Perspective

 How many of us stop to think about how fuel hungry the current global trade model is?

An average tanker (the red icons) consume about 180,000 kg of oil per day at sea... 

The average commercial jet airliner consumes about 120,000 kg of jet fuel per day

These two snapshots were just a peek at traffic happening today.  A day like any other day.  If we truly embrace the fact that oil is a finite resource and we are well into experiencing its slow depletion... how does logistics like this make sense?  How much of this is superfluous? 

Change in the way we live is an absolute certainty.  When you hear about green house gasses and carbon blah blah blah, take a moment to ponder what happens every day in order to get your widget delivered to your door.  Or just to keep the fuel tanks full at the corner gas station...  

In a year of continuous operation, just a single tanker at sea will consume 65,700,000 kg of oil... or 413,000 bbls of oil or 17,346,000 gallons or 2,317,425 cubic feet or 85,830 cubic yards of never to be seen again petroleum. As a point of reference, 3,300 cubic yards is the volume of one olympic sized swimming pool.  Thats 26 olympic swimming pools full of refined petroleum per year!  Just a little over 2 pools burned per month.  

The single average airliner continually operating, burns 43,800,000 kgs of refined oil...   or 275,000 bbls during that same year.  

Of course no ship or plane runs 24/7/365, but there are tens of thousands of them in the air and at sea  running intermittently day and night which makes for a continuous non-renewable consumption of an alarming rate.  The true cost of this global trading model is astronomical and unsustainable.  This contrivance is a blip in the history of the World that cannot be sustained and inefficiently drives a consumption and "growth" based economics fairy tale.  

Physics will win in spite of bit coins, digital whatever and delusional planning.

Changes that physics will drive will impact us all in the next 20 years or so (in a single generation!) We can, if we're cooperative, tenacious enough and smart enough, drive the logistics of trade to "manufactured sustainably and locally, consumed locally, and recycled locally".  But there will be no place for the current economic system with its unrealistic grasp of reality.  That perhaps is the bridge too far for planet Earth.

Perhaps - if this world is to exhibit intelligence and evolve - we can all agree not to waste our gifts on failures like war, corruption and greed.  Wouldn't that be an excellent outcome?  

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