EcoEquilibrium Mission Statement

You know that old joke: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. This is how I feel about learning about alternative energy, climate change, energy policy and conservation. There are lots of bites (and bytes) of information out there. But it is impossible to swallow the whole elephant in one bite. This blog is designed to make sense of climate change one article at a time.

I am doing this because I am passionate about combating climate change. This is the elephant in the room.  We have ignored it for so long, but finally we are beginning to see some substantive changes. We knew there would come a day when we would have to pay back the debt we charged to Mother Earth.

I look at it like college debt. Humanity went almost 400 Co2 parts per million in debt in order to build industries, have incredible personal luxuries and political stability. We borrowed this against Mother Nature by polluting our rivers with waste water from tanneries, filling our landfills with mercury from old paint cans, and choking our air with pollutants from coal fired power plants.

If humanity had a big “redo” button, I am sure we would not have sacrificed the benefits of the industrial revolution, the freedom of personal cars or the democratization of electricity. We graduated from the college phase of civilization, and now we need to get a real job so we can move out of Mother Nature’s basement.

Every capitalist (which I am proudly a member) knows that when you borrow against future earnings, you must pay back that debt with interest. The bill is coming due. We are lucky that Mother Nature is an incredibly forgiving lender.

If we do not act our loans will be called. Hurricanes like Katrina (or bigger) could threaten our cities, crop yields will fall as access to clean water plunges, and respiratory diseases like asthma will shorten our lives and limit our freedoms.

Paying the debt back is difficult, because there is no single payer. There is also no place where we can make out a check. The cost might be minimal if we find scalable alternative energies; it might be larger if we need to redesign the whole way we consume and manage electrons. This is what makes learning about climate change so challenging. There are few black/white answers to the thousands of questions.

For instance, I am torn when thinking about industrial farming. There is no doubt that industrial farming works to increase crop yields just at the time when the world needs more food to feed more mouths. But I also know the toll this type of farming can have when the land is over fertilized. There is a balance here. This blog will focus on that balance.

While I believe change needs to occur, I know this change can’t occur in a bubble. While I won’t apologize for the American way of life, I know we need to tweak the way our lives are lived.

I will find articles that have some interesting insight on climate change. My hope is that a couple of folks who are interested in taking small bites of the large elephant in the room will learn a couple of things with me along the way.

I believe in gray. There needs to be a balance between over regulation and sensible policy, between long term and short term interests, between human and corporate needs, between costs and benefits. I am looking for an Eco Equilibrium. I hope to advance the discussion together.

Thank you for reading!

Gerard Murphy