One person's convenience is another person's catastrophe

A friend posed a question on social media looking for recommendations on choosing between two stores at which to stop.  Many offered economic preferences, several offered social justice preferences, and some offered service preferences, and one person offered the following preference...

"Whichever is more convenient."

For decades, corporate America has sold us on the idea of consumption to update our life with all of the "modern conveniences".  We moved from developing cities in which people could live without a car to a society in which each household requires two cars to survive.  A TV in every home moved to two or three, at least.  A single phone line gave way to multiple lines and call waiting with caller ID, which has further given way to individual cell phones.  The family computer that introduced itself to American households in the 80s and 90s has become the family of tablets and laptops.

This proliferation of conveniences has counterbalanced the significant increases in efficiency of large appliances, automobiles, and home design, maintaining the US as one of the largest per capita consumers of energy.  Only in the last five years has our appetite for energy stabilized even as population continues to rise.  While much of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries (those against whom our economy compares best, and compared with some of whom our quality of life pales) survives and even thrives on half of the per capita consumption of the US.  Our continued desire for more conveniences (including entertainment) drives two prime factors that hinder our ability to get smarter about energy use and quality of life:

We see any reduction as a sign of less convenience, and we put our head in the sand when confronted with the impact of our energy use...mostly because most of us do not directly feel those impacts.

(AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Three stories from the last six months highlight this latter point.  In Colorado, significant flooding at the change of seasons from summer to fall last year placed surface water in jeopardy when as many as 80,000 fracking wells and their support infrastructure (including surface ponds of both supply and waste water) fell underwater.  Nearly four months after the flooding started, officials still cannot determine if, or how much, pollution occurred and where.  Over the past several years, on the southeast side of Chicago and northwest Indiana, refineries have stored pet coke - a powdery byproduct of the refining of heavy crude like tar sands - in large, uncovered piles.  Prevailing winds have spread the substance over houses, patios, and depending on the day, even a neighborhood of family barbecues.  Last week, in West Virginia, the storage containers for a chemical used to clean coal failed and leaked 7,500 gallons of 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol (MCHM) into the water supply for as many as 300,000 West Virginians.

All of these processes - the pressurized fracturing of rock to draw out gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons stored within, the transformation of heavy liquid hydrocarbon into the form we most frequently desire, and the chemical processing of solid hydrocarbons to reduce emissions - require complicated steps with chemical and energy inputs that result in waste heat, pollutants, and residual matter along with the usable energy.  In each of the cases noted above, the victims of the catastrophe represented a fraction of the people who benefit from the convenience the energy provides.  Their individual and combined voices will not, and cannot, sway industry to make changes...no market-based mechanism gives them the power to affect the corporation.  Even with significant empathy (that does not seem to have awoken, even with mine collapses, coal dust pollution, and increased earthquakes added to the list of catastrophes), our addiction to energy, and the services it provides, tempers our emotions so that we may pray for those affected, but not recognize our own role in the matter, and certainly not drive us to act in ways that will help them.

The solution offered by government regulation holds little hope to provide significant relief.  The knowledge and workforce required to keep up with the vast fossil energy industry would require a government much larger than the current political climate would allow.  Even if politics allowed for such a significant regulatory infrastructure, it would lag the innovation and development of industry, rendering it nothing more than a CSI unit determining guilt but not preventing damage.

We need to have a tough national discussion on how willing we are to sacrifice the lives and health of our fellow citizens of the world and country, and within that willingness, how much value we truly place on the lives of others.  Can we truly say that our choices place equal value on other lives relative to our own?  If you buy natural gas to cook or to heat your home, gasoline to power an automobile (or take a bus or commuter rail to work), and/or electricity to enliven your TV and refrigerator, the answer can be no better than "maybe".

With that as our best current response, we need to look toward a future that eliminates the risks.  That can take the form of an outright ban on fossil fuels phased in over an aggressive, but achievable, time period.  It can take the form of placing the burden on polluting entities to relocate all of those impacted negatively by their operations.  It can take the form of reinsurance that forces those responsible for a catastrophe to bear the burden, and not the public at large.

And it requires each of us opening our eyes to the damage caused by our pursuit of convenience.  Only then can we have the honest conversations that will lead us to a future where we achieve high quality of life for all .