Megan Nisbet: Berry-The Unsettling of America #1

While reading through Berry's chapter in this book titled The Use of Energy, I couldn't help but disagree on some things that he said. In the beginning of the chapter, the topic of his writing was about wasting energy, and the problems that using energy causes the environment. He also wrote about how finite resources are being used up, and that infinite resources aren't truly infinite, but humans call them this simply because we have no way of measuring them.

I am going to connect his discussion to discussions we have been having in my Econ 202 class about externalities and the "acceptable levels of pollution." From what I understood from his writing, Berry ignores the positive effects that these machines have on our lives, and merely focuses on the negatives to the environment. Without using energy, we wouldn't have the wonderful things we now have in our lives that make them so much easier. To have progress in life, there must be some sacrifices in other areas. Without the progress we have made from using machines and energy, we would still be stuck using wagons and farming our own food. Though many people, including Berry I'm sure, would agree that doing those things would make us much better than we are now, I personally enjoy the car I just bought, the roller coasters at Busch Gardens, and the TV I watch. I understand that these things cause damage to the environment, but we are making progress there as well. In the beginning, we didn't realize the harmful effects these machines had on the environment, but now that we do, we are trying to make the pollution that they cause much less. We are even developing better sources of energy, such as water, which is better than using fossil fuels. In Econ, we have been learning about things such as the cost-benefit analysis and the "acceptable" level of pollution. Though an "acceptable" level of pollution sounded crazy to me in the beginning, when Dr. Winder explained it further, it made perfect sense to me. Put simply, these theories say that when trying to judge what to do about a situation, you must weigh the costs to the benefits (in this case, pollution vs. an easier life), which will give you an "acceptable" level of pollution. Since we have realized what we are doing to the environment, we are now in a "going green" trend, and are reducing as much pollution as possible, based on how much it is costing us to do so. However, during this reduction process, there comes a time where the costs of reducing the pollution outweigh the benefits to society, in which case, the reduction of pollution for that particular machine stops.