On the color scale of going green to single-handedly sending the world toward blackout, I’m still in the murky brown area.
How can that be? A college student not intent on one-upping Captain Planet? Inconceivable.
But true. I refuse.
It’s not as if I don’t know how. Everyone and every place around me is encouraging green behavior.
My roommate seems to have every light in our apartment off all the time. It may save energy, but I’m beginning to wonder if she can see in the dark.
Now campus is littered with blue bins, imperatively stating, “Recycle.” Being the ungreen klutz I am, I’m more likely to trip over one than throw a bottle in it.
Despite these and other attempts to force or trip me into green submission, I stubbornly resist.
Not out of laziness. College students who claim they don’t have time to go green are lying about the hours they spend watching old episodes of “Arrested Development” on their computers. This time could clearly be spent planting trees or cleaning oil off ducks.
No, my environmental brownness stems from a much different place: science.
But, wait. Al Gore has a doctorate in earth science and another in planetary heroism. He would never lie to us.
False.
Let’s start with the science behind why an Earth Hour or a night-visioned roommate will not save the polar bears.
A single, 60-watt light (say, in a living room) expends only 9.9 kilojoules in a 31-day month if run 24 hours a day. That’s the energy of 0.00076 gallons of gas. In other words, I could leave one light bulb on for 110 years using only the energy of 1 gallon of gas.
Granted, that’s just one light bulb for one person (or four, roommates included). And 6.7 billion people — or 5.1 billion with electricity and 0.5 billion with cars — can use a lot of fuel very quickly.
But there’s no call for alarm for two reasons: the reality about oil supplies and the fact that our egos, not the planet, are sounding the sirens.
First, let’s quell fears that we will soon suck the world dry of oil. A Florida-sized piece of Alberta, Canada, has enough oil in its soil to supply the United States’ needs for the next century and then some.
And there are over a dozen other oil-producing countries to fuel the rest of the world for that time as well.
On top of that, most of our alternatives to carbon burning so far have caused more trouble than good.
Just look at the food shortages caused by the production of inferior-burning corn ethanol, which our government is subsidizing.
Or look at the fact that the high fuel expenditure of manufacturing hybrid cars makes it greener to drive a plain compact car.
I’m not against finding new energy sources as effective as fossils, so that, when carbon runs out in a century, we’ll have ways to power our lives.
But they have to be effective — and actual solutions instead of problem-causers.
Now for reason two for being ungreen — the reason half of campus will likely hate me.
Despite how important we humans see ourselves in the workings of Mother Earth, we’re not really wreaking that much havoc.
Yes, we’re cutting down carbon dioxide eaters while expelling more and more carbon dioxide ourselves.
But we’ve only been burning large quantities of fossil fuels for a few centuries. The planet has been heating for the last 20,000 years.
If we are playing any role in global warming, it’s a miniscule one. Plate tectonics, Milankovitch cycles and solar energy are the grand divas.
Only our overwhelming human egos tell us we must be the cause and solution of earth’s current hot flash.
The claim that we wish to save the earth is false advertising of our intentions. We are personifying a large sphere of elements, and what we’re doing is selfish because we’re undermining the planet’s ability to support human life. We’re seeking self-preservation, not earth preservation.
If anything needs cooling, it’s the hot air we’re spewing.
Still, if there is any real reason to go green, it is this: to feel footprint-free in the grand scheme of the earth’s existence.
Such satisfaction is ultimately what drives people to try to save Mother Earth. If you wish to tint your life, there’s nothing too harmful about emerald.
If the planet can survive four billion years of its own temperature turmoil, it can survive a few billion little humans keeping their lights on.
Besides, we all may be crying at the fate of the polar bears, but no human was around to shed a tear for the dinosaurs.
Sarah Dorn is an English junior. Her column will appear every other Monday.
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elkay 3 years, 9 months ago
Comparing lightbulbs to gas/oil consumption is somewhat misleading. I don't know the Oklahoma stats, but almost 3/4 of Kansas' and 50 percent of the United States' electricity comes from coal, another carbon dioxide monster of its own. Coal, like any other fossil fuel, is polluting and non-renewable. Pollutants like mercury and particulate matter that come from coal have little to nothing to do with global warming, but they are horrible for the health and environment of the community. Check out scorecard.org to see your city's pollution stats.
You're correct to point of the failure of ethanol, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't experiment with new technology. Maybe environmentalists should re-frame the conversation to talk about pollution instead of global warming since the former is a much more tangible side effect of our overconsumption.
Keep questioning people's motives, but don't be wasteful because you aren't seeing the consequences. Start in your own backyard (if college students have those) and expand from there.
z_maupin 3 years, 9 months ago
While I agree that too many people freak out about global warming and only pay attention to what the sensationalized media feeds them, I have some problems with what you say. Where are your citations for the numbers you present? Especially the Alberta, Canada facts. No disrespect to you as an English major, but have you ever had a science class focusing on global warming? As a zoology major/IPE minor I have had many of these course. From these I have learned that we are doing a significant amount of damage. And yes, I can point you to many legitimate and supported sources to prove to you my point. The problem is that we can trade data sets back and forth that support both our sides. But what is the context? Or are we just pulling random numbers and twisting them to support our claims? Yes, the planet has been heating for the last 20,000 years, but look at data and you will find that heating trends jump substantially in more recent years. Yes, the earth warms do to natural occurrences, but they ARE actually accentuated by anthropogenic effects. And yes, global warming (and the extent of the anthropogenic effects) is a theory, but a heavily supported one...just like gravity.
joecool 3 years, 8 months ago
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. Your favorite uncle here. I dislike the term 'Going Green', but it sounds much better than the fanatical sounding "Saving the Environment". I do believe in climate change, and understand the climate is always changing. The cause for concern is at what rate it appears to be occurring. Ice core sampling and good 'ol terra firma studies show that increasing temperatures are taking place at an accelerated rate. You won't feel it, but Mother Earth does. The axis of the Earth is not fixed. It teeters a bit on occasion. Thus we get fluctuating temperatures over great periods of time. Cold places may warm and warm places may cool. Ice ages pop up and inland seas become barren. My thinking is mankind's impact can play havic on the balance of nature. Our day to day modern ways are theoretically, but very likely, speeding up these changes. It is an overpopulated Earth. It is a modern machinery by-product spewing Earth. A place we have chosen to call home. I would like to call it that for a great while. The polar bears today. Man tomorrow?
AL 3 years, 7 months ago
You make me sick.
samar 3 years, 6 months ago
I guess this means that Sarah Palin was right when she said at the VP debate that global warming is caused partly by natural causes and is partly a result of human factors.
Ahem.