> We live in an age of luxury, splendor and wealth unimaginable just a few hundred years ago. An unsustainable age of luxury, splendor, and wealth. We're consu

> We live in an age of luxury, splendor and wealth unimaginable just a few hundred years ago. An unsustainable age of luxury, splendor, and wealth. We're consuming something like 2.5 Earths' worth of resources. Species are going extinct at record rates. For example, fisheries, which supply a significant portion of humanity's protein, are collapsing due to the efficiency of our magnificent trawler machines. We can fly around the world in less than a day and eat steak every night, but this is built on unsustainable energy use. Our cross-country flights emit as much carbon as 6 months of driving, and the calories from that nightly steak require another 10x as many calories from the grain required to feed the cattle, all grown using magnificent fossilfuel-created fertilizer, who's runoff into the gulf creates algae blooms that deplete all the oxygen and further collapse the ecosystem. Calories are a measure of energy, and as thermodynamics tells us, the energy must come from somewhere. A cow is a machine that converts grain to steak at 10% efficiency. Similarly, grain is a machine that converts soil energy to feedstock. And then artificial fertilizer is a technology that converts fossil fuels to soil energy at something like 15% efficiency [1]. The water required to grow all that grain is coming from dwindling aquifers -- farmers in California's central valley are calling in fracking firms from the fracking fields to drill new special fracking-depth wells because all the ones at traditional depths have gone dry. > Life is too short to spend your precious time on earth in a hell of self-induced punishment. Yep, eat drink and be merry today, because it won't be around tomorrow. Shit is gloomy because we're squandering our luxury, splendor and wealth, and we're starting see what it's like when it runs out. To the boomers, this was all abstract boogeymen. Today's generation is the one starting to feel the effects. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process