Andy Rooney: Conserve Our Resources
The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney.
I was reading the other day about what they called "an ice bridge" that is 25 miles long in the Antarctic. This ice bridge - I call it an "iceberg" - broke. It was holding up another iceberg the size of Connecticut. I used to live in Connecticut, so that got my attention. One picture shows a huge crack in the iceberg holding what amounts to one of our 50 states, and it's frozen in place.
Scientists say that if some of these big icebergs are lost it could mean that the whole ice shelf itself could break up and all that ice would have to go somewhere. I hope it doesn't come here. This is what global warming does though.
My grandfather once told me that we're ruining the earth by using up all the good things on it and sooner or later we're going to run out of them. He told me a lot of things I didn't believe and it turns out he was right about most of them.
The real question is: are we going run out of the things we need before we find substitutes for them? You know we're going to run out of oil and we're cutting trees down faster than we're growing them, too
It may be wrong to suggest impending doom, but if doom isn't
impending, it's out there somewhere. If we don't find replacements for all the good stuff on earth that we're using up too many of too fast, doom is what we're facing.
If running out of oil doesn't scare you, maybe an iceberg the size of Connecticut floating away from Antarctica and hitting the United States will get your attention.
A lot of people think we should just use everything we have because things will work out. Their attitude is, we can always pump more oil, chop down more trees, mine more coal.
A lot of people called conservationists want to save the forests and reduce our use of coal and oil before we run out of those.
I personally am a conservationist who uses a lot of oil and trees. I'm our problem.
Written by Andy Rooney