Social processes

• Electricity generation (takes a lot of energy, and as the second law of thermodynamics imply, that energy doesn’t disappear, it just gets transformed into less usable forms, often heat–think about how the energy of a light bulb turned on is transformed).
• Food production, agriculture (confined animals, nitrogen, fossil fuels). Our industrial agricultural system is totally dependent on fossil fuels to produce pesticides, fertilizers, and to fuel the machines that do the work. Nitrous oxide is a by-product.
• Transportation — hopefully you can see the contributions in transportation to greenhouse gas production
• Globalization and consumption — In a global economy, goods get produced in countries with cheap labor, and consumed mostly in wealthier countries. How does it get ‘re-exported’ to the wealthy consuming societies?
• Newly industrializing countries (India and China)–1/3 of the world’s population in two rapidly industrializing countries. What happens when they’re fully on the electricity grid? Yet why shouldn’t they be able to ‘grow’ their economies as the rest of the industrialized world has up to now (hopefully you see that as a rhetorical question)?
• Human population growth — from one billion 250 years ago to over 6 billion today
• Deforestation (land clearing, biomass fuel) — huge tracts of tropical forest are cleared, to satisfy consumption needs in norther countries, and to clear land for agriculture and (later) grazing in those countries. Tropical forest left without tree cover quickly deteriorates–all the nutrients are held in the vegetation. Cut the vegetation, and you’re left with grasses, which don’t have root systems capable of keeping nutrients near the surface where they’re available to plants.
• Politics — we talked about the American automotive industry, their political power, and their disinclination to make more fuel-efficient automobiles. Keep in mind also that they give lots to politicians seeking public office, and they do lots of advertising that keeps commercial media outlets flush with cash to add lots of cool special effects to their news casts!
• What happens to the economy otherwise? If we converted to bicycles as our main source of transportation, we’d definitely have cleaner air, less congested cities, less greenhouse gas emissions. How would our economy look?
• Economic systems — Capitalism and markets — capitalism operates on short-term horizons. Companies in it for the ‘ecological long haul’ will quickly get out-competed by companies making decisions that, though they may trash the environment, lead to greater profit in the short term.
• Total emissions? (hit ‘play’ to check out the relationship between income and CO2 emissions, from 1800 to present)