Remember handkerchiefs? For our younger readers, there was a time when, if you had to blow your nose, you used an ornate square of cloth kept in your purse or pocket. Here’s the weird part: you didn’t throw it out. You tucked your “snot rag” away to use over again until it was deemed dirty.
Even then you did not throw it out. It went into the weekly wash along with your favorite sun dress or polo shirt. For generations raised on one-and-done Kleenex this may be TMI, but brace yourselves young people, there is more.
Imagine washing and reusing diapers or getting take-out beer from a bar in a small tin bucket. Time was when there were no drive-thru restaurants or plastic utensils, and you always cleaned your plate, literally and figuratively.
Cities reeked of horse manure because the stuff was everywhere. You lived in these smelly cities because everything was in walking distance. Blocks of ice delivered by horse-drawn carts cooled refrigerators. Cars were a novelty, not a necessity.
My dad and his aunt supplied many of these anecdotes. They were born in the 1920s and 1890s, respectively, back when women were women and men did all the voting. Around this time dirt-cheap energy was discovered quite literally oozing from the ground,
That discovery changed everything. The next century was a fossil-fuel-fed frenzy of ever-increasing production and consumption of oil, gas and all kinds of other “stuff” made from it. By 2019 the US was burning through 93 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs) of energy to meet the needs of 331 million Americans. More than 80 percent of that from fossil fuels.
That’s about 2,500 BTUs or 625,000 calories per person per day, the same amount of energy as each of us—kids included—eating 1,136 Big Macs. In. One. Day. For a little perspective: One gallon of gasoline holds about 28 million calories or about 51,000 Big Macs. Yet, less than one third of the energy we consume each day goes to transportation.
The rest goes to buying all the “stuff” we can’t live without shortly before we throw it out: Kleenix, Pampers, plastic water bottles, plastic straws, Baggies, tin foil, incomprehensible amounts of agricultural chemicals, incomprehensible amounts of clothing, bread crusts, four-day-old Dim Sum, four-year-old flat-screen TVs, and date-stamped gourmet cookies to name an infinitesimally small sample.
All compliments of our inexhaustible appetite for exhausting fossil fuels. It’s how each of us produces three times more trash than anybody else in the world. Energy may not be created or destroyed, but it sure can be wasted and doing so in this country is almost a status symbol.
Generations before us worked long hours so their kids could buy all this “stuff” getting thrown out. So much so, being a “hard worker” became the highest form of praise in this country, regardless of what you worked hard at. All while we turned a blind eye to discarding the fruits of our labor half-eaten. It’s more like 60 percent, but who’s counting.
Here’s the punch line, it appears the younger generations are questioning this “hard-worker” ethic, and not just the rich ones. Is this “Great Resignation” the dawning of a great realization that we’re wasting a lot of our lives so we can waste all that energy? Could Millennials and their kin be contemplating not wasting the most precious resource of all, our time? Or at the very least putting our time to better use: ourselves?
If so, what’s going to happen to the people, industries and infrastructure dedicated to making all the “stuff” we work so hard to waste? If not, what do we do with our mounting excesses and how do we cover the spiraling costs of the energy needed to keep producing it? Lastly, why on earth are we doing it! Some inconvenient truths and disquieting questions as we trash waste in this issue of News by Nature.
A Great Resignation, or Realization?
Florida’s Amelia Island was about 20 miles behind us when I discovered our rental car displayed the elevation above sea level every minute or so. Always on the lookout for distractions when driving, and with a furtive glace to my wife who is always looking out for my distracted driving, I engaged the car’s auto-pilot and undertook a flood plain survey of eastern-central-north Florida.
For the puritanical zeal of a conservation-minded New Englander, it’s a call to arms when, 20 miles from shore, you discover that sea levels need only rise three or four feet and you’re back on shore. Said another way, if global warming stays the course Callahan, FL, is the next Miami Beach, so buy now!
Our destination that day was north-central Alabama, one of a dozen Heartland states attracting urban migrants like magnets even as the same climate change turns the nation’s Breadbasket into a bowling alley and the Sierra’s into the Sahara. For me there’s no greater reward for road-tripping than seeing the country first-hand and I can attest that, despite the climatic headwinds, the Bible Belt is booming.
Is climate change simply an inconvenient truth these migrants pan in pursuit of their American Dream? Or are we being swayed by those profiting from the economic pragmatism that inevitably supplants the hubris of our youth? A third answer might lie in a few other inconvenient truths also being ignored, most notably by those who vote. A Lot. in the greatest numbers.
I’ve spent the past few years interviewing back-office workers using software to save time doing back-office things. In that time I’ve concluded that upwards of 50 percent of the back-office endeavors of many millions of middle-class workers worldwide simply gets information from Point A to Point B.
These completely unsubstantiated estimates may sound extremist, but then consider secretaries, clerks at every conceivable counter, cashiers, accountants, legal aides, title searchers, and the $16.8 billion medical coding market. The faster these folks do their jobs, the better they do their jobs and that means computers will soon be doing their jobs faster, better and for pennies on the dollar.
Which leads to Inconvenient Truth No. 2. Through a stealthy process called digital transformation, software systems are being built at warp speed to automate these monotonous assignments, with faith in technology the only answer to filling the yawning gap being carved out of our workdays.
Which leads to Inconvenient Truth No. 3: Medical science is advancing so quickly the human life span is expected to expand by 20 percent in a generation or two. The world’s most expensive private healthcare insurance system will go broke overnight covering a nation of nonagenarians while paying CEOs and share-holder dividends.
So, let’s recap. Rising tides and radical weather are being ignored in a rural rush to own a piece of the American Dream. Millions of labor-intensive, creatively-cavernous work assignments are disappearing faster than lawn sprinklers in Arizona. And we work 30 to 40 years so we can take the next 30 to 40 off with little chance of earning enough to cover health care costs.
You don’t need to be a bean counter, computer programmer, or gerontologist to see any one of these inconvenient truths, let alone all three are going to force this country to radically change how it does things, and soon. Yet the problems are so complex, the solutions so disruptive, anything other than status quo almost requires a leap of faith in what are nonetheless science-driven realities.
For those putting their faith elsewhere, the one thing that can relieve us our angst over this frightening future is turning our backs on all this technology and doubling down on what gave us such a prosperous past: more fossil fuels and the freedom to do what we want with them. And therein lies the rub.
When Spindletop showed us something akin to dirt could heat our homes and fill our bellies, our capitalist economy became a consumer economy fueled by ever new discoveries of, and uses for, coal, oil and natural gas—ours, and others’. Rather suddenly we no longer needed to hunt-down and hack up whales to light our homes. Petrochemicals made every harvest a bumper crop.
Fossil fuels in all forms became a profit-making machine as we consumed more and more of it, and the products made with it. Lights burned brighter and longer as starving Chinese children faded from our collective conscious. Petroleum’s ready conversion into a mind-numbing array of plastics ushered in the age of ending is better than mending.
Waste went from sin to source of national pride when Ronald Reagan tore out Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels. Today it’s a bone fide religion while storing and getting rid of the ever-expanded excesses blossoms into multi-billion dollar industries.
Which brings me to Inconvenient Truth No. 4. Based on Inconvenient Truths 1, 2, and 3: The Consumer Economy must end if our children’s children want to live, and it looks like younger generations are getting the message.
Green shoots of common sense appear to be emerging in the land of shop-til-you-drop most notably for Millenials and their younger colleagues. Thanks may be due to these climatic, technological and healthcare, realities all colliding in the perfect storm of paradigm shifts known as Covid 19.
Lock-downs thwarting the contagion thrust into glaring contrast the career trade-offs we all make in choosing how we spend our limited time on earth. Covid also poured rocket fuel on digital transformation as offices were vacated and internet-accessible homes, mountaintops and Caribbean beaches filled the void. The resultant convenience and cost-savings put the ol’ 9-to-5 in a whole new perspective.
Between March 2021 and 2022 54 million resignations were submitted, not for better pay so much as better jobs. This employment epiphany is further challenging already wobbly logical linkage between what we to do make money and what we do with the money we make. What better proof of shifting consumer sentiment than tv commercials telling us to stop buying more “stuff”?
Who and what is most threatened by a sudden work-ethic shift from spending our lives making and spending the most money possible to simply making the most of our lives however possible: the global fossil fuel industry and its $35 trillion annual stake in the global GDP.
What happens when women will no longer be gamed by glamour? What happens when men discover he who dies with the most toys still dies? What happens when we all stop working for the weekend?
Our capitalist-cum-consumer economy inevitably becomes a conservation economy where preservation replaces exploitation as the premium placed on natural resources aka: zero waste.
That process starts by simply using a lot less fossil fuel and a lot more renewable energy. Covid kicked that process into high gear, and it has yet to fully recover. Next, the full production, disposal and ecological cost must be added to the avalanche of single-use products—edible, inedible, and/or inflammable—fossil fuels provide us.
People should have the right to work as hard as they want to buy, sell, or waste whatever they want, provided the price the world is paying for their profligacy is taxed in. Right now, fossil fuels and products derived therefrom are steeply discounted with the planet and future generations subsiding the price through vast, real-time and looming threats to the future.
In a conservation economy we won’t be throwing out plastic sporks or water bottles if they cost $1 each. Gas should cost $10 a gallon, if you’re filling up these ridiculous things. In a conservation economy fossil fuel consumption will plummet, and me thinks the afore-mentioned petroleum profiteers would rather this didn’t happen.
How else to explain a near coup-d’état fomented in the US by a luxury-loving POTUS who named the biggest of Big-Oil big-wigs and Russia Medal of Friendship awardee——Secretary of State. Why is Russia’s crucial ally China, the world’s No. 1 exporter of “stuff” made from fossil fuels, antagonizing its top trading partner with war games over Taiwan but never following through.
Soup Painting Why is Saudi Arabia, energy supplier to the world, cutting oil production as Russia, energy supplier to western Europe risks WWIII with its prime customers? Do the phenomenal profits all these actors are reaping as a result of these antagonisms factor in?
If these inconvenient truths and COVID-19 have Millenials et. al. casting a jaundice eye on the wastrel ways of consumer economics, that’s got to scare hell out of the movers, shakers and profit makers funneling money into the governments running all these countries. Is the world going crazy right now because entrenched fossil fuel profiteers are fighting tooth-and-nail a seismic shift in the global economy away from snake oil they’ve sold for the past century?
A little too conspiratorial? Perhaps. From a creature comfort perspective, conversion to conservation economics stacks up poorly against consumerism, particularly for Baby Boomers and Gen Xers who will need new whole new skill sets and jobs to make it to retirement. And these people vote. A lot.
Season such inertia with a slathering of faith in country, God, the good ‘ol days and fossil fuels and bingo: a global rise in authoritarian governance going all-in for the status quo, with America First leading the charge. What if the looming crises popping up around every corner these days as more of a marriage of convenience between the dealer and dependent, fearful and faithful with tranquil traditions, and putting off til tomorrow?
All the more daunting for future generations all with the most skin in the game but little of the say in how it’s played. Unless, of course, they vote. A. Lot.