Beavis and Butthead
Something to think about….
Something to think about….
Think about your living space this way. Every day you come home with the pizza, and when you’re done, throw the box on the floor. You would soon find that you what I have a hard time opening your door when you came home. There would be pizza boxes everywhere.
As far back in time as our species has existed on this planet, we have changed the surrounding environment. When we discovered how to extract from below the Earth’s surface, we began changing the surrounding environment. With each lump of coal that we burned, we added carbon previously stored in the earth’s crust to the surrounding environment. Let’s add another twist to our room of pizza boxes. Let’s put an old-fashioned shag rug on the floor. Let’s put an external layer of underlay. It’s so much softer to walk on. Why have I added this example? Consider the foam underlay to be a sponge which it is, which is the equivalent in our natural environment to bodies of water, especially our oceans.
Since our earliest existence on this planet, we have been using whatever we could find to enhance and make our life easier. Yes, it’s a hostile environment. When we used the forests as the source for heat and cooking, we simply returned the carbon stored in the plant material into the surrounding environment from which it came. Then we discovered coal. From the time we began using this resource, we have been taking carbon that has been stored for perhaps millions of years, letting the genie out of the bottle into our surrounding environment. This stored fossil fuel contains many contaminants and dangerous poisonous elements. One of the most predominant found in coal slag from power plants is arsenic. Everybody understands arsenic. It is the active component in rat poison. As long as we were burning available wood from the local forests, we were simply returning the captured arsenic in the tree back into the environment where it came from. When we began burning coal, we began unleashing captured and stored arsenic back into our environment. Arsenic, which had been stored for millions of years. It has been documented in the United States that groundwater has been contaminated from decades of coal slag leaching arsenic by seasonal precipitation. Our lakes, rivers and groundwater are gradually ratcheting up higher and higher levels of arsenic. All these water systems are interconnected on the planet. The water gradually reaches the oceans. The carpet underlay as a sponge continues to add more and more contaminants. For the past six hundred years, through the use of coal, we have been adding these contaminants to our natural environment around us. The oceans, like a huge sponge, continue to absorb more and more and more. However, the percentage levels of these contaminants continue to accumulate. Throughout our industrial age, this practice alone has changed the habitat for many species at a rate faster than evolution can accommodate. Therefore, many have already become extinct. They simply could not adapt. Yes, arsenic is a poison. The greater risk to environmental collapse is the carbon released into the atmosphere. Carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide are combined with moisture in the atmosphere to form an acid. Moisture as clouds and rain in the atmosphere and wave action at the surface of bodies of water continue to absorb. It is not an endless reservoir. What can now be measured is that this continued absorption is increasing the acidification. Areas bordering the western coast of North America now show deterioration and thinning of the shells of many aquatic species. We are seeing the beginning of a collapse. Arsenic and carbon are just two items. What about our most recent farming practices? Using fertilizers. For a few decades now, we have been extracting potassium phosphate from deep in the earth’s crust. Today’s agricultural practices require the continuance to remain competitive. We are adding potassium phosphate at an alarming rate to our natural environment. It was stored for millions of years in the earth’s crust. Along with the pizza boxes in our room, potassium phosphate is being placed in our current environment, where it has not existed before. Increased phosphate levels in freshwater lakes have caused algae blooms. The algae blooms have consumed all the oxygen, and the other marine life in this habitat has died. This is happening both in freshwater and in the oceans.
Everything we extract from the earth’s crust which can chemically interact with our current environment will cause change. We can not put the genie back in the bottle. The BEST ‘carbon-capture’ powered by the sun would take centuries to accomplish a measurable reversal. Not to mention the maintenance of such infrastructure over it’s lifespan. We can not recover all the arsenic released and return it to the earth’s crust.
Aluminum is suspected to cause health conditions. Perhaps a link to the Wearever cookware marketed decades ago. The aluminum reacts with salt. The inside bottom of the cookware becomes pitted from oxidation. Where did it go? Into the food you cooked. Think about all the aluminum extracted from the earth’s crust over past, and future centuries chemically reacting with salt of our oceans. There would be many more examples of elements that oxidize, or chemically interact with other elements in our environment, creating toxins that endanger many life forms.
We continue to go ninety miles an hour down a dead-end street. Proud of the Hummer, with a 6pack on the seat beside, and a quad RV in the back, and “legal” WEED in the glove box.
/h
…Beavis & Butthead
BUT we NEED JOBS….
