Seeing through the climate change hot air
By Khaled Diab
The climate change debate has become shrouded in hot air. We need to
step back and look at the larger picture.
August 2008
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Tonight marks the exciting climax of the
eco-drama Burn Up which I enjoyed
watching. Despite its simple political message, the characters were complex and
interesting, the acting strong and the drama unrelenting.
Aside from the unnaturally high percentage of
beautiful people and the stunning scenery, a similar climate change drama has
been playing itself out here on CiF’s own narrative
threads in recent weeks. This was triggered by the emission of OFCOM’s report on Channel 4’s The
Great Global Warming Swindle which caused the temperature of the debate
to rise alarmingly, raising concerns about CiF’s
delicate ecosystem.
In fact, I have found the growing fixation on
climate change over the past few years worrying, because the entire debate has
become sidetracked. What should have become by now a broad debate on the
environment and our place in it has actually been reduced to a single issue.
The whole environmental debate is being shoehorned through the funnel of global
warming.
In a way, this is understandable because people
find it easier to focus on individual political issues than try to tackle the
intricate complexities of reality. Environmentalists and greener politicians
can scare us with stories of the coming inferno, while big business and
free-wheeling politicians can assure us that in consumer heaven our actions
have no consequence, and even if the temperature does rise a bit, this
particular hell ain’t no bad place to be.
Meanwhile, the mainstream thinking has focused
on the idea that a low-carb Kyoto energy diet will
save our obese societies. And, like the formula of any successful dietary
programme, it acknowledges pain in one aspect of our life but promises that our
broader lifestyle will remain intact.
Those unable even to contemplate cutting back
cast doubts on whether the climate is actually warming up, whether temperatures
will rise as much as models project, whether it is our fault and how much
responsibility we bear for it.
Of course, I don’t believe that our oil-based
economies are sustainable and I think that switching to renewable energy is
essential to our future. But even if our energy supply becomes predominantly
renewable, will our woes end there?
By weaning us off oil, this will help avert a
massive energy crisis that already appears to have begun. After all, we only
have a few decades, at most, worth of petroleum left. According to a 1999
estimate by the American Petroleum Institute, the world’s oil supplies would be
depleted between 2062 and 2094.
This was based on estimated proven reserves of
1.4 to 2 trillion barrels and consumption at 80 million barrels per day. As we
have learnt since then, both OPEC and oil companies have had a vested interest
in overstating the amount of oil that is still out there, and, already in 2005,
daily oil
consumption passed the 83.5 million barrel per day mark.
The trouble is that it is not just the oil that
is running out – everything is. Coal at current production levels is likely to run out
within 150 years. If it is used as an oil substitute, many decades would be
knocked off this projection.
Many relatively common metals, such as copper,
are at risk of serious depletion, if the global economy continues its rapid
upward trajectory. Even relatively abundant iron ore could disappear within six
decades if demand continues to grow at 2% per year, according to Lester Brown of the Worldwatch
Institute.
At the current rate of deforestation, all
tropical forests in the world might disappear by 2090. One model even suggests
that the Amazon
could be no more within half a century and that more
than half of Papua New Guinea’s rain forest – the third largest in the
world – could disappear by 2021.
This is not just about the genocidal
effect on biodiversity and protecting cuddly and not-so cuddly animals, but it
also means we will be facing a global food and wood shortage pretty soon, as
well as the collapse of the farming land that have replaced the forests due to
soil erosion and depletion.
Droughts and desertification are also
threatening millions of people. The Sahara desert is growing at a rate of up to
30 miles a year, Nigeria loses hundreds of square kilometres of land to the
desert annually and as much as 80%
of arid Afghanistan’s land is subject to soil erosion and desertification.
Even in more temperate Europe, droughts have
dramatically increased over the past three decades – the areas affected have
gone up by a fifth between 1976 and 2006. The 2003 drought affected about 100
million Europeans and southern Spain might become desert in the coming decades.
Within a couple of generations, the global
economy will have outgrown the globe. Without access to other planets,
exponential economic growth cannot go on indefinitely. Finite resources cannot
be used to fuel infinite rises in our standards of living. One day we will hit
a brick wall. Our reckless lifestyles pose some risks for ourselves and even
more for future generations.
There is a desperate need to rethink our
attitudes to consumerism, the disposable culture, overpopulation and the
economic growth orthodoxy so as to find ways to spread the joy more equitably
without necessarily committing mass suicide in the process. Humanity will
probably survive our irresponsibility but our modern industrial civilisation
may not, and we may become the Atlantis myth for future societies.
This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 25
July 2008. Read the related
discussion.
ã2008 – Khaled Diab. Unless
otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the copyright of Khaled Diab.