Our Future Is (Literally) Crumbling Before Our Eyes
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,
The sorts of predicaments the world faces — ranging from over $200 trillion in debt, to our unsustainable addiction to fossil fuels, to our over-stressed ecosystems — all require that we get deadly serious about confronting them ASAP, and make difficult decisions and trade-offs.
However, our global leaders always seem to opt to kick the can down the road if at all possible. Short-term thinking and near-term priorities dependably get precedence over doing the right thing for the future. Tomorrow’s generations are thrown under the bus by selfishly motivated actors today.
As I’ve put forth over and over again: we’re simply not going to make it unless we get much more serious about our efforts than we have been to date. Yes, it’s a wonderful thing that Elon Musk is building sexy electric cars; but even a single minute spent with a pencil, paper and the aggregate energy statistics on transportation will reveal that there’s an enormous gap between where we currently are and where we need to be.
Most will never spend that minute; which is why I continue to do what I do.
For example, many people wave their arms lazily at the statistics for wind-generated electricity and never bother to ask if its current growth rates can be sustained. Or wonder just how tremendously massive the scale of the effort will need to be to meet any realistic sustainability goals.
In a prior companion piece to this article, I quoted a study which determined that to simply meet the wind power goal put forth in the recent Paris accord, the world would have to massively upshift from installing 37 wind towers per day currently to more than 1,300 per day by 2028.
Can we do that? Maybe. But not without a maniacal commitment to making it happen. And that’s the thing: the world is instead hoping that somehow ‘the market’ will deliver sufficient wind power in time. Given the state of the global financial system — with its more than $200 trillion(!) in debt — is that really something we want to leave to hope?
But leaving the economic and political issues of that challenge aside, I’d like us to focus on the more practical issues of the energy investment required to build out a new energy infrastructure, not to mention the longevity and durability of the components we'd be installing.
I’ve always found this time-lapse video of a single wind tower installation mesmerizing. The skill on display is amazing:
Here’s a brief summary for those of you too busy to watch this construction process right now: Diesel, diesel, diesel, reinforced concrete, diesel, petroleum, diesel. That is, installing a wind tower like this requires a huge amount of fossil fuels to accomplish.
To focus in further, watch from the 45-second mark to one minute. What you’ll see there is 96,000 pounds of reinforcing steel, and 53 cement trucks used to pour the windmill's base.
Which brings us to an overlooked and very important part of the story: …read more
Source: Our Future Is (Literally) Crumbling Before Our Eyes
