Photo by: Anton Novikov / iStock
The most serious issue for humanity is that of overproduction, which affects both climate processes and the environment. By producing products from primary and secondary resources, factories create large quantities of goods from materials that are not valued for their recyclability, and the demand is less than the supply. This all leads to mountains of waste, sometimes unused before it is thrown away.
It turns out that at all stages, from production to consumption, enormous amounts of different resources are expended: poultry and cattle farms for milk and meat with mountains of manure, deforestation with destruction of biodiversity, destruction of ecosystems for growing industrial crops and future palm oil cheese, changing riverbed processes and bird migration routes for wind or water power and much more. There is a huge amount of machinery, equipment and people involved in these processes. All this, including the waste produced, has a negative impact on the air, water and soil, among others.
Each proposed solution has little to do with those that already exist. This in itself is wrong, since nothing in nature exists in isolation. Therefore, it is impossible to ignore processes that are already occurring when designing future changes.
It is important not just to set a goal to solve the climate problem, but to choose the right tools to do so. For example, some advocates of low-carbon policies often assign high hopes for reducing CO2 emissions to the switch to electric cars, clean wind, solar power or water. However, we need to realise that such a transition is not about reducing resource consumption. Once it is fully implemented, minerals (aluminium and copper) will still be extracted, only on a larger scale.
It is therefore important, in my view, to achieve a reduction in unreasonable production, the demand for which does not even exist on such a scale. At the same time we should not allow a situation where some sectors of the economy develop at the expense of others.
It is good that the attitude towards the peaceful atom has recently changed for the better. It used to be shunned because of the catastrophic events of the past, but it is slowly being accepted as a green technology.
Cover photo: ollo / iStock
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