we play in a hobby that is not exactly green.
We pay to ship heavy metals around the globe.
We want lots of plastic foam packaging to protect our heavy metals.
We pay to ship liquids around the globe.
Main ingredient is water - we are paying to ship water.
Small quantities put in plastic bottles.
All of this freight and all of this plastic is dependant on oil.
The majority of your computer that you are reading and responding to this is plastic.
As long as we rely on plastics and trucking for products, we need oil and other petroleum derivatives.
As long as we need oil, we have to drill.
As long as we drill, there will be incidents: Tankers, platforms, pipelines - all mechanical with human oversight. Failure guaranteed.
Try going a week without any plastic in your life or without using anything that was freighted in to your store (local only).
Won't happen in the planet that we live on unless you are Amish.
Actually Bio-plastics technology has advanced rapidly now that we've begun paying attention to it. Everything from high end pastic parts for electronics and cars, to packaging and food storage, to dinnerware (Both disposable and non-disposable) can be made from bioplastics.
Freight can be hauled using Biofuel/Biodiesel as well, rather than Petrolium, and the process of making, storing and servicing biofuel is quite easy, as well as converting engines to run on the substance.
I'm not saying that our lives don't run on Petrol right now, they do, but only because we found it first. I can't say I have much of a problem with BP hitting the bricks and while the oil spill itself is quite disasterous, I'm staring to see the silver lining beyond it.
People across the world are looking at oil again as a potentially very dangerous thing. This time, we actually have viable alternatives to the problem that are not in development, but in use. Much like the Hybrid cars/Clean Air crave that saw people finnally buying into the electric car and alternative energy market, this has the great potential to change public opinion from one of uncaring and uninterested consumer to the concerned citizen and angry (partially-informed) mob that gets companies to shift gazes even slightly over to the alternatives.
