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What's
the Problem?
Today, we are facing a number
of serious challenges. Let's look at just one.
We are running out of oil.
Peak production is predicted by experts to be 10 or 20 years away.
After that, it begins to run out.
Added
to this, demand is rising quickly, not falling as technology
specialists promised us. So far, all the solutions I have heard come
from entirely within the system.
Renewable
power is one. Without glossing over it, there is no where near enough
renewable power available. For example, oil is the stored solar energy
from literally hundreds of thousands of years. We burned a large
proportion up in only a couple of hundred of years.
Wind, might be the answer,
some say. Has anyone actually calculated how much net energy
comes from a windmill?
We
need power to mine the metals, smealt them, mine and process the oil
into plastics, transport everything to the right location, presumably
all this using battery power from the windmill.
This
is before any power gets to us. There is simply not enough wind to
replace oil. But even if it did work, who wants windmills covering all
the windy land in the world?
The bottom line is the current
"green power" proposals aren't going to give us anywhere near what we
need today just to survive.
That
leaves nuclear. Fission makes seriously hazardous waste. The more we
make the more chance there is of a serious accident happening. If our
entire worldwide society moves to fission power as a
replacement
for oil, we will be producing nuclear waste on a massive industrial
scale.
Would
you gamble all your children and your children's children on our record
of avoiding major accidents or large spills of hazardous
material?
An
Exxon Valdez oil spill can affect an area for a generation. A major
nuclear spill could affect us for tens of thousands of years. One big
enough could effectively render large parts of the earth
unviable
for life.
And what about the
radiactive oil coming from the robots inside the nuclear core? How do
we safely store radiactive oil?
Fusion
is even more dangerous. It destroys water at the atomic level. Fusion
on a large scale would create a whole new meaning to the concept of
"water shortage".
No water means no life.
Looking
at solutions from only within our current system is a very limited way
to solve problems. There are several easily accessible solutions
outside the system, but we have to be willing to open our minds in a
way that our system trains us not to.
If
you told someone living in the fifth century in England that lamb meat
would be easier and cheaper to produce in New Zealand and shipped to
the England, rather than grown in England to be eaten there, they would
think you were crazy (even if they could conceive of "New Zealand").
The
reason is this idea is so far outside the system they currently inhabit
that they simply cannot envision how this could be true. The best solutions possible today cannot be seen by anyone whose awareness lies firmly within our current system.
They won't believe they could happen in reality.
Normally,
it is simply a matter of time and gentle evolution. But at this point
we have simply run out of time to learn the gentle slow
way.
The
impending oil (power) shortages are only one of the major problems that
we are about to face. We have to make a leap in awareness or
our
worldwide society is going to run into several very hard walls, nearly
simultaneously.
We
are at a crossroads. We can make relatively gentle changes ourselves or
we can crash into the hard walls and have change thrust upon us.
The choice is really ours.
But let us not delay. This choice will remain available to us for only
a short time.
Once too much time has
passed, there will only be one way left and it won't be the
easy way.
Go
to The Solution - Part 3
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