O preço do crude tem vindo a descer nos últimos dias. Mas não tenhamos ilusões! A crise energética veio para durar. Vamos mesmo mudar de vida, queiramos ou não.
A propaganda governamental, mais leviana em Portugal, nos Estados Unidos ou no Brasil, do que na Suécia ou em Espanha, não nos deve iludir. O actual paradigma energético tem os dias contados. Depois do crash course de Chris Martenson, proposto no artigo anterior, recomendo-vos a palestra do Dr. Albert Bartlett, que pode ser vista em vídeo (original), ou lida (em inglês, francês ou espanhol). Uma fascinante demonstração do impacto do crescimento exponencial na história dos organismos vivos.
Há coisas que podemos fazer por nós próprios, sem esperar pelas decisões tardias e contraproducentes de quem governa. O entendimento do que se passa e sobretudo daquilo que é preciso corrigir imediatamente, não está ao alcance dos modelos de acção político-partidária disponíveis. Teremos, aliás, que substituir as obsoletas máquinas adversativas dos actuais regimes democráticos ocidentais, cuja maneira de pensar e agir nos levará, a muito curto prazo, se não travarmos as suas decisões corruptas, demagógicas e populistas, ao desastre colectivo. A gravíssima e tripla crise energética, ambiental e financeira já começou. Algumas curvas fatais esperam por todos nós algures entre 2020 e 2030. E até lá, se não conseguirmos desenhar uma visão cultural alternativa para a civilização, haverá muita inquietação e tragédia.
Da arrepiante comunicação do reformado Professor Emérito de Física, da Universidade do Colorado (EUA), cito três magníficos exemplos de demonstração:
(...) Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth: it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle.
I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute.
And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realise you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1/8th; then a 1/16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realise there’s a problem?
(...) So no matter how you cut it, in your life expectancy, you are going to see the peak of world oil production. And you’ve got to ask yourself, what is life going to be like when we have a declining world production of petroleum, and we have a growing world population, and we have a growing world per capita demand for oil. Think about it.
(...) Bill Moyers interviewed Isaac Asimov. He asked Asimov, “What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues?” and Asimov says, “It’ll be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then they both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. And everyone believes in freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the constitution. But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, then no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there’s no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door, ‘Aren't you through yet?’ and so on.” And Asimov concluded with one of the most profound observations I've seen in years. He said, “In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one individual matters.”
OAM 410 08-08-2008 14:07 (última actualização 10-08-2008 17:45)
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