Like It Or Not, Our Energy Policy Actually Affects Our Prospects for Survival

I happened to tune into U.S.-based broadcast network CBS’s weekly “Sunday Morning” just now and noticed that it featured a look at the future of humankind, a subject in which I take a keen interest.   Not too surprisingly, the piece was almost uniformly optimistic: longer, healthier lives, the possibility of space migration, and the future of consumer product development aimed to render us even more comfort and convenience.  There was one segment on the build-up of trash, but that was the only mention of the fact that our approach to the generation and consumption of energy is rapidly bringing us to the point where our environment ceases to support life as we now know it.  Did the show’s producers ever hear of climate change?  Ocean acidification?  Loss of biodiversity?

I say that this approach to journalism is “not too surprising” because ratings matter, and people really don’t like to receive bad news.  In fact, it may be this one basic truth that lies behind our otherwise inexplicable failure to deal with the consequences of the way we’re behaving on this planet: we simply don’t want to hear the truth; we’d rather hear about how nanobots will one day engineer our aging cells in real-time, and boost life expectancy to over 120 years.

To be sure, presenting news that people find unsettling and disturbingly bad is not a root to popularity (as I’ve learned in a big way through the years), but I believe that someone’s got to do it.  After all, 99.9% of the species that have ever existed on this planet are extinct, and I feel compelled to do what I can to see that Home sapiens not join their ever-swelling ranks.