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Conflict Over, and in the Midst of, Nature’s Assets
Andrew C. Revkin, Dot Earth (blog), New York Time
Two reports out today on conflict and the environment mesh in a disturbing way. One, from the United Nations Environment Program, asserts that persistent conflicts within states most often relapse when the root cause is scarce natural resources and environmental issues are not incorporated into efforts to forge peace. The other study, “Warfare in Biodiversity Hotspots,” has been published in the journal Conservation Biology. The authors find that “more than 80 percent of the world’s major armed conflicts from 1950 to 2000 occurred in regions identified as the most biologically diverse and threatened places on Earth.” More on conflict and ecology from Conservation International.
So there’s potentially a vicious loop here, as resource-based battles drag on in the world’s last bastions of biological bounty.
The human population is heading toward more or less 9 billion (the latest bidding by population experts is on the high side). The highest birth rates are mainly in the most troubled places. There are a billion teenagers (there were only a billion people of all ages in 1830). And the chances of such fights abating look slim without intervention and multi-disciplinary thinking about human security and environmental integrity.
(20 February 2009)
NYT: Could Energy Success Backfire in the End?
Andrew C. Revkin, Dot Earth (blog), New York Times
One aim of this blog is to explore efforts to expand the menu of cheap, non-polluting, renewable energy options. That’s a pretty clearcut need given the risks attending the unfettered use of fossil fuels and the reality that 2 billion people today cook on guttering fires using fuelwood or dung harvested mainly by girls who are not going to school as a result.
But I had a dream about energy one fitful night not long ago and it left me a little cold. I pondered what kind of world might result if Nate Lewis at Caltech or Dan Nocera at M.I.T. or Shi Zhengrong at Suntech Power Systems in China had a breakthrough that made solar panels as cheap as paint?
We could synthesize food, even meat, in solar-powered factories. We could render water from the sea or briny aquifers drinkable in endless amounts (as is being done with wind power in sere parts of Australia even now).
And we could, in essence, vastly increase the carrying capacity of the planet. Fossil fuels were a big part of the growth spurt from 1 billion to nearly 7 billion people in two short centuries. On a finite planet, where would limitless energy, combined with humanity’s infinite aspirations, take us? This leads to a question that’s been touched on here periodically. Does a shift in values and aspirations have to accompany the technological leaps that will assuredly be made in the coming decades?
There have been heaps of warnings for a very long time about unintended consequences from a rush to new technologies.
(10 February 2009)
Gloom and doom
Gilles d’Aymery, Swans Commentary
A friend from the San Francisco Bay Area called me the other day to share his concerns about the US economy and, particularly, the state of affairs in California — and his own situation. He was worried. The value of his house has dropped by 30 percent, his 401(k) by 50 percent. The tech company where he works has laid off employees. He’s kept his meager savings at Bank of America, which by standard accounting is nothing more than a Zombie bank. He said that even Silicon Valley was in recession and the economy of the state in a tailspin with 10 percent unemployment.
… IT IS INDEED GLOOMY out there, a perfect storm that is worsening. In my opinion, we haven’t approached the eye of that storm yet and the full force of the shock has yet to materialize. And forget about California for a moment, or the USA for that matter. This has become a worldwide crisis with a velocity never seen before. Even pinstripe gray suits are in awe. During a conference at Columbia University on February 20, Paul Volcker, an economic adviser to President Obama and former Fed chairman, said, “I don’t remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world.”
… LAST SUMMER, when the hurricane-like crisis gathered speed, especially after the Lehman bankruptcy in September, the Europeans thought and asserted that they were in a better situation to ride the wave of the storm. Recent events have shattered their confidence. Iceland liabilities are more than 300 percent of GDP. The economies of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania are “clinically dead.” The Eastern European countries (remember Donald Rumsfeld’s “New Europe”?), which are members of the EU but do not belong to the Euro Zone, are threatening to bring down Western Europe (“Old Europe”). They have borrowed over $1 trillion Euros from Western banks, but are getting ever closer to defaulting on their debts as their economies have drastically contracted and the value of their national currencies plummeted
… SOCIAL UNREST, like a prairie fire fueled by heavy winds, is spreading all over the world from Russia to China. In Europe, they have toppled governments (Iceland, Lithuania, and counting). A new wave of riots is engulfing Greece. Two and half million people descended in the streets of French cities. Italy sits on top of a soon-to-erupt Vesuvius. Turkey is not immune. No country is immune, not even the U.S., which will eventually join the fray. Universities are in turmoil, from Helsinki to La Sorbonne (remember 1968?) in Paris. Governments, in spite of the crisis, or because of it, are increasing their policing budgets, unleashing these forces of state repression upon their own people. Scarcity brings fear and fear brings repression — an old story.
WHICH BRINGS ME BACK to the Doomsters. Some welcome the chaos in the making in the name of the famed “socialist revolution,” but others, often located in the U.S. — people who have made a business (often profitable) of predicting doom and gloom — lend a hand to the repressive times ahead. People like James Howard Kunstler, Jay Hanson of dieoff.org fame, Jan Lunberg of “Cultural Change,” Dale Allen Pfeiffer of Surviving Peak Oil, conspiracy theorist Michael Ruppert of From the Wilderness, Matt Savinar of Life After the Oil Crash, are just a small sample of that notorious crowd.
ONE TO PARTICULARLY ENJOY is Dmitry Orlov, who for years predicted the collapse of the former Soviet Union and is now predicting the same outcome for the U.S. Orlov’s recent speech given on February 13, 2009, at the Long Now Foundation — a bunch of new/old-age do-gooders — in which he claimed “that all the [support] systems and institutions that are keeping us alive [are crashing].” Says Orlov: “Forget ‘growth,’ forget ‘jobs,’ forget ‘financial stability.’ What should their [the policy makers] realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security.” Orlov goes on with a mind-numbing rant that includes getting a tiny chunk of land to grow food and an AK-47 for security. Notice that health care and education are not a part of his program… One should read the entire diatribe, “Social collapse best practices,” to get a clear picture of today’s face of reaction. Gloom and doom, it actually is — and utterly socially irresponsible.
(23 February 2009)
Links and more text at original. Dmitry Orlov and some of the other gloom-n-doomers mentioned are EB contributors.
Gilles d’Aymery really should look a little more carefully at the phenomenon. Name-calling is no substitute for investigation and argumentation. At this point, James Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov (for example) have a better record at prediction than the traditional socialist left. The left missed the boat on oil prices and suburbia, and seems to be ignoring the need for local resilience. -BA
The Secret
Hans Noeldner, Entropic Journal
What if the secret to more employment for people is less employment for machines? What if we were no less committed to “the least among us” than we are passionate about our vaunted economic and political theories? What if we really did put people first, firmly above climbing over others to get ahead ourselves?
If healthy, fulfilling, honorable work for everyone was our top priority, would tens of millions of Americans know – and a hundred million or more fear – that their fellow countrymen have no further need for their services?
What if more Growth for those of us already wallowing in stuff leads us away from true prosperity? What if a tide of material consumption that rises even further would drown humankind beneath depletion and ruin long before it lifted the leaking dinghies of the poorest of the poor? What if Edmund Burke’s warning is true: we are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to our disposition to put moral chains upon our own appetites?
Because the choice today – indeed, the choice for all time – remains very simple: to love and serve one another; or abandon ourselves to the pursuit of the lowest prices, the highest rates of return, and the opportunity to die with the most toys.
(21 February 2009)
Hans Noeldner is an EB contributor. He posts his communications with the President at Dear Mr. Change.
