Green weekend reading
A couple of frogblog readers have pointed me to two articles well worth reading for anyone with even a passing concern with the big environmental issues facing us.
First: the end of cheap oil. Writes William Keegan, the Observer’s senior economics correspondent:
Even the short-term optimists about the US economy are very concerned about the longer term. The big concern is that, with China and India now major consumers of oil, and not showing obvious signs of significant deceleration in their rates of economic growth, the oil price will stay stubbornly high after an expected dip and even go much higher.
The problem worrying officials at the highest level is the gap between known oil resources in the ground (or under the sea) and the rate of extraction. Given the obvious time lags between investment in new extraction facilities and delivery to those great tankers, a serious gap in supply can be envisaged over the next five years.
Of course, there will be those who say, “Fine: it’s about time we all faced up to a future world without oil. And why shouldn’t these Opec countries invest in extraction facilities at a pace to suit themselves?”
Fair enough. But in a world economy still hooked on oil - even if the ratio of energy use to GDP is now half what it was in the 1970s - there could be trouble ahead.
Second: climate change. BBC environment correspondent Richard Black writes:
The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for a fourth consecutive year, according to new data released by US scientists.
They say that this month sees the lowest extent of ice cover for more than a century. The Arctic climate varies naturally, but the researchers conclude that human-induced global warming is at least partially responsible. They warn the shrinkage could lead to even faster melting in coming years.
Also, the New York Review of Books has an interesting article on how big a blow the loss of New Orleans would be to the United States:
New Orleans is not optional for the United States’ commercial infrastructure. Vulnerable to inundation, it is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city of some kind will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port, or part of it, will have to be opened soon. The port area will have to be cleared, by herculean effort if necessary. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.
Happy reading, and have a good weekend. I’ll be back tomorrow morning with reaction to the specials.
September 30th, 2005 at 6:16 pm
New Orleans is really a crucible of all of these issues - oil, environment, and social ecology; there is a true sense of seeing the end of an era in the NY Review piece - reminiscent of journalism I read around the time of the Chernobyl disaster.
We have controlled our living conditions for so long that the effects of “natural disasters” take us by surprise, yet we have taken little notice of the brutalisation of nature that has been accomplished by our “civilising” urbanisation.
I agree with the writer that for a myriad of reasons, New Orleans will rise again, in some form, despite the obvious madness of siting a major urban centre in such a fragile environment.
I live in Wellington, where we take for granted that our urban environment is mitigated by fault-lines which would fragment our city in an instant, “when the big one comes”; yet most people are woefully unprepared for that event, and would struggle to find enough water, tinned food, candles, etc, to keep themselves comfortable for days, let alone the weeks that some householders waited out before being removed from their flooded homes in New Orleans.
We blindly ignore that our motorway would fall into the harbour, or distort out of recognition, leaving children stranded in after-school care as adults trek from the city to homes in the Hutt Valley or Porirua basin - there are no contingency routes out of the city, everything is stacked against the motorway and if that bet fails, we are all losers as the vulnerable children and elderly will be too distant to reach quickly.
Our compassion for our fellow humans has been subsumed to the worship of the almighty automobile, and our city still invests in motorways over other solutions, often in conditions that make engineering costly and difficult to accomplish. Now we are looking at an incomplete inner-city motorway extension, which may be a complete white elephant as the cost of importing oil climbs beyond any precedent. It remains to be seen whether this brings migration into the inner city at the magnitude anticipated by those who have speculated in appartment developments!
Green members of parliament have a lot of challenges ahead for the next decade; if coalition partners can begin to understand what we’ve been saying for so long, then we will be able to provide solutions to some of the issues before they become disasters that are the topic of breakfast/dinner conversations around the world.
September 30th, 2005 at 7:54 pm
Related to US economy, oil etc. Interesting teke.
http://cunningrealist.blogspot.com/2005/09/great-game.html
October 1st, 2005 at 5:33 am
Slightly off-topic cartoon insight.
http://www.savagechickens.com/blog/2005/09/good-old-days.html