Fossil fuels in a post-industrial world, it's time to rethink how we live

[BirminghamExaminer]

Excerpt:

Rachel Maddow had a good piece on her show last night about the way each presidential administration has "paid lip service" to reducing our dependence on oil that goes back to the presidency of Richard Nixon. It's worth watching as it outlines rather quickly our history of concern about the environmental when Nixon basically said we could no longer take the air and water for granted after the huge oil and natural gas leak that gushed into the ocean off of the coast of California in 1969.

Other fossil fuels we need to be concerned about include coal. The recent mining disaster in West Virginia is a good reminder that coal mining is a very dangerous business in terms of life. On top of that is a problem with an aging industrial infrastructure. In December, 2008, there was a coal sludge spill in Tennessee that was caused by a breach in a retention wall. The estimate on December 28, 2008 was that the sludge spill had grown to 1 billion gallons.

According to a December, 2007 article in Scientific American, "the waste produced by coal plants is more radioactive that that generated by their nuclear counterparts." Coal ash or waste is 100 times more radioactive than the waste a nuclear plant produces when manufacturing the same amount of energy.

There is no clear picture yet of alternative means of energy that can replace what we've come to take for granted, but the first step we need to take is to let go of our complacency and divorce ourselves from our love affair with cars and the convenience of deadly petroleum and other fossil fuels. We need to alter our attitudes and encourage and enable scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to invent new modes of energy for transportation, heating and cooling because we cannot continue to ignore the problems associated with fossil fuels. It's not a Republican, Democratic or Libertarian issue, it's a practical issue that affects us all.

Even if there is a bit more oil to be found by drilling in places unacceptable just a few years ago, it's clear after the latest petroleum spill into the Gulf Coast waters that it's simply not safe and even if we were to continue the unsafe drilling, fossil fuels, including drilled petroleum is simply not sustainable. We will run out. Now is the time for us to set our sights to a new industrial revolution, one that will remove the shackles that fossil fuels have us in just as the first industrial revolution removed the shackles of back breaking, life shortening labor.