Yesterday in My favorite solar panel I wrote about the problems with the solar panels we produce. Since they require nonrenewable resources to make and don’t biodegrade, we lower earth’s ability to sustain life in making them and disposing of them when they stop working.

As far as I know, that problem happens for all ways we create energy besides eating plants and fungi and using wood. We think we need them for life. People often tell me they think we can’t live without polluting, that even breathing and pooping pollute. Yet humans lived without lowering earth’s ability to sustain life for 250,000 years. Other life forms have exhaled and pooped for billions of years without lowering earth’s ability to sustain life.

We don’t need to extract or pollute to live. Our culture requires those things, but we can change our culture. We can live without lowering earth’s ability to sustain life. That is, we can live sustainably.

All the tools we create to create energy, sequester pollution, etc degrade in time and end up polluting. By contrast, things in nature that do those things get reused and don’t lower earth’s ability to sustain life. A natural power plant like a tree decomposes into food for other life.

I hope the next couple paragraphs make sense. I’m putting together an idea that makes sense to me intuitively but am now writing for the first time, so I’m working out the nuances. This is a blog, not a peer-reviewed journal.

Back to the post, the laws of thermodynamics say energy eventually turns to heat that we can’t use. By contrast, one thing turns heat into something we value.

In the entire universe, the only thing I know of that does the various things we’re trying to build machines to do is life. Life stores solar energy, for example as sugar in fruit. Life sequesters carbon in itself.

With power stations, carbon capture and storage, and solar panels, we are trying to reproduce what nature does, but we tend to focus on one function.

By focusing on one function, we may achieve it but at the cost of wrecking the things we don’t measure. Leaves turn light into energy and a lot more. Solar panels do, but at the cost of wrecking the environment to create them and to dispose of them too. Trees capture and sequester carbon without focusing just on carbon, as if the other pollutants in fossil fuels didn’t matter.

We are destroying what accomplishes the goals we’re trying to achieve, just on too big a scale to sustain. Why don’t we return to valuing life?

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