H A&S 220C Energy and Environment: Life Under the Pale Sun

H A&S 220c Energy and Environment: Life Under the Pale Sun

Essay/problems 3

Out: Tues 16 Nov 2004

Back: Tues 23 Nov 2004

In reading McNeill’s book, Something New Under the Sun, excerpts from Roberts’ The End of Oil (handed out, see website) and now excerpts from Bjorn Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist you get a wide range of views of the problem of global energy supplies.The conclusions of Lomborg are very different from most environmentalists and even from most scientists, whatever their leanings.

This week, let us focus on oil. During the coming week read the Lomborg sections just handed out, and make notes on areas where he disagrees with Roberts and McNeill. The goal of your study is: “Is there an oil crisis?”

If you find extra information, add this to the debate. Also use your own knowledge and observations of the environment to shape your discussion.

Hand these notes in with enough text to make it a ‘1st draft’ of an essay about the future of oil, our dominant energy source. Length: 3 to 5 pages (1 ½ line spacing, for fontsize 12 Times New Roman).

Notes: •Some important disagreement comes in areas very difficult for us to judge. For example, there are severe differences regarding estimates of oil reserves for future use…that is, how many barrels of oil will be accessible in the coming century, both ‘proven reserves’ and ‘undiscovered’ oil. Be sure to identify these differences in the above readings.

•Sometimes we are fooled by being forced to answer the wrong question. In the debate over how big our energy supplies are, only a few people are saying, “Is this the right question, the most important issue?”. Suggest new questions that improve this debate (remember the quote on our website: “The problem is not that we are running out of oil, but that we are running out of environment.”)

•Consider whether you are satisfied with basically economic arguments about the environment. Thus consider the difficulty in putting a dollar value on the environment, or parts of it when you see someone trying to do this. An economist, discussing the decimation of large whales in the ocean, once said, “When we put a high enough dollar value on whales, then they will be saved.” Is that convincing?

•Make a judgment over the issue of anthropocentric…that is, human-centered, judgments about the environment: how do the different authors approach the problem of valuing ecosystems and the physical environment, as contrasted by valuing human prosperity. See p.12 of ‘The Litany’ of Lomborg. It is possible to argue that in our own selfish interest we should preserve the vitality of other species and of the physical environment.

•Update some of the trends under discussion, for example the price of a barrel of oil, and compare with the texts (today’s oil price has ‘spiked’ upward and may fall back down, but it is worth trying).

•Avoid knee-jerk environmentalist responses. All the above authors have important things to tell us, even though they disagree strongly.

•Challenge assumptions.

•Challenge data. Some of the most strident criticisms (in Scientific American magazine and Nature magazine)accuse Lomborg ofthe selective use of numbers: some inaccurate, and some being isolated examples that run counter to the general trend.

•Consider the web of interactions that is Gaia…our biological system riding on a small planet. When Lomborg discusses the amount of fish being caught (p30, of The Litany) he says that the world fish catch has increased by 75% (he later corrected this to 55%) since 1975. However he includes fish farming in his curves; the more mainline Worldwatch Institute view (run by Lester Brown, whom Lomborg roundly attacks) emphasizes the leveling off and beginning decline of the catch of wild fish. Cod have disappeared from the western North Atlantic Ocean, and from New York to Newfoundland fishermen are out of work. And fish farming is expanding greatly yet there have been major setbacks, with disease infecting fish farms, serious local pollution, and escaped ‘farm-salmon’ interbreeding with wild salmon, with unpredictable consequences. Thus we add the next idea:

•Consider both global and local impacts of changes in energy, food, and other natural resources. Lomborg in his introduction does advocate this, comparing the bad news of the caloric intake of people in the African state of Burundi with the good news about Chad.

•What is the metric? Lomborg says the things may be ‘bad’, say with access to clean water but they are ‘better’ than in the past. He also argues that with rapidly increasing population, one should consider the % of people who are badly off, not the absolute numbers (p.5 of The Litany).

•Beware of this evasive tactic: the long argument that recyclable toothbrushes are trivially unimportant (p10 The Litany) deflects our attention from the huge problem of waste management and toxic waste and limited resources to continue producing it.

On p14 of The Litany, Lomborg confronts the claim that local ecosystems are beginning to collapse (Worldwatch Inst.); the example of subSaharan Africa is given, where life expectancy is falling as AIDS increases to decimate the population. Lomborg says this has nothing to do with overdevelopment and fragile ecosystems. However if you look at the history of Sahel drought in Africa, and of AIDS, you see a devastating confluence of several kinds of disaster: from overstressed farmland, drought, disease, economic dislocation and civil wars. It ain’t simple. But it also is not good. And, some authors (e.g., Richard Preston, The Hot Zone), ask whether AIDS might indeed have emerged from the jungles of Africa when they became an overstressed habitat for primates.

•Beware of predictions without some idea of their reliability. Test this by seeing what has happened since the book was published. The price of oil comes up often; on p.14 of The Litany Lomborg says “ the US Energy Information Agency expects an almost steady oil price over the next 20 years of about $22 a barrel.” This autumn that price has ranged from $40 to $55 a barrel. It may come down again, and in inflation adjusted dollars it is still cheap. But it is important to see how the system can be upset by wars and terrorism as well as oil reserves.

•Related to this, in the web of interactions that determine our comfort level and that of Gaia, be aware that the environment is close to the root of social injustice, poverty, and ethnic wars (often disputes over land and resources), and not just the price of gasoline; look for concrete examples relating to this.

•Consider the totally unexpected. The ozone hole was a near total surprise (though Paul Crutzen won a Nobel Prize for predicting the effect of human generated CFCs on the ozone layer high in the atmosphere). Somewhere in the text Lomborg gives statistics for literacy and starvation in Iraq. Of course he did not know that some 100,000 Iraqis would die in a war soon after his book was published, and did not acknowledge that, we are told, a million or more Iraqi children died in the past decade due to poor water supplies and lack of medicine.