|
|
Global WarmingI fear for our world and for human survival. After two hundred years of increasingly rapid industrialisation we have done huge damage to the planet. But what we have done so far is nothing compared to what we are likely to do in the next few decades. The population of the earth is increasing rapidly, and our wealth is also increasing rapidly. This causes total industrial output and personal consumption to increase not linearly, but at an accelerating rate. The damage we did in the last century is nothing compared to the damage we will do in this century unless we radically change course. On a global scale, by far our greatest threat is global warming. There is now little room to argue with the claim that our pollution of the last hundred years has contributed to heating the earth. There is less room to argue against the claim that our contribution to global warming is accelerating, as our consumption of the world's resources increases. The only questions are how much damage will we do before it is too late to save the world as we know it and how can we change to get back to a stable state. This page presents an argument that we must immediately change course and suggests how it can be done. The argument is presented in three levels of detail. The first is a ten point summary. The second is the argument in brief, at a paragraph for each point in the summary. You can get to the second level either by reading down this page or by clicking on each point in the summary. The third level is the detailed argument. You can get to the third level either by reading down this page or by clicking on More... in each paragraph in the second level.
And, most importantly, what we can do
Short argument 1. Our pollution is heating the planetWe use energy to: heat our homes; cool our homes; run our factories; power our cars, delivery vehicles, jet planes, and everything that else that moves; power our computers, TVs, cookers, fridges, dishwashers, burglar alarms, ipods, mobile phones, Tamagotchis and everything else. We use an incredible amount of energy, and nearly all of this energy comes from burning carbon in the form of coal, gas and oil. The main waste product of this energy consumption is the gas carbon dioxide (CO2) which is released into the atmosphere. Unfortunately it is now known that pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is causing the earth to heat up, through a process called the Greenhouse Effect. This global warming is predicted to cause significant and damaging climate change, including an increase in the sea level which will cause many low lying countries to be permanently flooded. We're starting to change the planet in unpredictable and damaging ways. 2. Without radical action, our polluting will accelerateSince I was born approximately forty years ago (okay, a little bit more), the population of the world has doubled. It has also become richer. Both trends cause our total energy usage to increase, roughly in proportion to each. Consequently, our greenhouse gas pollution is increasing year by year, and by an accelerating rate. The strain we have inflicted on the planet in the last fifty years is nothing compared to the strain we will inflict in the next fifty years. If we don't change course it will get very bad very quickly. 3. Therefore: We have to changeWe can easily measure the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere in recent decades. Less easy is to predict the amount of heating being produced by this CO2 and less easy still to predict the consequences. However, it is undeniable that we have already pumped into the atmosphere more CO2 than it can absorb and that we will be pumping more out at an ever increasing rate. It is inconceivable that ever increasing the strain on the planet will not have consequences, and we cannot be so foolish as to think that these consequences will benefit the planet, other species or us. The most likely major consequence that is predicted is the warming atmosphere melting the Antarctic and Greenland ice-caps (which appears to be already happening), causing the sea levels to rise, resulting in flooding in low-lying coastal areas. We are creating a disaster of almost unimaginable size. We have to change. 4. It’s no-one’s fault (it’s everyone’s fault)It seems comforting to some people to cast the blame for global warming at some other group of people. The list of culprits seems to include Americans, 4x4 drivers, car drivers in general, capitalists (particularly big global capitalists). In general, them - it's their fault. But this argument is hopelessly self-serving, both in the childish finger-pointing, and in the imagining that if they just mended their ways, it would all be alright. It's not that simple. The problem is not them, it's us - all of us who heat our homes and who use manufactured goods and who drive cars and who watch TV and who read this on the internet or on a manufactured piece of paper. And not only those of us in the rich developed world, but all those in the developing world who aspire to do all these things. Do you know what - for every rich car driving American, there are about six people in China and another four in India who aspire to that, and who in the next fifty or so years will acquire the wealth to consume in the same way. The fault belongs to no one country or group - it belongs to the whole human race. 5. We can’t stop consumptionSome environmentalists tell us we have to wind down industry, stop driving cars and return to some bygone time when we were conservators of the planet. Trouble is: (i) there never was such a time - primitive wood-burning may have worked when the population of the planet was a few hundreds of millions but it couldn't support several billion even if it was clean, which it isn't. Burning wood is less efficient and more polluting even than burning coal. Trouble is: (ii) the good people's of the rich western economies aren't about to give up their life-styles, fridges, air-conditioning and cars and return to a hand-to-mouth existence, no matter how much hand-wringing and moral pressure is applied. Trouble is: (iii) the good peoples of the developing world are rapidly catching up with us in both wealth and pollution-creating consumption. They've seen what we have and they want it and even if we had the moral right to say they shouldn't have it, they'll have it anyway. Just advocating restraint is whistling in the wind. 6. Therefore: We must make consumption cleanIf our consumption is going to kill the planet and most of us, and we won't give up our consumption, then we will have to make it clean. This isn't a new idea. Until the 1950s London was a smoky smoggy city with an air that damaged people's health. Clean air acts stopped the smoke and London is today a cleaner city than many in the developing world. There seems to be a trend whereby in the rush to industrialisation pollution is ignored until the concern and the wealth is there to tackle it. Once tackled, the environment becomes healthier than before industrialisation started. The river Thames in London is cleaner today than it has been for five hundred years. We must now do this on a global scale. Where in London we banned smoke emissions, now we must ban carbon emissions and use our technology to develop and implement alternative solutions. 7. We must aim for 0% CO2 emissionsIt's no good a few countries trying, and failing, to cut their emissions by 10%. Even if the USA and developing world signed up to this and achieved it, global warming would still continue. But there is no way a target like this can be implemented globally and made to stick - the developing world wants to increase its energy use drastically, and it needs to if it is to compete with the west. The Kyoto process is worse than a waste of time for in pretending to be caring and doing something to alleviate global warming, the world's politicians are delaying the day when the problem is faced head-on, and beaten. Every day that passes is another 20 million tonnes of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, every week another cubic mile of Greenland ice sheet melts into the sea. If the human race is to survive another two hundred years we have to cut back our CO2 emissions by 80% or more. To do this, we have to completely replace most of our existing carbon burning technologies, from the internal combustion engine to coal/gas and oil-fired power stations. We have to stop burning carbon. 8. We have the technologyRemarkably, we have had the technology to replace much of our carbon-burning electricity generation for fifty years. And chosen not to use it. How stupid and short-sighted? Nuclear power stations do not emit CO2. Some countries already have significant nuclear capability. In Japan 55 reactors provide 30% of its electricity, in France the same number of reactors produce about 75% of its electricity. A common belief is that nuclear energy is dangerous. (Just look at www.greenpeace.org ) And yet the history of nuclear power is that of a safer industry than any of the carbon producing industries, even assuming worst case (ie Greenpeace's) estimates of death caused by the Chernobyl disaster. Nuclear energy is safe and we should use it. We are also very close to having fuel cell technology which can replace the internal combustion engine in seven hundred million vehicles on the planet. Don't believe it? How quickly did mobile phone batteries shrink in size from 1990 to 2000? (A. From a brick to a credit card.) 9. Therefore: Substitute nuclear + renewables for coal, gas, oil.Where Greenpeace and friends are right is in the desirability of getting rid of carbon based energy generation and using clean renewables instead (wind/wave/solar power). Where they are wrong is in thinking we have the time to do this. Maybe we can in two hundred years, with the discovery of new clean energy sources that today we can't imagine. But to bridge the gap we need to use the proven non greenhouse gas emitting energy source we do have, and that's nuclear energy. If we are serious about saving the planet, rather than just playing protest politics, there is no alternative. 10. The problem is political, not economicThe development of the mobile phone shows how quickly a new disruptive technology can take hold when there is a demand and people see a money-making opportunity. If there was a similar demand to banish carbon burning industries it could happen very quickly - most of it in a decade or two. With motivation we can stop global warming. Unfortunately there are major entrenched interests who will fight any move to ban carbon burning. These include: the oil industry, the coal industry, unenlightened vehicle manufacturers, unenlightened environmentalist organisations, the governments of middle eastern countries, Venezuela and Russia whose countries' wealth depends upon selling oil, and, not least, the collective governments of the world whose self-serving politicians put considerations of the risk of being voted out of office before considerations of saving the planet. All these people will resist the change we need to make. And, most importantly, what we can doWell, there's lots, but for now ,could you tell me what you think of this argument so far? If you agree, please let me know and encourage me. If you disagree, tell me how. Please click on Feedback and let me know. Thank you.
Long argument (to come) 1. Our pollution is heating the planetblahblah Click on the picture below (lifted without permission from www.bertc.com). It is a montage of the world at night. The white spots are where we are burning energy to light up our surroundings while we sleep.
Shouldn't this embarrass us? Can't we even switch the lights oiff when we go to sleep? 2. Without radical action, our polluting will accelerateGlobal warming (due to man's pollution) started sometime in the second half of the twentieth century. In that fifty years the population of the world roughly doubled, from about 3 billion to about 6 billion. In 2006 it is now about 6.5 billion and increasing. Whilst we believe that population growth will slow and probably stop sometime this century, we can be sure that the total population will continue to grow quickly for some decades, due to the heavy preponderance of young people in the developing world, and the increasing life expectancy brought by modern medicine and improving water and food supplies. People are living longer and more of them are having children of their own. Whether the world's population eventually stabilises at 8 billion, 10 billion, 12 billion or more, we can be certain that it will be hugely larger than the 4 billion or so people which were enough to get global warming started. And if the population is two or three times as large the resource consumption and pollution - the environmental impact - will be two or three times as large. Not only is the population growing but it is also getting richer. The economies of the two most populated countries - China and India - are growing very quickly. Between them they have a population of about 2.4 billion people, which is eight times the population of the USA. These people aspire to achieve the wealth we enjoy in the developed world and, at current growth rates, will get there sometime in the next few decades. But with wealth comes environmental impact. The environmental impact of each person in the rich developed world is estimated at 32 times that of each person in the developing world. It has been estimated that if China increased its wealth up to first world standards but nothing else changed at all (the world population stayed static, all other countries' economies stayed static), that this alone would increase the environmental impact of the world's population by 94% (Jared Diamond). From 1900 to 2000 the population of the world increased from about 1 billion to about 6 billion. The average energy consumption in that time increased by a factor of about four. Hence man's environmental impact increased by a factor of about 24 in the twentieth century. We were destabilising the planet with four billion people. There's going to be two or three times as many soon and on average they are going to be using more and polluting more. Jared Diamond suggests that increasing the wealth of the developing world to the current standards of the first world will increase our environmental impact a staggering twelve fold. There is no question that without radical action our polluting will accelerate beyond the earth's breaking point. 3. Therefore: We have to changeWe have to change. We will be forced to change, if for no other reason than the aspirations of the developing world cannot be met without radical change. The populations of China and India don't have one car for every three people (as in the USA) but they do have television and on television they see the standard of living enjoyed by richer countries and aspire to it. But to achieve a vehicle for every three people in China and India will add something like 700 million more vehicles, roughly doubling the number of vehicles on the planet. That doubles the demand for steel and it doubles the demand for oil and it doubles the CO2 emissions. It is doubtful whether the steel and oil can be found for all these new vehicles, even if demand for steel and oil was not growing from other sources. And if it can, how will we cope with double the fumes being produced?
4. It’s no-one’s fault (it’s everyone’s fault)China now burns more coal than the USA. Each year China is building more new coal burning power generation than the whole of the UK power generation from all sources. Hence China's annual increase in pollution is more than the whole of the pollution produced by the UK. Should the aim of the UK government be to nag and nag the UK population into using energy efficient lightbulbs or should it be to find technological and political solutions to Chinese energy needs? In the light of this does the Kyoto protocol have any significance? Or are the governments of the west just fiddling while the earth burns? (Exempting the American government, which isn't even fiddling.)
5. We can’t stop consumptionblahblah 6. Therefore: We must make consumption cleanblahblah 7. We must aim for 0% CO2 emissionsblahblah 8. We have the technologyblahblah 9. Therefore: Substitute nuclear + renewables for coal, gas, oil.Flannery p.159: Burning coal kills 60,000 people annually in the US. ... The state of South Australia is home to the world's largest uranium mine, yet its largest singe point source of radiation isnot the mine but the coal-fired power plant at Fort Augusta. dirty coal - http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/cleanair.htm
10. The problem is political, not economicblahblah
And, most importantly, what we can do
|
|
