Gee, I guess because millions of people have decided that the ‘little difficulty’ is worse than the cost of driving a car. You gonna tell them they are wrong and take their cars away?
In case you haven’t noticed, we are an incredibly wasteful society, and much of our waste comes from getting rid of ‘little difficulties’. We keep our houses warmer than they need to be. We live in bigger houses than we need to. We keep too many lights on. We drive cars. We use many power appliances instead of doing things by hand. We used disposable goods of all sorts rather than go through the ‘little difficulties’ of re-using things.
And YOU do 98% of it all. And yet you have the nerve to focus on the .2% where someone uses slightly more resources you do, and declare them evil and march against them.
BTW, this is the generic ‘you’. I’m not aiming this at any poster in particular, but at the mindset. Like people who throw paint on people wearing fur coats, then go home and remove their leather shoes, leather belts, and put down their leather briefcases and go off and eat some meat.
BTW, I grew up in a farmhouse without running water or indoor plumbing. Those ‘little difficulties’ add up pretty fast, and make life pretty freaking miserable.
And people who say using mass transit is only a ‘little difficulty’ usually turn out to be young single people in good health. For them, that may in fact be the case. Wait until you’re 40, with children and a job that is a half-hour drive away. Wait until taking your child to skating lessons changes from a 10 minute drive while you listen to music and sing along with your daughter, into a 30 minute hassle of standing in the cold, standing in a crowded bus, and walking several blocks in the winter lugging around a sports bag.
Not being able to drive would add at least a couple of hours of hassle a day for me. Running out of milk would no longer mean a quick 5-minute trip to the store, but going without rather than walking 45 minutes. Life would be significantly more difficult.
I’m all for ‘raising awareness’. Feel free to write some books, write letters to the editor, organize marches, and do whatever else you want to ‘raise awareness’. The thing is, I think the people are plenty aware. They just don’t agree with you.
And yes, oil will eventually get more expensive. The price isn’t low because of a conspiracy. The price is low because we have a lot of it, and we are currently producing it faster than we are using it. Proven reserves of oil keep increasing, because the exploration technology keeps improving. But one day that will stop (I wouldn’t hazard a guess - maybe 20 years, maybe 2000). But when it does, oil will rapidly increase in price. When that happens, you’ll see a relatively rapid shift away from profiglate oil use. Guaranteed.
And we’ll never run out. Because long before every drop is used up, it will be too expensive to use in mass quantities.
And sure, North America has a large ecological footprint per capita. But is that the right measure? We also produce more goods per capita, more food per capita, and make more wealth per capita than anyone else.
How about about we come up with a new measure, which is ecological footprint per dollar of wealth created? I’ll bet you’ll find out that we’re not so inefficient after all.
