The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [126]
Fundamentally, this book and my work are about exposing the choices and options we have. As dire as things may seem, the future has not yet happened. Hope remains that we can respond intelligently to the current predicaments, and even create something better for ourselves along the way.
Yet it’s also true that the stadium is rapidly filling with water and our choices matter very much from here on out. There’s a lot less room for error than there was a few decades back, when we had plenty of time to make mistakes and fumble around with our handcuffs. But now that the water is swirling up the bleacher stairs, our choices take on new urgency and matter a great deal. There’s no time to waste making wrong choices anymore. History is sitting up straight with pencil poised over notebook, carefully watching to see what we do next and determine how our efforts should be remembered.
Technology
We don’t need to develop any new technologies, although it will be nice when they come along. We already know how to build highly efficient machines and dwellings that use tiny fractions of the energy of those currently in use. We can live extremely comfortable lives using much less energy than we currently consume by making a few small changes in our technology choices and daily routines. By doing so, we will preserve some energy for the future, which will allow us the gift of time. There’s nothing to prevent us from making such a change, except possibly a lack of a coherent vision from our leadership that this is an important thing to do.
It will be fantastic when higher-capacity batteries are developed, but we don’t need them in order to immediately begin using existing technology to consume less electricity. For example, electricity is still consumed to heat water for home and commercial use, yet solar hot water panels are a proven, decades-old technology that works and is economically sound even at current energy prices. Despite this, such panels are relatively rare in some countries, the United States included. Using fossil fuels to heat water when the sun can do it efficiently and reliably is a mistake, especially when simple technology already exists that can be installed quickly and which will save money and energy over time. Eventually we will collectively come to that conclusion, but why wait? What is stopping us from making the installation of solar hot water panels a top priority and beginning immediately? The limitations that do exist have nothing to do with technology; they are social and political in nature.
For example, we still beam an enormous amount of electricity into outer space in the form of stray photons from the area lights that we use in every city and along major roadways. These could (and should) be replaced with LED technology that uses a fraction of the electricity of halide and halogen lamps. Nothing prevents us from doing this today, other than inertia and a lack of urgency that it needs to be done.
We already know how to build houses that face the sun and use almost no energy, we know how to build smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles, we know how to live, work, and play near where we live, and we have all the technology we need to live far more sustainably than we currently do. So what is holding us back? I submit that there’s nothing rational or logical or even economically sensible about our lack of action on these matters; the cause lies elsewhere.
Food
We know that healthy soils produce more and better food than ruined, nearly biologically sterilized dirt. Reason tells us that flushing vital and irreplaceable nutrients into the sea isn’t a good idea. Eventually we’re going to have to find some way of recycling nutrients back to the farms on which our food grows. We understand how to optimize yields for a given area based on the