"Not in my backyard" is a great line, it goes so well with "think of the children!"
In the early 1950's, the amount of dissolved oxygen in the Kalamazoo River was so low that fish simply could not live in it. Since then, it had been rehabilitated significantly. My father-in-law is one of the people who was heavily involved in the clean up of the Kalamazoo River starting in the mid-70's. He personally put actual years of effort into the rehabilitation of the river. He's not happy about the spill that (directly or indirectly) undid quite a bit of the years of work he put into that project. Yes, he gets emotional about it, and understandably so.
As far as our energy needs, our current investment in renewables (mostly wind and solar) IS doing a lot to offset this demand for more invasive fossil fuel acquisitions, but until the renewable supply surpasses a substantial portion of the demand, the economics of that demand will continue to push us into further into riskier and more environmentally unfriendly methods of acquisition/reclamation.
For that matter, a person pedaling an exercise bike can comfortably put out about 200W, so your average morning crowd of 8-12 cyclists at the gym could put out a couple of kilowatts. If you put a generator bike in everyone's home and
force them to pedal it for a minimum of 2hrs every day (in shifts, and with no pay since it's your
civic duty), a US city with the median population of around 25 thousand (minus a third for old/infirm/underage) could conceivably produce around 6700 kWh/day, which is enough energy to run about 200 homes (about 2% of the population) for that same day (but think of the health benefits!). Yet people still consider it
more humane to spend time and equipment digging oil/coal out of the ground and flirting with the environmental damage of extracting it and burning it than to do this. We Americans are so lazy that way.
--Patrick
(lots of napkin math here, but it should at least be representative)
