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Questioning the Sustainability of the "American Dream"
Rating: 2.87
Total Votes: 30
Six percent of the world's population uses over twenty-five percent of the world's resources. What if everyone tries to live like this? The "American Dream" is in trouble.
Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, immigrants came to the U.S. to try and fulfill the "American Dream" - which consists of things such as getting a good job and raising a family. After WWII, the American Dream included a suburban home, an automobile, a TV set and other time and labor-saving appliances.
When OPEC cut oil shipments to the U.S. in 1973, it was a wake-up call that lasted about 10 years. We went back our old ways, and few people seemed to learn a thing from it, especially big business and government leaders.
Now, with the recent increases in the cost of petroleum (therefore affecting the entire economy of the world, as petroleum is the foundation of the economy), it is time again that we take a look at what we call "The American Dream". We must ask ourselves "Is this way of life sustainable?"
What do we expect in the American Dream?
Energy, especially energy from petroleum, is intertwined into every part of our lives, and this energy is becoming more and more difficult to obtain, and its impact on the environment that society depends upon for success is becoming more and more clear every day.
The age of cheap oil is over with...never to return. We're in the home stretch of siphoning off the good oil from the nearest reserves. Our "great, booming ecomony" is an industrial monster, guzzling 85 million barrels of petroleum per day.
We ship goods 15,000 miles to their final destination, then when they become waste, we ship them 15,000 miles and dump them on the same people who made them. (E-waste Shipments to China)
We have the luxury of being able to throw a fourth of all of our food into the garbage.
It is not uncommon to live 40-50 or even 100 miles from our workplaces, traveling by car each day.
We take near-supersonic, oil-fired air travel for granted. "Oh yeah, I'm going to London on business for two days!"
It is considered normal to own a 2000+ square foot house with a hot tub and other energy-guzzling amenities, along with the signature 500-watt second-sun halogen light blazing above the garage door all night long.
We expect to open our shower taps and bathe ourselfs, often for hours, in 100 F clean water.
We expect clean drinking water to be cheap and endless.
We expect to be able to buy fresh fruit in the dead of winter.
We make buildings in warm and sunny climates (e.g. Florida) that require 5 megawatts of electricity for lighting IN THE MIDDLE OF A BRIGHT SUMMER DAY! With all of the advances in technology we have, you'd think we could put WINDOWS in these buildings that let NATURAL LIGHT INSIDE!
We see energy conservation as a joke. "I pay for every kWh/BTU that comes into my home, so I have the right to use as many of them as I want to!" Too bad there's a lot more to the costs of energy than money.
We expect to go to a gas station and fill up the tanks on our 6000-pound Escalades, Envoys, Excursions, and Explorers at a dirt-cheap price.
We expect to be able to travel to Wal-Mart and buy consumer electronics at rock-bottom prices, then go and plug them into our electrical outlets...using energy that we expect to be dirt cheap, 100% reliable, and delivered without dirty/ugly power plants and large pylons near our homes.
We expect our toilets to flush without a hitch and for the icky garbage to be trucked away weekly for burial in distant mega-landfills - out of sight, out of mind, is the mentality.
We expect to have "Easy Living", and allow the energy from those solar roofs, nuclear reactors, and wind turbines that we fight over instead of building to do all of the work for us.
We expect taxes to be rock-bottom, so that we can afford to buy more designer clothes, made right alongside cheaper Wal-Mart brands in the same Southeast Asia sweatshops, and then shipped to us on a big boat, propelled through the Pacific by #6 fuel oil.
We expect to have a right to good health, so what happens is the coal-fired plants and diesel trucks are allowed to continue belching out pollution and our drug companies just create drugs that people eat/drink/inhale/inject to overcome the diseases caused by pollution. We expect to have insurance to pay for medical costs, but we also want low taxes and high-paying jobs, and cheap energy (read: fossil-fuel energy without costly pollution controls).
We say that renewable energy can't compete while the subsidies received by the fossil fuel industry dwarf those received by the renewable industry.
We expect to be able to build cities below sea level, using petroleum-fired pumping stations to bail us out during a flood. After the first hurricane hits, we ship all of the debris to a mega-landfill and re-build it all over again! These low-lying cities continue to sprawl even as we rip a gigaton of coal out of the ground each year, burn it, and and use only about one-quarter of its energy to provide electricity, and send the climate-altering proceeds into the air.
We expect our roads to be free of potholes, but yet we cut the taxes that pay for those roads, and we have the rail lines ripped up, and more and more destructive 21,000 pound trucks (complete with some drivers who urinate into jugs and toss them out windows) drive on those roads to get all of the goods from the west coast of California to the Wal-Marts and K-Marts of our hometowns.
We expect 3-4 percent economy growth per year, yet our economy is running on fossil fuels which are DECLINING not GROWING! Natural Gas in particular, as we're basing almost all growth of electricity on natural gas-fired plants. 15% of our gas comes from Canada. That's 50% of Canada's supply. Look out Middle East! Here come our LNG Ships! Time for Foriegn Energy Round 2...Million Mile Methane to fuel the fryers and coffee brewers in the nation's Dunkin' Donuts stores!
Most of us know that in the back of our minds we will need to switch from oil someday. They think "someday" is far off, and that American ingenuity will bail us out at the last minute without causing any economic disturbances. Think again. For one, a lot of the "American Ingenuity" has faded away, and more and more people work in service industries instead of science and engineering. We've got all of this top-level stuff, but what is there to support it - people to make the infrastructure, electricity, and energy that it all uses possible? The scale is massive - Remember, we use 146.476 terawatt-hours of energy from oil every day worldwide...the equivalent of 6103 nuclear reactors or 3,051,500 wind turbines on full-bore!
We expect endless petrochemicals for our bottled-water bottles that "only environmentalists recycle", our clothing, our homes, our medicines. Oil isn't just for burning.
When petroleum supply can no longer meet demand, the energy deficit will have to be taken up somewhere. Since nearly all oil goes into transportation, that is a problem. Driving people and goods will become very, very expensive, and the slack is likely to be taken up by forced conservation followed by stunted future economic growth. It's called the laws of nature, and we built a society that is blind to them.
When China begins to REALLY push the "American Dream" concept, then we're in trouble. Big Trouble.
Last Modified: 05/25/2008
Created On: 05/16/2006