Some observations on life in the early 21st century

While the governments of Australia - the federal government worst of all - are doing little other than talk about limiting emissions of the gasses that cause climate change, the majority of the people of Australia are no better. They seem to think that something must be done, but expect the governments to do it and do nothing themselves. For example, few Australians drive small fuel-efficient cars, and it seems to me that few Australians limit the number of flights that they do because of a desire to reduce greenhouse gas production. Few Australians alter their behavior in any significant way to reduce their greenhouse gas production rate.

It has always been a difficult step for humanity to apply the ethics test of "What if everybody did that?" (see Ethics). If everyone in the world had four or more children in their family, over-population, famine, starvation, shortage of water and other resources, deforestation, etc. would be much worse; yet very few people limit their family size because they look at the big picture.

If everyone in the world produced the same amount of carbon dioxide as the average Australia, climate change would be far more advanced than it is, but it is a big mental step for Australians to go from possessing this knowledge to acting on it. Rather, we expect our government, being fully aware of the problem, to make laws that will force the limitation of greenhouse gas production. But governments have learned that high ethical standards do not win elections, and the Australian voters are to blame for that.

Air travel

Air travel is one of the greatest contributions to greenhouse gasses in most people's lives; for each person traveling 5000km in a commercial jet plane about one tonne of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphers, see Greenhouse Impact.

Flying is inexpensive, quick and convenient, compared to the alternative available methods of travel. For example, if my wife and I travel from our home in South Australia to visit our daughter in Western Australia...

Form of travel	Air/train travel time	Total travel time
Air	3 hours	9 hours
Train	36 hours	42 hours
Car		72 hours (with leasurely driving)

- Total travel time includes time to get to the air port or train station and from there to our daughter's house.
- Travel by train would cost about three times as much as travel by air.
- Overnight accommodation for car travel would cost about the same as the cost of air travel.

For overseas travel flying is even more the outstanding option. Travel by ship is no longer a practical way to get oneself from home to a destination; cruise ships travel the world's oceans, but are very expensive and rarely run where one would need them.

The Australian democracy is in poor shape, we have a plutocracy (rule by the wealthy) rather than a true democracy. Both major political parties are corrupt, they do the bidding of big business rather than of the Australian people, because it is big business that gives them the money to fight their political campaigns. (Labor also gets a substantal part of its funding from the unions. This money also comes with obligations.) The Australian government invests about $47 to the fossil fuel industry for every dollar that it invests in sustainable energy (report from Aust. Conservation Foundation, 'Responsible Public Investment in Australia', March 2008) Yet people continue to vote for the same parties as they have always voted for; they seem unable to see the trees for the forest.

We have a preferential voting system in Australia, so it is possible to vote for an independent candidate or a minor party and still have your vote count for one or other of the major parties. But still the great majority give their first preference vote to one of the big parties - even when they don't really trust any of them. Our preferential voting system allows one to vote for the candidate one likes best and, in addition, express a preference between the candidates from the major parties. If the voter's first preference candidate has insufficient votes to get into Parliament, the expressed preference between major parties is counted. (None of today's major parties would have introduced such an ethical voting system; it must have been due to those who wrote the Constitution. They, at lease, must have had some ethical standards.)

If voters behaved rationally we could have a functional democracy in Australia. The great majority of humanity, it seems, is not sufficiently intellegent for democracy to work as it might.

Many people believe that the scientific community is deeply divided over whether climate change is happening or, if it is happening, whether its cause is anything to do with Man's activities. This is quite false. Of the papers published in scientific journals by climatologists 100% see climate change as a real phenomenon and ascribe at least a very large part of it to human activities. The media have a strong tendency to try to look for two sides to every story, so when they have a scientist warning about the danger of climate change they feel obliged to look for a skeptic - and there will always be some people who are skeptics on any subject, there are still people who believe the earth is flat!

On the other hand there can be no doubt about terrorism. We see film of the aftermath of car bombs in Baghdad almost every night on telivision. People are being killed; it's happened in the USA, the UK, Spain, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Australians have been killed by torrorists.

People have a hard time balancing the mainly future risks of climate change against the clear and locally very destructive acts of terrorists. That climate change is an incomparably larger threat than terrorism is clear to any rational and informed person, but much less clear to the typical ill-informed and emotion-driven citizen.

For example: I did a search of the Internet on "Life in the 21st century" and one of the first results was a page stating that the discovery of

1. One or more means of producing free energy;
2. One or more means of controlling gravity;
3. Electronic methods to sustain health and rejuvenate the body;

"That spark of the Creator, which we call the soul, decides to incarnate from time to time, in various dimensions, planets and environments in order to experience and overcome the dangers of the dense, physical environment and eventually, having successfully climbed the ladder, return from whence it came."

The success of science has demonstrated that to understand the world you need to try to, as objectively as possible, look at the evidence and follow where it leads you. Instead, a very large proportion of the people of the 21st century base their lives on beliefs that are not in any way supported by evidence. Religion is probably as much a part of life as it ever was, especially in the USA which is the perhaps the most technologically advanced nation on earth. (Certainly it is the country possessing the most destructive arsonal of weapons of any country on earth. To have so many people in such a powerful nation basing their lives around irrational beliefs is a terrible thing.)

• Fossil fuels are being burned as if they would last for ever; even though it has become very obvious in recent decades that we are quickly running out, particularly of liquid fossil fuels. We are not considering the right of any future people to some share in the natural wealth of the earth. We could be living very nearly as well as we do while consuming a fraction of the amount of fossil fuels and conserving the remainder for those who will come later.
• Few people seem able to see that they, as individuals, are producing far more greenhouse gasses, particularly carbon dioxide, than can be handled by the earth's natural processes.
• The way that nuclear power is produced from uranium seems to me typical of the very short sighted, ignorant and apathetic way that modern man approaches energy. For the last sixty years man has used only the 0.7% of natural uranium that is U235 to produce energy in electricity generating nuclear power stations. Most of the 99.3% of the uranium that is the U238 isotope goes to waste. The U235 is needed to start the nuclear reaction. It is quite feasible to design a reactor that can consume both U238 and U235, but so long as the U235 is cheap our society is content to consume that and dump the U238. Practically no-one seems able to see that this is irresponsible. We should be mining one hundredth as much uranium and extracting all the available power from it so that the resource can last a hundred times as long; we are stealing from future generations. I have written on this point at rather more lenght in another page.

Cost of food

If, instead of preparing one's own food from simple ingredients, one eats in restaurants, then food can be very much more expensive. It could easily become the greatest single cost of living. On the other hand, especially in cities, it is possible to buy prepared foods relatively cheaply - with the disadvantage that many of these are poor nutritionally; in particular they might be very high in fat and contain a poor mix of vitamins.

Those people who have gardens could grow their own vegetables and could produce the bulk of their own food. It would, though, be unlikely that they could grow foods like potatoes and carrots as cheaply as they could buy them. Most people do not grow significant amounts of food because of either lack of time or lack of space; or perhaps because they do not feel any need to.

This is a work in progress

Much of our beef comes from feed-lots. In large commercial cattle feed-lots the animals stand around in bare dusty yards in the summer, usually with little or no shade, and in mud in the winter. They stand more than they would normally choose to in winter because they do not like to sit in mud (who would?). That this is cruel does not seem to worry many feed-lot owners, workers, or citizens; in the case of the citizens it is probably a matter of out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Feed-lot cattle are fed grain and hay. To feed a cow grain that could be eaten by a human is an inefficient use of that grain. To produce a kilogram of meat on a cow requires many kilograms of grain.

Much of the problems with modern Man being overweight is due to poor diet and this is at least partly due to an abundance of high-fat or high-carbohydrate food.

Many fish species have been over-harvested. The modern fishing industry is so efficient that it is able to find and catch most of the fish of any target species. It has been easier to fish-out a species and move on to a different one than to regulate the industry and get the fishermen to agree to limit their catches.

Many fish are raised in fish farms. These have much in common with cattle feed-lots. The fish are fed smaller fish or grain-based diets - both of which would feed more people if eaten directly by people rather than being used to feed fish which then are eaten by the people.

Of course Man runs fish farms and cattle feed lots because they are profitable - whether they are an efficient use of resources is irrelevent to their profitability. Perhaps being an inefficient use of resources doesn't matter from the ethical point of view; if the cattle and fish didn't eat all that food mal-nourished people probably would not be able to afford to buy it anyway. Is there an ethical responsibility to feed ever more hungry people just because we could do so in theory? But needless cruelty is never justified.

The dominant factors in late twentieth and early twentifirst-century transport are cheap liquid or liquified gas fossil fuels, abundant access to cheap motor vehicles and lazyness. New vehicles are not cheap: a medium sized car might cost forty weeks wages for an average wage-earner, but older, used, vehicles are much cheaper; for example I have not been able to sell a perfectly servicable thirty-year old car for any price.

More than half of the people of most Western (industrialised, developed) countries are fat or very fat (overweight or obese). I believe there is a cause and effect here: lazy people driving their easily affordable cars everywhere they go rather than getting any exersize walking. The food we eat is also a factor. It is easiest - whenever you decide to go to the shops, to work, to visit a friend, to the local hotel - to get in your car and drive. Even taking public transport would cost you a bit more effort; you'd have to walk to the bus stop or the train station and walk from another bus stop or train station to your destination.

One of the ironies of this society is that many of these people who drive cars everywhere they go will then spend a significant amount of money and use a significant amount of their time exercising in gymnasiums in order to get some of the exercise that they avoid getting by driving everywhere.

I suspect that the desire to save energy - in the sense of avoiding non-essential exercise - goes back to our hunter-gatherer days when we needed to use our available energy as efficiently as possible. In the modern world it works against the maintenance of good health; carrying excessive fat is a cause of poorer health. Of course carrying excessive fat makes walking or riding a bicycle more difficult, so the fatter one gets the less inclined he is to get exercise while travelling from place to place.

Another irony is that more of us would travel by bicycle if more of us travelled by bicycle! Few travel by bicycle, so the many who are afraid of standing out from the crowd avoid bicycling. Another aspect of the problem is that if there were many more bicycles on the road car drivers would be more familiar with them and would learn to be more tollerant of them; bicycling would become safer and less harrowing. If more people used bicycles then roads would be designed more appropriatly for bicycles; at present roads are designed for cars and trucks, people on bicycles have to make do with roads that are not well suited for them.

A great many of us are fat, then, because of our readily available and cheap cars. We are well aware - those of use who make any effort at all to be well informed - that our cars, collectively, are a very large producer of greenhouse gasses and therefore a cause of climate change. This, unfortunately, seems to have very little effect on our behavior; many of us drive cars that are much bigger than we need.

Bigger cars, of couse, consume more fuel (they also cost more than smaller cars, but as I said, cars and fuel are cheap). Modern man does not care that his actions are destroying the world - he is too ignorant, apathetic, and/or short-sighted to care what will happen twenty or fifty years into the future. It is convenient to have a car that is large enough for most occasions rather than one that is no bigger than you need for most occasions. If people cared more for climate change and less for their own convenience they would drive smaller cars and live with the problem of sometimes having to squeeze a large load into a small car, use a trailer, or take two cars rather than one.

Other environmental damage from 4WDs