For your amusement, here is George Carlin, at his best, making fun of those who strive to save the planet, when it is their own species whose demise is inevitable. Well, that last bit isn’t so humorous.

Garbage. On average, each of us deposits over four pounds of garbage every day in waste baskets around the house. That’s about 30 pounds of garbage per person, per week. If we didn’t take the trash out, it would soon fill up our houses and apartments. If garbage trucks didn’t haul it away, it would soon fill up our yards, neighborhoods, cities. The average infant soils 8,000 to 10,000 diapers before being potty trained. On a national basis, that’s 570 diapers per second, 49 million diapers a day, nearly 18 billion diapers thrown in the trash a year. We toss in another 27 million tons of food waste, 7 million tons of clothing and footwear, 9 million tons of furniture and furnishings. At work, we produce a lot more garbage. It adds up. America has to find somewhere to stash over 400 million tons of garbage a year.

As cities, states, and countries run out of room for their garbage, they look for places elsewhere on the planet to ship the stuff. New York City, for example, sends garbage by rail to landfills in Virginia, South Carolina, and other states. Garbage trains also run from Naples, Italy to Hamburg, Germany. Honolulu ships garbage 2,500 miles across the ocean from Hawaii to mainland destinations willing to dispose of it, for a price. Of course, it’s harder to find willing recipients for certain kinds of garbage, such as hazardous waste, which may be corrosive, reactive, ignitable, carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, infectious, or radioactive. This garbage requires special handling and disposal. Billions of tons of hazardous waste were improperly disposed of before congress established management and liability laws in 1976 and 1980. Quite a bit has been disposed of improperly even after that legislation. According to the EPA, there are 36,000 contaminated sites across the U.S. that still have to be cleaned up, which means more garbage to haul away and deposit some place.

Not counted in the above tonnage is waste from nuclear reactors. The U.S. must find a place to dispose of 2,200 tons of such radioactive waste each year. About 32,000 tons of the stuff is piling up around nuclear facilities, since there’s no place to send it. There’s more stored at research facilities around the country, such as the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state, which has 53 million gallons of radioactive waste in huge tanks. Radioactive materials can be dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Temporary storage is risky. One million gallons of waste at Hanford have already leached into the soil. The much-anticipated “permanent” resting place for America’s radioactive waste was to have been Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but the license for that project has been withdrawn by the government.

Also not counted in the above totals for U.S. garbage per year are waste products from chemical and petroleum industries and farming and agriculture. Animal waste alone amounts to about a billion tons a year. Some of that ends up contaminating fresh water supplies. Several E. coli outbreaks have been traced to waste product-contaminated lettuce, spinach, and other produce downstream from huge animal operations.

So what can we do with all our garbage, when we can’t find places to stash it on land? The answer for some has been to dump it into the oceans. Estimates vary, but judging from the vast islands of garbage floating in the Pacific and Atlantic, one patch said to be the size of Texas, there are hundreds of millions of tons garbage out there, and it’s growing every year. Of course, there’s a lot more garbage that gets pumped into the oceans in liquid form, such as the millions of gallons of oil from the failed Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and untold millions, billions, of gallons of toxic chemicals we wash down the drain, into streams and rivers, and out to sea.

The biggest share of the world’s garbage comes from the U.S., whose 5 percent of the world population generates about 40 percent of its garbage. But as other countries adopt American ways, their production of garbage is catching up. China and India, with a combined 40 percent of the world’s population, are particularly worrisome in this regard.

I don’t often illustrate my posts with ads, but the one above is just too appropriate to pass up. “From our planet’s point of view, there’s no throwing garbage out. Because there is no ‘out.’” Those words, together with the picture of a globe of garbage, aptly describe what has become of our little planet, our little planet whose ever-growing, ever-consuming population of humans is trashing it, our little Garbage Planet.

UPDATE: Trafigura, a London-based oil trading company that was prosecuted for dumping toxic waste in Africa, has been fined $1.25 million, and one of its employees as well as the captain of the ship that transported the waste Africa in 2006 were given suspended prison sentences by a Dutch court. Reportedly, 30,000 Africans required medical treatment following exposure to the waste. A Greenpeace spokesperson quoted in the UK’s Guardian said, “This is a first step towards justice and a clear signal to other companies that the illegal export of waste to Africa will not go unpunished.”

UPDATE2: An amendment by Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash) to continue funding for the Yucca Mountain Nevada nuclear waste site was defeated. According to NTI, this proposal by Senator Murray “put her at odds with Senate Majority Leader Reid and President Obama, both of whom have pushed to close the Yucca site.” Senator Reid represents the state of Nevada. Washington state is the home of the Hanford site, with its millions of gallons of nuclear waste. “Without a national repository Hanford and other nuclear waste sites will be left in limbo,” Murray said.

JJ: So this NASA spaceship takes off to colonize Mars, but it flies through some sort of magnetic field and gets lost and crashes onto a planet a lot like Earth.

LLOYD: Lost in Space. Loved the robot, but it’s been done.

JJ: There’s no robot, Lloyd. All the survivors are human. There’s a dozen of ‘em. They’re scientists.

LLOYD: I can see it. The men are hunks and the women are babes. And multo, uh, multi-cultural. All the ethnics. And one should be handicapped. And how about a dog? Viewers like dogs.

JJ: Okay, sure, a guy in a wheelchair, like Stephen Hawking . . .

LLOYD: The planet heals him, turns him into George Clooney. Can we get George Clooney? And what about that dog?

JJ: I’ll write-in a dog. But Lloyd, I’m thinkin’ big here. The planet appears to be perfect. Oceans, lakes, streams, mountains, forests, jungles, fertile valleys, broad plains, every kind of creature you can imagine. A paradise. The survivors think they’ve landed in the Garden of Eden. But they’re not alone. They’re surrounded by The Others.

LLOYD: Wookies? Vampires? Robots?

JJ: No robots, Lloyd. Human-like creatures, billions of ‘em, all over the planet, well-armed, aggressive, chasing down the survivors, putting ‘em in cages when they catch ‘em.

LLOYD: Planet of the Apes. It’s been done.

JJ: No, this is different. The survivors realize that the planet isn’t as perfect as they had thought. In fact, it’s dying. It’s facing twelve crises. The oceans are polluted. The climate is warming. There’s a mass extinction of plant and animal species underway . . .

LLOYD: Wasn’t the Planet of the Apes dying?

JJ: Yeah, but this is different. The mission commander assigns each of the twelve survivors one of the crises to research. He thinks if they can come up with solutions, they can save the planet, make peace with The Others, maybe get some help repairing their spaceship, so they could return to Earth.

LLOYD: Hmmm, that title, “PARADISE LOST,” I’ve heard that before.

JJ: It’s a classic, Lloyd, a 17th century epic poem in twelve books by John Milton.

LLOYD: So we wouldn’t have to buy the rights?

JJ: No, it’s public domain.

LLOYD: That’s a plus. But if it’s a “classic” (he makes finger quotes) and if it’s got “scientists researching pollution,” (more finger quotes) wouldn’t this kind of show be more appropriate for PBS?

JJ: I’m not really using much of the classic plot. It’s mostly the title I want, and the basic concept. The inhabitants of this world had a paradise. They could have cherished it, protected it, enjoyed it forever. But instead they gave in to temptation, to their worst impulses. They raped and pillaged and poisoned their world. If the survivors from the spaceship can’t find ways to save the planet, it will be Paradise Lost. It’s a parable, Lloyd, a parable about good and evil and what mankind is doing to Earth.

LLOYD: That’s beautiful, JJ (wiping away the tears). I mean it, man. Just beautiful. We’ll buy the show!

JJ: Really? That’s great. I can’t wait to tell Damon and Jeffrey . . .

LLOYD: If you’ll just make a few changes. Instead of a spaceship crashing onto another planet, make it an airliner crashing onto a tropical island. It won’t be like that Tom Hanks movie, because there’s no FedEx product tie-in and there’s twelve hunks and babes. But just passengers on the plane, average types, not scientists. Well, maybe one doctor. Doctor shows are popular. And a criminal, a prisoner who escapes in the crash. Keep the ethnics, and wheelchair guy, and the dog, of course, and The Others chasing ‘em down and putting ‘em in cages. That’s all good stuff. But is it enough to succeed in the 9:00 pm time slot? I think we need to amp it up. Ghosts, maybe an invisible monster, or better yet, a smoke monster. And a polar bear. Everybody loves polar bears. Oh, and could you work in some time travel? You wanted science. There it is. Forget about all that environmental stuff. That’s the boring kind of science. And that title. This isn’t Masterpiece Theater. Drop the “Paradise” and just call it “LOST” . . .

JJ: (Smile fading, eyes glazing over)

LLOYD: An atom bomb! Yeah, that’s the ticket. You film an episode with an A-bomb to use as the grand finale. You never know how long a series will last. Or we could keep our options open for a spinoff if the bomb flipped survivors into an alternate universe. See, more science. I like science.

Those are the best opening lines and that is the most sensible content of any column Thomas L. Friedman has written for the New York Times. Well, of the ones I’ve read, anyway. The piece is entitled “No Fooling Mother Nature,” and I encourage you to read it (click here), if only to understand better what might have been. Unfortunately, it’s written about a decade too late. Even if the leaders of the The United States of America, Inc. were smart enough to act on it immediately, and they are not, and the American people were prepared to do something serious, and they are not, there’s just not enough resources or time left to do it. Production of oil is declining faster than it can be replaced with new wells. The finite limits of this and other non-renewable energy resources are in sight and the consequences of befouling the atmosphere and poisoning the water and soil are all around us, obvious to anyone who bothers to look, but we are still pushing the pedal to the metal. The “drill, baby, drill” mentality behind the Gulf oil spill is just the latest example of a country, a civilization, stuck in a short-term mindset, selfishly consuming non-renewable energy and other natural resources without a thought about the implications for future generations, incapable of making the hard decisions, the right decisions, today, because the rewards would be postponed until another day.

As Winston Churchill famously said, “You can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted every other possibility.” In this case, Americans have also exhausted the financial resources, industrial infrastructure, natural resources, and lead time necessary to do the right thing, i.e., to convert from oil and other non-renewable energy sources to a mix of solar, wind, tidal, and other renewable sources. Now that we have spent, off-shored, outsourced, and consumed the necessary resources and we have day-dreamed and frittered away the time necessary to do those things, Tom Friedman is frightened and angry enough to write a column about it. Too little, too late.

USA, Inc. is dependent on non-renewable resources for almost all of its energy needs. There are 250 million vehicles in this country that run on fuel made from oil. Electrical power is generated by coal (48%), natural gas (21%), nuclear fission (20%), and oil (1%). Of the renewable energy sources feeding the electrical grid, hydroelectric (6%) is the primary source, and of the other renewables (3%), which includes solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass, none contributes over 1%. To convert this country’s transportation and power generation from non-renewable to renewable energy sources would take trillions of dollars and literally decades of time, not to mention immense natural, industrial, and human resources, as well as strong and visionary leadership, unprecedented political cooperation, and whole-hearted public support, effort, and sacrifice.

If that’s what it takes, we’re in big trouble, because we don’t have it. So our country and the larger civilization of which it is a part will have to make do with less and less energy, until the fuel tanks run dry. By that time, the civilization, or what remains of it, will have contracted to a size that can be powered by whatever natural resources are left — like windmills, water wheels, and feet.

Of course, energy is but one of the multiple and simultaneous crises that we face. (Click here for an overview of those crises.)

As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Yes, even those right-minded people who organize and participate in Earth Day and other such events. The population of Homo sapiens has tripled, from a little over 2 billion to 6.7 billion, in just the average lifespan of one human, about 65 years worldwide. Our fast-growing population has resulted in consumption overshooting resources. And when that happens in any environment, from petri dishes to planets, all life is threatened. To think that Earth Day or any other “day” can change the reality of Earth’s limited carrying capacity is daydreaming. To think that we can stop our civilization’s pillaging and destruction of the environment without addressing the underlying cause — overpopulation — is daydreaming. Yet politically correct environmentalists on Earth Day, or any day, dare not even utter the word overpopulation. So the world’s population continues to daydream its way toward disaster.