ARE “THE CRITTERS” HAPPY WITH OUR PLANS FOR FURTHERING INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION?
Join me for a conversation with the wise and thoughtful physics professor from UC San Diego, Dr. Thomas Murphy.
Dr. Thomas Murphy, Professor of Physics, Astrophysics and “Energy & The Environment” at UC San Diego, has a different perspective on the topic of "Energy and the Environment," which he has taught for many years. The more he taught and learned, the more clearly he could see that most of humanity’s plans for energy will not work, either for people, in the long run, or for the natural world.
Tom has a special place in his heart for "the critters," such as the squirrels and the newts, and those that are groaning under the burden of human civilization. There's almost no way out for them. That's why we need to seriously rethink everything we're doing, including our grandiose plans to power industrial civilization with so-called renewable energy and electrification of our vehicles.
HART HAGAN: You have a blog post called “Shedding our Fossil Fuel Suit.” This is on the “Do the Math” blog, which is excellent. You say, “One thing we know for certain about fossil fuels is that they are a finite resource on this planet. You go on to say that it's not just a footprint anymore. It's a boot on the throat of the planet leaving non-human life gasping and silently begging for even a little mercy.” So that relates to your idea of whether the squirrels are going to be happy if we blanket the Earth with solar panels and wind turbines.
TOM MURPHY: Let me share with you a concept that I've been kicking around a little bit. Imagine that there's a theater showing a movie. This is an animated story. And all these critters come in to watch the movie. The movie is “The Human Saga.”
So they sit down and have their popcorn. They settle in for a nice movie. For most of the movie until the last few minutes, it's a fairly fun little romp of humans interacting with animals.
Yeah, some humans die. Sometimes animals die. But they all understand that. People have to eat. Animals have to eat. When the humans die, they fertilize the ground and then the deer eats the grass. It's all part of the cycle of life and everybody accepts that and, you know, they're having a fine time.
And then right before the movie ends, suddenly we're domesticating animals, which makes them worry what that's all about.
And then we find the fossil fuels.
And in the last few seconds of the movie, we're just going gangbusters. Picture this city with city walls that are expanding toward a cliff and animals are being pushed off the cliff.
That's the boot on the throat. That's rapid diminution of animal species and populations and some of them are propping up sticks, like in Star Wars, trying to keep the trash compactor from coming in and nothing is working.
The sticks are breaking and they are being pushed off. And then some guy in his garage looks at his car and notices that CO2 is trending upwards.
In his Mind's Eye, he’s picturing all the negative things that we associate with climate change, catastrophic weather damage, cities under water. It’s mainly impact to human structures. It’s very self-centered. But suddenly, he sees that as a problem.
Then the city halts for a second, the animals are like, “Oh, good, thank you!”
And then some animals from the audience shout, “That's what it took?!? It’s crummy CO2?!? That's what finally got your attention? But whatever. Fine.
We're ready to forgive you and get on living. But then the guy snaps his fingers, and has an idea. He rolls his car into the landfill, purchases an electric car which involves scraping up a lot more materials from the planet.
Now a solar panel farm plunks down in the desert and stomps out some tortoises. Windmills knock birds out of the sky, and then the city starts resuming its expansion and all is lost.
That’s how I see things.
HART HAGAN: It's a sad and tragic story. It's very sad from the perspective of the animals.
TOM MURPHY: Absolutely! They are not doing very well on our watch here and it's all very rapid. So, that's the boot on the throat idea.
We talked about human footprints and that sounds gentle, but it's actually pretty violent from the animal's perspective. We get a lot of publicity--and rightfully so--when a human is used in this way and caught on video and says they can't breathe, for instance. And, you know, certainly that's tragic. We don’t like to see those things happen. But in terms of scale, that's nothing compared to the scale at which the animal population on this planet would say--if they could-- “I can’t breathe!”
They don't talk, but they would say, “We can't breathe.” What are we going to do about that? We have to take our boot off the throat. We have to scale back. There's just no way around it.