Environmental and Health Impacts: Non-Renewable Resource Consumption

Oil Consumption

The consumption of crude oil by humans is commonplace in the United States and it seems most people hardly bat an eye at the matter. Most of us don’t realize the process that goes into the consumption of our resources and ultimately take it for granted. Although it is so fundamental to the United States, only a small amount of crude oil is directly consumed in the U.S. Nearly all of it is refined into petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, and jet fuel. On average, humans consume about 19.69 million barrels of petroleum products each day, totaling to about 7.21 billion barrels a year.

In the reading by Antonia Juhasz, he talks about the site of BP’s Macondo where in 2010 a blowout caused the largest offshore-drilling oil in spill history. Their goal was to determine how BP’s oil spill had affected the ecosystem from the seabed up. The Gulf of Mexico is one of world’s most ecologically diverse bodies of water, home to more than 15,000 marine species. Some five million acres of wetlands provide habitat for a variety of birds and fish. Before the oil spill, more than 60% of all oysters harvested in the U.S. waters were caught in the gulf. Today the percentage has dropped to 40%. Samantha Joye states that “any damage the oil has done to creatures inhabiting the deep-sea waters threatens the ecosystem, harming organisms that rely on those species.” By May 2011 the spill had sickened or killed more than 100,000 Gulf animals, 28,500 sea turtles, 82,000 birds, and more than 26,000 marine mammals, including several sperm wales.

In regards to human health, the effect of oil spills on humans may be direct and indirect, depending on the type of contact with the spill. People who live or work near a contaminated area face direct exposure to the spill by breathing in contaminated air and direct contact with the skin. Indirect exposure occurs when people who live far away from the area can potentially be bathing in contaminated water and eating contaminated food. The main oil spill effects include a variety of diseases as well as some problems such as skin and eye irritation, neurologic and breathing problems, stress, and gastrointestinal conditions.

"Humans transfer and transform energy from the environment into forms useful for human endeavors."

Resource Comparison

The world economy uses about 60 billion tons of resources just to produce all of the goods and services in which we consume. In North America, 88 kg of resources are extracted per person per day. Although we have a hearty amount of renewable resources, much of our consumption is based off of non-renewable resources. Agriculture requires a lot of energy and resources to power machinery and equipment. The oil that is extracted and refined into petroleum products is heavily used to power agricultural equipment. “Agriculture, as a production-oriented sector, requires energy as an important input to production. U.S. farm production — whether for crop or animal products — has become increasingly mechanized and requires timely energy supplies at particular stages of the production cycle to achieve optimum yields.”  It is all a big chain of production, from extracted oil to refined petroleum, to fuel for machinery, to vegetation of crops, to harvesting, to transportation of goods, all the way through consumption of goods. The use of petroleum products from crude oil is almost directly linked to our food sources and consumption.

"A warming climate resulting from increased emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will make it more difficult for farmers to grow crops and raise animals in some places."

Same goes for the production of plastics. Crude oil products are used somewhere along the process of plastic production. Whether it be to provide heating or fuel for machinery, plastics can be produced from oil or gas that has undergone chemical processing, and consists of synthetic polymers. Plastics have replaced many common materials we see in our lives such as wood, metal, glass, leather, and rubber because they can be lighter and stronger. The production of plastics as well as the extraction of crude oil plays a tremendous role in global warming and climate change. Both processes give off huge amounts of emissions into our atmosphere, resulting in warmer air, ground, and water. The plastics then wind up in the ocean where they break into tiny pieces that look like plankton and are ingested by fish. This is highly damaging to the fish due to the fact that it cannot digest the plastic. The plastic also carries pollutants that can be absorbed by the fish, ultimately making it's way back to humans through our consumption of these fish.

"The Institute based in Washington D.C. states that 299 million tons of plastics were produced in 2013" 

Everyday Use

These resources are used by the billion every second that goes by. Americans constitute 5% of the world's population but consume 24% of the world's energy. The average individual daily consumption of water is 159 gallons, while more than half the world's population lives on 25 gallons. At Keene State, I see the use and abuse of resources every day. It’s inevitable that us humans will use and consume loads and loads of resources very mindlessly. At the dining commons I am constantly seeing little flyers stuck inside the napkin holders projecting some statistics on consumption of resources and what it takes to produce the food that ends up on our plates. It’s some food for thought (ha, literally), every day we consume food products that are sourced from a farm of some sort that is powering their machinery with petroleum products from refined crude oil that was extracted from the ocean somewhere. There’s a long chain of events that goes on in the process of our daily consumption. Every day in the winter many of us go home to heated houses with oil based heat. We use gasoline to drive ourselves to the grocery store where we then pick out food that has used many resources to produce & package then we arrive back home to make food with a stove or oven which uses heat from petroleum gas. We are constantly consuming resources at a rate we can’t keep up with in the long run, it is alarming how many resources are consumed compared to population size. People consume food, fresh water, wood, minerals, and energy as we go about our daily lives. And producing food, pumping groundwater, harvesting wood, mining minerals, and burning fuel all deplete our resource base. It is a constant cycle of consumption, and anywhere you look you will see the process of consumption. It’s ubiquitous.

Works Cited

• Energy Use in Agriculture: Background and Issues, November 19, 2004, Randy Schnepf
• THE USE OF CRUDE OIL IN PLASTIC MAKING CONTRIBUTES TO GLOBAL WARMING, May 2007, Bruno GERVET
• Overconsumption, Friends of the Earth
• Thirty Million Gallons Under the Sea Following the trail of BP’s oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Antonia Juhasz