When we dumped those wood-fired stoves ...

The energy crisis made me think of how we used to live in our village - the women used firewood collected from the trees, especially the dried leaves and other matter from coconut trees, to cook food. As I grew up and the country progressed economically, the ease of getting a cooking gas connection increased and at the same time such a connection became affordable to more people. And then, people stopped using firewood - entirely. The results were immediately visible. The dried leaves and stubs from the coconut palms, and even the dried husks, suddenly had no takers. Earlier, people used to run to grab the dried coconut palm leaf or other parts that fell on the ground. Now those were left to rot on the ground. The immediate effect was the coconut groves became untidy and as soon as rain fell the decaying biomatter led to an increase in the number of millipedes and other such insects. More importantly, useful biofuels were being left to rot while the people were paying money to pay for LPG.
Of course, buring those firewoods is never a clean solution but they could easily have been turned into biogas. In fact, some people in my village were considering setting up biofuel plants when the whole thing was made irrelevant by the easy availability of cheap cooking gas.
And now, we have a problem - there is suddenly not enough of that gas and its price is climbing!
Who will we blame here? I don't know.
Maybe we should never have gone to exploiting natural gas reserves, considering the long-term and as yet unknown dangers that could create to life on earth. Does sucking out all that oil and gas make the earth prone more to earthquakes? I have heard such arguments and scientists dismiss them as baseless. But can we really say that? As more and more oil and gas is sucked out, wouldn't it create imbalances in the earth's crust? Isn't that simple logic?
And buring fossil fuels and petroleum products are adding so much of toxic substances to the air and water around, I am not sure what kind of consequences they would bring to life on earth in, say, 50 years. In fact, no one is sure.
Makes me think the simple village life that we had a couple of hundred years back was preferable to the toxic environment we have now, despite all the comforts of the modern life!