Time running out for old world resources

2 Jul 2008
The Irish Times
John Gibbons is founder of Climatechange. and the blog, ThinkOrSwim.ie

Time running out for old world resources

Not only must we accelerate the separation of energy and CO emissions from economic growth, but Ireland itself should be working towards energy independence, writes John Gibbons

IMAGINE THE world’s most colossal manmade structure, one square kilometre in area, 4.5km in height – 75 times taller than Dublin’s Liberty Hall. Imagine that this building grows taller at the rate of seven or eight floors every 12 months. Then fill it with oil.

Now you have a picture of just how much of the stuff we burn every year. Twenty-nine billion barrels, to be precise. On a daily basis, that’s around 82 million barrels. Ireland alone consumes nearly 200,000 of these a day.

[As opposed to 210,000 barrels in China - EVERY MINUTE, and 2.5 thousand tons of coal - EVERY MINUTE]

Abundant oil has made the impossible possible. It took until 1804 – 100 centuries from the end of the last Ice Age – for the world’s population to reach one billion.

In the 200 years since then, the earth’s population has grown almost sevenfold. And fuelling this mind-boggling expansion in our numbers was cheap, powerful and plentiful oil.

Modern agriculture feeds the teeming billions by essentially using the soil to turn oil and gas into food. Natural gas is used to make fertilisers, while oil is heavily used for farm machinery as well as the manufacture of pesticides and the operation of irrigation equipment. Plus, of course, we depend utterly on oil to get products from the field to our shopping trolleys.

It takes the equivalent of 350 gallons of oil a year to feed one American. Apart from the billions of barrels of oil we consume each year, we also burn around 5.5 billion tonnes of coal annually, the great bulk of which is used for electricity production.

[I love it when people conflate issues and are unable to distinguish - until very recently, the United States fed much of the world. Each American is and was part of that process. We consumed, but we did so in the process of feeding the world, producing technology, and science that directly and indirectly benefited the world. The fact we use 350 gallons a year per person is really quite silly. now, if you said that the Swiss use 100 gallons per person we should be concerned. if you said that Austria uses 120 gallons per person - we should be concerned. The United States is the 2nd or 3rd largest country on earth in mass and our movements in that space use up the majority of that oil. If we were living in Austria or Belgium, we would use 50 gallons per person and still would have fed much of the world due to our productivity. If a person who sits on their couch all day uses an average of 100 gallons a year and a person who does surgeries and builds computers uses 100 gallons, there is a distinction. We should understand that distinction.]

This vast fossil-powered inferno is slowly cooking our planet. Atmospheric levels of CO – a potent greenhouse gas – are now at their highest in at least a million years, and perhaps a great deal longer. These levels are rising inexorably, year by year.

[Wholly unsubstantiated. There is absolutely no evidence. In fact, it defies logic. We are being asked to believe that when ice covered the earth, there was less CO in the air. That when the ice age ended, there was less CO, than today, in the air. So the greenhouse gases today are melting ice, but there was less CO 10,000 years ago when the ice age ended and the ice melted not from CO but from heavy breathing. There were, according to at least three sources, at least 5 million human beings on earth at the time - perhaps they breathed heavy. Yet, we are now told that it is the highest in a million years. They do not know, they just guess, and then the guess becomes science based on the number of people reiterating the nonsense, and pretty soon anyone who questions the million years, is a heretic, deserving of a stake and fire.]

It takes a molecule of CO upwards of a century to break down in the atmosphere, so the pollution from the oil we burned and the coal fires our parents lit 50 years ago are still heating our atmosphere today – and will continue to do so long into the future.

[So everything now is unrelated to anything we have done in the last thirty years, and is unrelated to the billion people in China who use 210,000 barrels of oil every minute, 2.5 thousand tons of coal every minute, 24 million Watts of electricity every minute, and consume 1/3 of the steel on earth (and the processes it goes through to become steel), and 1/2 the worlds concrete (and the processes it requires to become concrete). if everyone on earth stopped using anything with CO, we would be doomed due to the Chinese ... except this columnist understand that people question the role of the Chinese and he tries to deflect their involvement - more evidence that he doesn't understand what it is he is arguing.]

There is now “an urgent need to consider ways to accelerate the decoupling of energy and CO emissions from economic growth”, reports the International Energy Agency.

Put in simple terms, if we continue on our current path of everincreasing fossil fuel burning and spiralling emissions, we will, in the proximate future, irreversibly alter the climate on this planet in ways we can barely imagine.

The EU has decreed that under no circumstance can the planet’s temperature be allowed to warm by more than two degrees versus pre-industrial levels. Beyond that point, and we will have entered a new climatic era on Earth – one unlike anything recorded in human history.

Right now, we are well on the way to two degrees. Already, global temperatures have risen by 0.8 degrees,, with an additional 0.7 degrees reckoned to be already “in the system” in the form of heating of the oceans that will, over the next century, continue to raise global temperatures.

We can say with some certainty that 1.5 degrees (of an absolute “safe” maximum of two degrees) is already unstoppable.

[There is no science that proves anything of the above. It is models and those models as computed by computer programs are developed based on criteria humans insert. The entire modeling program is flawed.]

Business as usual – meaning that we continue to pursue economic growth by burning ever more fossil fuels – will most likely take us over the two-degree line within a couple of decades.

From that point, there will be no easy way back. All the international conferences, austerity measures and well-meaning expressions of concern cannot prevent a catastrophe after it has occurred. The only time available to head off this scenario is right now.

The other reason to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels is rather more mundane, albeit practical: we are running short of oil. Thierry Desmaret, chief executive of Total, said in 2006: “We say to governments, it’s urgent to take action plans to reduce oil demand growth.” Remember, this statement is not from Greenpeace, but from a senior oil industry figure.

Last year, about five million cars were sold in China alone. China is commissioning a new coalfired power plant on average every five or six days. It is now on target to overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy – and biggest polluter – in the coming years.

However, much of China’s massive industrial output is packed straight into containers destined for Dublin port, Rotterdam, Houston, Texas and elsewhere in the Western world.

It is unfair to blame the Chinese for overproducing; the reality is that China is mostly doing the dirty work of producing cheap goods for our throwaway Western lifestyles. A Chinese person accounts for 3.1 tonnes of emissions, less than a fifth of the 17.5 tonnes for each person in Ireland.

[It is fair you twit. In an earlier paragraph, the issues we have now are the result of what our parents did fifty years ago. Well, what the Chinese are doing has not even and will not begin to affect us for fifty years. If all else ended - they would more than quadruple what we now produce. This twit and others like him would say - then we need to cut back ... NO, they need to cut back. Their attempt to overtake the US in no way would resemble what the US produced. Their air quality is in dangerous nearly every day, in every city, around China (Pollution ...in Beijing ,,, five times worse than levels deemed safe by the World Health Organisation.). They are the biggest threat to earth today. Another mistake this twit makes is - based on the number of people, per person - Australians are the biggest polluters, NOT Americans. It is nice to always blame Americans, and I suppose if we produced as little as Europe, we could be blamed for something.]

One country that has demonstrated how consumption and emissions can be decoupled is Sweden. Despite their high standard of living, the average Swede produces seven tonnes of emissions – about 40 per cent of the Irish figure.

Drastic emissions cuts can be achieved, mainly via energy efficiency and conservation, if the political will is there.

[We are already do that. Energy efficiency - the percent of homes that have been reworked to be more energy efficient has increased in California by 37% from 1995; in Oregon, it is up 49% since 1995. We are doing it. We are switching to hybrids. We are switching to smaller cars. We are, and we are doing so without any political will (according to some). We are doing it because, not because we are told to. Dramatic results will show, but it will take 5-10 years to compute these savings.]

Big business has long been seen as the enemy of conservation, with its focus on share values and the bottom line, combined with industry’s tendency to let someone else pay for its pollution and emissions. We share a finite, fragile world, however, and we are only now beginning to fully fathom that what goes around, rapidly comes around.

Recently, the World Economic Forum (WEF), representing 100 of the world’s largest businesses, issued a set of policy recommendations ahead of next month’s G8 summit. “Nothing less than a rapid and fundamental strategy to reach a low-carbon world economy is needed,” the WEF stated bluntly. “Emissions will have to fall very strongly in all countries by 2050 if we are to avoid dangerous climate change.”

[What silliness. Remember, the Chinese and their 210,000 barrels per minute ... it will be 2050 when those effects are felt and .... regardless of the rest of the world, those effects will be catastrophic. What it shows is these twists at Davos, have no ability to understand complex ideas and understand how they relate to unstated evidence ... which is curious given they made billions by out thinking each other.]

Ireland is one of the most oil dependent countries in the OECD, and yet our western seaboard offers hundreds of rugged, windswept miles of coastline capable of being converted into one of the world’s biggest wind and wave generators. Harnessing this potential would slash our CO emissions and free us from our dependence on other countries for our energy security.

[What a pretty sight - entire ocean sides, mountains, hills, valleys - filled with windmills. These people are obsessed with fans. They refuse to allow digging in Anwar or other reserves because it ruins the environment and the home for the animal, but they want unsightly and costly windmills to be built that per windmill are not very productive. Why not build these windmills throughout the national parks in Alaska - fill ANWAR with windmills. I'd support that.]

It could also allow us to become a net electricity exporter, via an interconnector, thus creating a vast, valuable, new “clean energy” sector.

And we could use our abundant electricity to power an extensive high-quality electrified public transport system.

The investment involved in achieving this goal of energy independence would be huge, and in a world of soaring oil prices and growing climate uncertainly, there can be no task more vital.

[Before we jump up and down, we should recognize that under current restrictions set up within the various treaties on carbon - China and India are excluded. Forcing the US to sign would knock off trillions from our economy - weakening us politically, militarily, and economically, while giving the advantage to China to overtake us militarily and economically. For the environmental fascist, this is fine, as all they are interested in is destroying the US and stopping the US from causing one more CO molecule. Assume China were to then overtake us - with 1/6 the worlds population - why would it care what you thought about the environment? Why would it ever agree to weaken its economy? China has the dirtiest air in the world. More people die from air in China than anywhere else in the world, combined. Why? They have a military and would not are what ten million people thought - they destroy whole cities of ten million people to build dams. They do not care, but in the process, the only country that could keep China from abusing the world, the US - would have been so weakened. The environmental fascists would say that international pressure would bring China to heel. Yes, like it has done so well on human rights thus far, on Tibet, thus far. I am confident. Silly and foolish treaties like Kyoto are failures - five countries. China, India, US, Vanatu, Micronesia. Every country on earth is given a credit for the max amount of CO they can produce. Countries like Vanatu or Micronesia produce 1/1000 of their total, so what do they do with the rest? China produces 1000 over the max because it doesn't care about the environment. The US produces 20 above the limit and our economy is weakened leading to widespread famine. China will buy from Vanatu the other 900 and 100 to keep its max limit intact. BUY is the key term. While China will not cut back at all and will instead go full steam ahead, the US will cut back weakening our economy (oh some losers say we can create new energy sectors as if that will compensate for a Chinese economy overtaking the US). China will buy up extra credits from the poor countries, stay within Kyoto and overtake the US. meanwhile, the largest redistribution of wealth in human history would occur - wealthy nations paying poor nations who would then industrialize, leaving fewer credits available. What would be decided is - it is the right of all people to industrialize so ... credits will be available based on those countries seeking and close to reaching the industrial stage, while others will have to be satisfied cutting their output. The US will be unable to buy credits while China, still industrializing, would continue to buy credits. This should make every human being experience a shiver down their spine.]

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