By the title of my blog you probably already made up your mind about what I’m going to write about. You think that I’m going to say that global warming doesn’t exist, that we should drill for more oil, keep driving SUV’s, and that the earth is only 5000 years old. Well, you’re wrong. I am definitely one to say that humanity will face enormous problems in the next 50 years if nothing is done very soon, and in fact we might already be too late. We are overfishing, over polluting, over mining, over drilling and overpopulating. Fresh drinking water is becoming more scarce, droughts are becoming more common, deserts are expanding, forests are shrinking, and we face many natural disasters due to climate change.
The reason I say that “going green” is BS is because people think that because they drive a hybrid and use energy saving light bulbs they are doing their part for the environment. In my opinion, most of these people are either delusional and hypocritical or simply can’t see the big picture. Most of these people aren’t really doing it because they want to be socially responsible, they are doing it because there is an economic incentive to buy these products. How many people would really be buying hybrids if the cost of gasoline was $1.00? We can safely say that probably not many, if the opposite were true, SUV’s would have never become as popular as they did. If energy bills for every household were a fixed price, no one would be buying energy saving light bulbs. Let’s be real here, most people are not socially responsible, they simply react to economic incentives to products that affect their bottom line.
In my mind, if we truly want to be socially responsible we need to put a price on the things that we value and that matter to us. For example, it has taken $4 dollar gasoline for people to start looking at more energy efficient cars and other forms of fuel. Had we taxed the hell out of gasoline a long time ago (like the Europeans), don’t you think we would have had these better cleaner and more efficient cars or would have looked for other fuels a long time ago? Another example is coal burning power plants. Why do we still have them when we all know they are the dirtiest power plants? Its simple, they are much cheaper than solar, nuclear or wind power plans. Unless there is price associated with pollution, they will continue to exist because coal is the cheapest way to produce electricity.
Unless we make dirty technologies and things that harm the environment have an actual monetary cost, “going green” doesn’t mean anything. For any of this to happen we are going to have to wait for our great government to pass legislation that will tax pollution, make water more expensive for everyone, restrict commercial fishing, and incentivize people to use cleaner technologies, so don’t hold your breath. In my opinion Americans are too selfish and are not going to give up their SUV’s, plasma TV’s, 45min showers, and their bottled water to help the environment unless it cost too much to have those things.
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