Human beings.
Innovative, clever, and hopelessly addicted to fossil fuel and it's byproducts.
Like an addict, we are just concerned with our next fix. We don't care about the cost. But its not just a financial cost. It is far, far greater, our impact on our planet.
We are poisoning our home.
The place that gave birth to us and nourishes us.
Do we even realize what all is made from oil and it's by products?
Here is a link to a website with a partial list of items, 144 of 6,000 items.
http://www.ranken-energy.com/Products%20from%20Petroleum.htm
A 42 gallon barrel of oil makes 19.4 gallons of gas.
It's in your toothpaste and your toothbrush. Your milk jug, your yogurt tub. The packaged meat and food you buy at the store and then take home in plastic bags, where you sit on a couch with plastic in the filling or even the upholstery, holding a plastic remote to control some plastic electronic device. Your credit card, your lotions, soaps, shampoo. The pen you write with, the keyboard you type on. The pipes that bring running water to your house. The stuff that insulates the electrical wiring in your walls. Your bike helmet. Your clothes and your kids toys. In your house painted with an oil by product, or a linoleum floor. Or carpet. No matter, it's there. It's everywhere.
The plastic trunks you buy to 'clear the clutter' of stuff, stuff made from fossil fuels, stuff that society tells you you want. You need. Got a headache just thinking about it? Well I hate to tell you it's in your aspirin, too...
How do we overcome our addiction?
We are creative! Oh, so creative! How else would we have dreamed up so many uses for oil? We can think outside the box!
But like an addict, we are using more and more, and we do not realize... Like an addict, most of us WANT to stop, but without help, we don't know if we CAN.
There are things about our society that really, really bug me. And some things seem pretty simple to change!
Let us take plastic shopping bags as an example:
They are extremely abundant. They have been made thinner, some stores charge a small fee on them, people are encouraged to use reusable shopping bags. Why not just ban them outright? You will only forget your reusable bags the first time :) after that, you will remember. People adapt. They may complain, but if that can save some of our massive oil addiction, if that can reduce our massive plastic floats out there in the ocean and filling our landfills - why not just ban them?
Recycling
That should be made mandatory, not voluntary There should be random audits in peoples garbage and fines issued for people that do not recycle. (there's some job creation!) I am disgusted when I go to the town dump, to see how much is just thrown out. Food waste that can be composted, paper, tin cans, milk cartons, plastic.... the list goes on. There is no AWAY, people! We all live on the same planet. Sooner or later with 8 billion of us, there will be nowhere to put the stuff. None of us like garbage. So try and reduce it!
Some bigger cities have curbside pickup of recycling and I think that is awesome. I understand that is not possible in the rurals but give us more options. Stuff like hard plastics - shampoo bottles, detergent containers, salad dressing containers... they are all recyclable, yet our local SARCAN doesn't take them. I have to take it to the city to recycle it.
The amount of plastic simply drives me nuts. Everything comes in plastic! I buy frozen fruit or vegetables - it's in a plastic packet. Buy cereal in a box (not that I do, really!) and there's a plastic bag inside it. Buy yogurt and there is the plastic container, then the little plastic you peel off and throw away (!!!) under the lid.
Honestly.
And that is the problem with oil. It has turned us into junkies.
National Geographic had a great article that can be read here
National Geographic
about oil in the shale in North Dakota. The statistics are absolutely staggering.
The lifetime of an oil well takes:
2 million gallons of water
4 million pounds of proppant (a mix of sand, and man-made ceramics)
and
350+ barrels of chemicals. What chemicals, you ask? Well it seems that we are not privileged to know.
Where does it go, you ask? Oh, it gets pumped back into abandoned wells - 2 miles down, they say. Far away from water, they say. Our aquifers will not get contaminated, they say.
I believe a little area on North Dakota where the Bakken Shale formation is (the very same that goes through south east Saskatchewan), has over 65,000 wells. They see potential for 200,000+ wells, according to the National Geographic article.
Soooo 200,000 x 350 barrels..... 70 million barrels of chemicals pumped into the earth. In a space the size of a big city, really.
Not to mention 2 million gallons of water x 200,000..... = 400,000,000,000 gallons of water.
I know what you are saying. You are shrugging it off right now, saying what can I do? I'm just.. me. I try to remember to take my reusable shopping bags most of the time. I recycle. Heck, I even have LED or some other form of 'green' lighting in my house and an energy efficient fridge.
I'm telling you, that's not enough.
We have do stop the insanity.
How?
I don't have the answers.
But I'm willing to listen if somebody does.
