overconsumption

Waleed Aly ("A Rhetorical S

France has banned fracking, but the United States is allowing lateral mining to utterly demolish democracy and people are facing destitution and starvation because of the lack of citizen rights in the United States to protect farm and town water. Here are some quotes from the film: "Using our resources against us"... "Greed and money: they're just sucking all of the water out of the ground. Why can't I have a say? Why can't these oil companies understand?"..."We've got to have some restrictions on mining... "If we run out of water, we're going to have to pump it in and it will cost more than oil. So why do you think the people of this town should be quiet about it?" In the face of a winner takes all, some farmers are caving in and trading farming in for mining and selling off their water. "... If you've got to have the oil you have to use the water. The demand is out there." Australia's government is going the same way as the United States.

The way The Australian writes him up, Tim Flannery, who once wrote so articulately in defense of our land and its ecology and our place in it, now seems reduced to a quasi-apologist for extreme mining technologies. The Australian writes in such an unbalanced way.

This article makes it clear that energy consumption and its fall-out, pollution, have enormously increased over two or three generations, to a point where actions commonly recommended to minimise them, are laughably inadequate.

I =P x A x T

( Environmental impact= Population level times Affluence or per capita consumption x Technology)

Many of us use costly elephants to do jobs that don't need an elephant. What do I mean?

Perhaps the most urgent near-term issue for environmentalists is one that few yet talk about. It is what I call "the human bottleneck".