Please commit to generating…

Please commit to generating our electricity from 100% renewable sources such as the sun, wind and water and commit to do it within the next 10 years at most.  And in conjunction with that commitment, also expand and support conservation of energy, i.e. tax people and corporations on the amount of energy they use.  Whomever wants to live lavish lifestyles through huge resource and energy use, then they should pay for it and that money should then go to support renewable energy generation and to those who conserve and protect our valuable resources.  The money could also be used to help those in carbon-intensive industries retrain and find jobs in new, cleaner industries.

Oil, gas and coal were created over millions of years.  Releasing all this carbon into our atmosphere and biosphere at such fast rates is simply beyond what the natural world can handle without increasingly drastic effects.  Nuclear power is dangerous; numerous accidents have proven that.  We do not know what to do with the waste which lasts for thousands of years before it decays to safe levels.

Jobs in old industries will gradually decrease but they will be replaced by jobs in new industries that support conservation of energy and renewable electricity generation.  We need to forget the rich who are making life miserable for the majority because of their exploitation of people and resources and band together to make life better for the majority of people on the planet.  But people first have to get past their selfishness in terms of extreme individual rights and entitlements.  What about the entitlement for a poor person in Africa to have food or water to survive?  Or another species of animal to live a life in an undisturbed ecosystem?

Humans are not above the laws of nature.  Either we can decide to curb our energy consumption, consumerism, lavish lifestyles and resource plundering in a way to gradually shift our society in a better direction more in balance with the planet's biosphere or nature will do it for us but that option will likely be very drastic.  The planet will still be here, no matter what we do to it, but will we still be here?  Not to mention other species.

Nobody says it is easy, but anything worthwhile doing is never easy.  Easy means lazy and inconsiderate for anybody or anything.  Ultimately, that leads to suffering.  Continuous economic growth is impossible.  Nothing in nature can grow indefinitely, it's physically impossible. Mountains rise, the erosion wears them down.  A population of deer in a given ecosystem rises until they exceed the resource base in that ecosystem and then famine and disease can decrease that population to an amount that can be sustained by the given resource base.  And so on.  People need to live in balance, not extravagance in the long term.

[Original Comment ID: 206520]