A cry for survival
the environmental crisis has always been a statistic for me, a statistic i learned as a child.
So i am not shocked when i hear the dire predictions about the future. Somehow i have just resigned to the fact that future technologies would eventually replace oil and coal as our main sources of energy. But it has failed to arrive.
Instead, we have arrived, at a magic number. And a magic clock just stopped counting down to zero. Parts per million. PPM. 400 PPM of carbondioxide. Doesn't sound very dramatic does it?
It is a magic number because it is known among scientists as the point of no return. I look around me and i do see people talking about the environment, i do see people facing up to the fact that global warming is real, i do see that the sham scientists working for status quo forces grow fewer every year. But I acknowledged global warming as real a long time ago, i haven't recently awoken to the errors of our ways. Au contraire, I've watched shit hit the fan for 17 consecutive years. In that time the problem has deepend, and i have seen zero political and economical will to "do something", in fact, to do anything at all. Now the leader of my country *talks* about global warming, but I'm afraid all he is achieving is put more co2 out of his mouth. My government is doing nothing, nor does it have any plans to do anything. As such they reflect most governments in most countries. People take offense at being told their standard of living must go down, and that they can't choose a to have a big car, or that they can't have the level of airconditioning they're used to.
In these 17 years i have been aware of the problem i have met few people willing to accept the consequences. Least of all the environmentalist movement which have wasted their time trying to save the whale or whatever. Don't get me wrong, i have nothing against whales, they taste great.
Meanwhile the real issue have gone us by.
But i'll admit, it has been alot of numbers on a piece of paper, it hasn't been fun or exciting or contained powerful imagery of dying kittens, only the asthma of our children have told the tail. But we're here now, we've arrived. Last stop, 400 ppm.
Although I am overdramatizing, there is one final escape clause available to us: nuclear power.
This is the only way to save the environment:
Before the end of the next decade, more like the middle of it, say 2015, that's eight - 8 - years from now, we must replace at least half of all coal and oil power plants in the world with nuclear power plants. That means closing literally thousands of coal and oil plants and building literally thousands of nuclear power plants.
Sounds pretty grim doesn't it? I bet you're thinking; what are the odds of getting another Chernobyl out of that?
They're pretty good actually, and most likely Chernobyl type accidents will happen again.
If we start tomorrow, rush out plans, waive neighbours' options to complain, expropriate land and compromise security we might just make it in time. It is physically doable.
Sounds pretty unlikely no?
Well trust me on this:
it is our only option.
The alternative is this:
1 billion dead, all the major cities of the world destroyed, 3 billion refugees, war over food and water instead of oil and power.
A few Chernobyls suddenly sound like a cheap price to pay, no?
This is the biggest mistake the environmentalist movement made, they attacked nuclear power instead of oil and coal. Such naive people, I mean, they must have been reading the same statistics I did. I suppose they dreamt of windmills, like me...
Now, in this zero hour, advocating nuclear power is our last and final option. We have reached the point of no return. We are standing on it and have one final chance to tip the scale.
This, is the proverbial it.
If, in the next less than a decade, we don't build thousands of nuclear plants, it is bye-bye.
Old news i hear you say, spare us the doom and gloom; but i'm not writing here to fill you in on the science, i'm writing here to fill you in on the emotional impact.
I'm ahead of the curve. While the world is just starting to realise there's a problem i'm through with all that, i'm facing up to the world *after* tomorrow(pun intended).
And i look around me at nature, at trees and mountains, at animals and people, and i feel like i'm looking at them for the last time.
That future up above, the one with the billion dead people in it, that is my future now. For even though nuclear power could get us through the preliminaries of this crisis, it won't happen. The socialeconomic powers that be are too dumb to act.
And for their stupidity we will all pay.
It is time to sell my computer and buy a hunting rifle, it is time to stock up on heremtically sealed food, it is time to build underground shelters(at least 15 meters above current sea level), it is time to buy personal windmills and/or solar panels. I see the future. And it is full of pain and suffering, it is ugly and darwinian. The real worst case scenario is the end of our species, but in the balance now is our civilization. Nuclear power can save it, but politicians probably won't let it, so be it. The end of civilization and not as we know it, just at all. And not in some abstract hundreds of years from now, in 20-30 years from now.
It fills me with a deep sadness and a vast sense of wonder. Thinking of it i feel like an astronaut seeing the planet for the first time from space. I feel like a small child seeing the seven wonders of the world. I feel foreboding and a sense of inevitability much like how I felt in the two seconds from i lost control over my car till it slammed into a ditch at 50 miles per hour. I feel infinity. I feel like watching a time lapse of a hundred million years, from amobea to man. I feel like an artificial intelligence computer singing a sad song to humanity. And I feel a sense of waste as all of mankinds achievements is washed away by the sea. I think of Michelangelo, Mozart, Fellini; whose works will be forever lost in the next 50 years.
I think of all the art, buildings, roads, science; all gone. In a hundred years noone might know how to divide three by four, noone will know how to write, or have anything to write on or with. Or to.
And now the government wants to make recycling mandatory. They just don't get it, cosmetic surgery is a bit late when the patient is dead, ofcourse, it'll still make a pretty corpse.
The only trace we will leave behind are a few machines on the moon and on mars, a few satelites in orbit. Voyager with its golden plate with our picture, where we were, hello in many languages, and a few minutes of music. It just left the solar system, still broadcasting its tiny stream of data.
Nothing we have constructed on this planet will survive, it'll be smashed to rubble. And the long chains of carbon molecules we know as plastic will be as indistinguishable from our remains as oil is indistinguishable from the dinosaurs it came from.
It such as a sad end, black goo deep under the oceans.
I'm a dreamer. I dreamt about travelling the seven seas, I dreamt of leaving the gravity well, of orbit, of distant lands and planets. Of discovery, of understanding how the universe worked, quantum mechanics and all. A bright, shining, glorious mankind that has abandoned its national states, its prejudice, its wars and famines, colonizing mars, then other systems. Of pirates in space, of man fracturing and becoming many new species as we adapted to our new habitats, of fighting new wars over new resources, maybe even meeting aliens. Of driving a race car really fast on the highway. I never dreamt that we would put too much co2 in the atmosphere and die. It's so banal it could only be reality. Gaia is dying. What if it really is the only inhabited planet in the universe(unlikely, but we don't know)? Where would my soul reincarnate? Why should i make art?
The dream is over.
b
So i am not shocked when i hear the dire predictions about the future. Somehow i have just resigned to the fact that future technologies would eventually replace oil and coal as our main sources of energy. But it has failed to arrive.
Instead, we have arrived, at a magic number. And a magic clock just stopped counting down to zero. Parts per million. PPM. 400 PPM of carbondioxide. Doesn't sound very dramatic does it?
It is a magic number because it is known among scientists as the point of no return. I look around me and i do see people talking about the environment, i do see people facing up to the fact that global warming is real, i do see that the sham scientists working for status quo forces grow fewer every year. But I acknowledged global warming as real a long time ago, i haven't recently awoken to the errors of our ways. Au contraire, I've watched shit hit the fan for 17 consecutive years. In that time the problem has deepend, and i have seen zero political and economical will to "do something", in fact, to do anything at all. Now the leader of my country *talks* about global warming, but I'm afraid all he is achieving is put more co2 out of his mouth. My government is doing nothing, nor does it have any plans to do anything. As such they reflect most governments in most countries. People take offense at being told their standard of living must go down, and that they can't choose a to have a big car, or that they can't have the level of airconditioning they're used to.
In these 17 years i have been aware of the problem i have met few people willing to accept the consequences. Least of all the environmentalist movement which have wasted their time trying to save the whale or whatever. Don't get me wrong, i have nothing against whales, they taste great.
Meanwhile the real issue have gone us by.
But i'll admit, it has been alot of numbers on a piece of paper, it hasn't been fun or exciting or contained powerful imagery of dying kittens, only the asthma of our children have told the tail. But we're here now, we've arrived. Last stop, 400 ppm.
Although I am overdramatizing, there is one final escape clause available to us: nuclear power.
This is the only way to save the environment:
Before the end of the next decade, more like the middle of it, say 2015, that's eight - 8 - years from now, we must replace at least half of all coal and oil power plants in the world with nuclear power plants. That means closing literally thousands of coal and oil plants and building literally thousands of nuclear power plants.
Sounds pretty grim doesn't it? I bet you're thinking; what are the odds of getting another Chernobyl out of that?
They're pretty good actually, and most likely Chernobyl type accidents will happen again.
If we start tomorrow, rush out plans, waive neighbours' options to complain, expropriate land and compromise security we might just make it in time. It is physically doable.
Sounds pretty unlikely no?
Well trust me on this:
it is our only option.
The alternative is this:
1 billion dead, all the major cities of the world destroyed, 3 billion refugees, war over food and water instead of oil and power.
A few Chernobyls suddenly sound like a cheap price to pay, no?
This is the biggest mistake the environmentalist movement made, they attacked nuclear power instead of oil and coal. Such naive people, I mean, they must have been reading the same statistics I did. I suppose they dreamt of windmills, like me...
Now, in this zero hour, advocating nuclear power is our last and final option. We have reached the point of no return. We are standing on it and have one final chance to tip the scale.
This, is the proverbial it.
If, in the next less than a decade, we don't build thousands of nuclear plants, it is bye-bye.
Old news i hear you say, spare us the doom and gloom; but i'm not writing here to fill you in on the science, i'm writing here to fill you in on the emotional impact.
I'm ahead of the curve. While the world is just starting to realise there's a problem i'm through with all that, i'm facing up to the world *after* tomorrow(pun intended).
And i look around me at nature, at trees and mountains, at animals and people, and i feel like i'm looking at them for the last time.
That future up above, the one with the billion dead people in it, that is my future now. For even though nuclear power could get us through the preliminaries of this crisis, it won't happen. The socialeconomic powers that be are too dumb to act.
And for their stupidity we will all pay.
It is time to sell my computer and buy a hunting rifle, it is time to stock up on heremtically sealed food, it is time to build underground shelters(at least 15 meters above current sea level), it is time to buy personal windmills and/or solar panels. I see the future. And it is full of pain and suffering, it is ugly and darwinian. The real worst case scenario is the end of our species, but in the balance now is our civilization. Nuclear power can save it, but politicians probably won't let it, so be it. The end of civilization and not as we know it, just at all. And not in some abstract hundreds of years from now, in 20-30 years from now.
It fills me with a deep sadness and a vast sense of wonder. Thinking of it i feel like an astronaut seeing the planet for the first time from space. I feel like a small child seeing the seven wonders of the world. I feel foreboding and a sense of inevitability much like how I felt in the two seconds from i lost control over my car till it slammed into a ditch at 50 miles per hour. I feel infinity. I feel like watching a time lapse of a hundred million years, from amobea to man. I feel like an artificial intelligence computer singing a sad song to humanity. And I feel a sense of waste as all of mankinds achievements is washed away by the sea. I think of Michelangelo, Mozart, Fellini; whose works will be forever lost in the next 50 years.
I think of all the art, buildings, roads, science; all gone. In a hundred years noone might know how to divide three by four, noone will know how to write, or have anything to write on or with. Or to.
And now the government wants to make recycling mandatory. They just don't get it, cosmetic surgery is a bit late when the patient is dead, ofcourse, it'll still make a pretty corpse.
The only trace we will leave behind are a few machines on the moon and on mars, a few satelites in orbit. Voyager with its golden plate with our picture, where we were, hello in many languages, and a few minutes of music. It just left the solar system, still broadcasting its tiny stream of data.
Nothing we have constructed on this planet will survive, it'll be smashed to rubble. And the long chains of carbon molecules we know as plastic will be as indistinguishable from our remains as oil is indistinguishable from the dinosaurs it came from.
It such as a sad end, black goo deep under the oceans.
I'm a dreamer. I dreamt about travelling the seven seas, I dreamt of leaving the gravity well, of orbit, of distant lands and planets. Of discovery, of understanding how the universe worked, quantum mechanics and all. A bright, shining, glorious mankind that has abandoned its national states, its prejudice, its wars and famines, colonizing mars, then other systems. Of pirates in space, of man fracturing and becoming many new species as we adapted to our new habitats, of fighting new wars over new resources, maybe even meeting aliens. Of driving a race car really fast on the highway. I never dreamt that we would put too much co2 in the atmosphere and die. It's so banal it could only be reality. Gaia is dying. What if it really is the only inhabited planet in the universe(unlikely, but we don't know)? Where would my soul reincarnate? Why should i make art?
The dream is over.
b
posted by bangskij at 12:31
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