In response to Greg’s editorial in Issue No. 110 of The Shed lamenting our lack of global climate action, I offered to compile a useful sheddie to-do list.
Then I thought some more. Our predicament is a multi-headed beast; in addressing climate only, we run the risk of making other matters worse. Discussing the whole, though, takes more than one article, so here’s a ‘once over lightly’ before we get on with the to-do list. I’ve also suggested some further reading in a side panel.
The predicament, briefly
There are many reasons society clings to the concentrated carbon energy from fossilised sunlight, which we call ‘fossil fuels’. We are carbon-energy life forms; we decay – or die – without enough of it, as do our constructs. Our energy progression has been towards the more convenient / more compact: from firewood to coal to oil. In a way, gas can be seen as our first step backwards from oil. In all cases, we have burnt the best first, so diminishing quality is a contributing factor. By default, we will end up using so-called renewable energy, better defined as ‘rebuildable’. That is because fossil fuels are a finite resource and we’re roughly halfway through them; they are
