As someone who worked on oil platforms for almost three decades, one of the hardest things to ignore was all the excess gas burnt straight into the atmosphere. Flying from Stavanger to Aberdeen at night, you could see the flames from every production platform across the North Sea. Just imagine how much valuable gas was wasted because nobody was willing to invest in capturing and using it. Again, oil was never the problem. Waste, greed and lack of common sense were. You can blame individual responsibility, but is it that easy? Or did our leaders realise they could not make too many restrictive decisions? They had to give people bread and circuses, along with promises they could not keep. That is the cycle of political life. Promises that cannot be kept, unpopular decisions that must be avoided, and the need to please those who create jobs and offer people a future that looks bright. It becomes a vicious circle of trust, betrayal and corruption, one way or another, all built around short term solutions at the expense of the environment. Industrialisation is only around 250 years old. How much have we managed to destroy in that short time, and how much have we left for the generations to come? I am guilty. Are you guilty? Are we all guilty, or is this simply human nature? I do not think we as individuals are guilty. But as a species, we are. It was not your fault that your car used a gallon a mile, or that society was built around cheap oil. We all lived within the system we inherited. I actually felt some guilt while working in the oil industry, and I know many people carry guilt for what they do in life. But guilt is not the solution. Then you see politicians exploiting that guilt, doing next to nothing for the environment while using it as an excuse to create new taxes and encourage even more consumption in the name of saving the planet. It becomes a whole circle of stupidity. Eventually, I realised I could not carry the weight of humanity on my shoulders. At some point, you have to brush it off and simply try to live the best life you can. None of us can take responsibility for everything that is wrong with the world. What I can do is take back some of our grandparents’ values. Grow some of my own food, live a simpler life in Isaan, eat clean food and waste less. But Isaan is not my whole life. As long as I have opportunities, I will use them too. I am not pretending to be an environmentalist. It is not our responsibility to fix the whole world, but it is our responsibility to understand what is happening, be conscious of the consequences of how we live, and perhaps pull things in the right direction where we actually have some influence. Local actions may matter more than simply allowing ourselves to be led by grand solutions and political slogans. My gift to the world was simply not having children. In my own small way, that means one, two or perhaps three fewer people consuming resources as I have, followed by their children and the generations after them, multiplying again and again. For me, it stops here. 😉 Sorry for the long rant. This is something I have been thinking about for a long time, and, to put it mildly, I have been offended and annoyed by the lack of understanding of some very simple logical things.
