We simply cannot afford to gamble… by ignoring it.
We cannot risk inaction. Those scientists who say
we are merely entering a period of climatic instability
are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our
climate can soon change for the worse are too
strong to be reasonably ignored.
1978, Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, p.237
The world as we know it is in a serious crisis. I would argue that we have less than ten years to take care of this problem before it takes care of us. No, I’m not talking about global warming, overpopulation or eugenics. I am talking about the danger of assumptions.
The above quote, by the way, was from a book published in 1978 on the global cooling epidemic. As it turns out, the world was not actually cooling as rapidly or as cataclysmically as everyone had thought; nothing happened.
Now, we have moved on to greater media hype, and louder alarmists. Many around the globe have already sounded the alarms about crisis on a global scale. With assumed timescales, we hear that before the next decade there will be serious flooding in low lying regions because the ice caps will have melted. A veritable “Water World” scenario, if you recall that fine film.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe that everyone should be an environmentalist. Our nation has a severe dependency on foreign crude oil, which causes tension between nations and dangerous transportation methods which lead to pipeline leaks and tanker spills, as well as the exploitation of those in oil-rich under resourced regions. These factors have a tremendous negative impact on the environment. We’ve done oil long enough, now it’s time to move on to something better. But in the scramble to save the world from the “impending doom” caused by the use of fossil fuels and the assumed dangers of carbon-dioxide, many have jumped the gun and are researching technologies that are not sustainable and will have a crippling effect on the world economy.
Consider ethanol. The US ethanol industry received $6 billion dollars last year in government subsidies to industry leaders and farmers to promote production and adoption of bio-fuels. The main idea (misconception) behind ethanol is that it will not contribute to greenhouse gases as much as fossil fuels because it is produced by burning crops that have absorbed carbon from the atmosphere over their lifespan. The problem with this being that forests, which process large amounts of carbon-dioxide, are being leveled to make more arable land. Once farming begins, farmers use equipment that guzzles conventional gasoline and diesel fuels to farm that land. In the end, the solution is worse than the problem.
And we are already seeing symptoms of this problem. You may have noticed in the world news lately that there is a severe shortage of food. In a recent interview with BBC Radio, Jean Ziegler, an adviser to the UN on the right to food, blamed bio-fuels as the major contributor to global food shortages. Last year alone, the United States burned 138 billion tons of corn for bio-fuels. On top of that, the European Union just passed government regulations mandating that by 2020, 10% of all fuel in the 27 nations of the EU will come from bio-fuels. We are burning massive amounts of a food source while the world goes hungry. This will only compound the problem with the world’s poor. As a result of the demand for fuel-crops, prices for rice globally have jumped 53%, and the price of cereals has jumped 83%. With 2.2 billion people in the world who cannot afford the cost of food now, these recent skyrocketing food prices will seal their fates.
My fear is that as historians look back on this generation, they will be appalled. While we were worrying about the weather, billions of people around the world were dying of starvation and disease, while the developed, more privileged world, spent billions of dollars trying to fight a problem that went the way of global cooling.
Sources:
1. Ponte, Lowell, The Cooling. Englewood, N.J.: Prentice -Hall, 1972.
2. BBC World Services. “Global food shortage forces prices up”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2008/04/080414_food_crisis_sl.shtml
3. Bread for the World. “Hunger Facts: International”.
http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/hunger-facts-international.html
