The following is not my writing, but that of aldous, posted first on New Worlds.
It's a late Sunday afternoon in central Pennsylvania at the end of July. I look out the window and it appears to be a gorgeous summer day. The sun is shining, a gentle breeze is in the air, the birds are singing. But I just went out on the street and confirmed my suspicion: there is no sign of life in any direction. It's too damn hot! Nothing like the heat wave that killed 150 people in California, or the one about to melt the Midwest, but too hot for the activities we are used to on a typical summer day in Pennsylvania. I just got gas the other day and paid over $3 per gallon. Last September I was shocked when prices shot up from under $2.50 to over $3.00 per gallon. This was a temporary increase but now, less than a year later, the current price appears to be permanent.
Granted, the current heat wave cannot with certainty be attributed to global warming, though most scientists agree that existing heat waves may be exacerbated by it. Likewise, the high prices at the pump, especially considering the obscene profits posted by oil companies (e.g., $1.5 billion per day for Exxon Mobil), cannot conclusively be blamed on peak oil, though oil and gas reserve estimates suggest such a scenario is imminent.
Both global warming and peak oil are large-scale problems that are already having small-scale repercussions, affecting the lives of individuals and families everywhere. Most people in their right mind - and that certainly excludes the current administration and most members of Congress - are not going to wait for universal consensus or studies that show "beyond the shadow of a doubt" that these phenomena are real and are contributing to serious local effects on jobs, lifestyles, and personal well being. Instead, such folks are already looking at global warming and peak oil and are very worried by what they see.
However, the first response to these closely related issues (global warming is caused by an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases, most likely due to the burning of fossil fuels, including petroleum, the production of which will inevitably lead to peak oil) is to try to kill both birds with a single stone: alternative fuels. Because global warming is probably caused by the overproduction of oil (and coal, as well as widespread deforestation), why not simultaneously confront climate change and safeguard precious hydrocarbon reserves by developing fuel sources such as solar, geothermal, wind, and, God forbid, nuclear? With a Kennedyesque commitment to such development, we could nip both problems in the bud by the end of the next decade.
But in the absence of a fundamental cultural shift, the development of alternative fuels will simply maintain the illusion that the global growth economy, heretofore driven by the production of nonrenewable resources, is somehow sustainable. Even a total one-to-one replacement of fossil fuels with alternative ones will leave many huge problems unaddressed: urban/suburban sprawl resulting from growth and development; the continuing loss of biodiversity and habitat including the extinction of alarming numbers of plant and animal species; overpopulation and an accompanying lag in per capita food production; the shrinking of potable water supplies; the depletion of metals such as mercury, copper, nickel, lead, zinc, and tin, all projected to disappear before the next century; and the escalation of ideologically-based conflicts including the potential use of nuclear weapons.
Within the context of a growth economy, the only thing that alternative fuels will make sustainable is fuel itself, in the form of virtually limitless energy sources with, therefore, an equally limitless capacity to continue our inherently unsustainable western lifestyle. This lifestyle is unsustainable because it is based on a paradigm - the mechanistic world view arising proximally from thought patterns of the 16th and 17th century and distally, perhaps, from the advent of domestication 10,000 years ago - that assumes an infinitely large resource base. Even coupled with advances in fuel efficiency, innovation in alternative fuels does nothing to change the dominant paradigm at the root of our rapidly approaching destruction on so many fronts. If we wish to address global warming, peak oil, and other components of this global disaster, I suspect we may have to pass on the idea of alternative fuels/efficiency gains as a panacea and instead adopt a new paradigm based on reverence and awe for nature and a holistic relationship with the Earth. Only in service to this new understanding does the development of alternative fuels make sense.