All Diamonds are Blood Diamonds
All consumption becomes overconsumption when the world is nearing eight billion of us. Any alternatives other than reducing human numbers as quickly and humanely as possible just shifts the burden to another type of resource depletion.
The television program, CBS Sunday Morning (aired on February 14th, 2021),did a story on the mining of diamonds. It showed how in an effort to stop the wars over diamonds in Africa, the diamond industry dug up an area under the Arctic sea. This is a perfect example of trying to solve one problem by creating another. Now to solve the environmental and economic costs to digging tunnels under the arctic sea, synthetic diamonds are being produced.
The story presented this as a great way forward, ignoring the energy needed because of the extreme heat and pressure synthetic diamonds require. 750 kilowatt hours has to come from somewhere, and that is what it takes to produce a diamond in a lab, the equivalent of about 3 weeks of powering the average home in the USA.
In another example, one billion toothbrushes are thrown away each year in the US alone, amounting to 50 million pounds of trash each year. To solve that, those who focus only on consumption will run to their laboratories to create a biodegradable toothbrush. But even that choice is not benign. It takes resources and energy to create alternatives, it is never a zero sum game. Just one more in a litany of examples. 50 billion coffee cups are thrown away in the US each year. Companies have made valiant efforts to make compostable ones, but they have to get them to certified compost sites and so far they are more expensive. I know because for 17 years I ordered and tried to properly dispose of 20,000 cups for a half marathon and 5k race to support the nature center where I was director and in charge of the waste we generated. It was hard to justify throwing away cups from seven water stops while trying to get money to fund our nature center. Even then I was well aware that these cups still had to be shipped to us and then the used ones, used once, had to be hauled with 2- ton fossil fuel powered trucks to a proper site further away.
The king of bad ideas is the biomass industry. In an effort to create a burnable fuel that doesn’t require digging in the ground or going to war in the Middle East, someone came up with the brilliant idea to grow trees and other natural plants to burn in order to create energy. They call this biofuel and it not only pollutes but removes the best carbon absorbing organisms we have. Trees give us oxygen and absorb carbon so let’s burn them down as long as there is money to be made.
All of these so-called solutions to our over demand of the earth’s very limited resources are driven by the almighty dollar. If a buck can be made, it will done under the umbrella of so called “green” energy. What we need is less of it all. Less is easiest accomplished by having small families and strict immigration legislation. Tighten up demand on a limited resource and you will have real success not some smoke and mirrors answer that only puts money in the pockets of investors, who could care less how their investments effect the earth in the long term.
Modern living is not sustainable and it’s not just about our ubiquitous smart phones and flat screens. We take for granted that we will always have oranges in winter and coffee to drink even though we are past the peak oil that brings it to us. But I see no one volunteering to start washing their clothes in the river and giving up on their washing machines any time soon. The only answer to our spoiled ways is to have less of us doing those things we will not give up using.
We must adopt the phrase, “nothing I do in an overpopulated world is sustainable,” Unless and until we start to solve how many people are consuming, we will be caught in the cycle of alternative consumer choice which will always be stained with blood.