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> Rather, the point is to say "here's a huge vein of untapped energy, some of which could be tapped without damaging the environment and without releasing carbo
by roninb 10y ago
> Rather, the point is to say "here's a huge vein of untapped energy, some of which could be tapped without damaging the environment and without releasing carbon."
Did we say that about trees? Fossil fuels? Have we said that about silica, lithium, or rivers (we're having plenty of issues from Georgia to Pennsylvania along the Appalachians because of just that)?
I agree with what you're saying, I just don't think your last sentence is right. Kinda seems like a contradiction if everyone overuses resources (keeps burning oil) and it's causing problems (and we know that is a class of problem that we've experienced with other substances like rubber, trees, fish, dodo birds, lithium - hell, anything we can get our hands on), shouldn't we ensure other problems don't pop up from overusing resources (what if everybody else did this)?
I think the exact point is to not make the same mistake we've made with pretty much every other resource we've ever found...
- hueving 10y ago>I think the exact point is to not make the same mistake we've made with pretty much every other resource we've ever found... So... keep burning oil instead of experimenting with this?
- roninb 10y agoSo... don't overuse resources. And when presented with the question of "how does this scale?" don't ignore how fabulously efficiently we damaged the environment every other time we've scaled production up. Not sure how you got "keep burning oil" from that...
- hueving 10y agoWe're not even near the scaling part. It's silly to argue about how something will have issues if the entire world did it. There are tons of things we do today that wouldn't scale environmentallly if the entire world wanted to do the same thing (e.g. flying).
- URSpider94 10y agoWe have more trees in the USA now than we had in Colonial times.
- wcoenen 10y agoThe forest area seems to have decreased significantly between 1760 and 1910. http://forestry.about.com/od/forestresources/tp/forest_fact_USA.htm http://forestry.about.com/od/forestresources/tp/forest_fact_...