Global Warming

The population of the planet is growing at a rate that was increasing every year, and every one of those people has to be fed, clothed, housed in some way.  A large and growing proportion of those people are becoming more affluent, in their terms.  They are demanding jobs that pay more than the tiny minimum that has allowed the Chinese economy to grow at ten per cent or more each year for the past decade, and those jobs are being provided in cities that were mushrooming daily.  And that growth, those demands, are not confined to China.  India is achieving close to the same growth.  Japan and South Korea has done it too, only a couple of decades ago, and the African countries are aiming for the same achievements.  The problem is that such improvements in living conditions are good, at the scale of the individual, but disastrous at the scale of the planet.  Fertile agricultural land is being appropriated to build the cities, forcing agriculture to work harder and to mechanize more to extract more production each year from less land and that reduced amount of land is also becoming less fertile each year, as the goodness is drained out of it by the fertilizers and pesticides.  The insects that fertilize the land and pollinated the plants are disappearing, more each year, forcing farmers in some areas to pollinate their fruit trees by hand.  The people in the cities need electricity for light, heating and to run the machines in the factories that pay their wages.  They need transport from their new homes to their new jobs, and, as their wages and their savings grow, they want to enjoy more of the ‘good things’ in life, things such as their own car, a television set, new and more fashionable clothes every year, even vacations abroad or the occasional short break over a weekend, now only a two-hour flight away.  Where people used to stay home and read a book, or pop round to the neighbor for a chat, they are now flying cross-country for an evening at a casino or a weekend at some fashionable beach resort, generating a demand that keeps an average of three thousand aircraft in the air at any one time over the United States alone, burning fuel at the rate of thousands of gallons each hour.  All of this generates economic activity and economic growth, the key measurements of the effectiveness of the government.  And all of this uses energy, in one form or another.  Cement is being produced in ever-increasing quantities to meet the insatiable demand for housing, factories, offices, shops and roads.  Coal is being mined at an unprecedented rate to supply the power stations, with vast tracts of land being strip-mined to meet the demand, oil is being pumped from ever-deeper wells, shale deposits that contain previously unrecoverable resources of oil and natural gas are being drilled and fractured to force them to release their treasures.  And all of that oil and coal is being burned, more every day, and the carbon those fuel sources contained is being disgorged into the atmosphere.  Earlier regulations, to limit the quantities of visible pollutants permitted to be released into the air, changed the brown skies that people of earlier years had come to see as signs of their success in their drive to ‘the better life’, so that the skies are now blue once again in the more advanced economies, but that improvement has merely hidden the ever-increasing volume of invisible carbon dioxide that is being added to the atmosphere.  And all the while the huge forests of the equatorial areas of the Earth are being cut down, to provide fancy wood for the increasing number of people demanding the ‘good life’, or to make space for the farming activities required to supply the hamburgers and the maize demanded by the hordes of new customers.  At the same time as the load of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing at three or four per cent a year, equatorial forests in South America, Central Africa and Asia, the ‘lungs’ of the planet that take that carbon dioxide out of the air and convert it to timber, are decreasing at four or five per cent per year.  Huge stretches of old forest are being cut down, the exotic hardwoods that have taken centuries to grow being shipped off to the markets to provide jobs for relatively few ‘sophisticated’ people and large incomes for the organizers of the activity.  One definition of ‘sophistication’ is ‘wasteful and conspicuous expenditure’.  That definition seems to fit the lifestyle of all the good people.

“So what?” the naysayers ask.  “Three per cent per year is not noticeable.  At that rate, it will take thirty three years for the present amount of carbon dioxide in the air to double, from under four hundred parts per million to eight hundred.  Four hundred parts per million is only 0.04 per cent.  It will take fifty years for the carbon dioxide to reach even one per cent.  There are much bigger and more pressing problems to worry about.  The American economy is presently growing at only two per cent per annum, and it needs the export sales to China and India, much more than it needs to worry about some maybe problem in a hundred years.”

The statement is repeated in practically every other country, wherever a politician puts his or her job on the line by espousing a cause that would reduce the fragile economic upswing that was only now starting to happen, after seven years of bust.  Only a year ago, Julia Gillard almost lost her job as Prime Minister of Australia when she and her Party imposed a ‘carbon tax’, a measure designed to force the large producers of carbon dioxide to seek other alternatives or, failing that, to find ways to do what they did at a lower cost to the planet.  Of course, as was to be expected, the levying of a universal tax on any production of a greenhouse gas results in the cost of that tax being passed on to the consumers, increasing their already high cost of living while the Government uses the funds collected by it, not to develop cleaner energy sources, but to buy the votes of the increasingly large poor section of the voting population.  The fact that the poor are poor largely as a result of the increasing tax burden on the economy apparently has failed to come to the attention of the voters, who want only more benefits from the Government.  They all seem to believe that the Government can wave a magic wand and create the money that would be distributed to them as an indication of how much the political party in power cares for the people.

Global warming is a real and pressing problem that will inevitably affect every person on Earth.  The only question is what you will do about it.

For further thoughts on this subject, read ‘Preparation’, by Nicole Stuart at Amazon.com