Homebrew

Making the planet uninhabitable is different from "running out of resources."

When yeast in a batch of beer die off, it's because they've been poisoned by their own waste product - ethanol - not because they run out of sugar to eat. Any homebrewer learns this pretty quickly. I know! In my frat bro years I tried to make a super-alcoholic beer by dumping a bunch of sugar into my first brew attempt. Epic fail illustrated here.

Two takeaways:
1) Environmental sustainability is about limiting our resource use to avoid poisoning our surroundings. It is NOT about supply concerns. There are many peak oil and mineral supply conversations masquerading as sustainability conversations. Don't get it twisted. We will poison ourselves with the byproducts of our resource use far before we can run out of them.
This is one way to think about climate change (a mass poisoning event) and fossil fuels (an abundant resource that we can always dig further and deeper for).

2) Catastrophe does not happen immediately or equitably. As ethanol in the brew rises, there is a steady "death phase" during which a gradually smaller and smaller population of yeast gets to continue eating sugar. These privileged yeasts actually enjoy cheaper resource access as the competition dies off. Yeast cells cannot collectively decide to avoid this outcome. Every good batch of beer or wine goes through this biochemical process in a very predictable way.

But we humans are not yeast cells and the Earth is not a big beverage reserved for our consumption. Let's stop treating it like one.

Note:

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