What will our landscapes look like if we continue to focus on finding new natural resources as opposed to minimizing our consumption?
Apparently, energy resources are a big deal. The industry is frantically searching to find natural resources and use them more efficiently. Unfortunately, the “find” part is being prioritized too heavily. Recently, Michele Bachmann claimed that as president she would return gas prices to $2 per gallon. She believes the U.S. has hoards of untapped natural resources, so much so that we can stop “begging” others for theirs.
The New York Times recently published an article, presenting new estimates of natural gases in the Marcellus Shale formation that runs from New York down to Virginia. Unfortunately, it’s slightly lower than their previous estimate from earlier this year, 410 trillion down to 84 trillion. Texas also has discrepancies in estimated accuracies of natural resources.
Even if we discover new, easily-accessible resources, we will devastate the landscape if we don’t change the infrastructure of how we consume them. According to Konrad Otto-Zimmermann, secretary general of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, “In the next 40 years we need to build the same urban capacity that we built in the last 4,000 years, or people will live in slums.” No matter which resources we rely on, if we do so in such a large capacity we are still destroying the environment as a dynamic system.
Renewable resources are seen as the savior to the crisis of limited fossil fuel resources, while the true problem of mass consumption is pushed aside. Political attention should be refocused on discovering ways to lessen our environmental impact by limiting our consumption and then maybe wind farms and solar farms will be a more reputable and reliable alternative.