Not Sustainable

Even if Christopher Calder and his two cherry-picked studies are correct, and 97 percent of climate scientists are wrong (Letters, 10/31): If human caused climate change is indeed not happening, the truth is that we need to act as though it is happening because we are going to painfully run out of fossil fuels if we don’t discontinue their use voluntarily.

As Mr. Calder points out, wind, solar and biofuels are poorly suited to keep our current paradigm running.

So what does Calder suggest? Nuclear? The whole question of what to do with the diabolically toxic waste notwithstanding, the fact is that if we built enough nuke plants to replace the fossil fuels we would begin running out of uranium in short order.

Perhaps some other energy technology capable of replacing fossil fuels will emerge. We don’t know, and it’s foolish to carry on with business-as-usual just assuming that technology will save us.

As John Zerzan has suggested many times in these pages, this enterprise called modern industrialized civilization is utterly unsustainable. When you examine the myriad issues with intellectual rigor and honesty, it’s not at all clear how we’re going to keep it going.

Robert Bolman

Eugene