fuels, water, food, etc. are all things of value. Burning gas in one's car while sitting still in a traffic jam is to no purpose so it would clearly qualify as wasteful. According to one estimate, Americans burn 2.7 billion gallons of gas unproductively. That is a little less than the daily gas production worldwide. They waste even more heating and cooling their empty houses during the day.

But our good reader would no doubt argue that it is not his fault that he has to spend time in traffic jams. He is not "in love" with traffic jams anymore than he is "in love" with petroleum. Furthermore, he would point to a technological solution to do away with traffic jams, in the process singing the praises of technology and pointing out to us how technology will save us all.

But let's go back to the original definition and explore some more. Air is certainly a thing of value. Cut off someone's air supply and they die a swift death. Yet nobody would argue we are wasting air. Sometimes people say, don't waste your breath, but that clearly has a different meaning. We do not waste air under normal circumstances, because there is plenty of it around and it is free, so its real value is close to zero. Unless you go scuba diving. Divers do know about wasting air. You can easily waste a lot of air by panicking, or making unnecessary movements. Beginning scuba divers waste a lot of air.

The context really matters. You can easily waste air while diving, whereas nobody would accuse you of wasting air if you made a few frivolous dance passes on solid ground. Similarly, you may not be wasting water if you have a huge green lawn in Seattle, where it rains every other day, but the same cannot be said for a lawn in Phoenix, Arizona. Building golf courses in the desert is clearly very wasteful. And it becomes more wasteful with every passing day.

Because there is another thing to consider. The human condition is far from stationary. The conditions that prevailed when we grew up are no longer there once we reach middle age. That is probably one reason why biological organisms have a limited life-span. Because, even though these organisms are quite flexible and adaptable, there are clear limits to their adaptation potential. And then it is time for a new generation to take over. Anyone who grew up in the baby boomer generation, when there were 3 billion people on the planet is now faced with the fact that we have 6 billion humans. What may have been a little excessive back then, will now often be downright wasteful. And by 2050, there will be 9 billion people. Clearly things that are acceptable today will not longer work then.

There are two other misconceptions at work. One is that technology will solve all our problems. People will often point to the great achievements of modern technology, and to the great gains in efficiency. But the reality is otherwise. If anything, technology created our problems, and so far has not shown any evidence of being able to solve them. All efficiency gains have quickly disappeared as people cashed in on the "savings." Whenever the savings were huge, people have quickly responded by making more people so as to cash in even more effectively.

The second misconception is to view human history as a straight line from inception to the present, with things always improving. That too is easily debunked. There have been serious setbacks in human history and both life expectancy and well being have fluctuated enormously in the past. There have been times of great wealth and great achievement, followed by deep retreats. And even those who think the overall trend has been upward would do good to consider the warning: past performance is no guarantee of future success.