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This video was excerpted from After the Frack by Mary Fecteau.
"You can't win; you are sure to lose; and you can't get out of the game."---Garrett Hardin, Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent
While we look for renewable and cleaner supplies of energy, we must acknowledge that humans have created a world that relies on vast amounts of non-renewable energy every day. If humans want to continue living on Earth, issues of energy production and consumption must be addressed today and into the future. In less than 200 years humans have extracted an incredible amount of coal, oil, and gas from the ground to feed our energy hunger. Earth’s non-renewable resources are finite and dwindling. The burning of fossil fuels produces more carbon dioxide emissions than the planet’s natural systems are capable of recycling. Of the fossil fuels, natural gas is the cleanest to burn, and fracking may provide a bridge to the future until cleaner energies are more efficient and affordable. That bridge, however, may be very fragile and risky to travel unless critical decisions are made about our use of energy.
This video is part of a five-part educational series called Challenges of Non-Renewable Energy.