A Refusal to See and Set Limits

Citizens of the United States typically will summarize our national core values with three words - - freedom, liberty, and equality. Of the three, freedom rings the loudest. Freedom combined with out aggressive capitalistic system has produced more than a national abstraction - - it has produced a system and culture where freedom has been monetized. In essence, freedom has come to mean a refusal to set limits. Many people view this, for example in the context of water, as a right and freedom to utilize any quantity of water that they deem necessary for their particular lifestyle. The ability to pay for a public resource becomes a private right and freedom (and given our inability to adequately value and price water resources - - easily done).

This refusal runs directly into the limits of what our planet can provide. The essence of sustainability looks at our limits - - where professional engineers with an ethical and moral requirement to protect and monitor the health, safety, and welfare of the global public need to understand that they are fundamentally the guardians of the future against the claims of the present.

The September 2010 issue of Scientific American highlights the limitations of our more limited natural resources (How Much Is Left?):

• Oil - - Peak Oil in 2014. You can argue endlessly about this - - but the recent disaster in the Gulf demonstrates the limitations of our current technical knowledge combined with the increasing levels of risk that we are being forced to take. Maybe not peak oil - - but "Peak Cheap Oil." Once you hit Peak Oil - - does that also mean Peak Roads, Peak Suburban Development, Peak Low Density Development, etc. - - we really need to be thinking about this issue in greater detail.
• Water - - 2025. Climate change, pollution and population growth are putting a significant strain on supplies. Poverty, overfarming, overgrazing, deforestation, and increasingly erratic weather patterns will contribute to the conservative prediction that, if the world's temperatures rises as little as two degrees by 2100, as many as 250 million Africans will be left without adequate drinking water. Water is still the most important and improperly valued resource on the planet.
• Indium - - 2028. The element in all the flat-panel television and computer screens. At current production levels, we have 18-years of reserves. How many Indians and Chinese, as their two countries rapidly develop, want that new television set?
• Silver - - 2029. Find grandma's old silver service set - - because silver also naturally kills microbes, and it is increasingly used in bandages and as coatings of consumer products.
• Gold - - 2030. Probably about 20-years of easily mined gold left. The global financial crisis was boosted demand for gold, which is seen by many as a tangible and lower-risk investment.
• Copper - - 2044. The "in everything element" - - supporter of the electronic age. Probably the backbone infrastructure as we move into a potential new era of electric cars.
• Productive Farmland -- 2050. Feeding a warming planet - - maybe longer growing seasons in some parts, while others will face more extreme weather events and possible agricultural pests. The issue is the new winners and losers and the shifts that will occur.
• Coal - - 2072. Is anything virtually inexhaustible? The issue again becomes the advances in technology, the risks associated with those advances, and the impact of market forces as we search and development non-carbon based fuel sources.