Courting Disaster: The Fight for Oil, Water and a Healthy Planet

Stanford University Roundtable

Climate Change a Threat to Peace

Award Underlines Danger of Climate Change
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

The Nobel Peace Prize committee made a powerful statement today that the consequences of increasing carbon emissions could be as dangerous as the ravages of war.

The award to Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reflects a growing conviction on the part of scientists, politicians and economists that emissions and the global warming they produce will lead not only to more pollution but could also create economic mayhem, social upheaval and conflicts between nations or groups trying to survive in an increasingly hostile natural environment.

“We face a true planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in his statement. “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”

“This prize is an indication of the degree to which we’ve realized in the past few years that what happens in the environment is not just about natural resources but has so many different dimensions,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which helped found the intergovernmental panel.

“It recognizes that changes in the environment are likely to manifest themselves in tensions and conflicts.”

Indeed, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which has for years maintained a “Doomsday Clock” to monitor the risk of global disaster from nuclear weapons, this year increased its warning level for the first time not because of weaponry but because of the threat posed by global warming.

Some scholars believe that climate-related conflict is already upon us. “I believe there are many places that are in, or on the edge of, conflict because of climate change already, and this prize is a warning that on our current trajectory of climate change the risk will get a lot worse — these will be the conflicts of the 21st century,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York.

He said that climate change had already helped ignite conflicts and wars in a swath of the world that extends from the Sudan in Africa, through the Middle East and to Afghanistan. “All of these are in dry lands that have had significant environmental stress, which is probably related to climate change,” he said.

A recent United Nations report concluded that land degradation and desertification in the Darfur region of Sudan helped set the stage for the devastating tribal and ethnic conflicts of the last few years as poor people increasingly competed for depleted resources. “But for the environmental stress, I doubt this would have exploded,” Mr. Sachs said.
Large-scale migrations from Africa to Europe are already on the increase at least in part because climate change has made traditional livelihoods, from farming to fishing less viable, experts say.

If global warming continues on its current course, the Himalayan glaciers will melt, according to the most recent I.P.C.C. report, ultimately reducing the water supply of hundreds of millions of people in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. “It does not take a lot of imagination to see that this will have drastic economic and social effects and lead to conflicts,” Mr. Steiner said.

But the potential for conflict spawned by climate change is not limited to the poor countries of the world. Already, as polar ice melts, countries are scrambling to claim newly accessible waterways and resources.

The United Nations panel and Mr. Gore have in their separate ways insisted that the world to find a global strategy for limiting climate change and adapting to climate shifts that are already inevitable.

Many others have joined forcefully in the mantra that peace and prosperity depend on the success in this quest — including former President Bill Clinton, under whom Mr. Gore was vice president; Sir Nicholas Stern, who was the chief economist of the World Bank; and business leaders like Richard Branson.

In a report prepared for the British government and released last December, Sir Nicholas suggested that projected climate change could shrink the global economy by 20 percent and plunge the world into recession.

At a conference in New York earlier this month, Mr. Clinton noted that the world population was expected to rise from 6.5 billion to 9 billion in the next 43 years, a period in which further warming is projected, even if emissions were brought under control.

“Most of those people are going to be born in countries not able to support their current populations, which gives a certain quaint air to the illegal immigration debate in Congress.”

Those conditions will make 2007 “look like a Sunday afternoon picnic,” Mr. Clinton said.

Arithmetic, Population, and Energy

A lecture by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett at the University of Colorado


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Part 8

Economic Growth and the Environment

Doha and Dalian
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 19, 2007

In the last few weeks, I happened to visit Doha and Dalian, and I must say: I was stunned.

Before explaining why, let me acknowledge that chances are you’ve not visited Doha or Dalian recently. Indeed, it may be — I presume nothing — that you have never heard of either city. Doha is the capital of Qatar, a tiny state east of Saudi Arabia. Dalian is in northeast China and is one of China’s Silicon Valleys because of its proliferation of software parks and its dynamic, techie mayor, Xia Deren. What was stunning is that I hadn’t been to either city for more than three years, and I barely recognized either one.

In Doha, since I was last there, a skyline that looks like a mini-Manhattan has sprouted from the desert. Whatever construction cranes are not in China must be in Doha today. This once sleepy harbor now has a profile of skyscrapers, thanks to a huge injection of oil and gas revenues. Dalian, with six million people, already had a mini-Manhattan when I was last here. It seems to have grown two more since — including a gleaming new convention complex built on a man-made peninsula.

But this, alas, is not a travel column. It’s an energy column. If you want to know why I remain a climate skeptic — not a skeptic about climate change, but a skeptic that we’re going to be able to mitigate it — it’s partly because of Doha and Dalian. Can you imagine how much energy all these new skyscrapers in just two cities you’ve never heard of are going to consume and how much CO2 they are going to emit?

I am not blaming them. It is a blessing that their people are growing out of poverty. And, after all, they’re just following the high-energy growth model pioneered by America. We’re still the world’s biggest energy hogs, but we’re now producing carbon copies in places you’ve never heard of.

Yes, “Americans” are popping up all over now — people who once lived low-energy lifestyles but by dint of oil wealth or hard work are now moving into U.S.-style apartments, cars and appliances.

Our planet cannot tolerate so many “Americans,” unless we take the lead and change what it means to be an American in energy terms. Attention Kmart shoppers: the world consumed about 66.6 million barrels a day of oil in 1990. We’re now consuming 83 million barrels a day.

“Demand for oil has grown 22 percent in the U.S. since 1990. China’s oil demand has grown nearly 200 percent in this same period,” Margo Oge, director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s office of transportation and air quality, told the Tianjin China Green Car conference that I attended. “By 2030, the global thirst for oil is forecast to increase by another 40 percent if we maintain business as usual.” Such an appetite would devour every incremental green initiative we make.

Hey, I’m really glad you switched to long-lasting compact fluorescent light bulbs in your house. But the growth in Doha and Dalian ate all your energy savings for breakfast. I’m glad you bought a hybrid car. But Doha and Dalian devoured that before noon. I am glad that the U.S. Congress is debating whether to bring U.S. auto mileage requirements up to European levels by 2020. Doha and Dalian will have those gains for lunch — maybe just the first course. I’m glad that solar and wind power are “soaring” toward 2 percent of U.S. energy generation, but Doha and Dalian will devour all those gains for dinner. I am thrilled that you are now doing the “20 green things” suggested by your favorite American magazine. Doha and Dalian will snack on them all, like popcorn before bedtime.

But, as I said, this is not just about “them.” It is still very much about us. Peter Bakker is the chief executive of TNT, the biggest express delivery company in Europe. The Dow Jones Sustainability Index 2007 just listed TNT as the No. 1 company in terms of energy and environmental practices. Mr. Bakker, whom I met in China, told me this story:
“We operate 35,000 trucks and 48 aircraft in Europe. We just bought two Boeing 747s, which, when fully operational, will do nine round trips every week between our home base in Liège [Belgium] and Shanghai. They leave Liège only partly full and every day fly back to Europe as full as you can stuff them with iPods and computers. By our calculations, just these two 747s will use as much fuel each week as our 48 other aircraft combined and emit as much CO2.”

That’s why we’re fooling ourselves. There is no green revolution, or, if there is, the counter-revolution is trumping it at every turn. Without a transformational technological breakthrough in the energy space, all of the incremental gains we’re making will be devoured by the exponential growth of all the new and old “Americans.”

Will oceans surge 59 centimetres this century - or 25 metres?

THE NEW CLIMATE: A CONTROVERSIAL STUDY SUGGESTS RAPID POLAR MELTDOWN AND RISING SEA LEVELS

Will oceans surge 59 centimetres this century - or 25 metres?

ZOE CORMIER


August 25, 2007


LONDON -- When Al Gore predicted that climate change could lead to a 20-foot rise in sea levels, critics called him alarmist. After all, the International Panel on Climate Change, which receives input from top scientists, estimates surges of only 18 to 59 centimetres in the next century.




But a study led by James Hansen, the head of the climate science program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and a professor at Columbia University, suggests that current estimates for how high the seas could rise are way off the mark - and that in the next 100 years melting ice could sink cities in the United States to Bangladesh.


"If we follow 'business-as-usual' growth of greenhouse gas emissions," he writes in an e-mail interview, "I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several metres, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose."




The scientific basis for this idea - which Prof. Hansen and five co-authors gleaned from geological records, ice core samples and analysis of the sea floor - is outlined in a recent paper published by the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.




In stark contrast to estimates put forward by the IPCC, Prof. Hansen and his colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 - or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago.




Their argument goes like this: As the atmosphere warms and the ice caps melt, they will not melt in a consistent, gradual fashion. Rather, they will start to melt faster and faster as the century progresses, quickly reaching a point where they could disappear altogether. This is because of "positive feedback" effects - factors that create a loop of exacerbated melting and global warming.




For example, snow and ice reflect sunlight and reduce global warming. But as the temperature of the planet increases and the polar caps melt (as scientists are already observing at both poles), there is less ice to reflect sunlight and more water to absorb it, thus making the planet warmer and increasing ice cap melting further.




Likewise, the mass release of methane from thawing permafrost (happening now in the Canadian Arctic) means that natural greenhouse-gas emissions could be added to man-made emissions - potentially speeding up climate change. And as meltwater from polar caps lubricates the contact points between the ice and the bedrock below it (evidenced by an increase in "ice quakes" in Greenland), ice sheets could be further destabilized and result in increased melting.




So why the radical discrepancies between Prof. Hansen's predictions and those of the IPCC? Certain positive feedback effects, as well as recent data on the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, were not included in the IPCC's report. "Because of the cumbersome IPCC review process, they exclude recent information," Prof. Hansen says, "so they are very handicapped."




Richard Peltier agrees. A University of Toronto physicist and the director of the Centre for Global Change Science, he works on mathematical models to explain the melting and freezing dynamics of the Greenland ice sheet and has contributed to the IPCC publications - but even he agrees that their assumptions tend to be "extremely conservative."




"[Prof. Hansen's] basic thesis is undeniable, because the mathematical models, which we have developed to describe the evolution of ice sheets, do not include certain processes that control how quickly an ice sheet could respond to climate warming," he says. "You need a model that incorporates all physical processes - and no such model exists."




However, Prof. Peltier does not think that the ice caps are likely to melt as quickly as Prof. Hansen suggests. "We really don't know what the future has in store. I am incapable of predicting how fast the ice sheets will melt, and so is he. But I don't think we are going to hell in a handbasket."




Others are even less convinced of the catastrophic predictions put forward by Prof. Hansen. Andrew Weaver, a physicist at the University of Victoria who works on the dynamics of the polar ice caps and also contributes to the IPCC reports, says he thinks the "upper bound for sea-level rise this century is a metre.




"I don't disagree with the seriousness of the issue or the importance of these positive feedback effects," he says, "but runaway feedbacks have extraordinarily low probabilities, which is why they are not given much attention by the IPCC."




He adds that the Greenland ice sheet will almost certainly melt away completely, but the IPCC predicts that this will take 1,700 years - not a century. "The complete disintegration of the ice sheets cannot happen in 100 years," he says.




Moreover, although he calls Prof. Hansen his "hero" for speaking out about global warming in the 1980s "when nobody was listening," he criticizes the tone of his recent paper and the use of words such as "cataclysm," which he believes move "dangerously away from scientific discourse to advocacy."




And at any rate, Prof. Weaver says, we have enough to worry about, regardless of what the future holds: The disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers threatens the source of fresh water for about one billion people and climate change is causing severe weather ranging from the droughts in Darfur to the flooding seen in Britain this summer.
Still, Prof. Hansen insists that his predictions are on target - and that the conservative take on climate change put forward by the IPCC and others could result in catastrophe.




"I believe there is pressure on scientists to be conservative. Caveats are essential to science. They are born in skepticism, and skepticism is at the heart of the scientific method and discovery," he wrote in New Scientist magazine last month. "However, in a case such as ice-sheet instability and sea-level rise, excessive caution also holds dangers. 'Scientific reticence' can hinder communication with the public about the dangers of global warming. We may rue reticence if it means no action is taken until it is too late to prevent future disasters."




Instead, Prof. Hansen urges a swift curb on greenhouse-gas emissions. The last time sea levels rose by almost 25 metres, he points out, was when the greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere were on par with what may happen if fossil-fuel emissions continue unchecked. He believes we should keep the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million. Right now, it stands at about 385 ppm.




"The first step should be a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants until technology is available to capture and store the carbon dioxide," he says, "and a gradually rising tax on carbon emissions."




Zoe Cormier is a science and environment writer based in London

The Serra Pelada Mine in Brazil

Brazilian Miners Wait for Payday After Diet of Bitterness
By Larry Rother, The New York Times

Serra Pelada, Brazil, - The gold that was extractable by hand, more than half a billion dollars worth, was mined out long ago. But the prospectors who still linger in this forlorn and neglected corner of the Amazon jungle refuse to give up their dreams of yet another lucky strike.


Nearly a quarter of a century ago, after the discovery of some of the biggest nuggets on record anywhere started a gold rush, great wealth was generated for a fortunate few here, with great sacrifice and suffering for others. During the early 1980's, more than 110,000 prospectors flocked to this site, which at its peak was said to be not only the largest open- air gold mine in the world, but also the most violent and chaotic.


Today, Serra Pelada is home to no more than 8,000 people, mostly prospectors who have no other place to go or who cannot afford to leave. The 300-foot-deep pit from which they earned their precarious livelihood is now flooded, but even so, they envision a pair of windfalls just around the corner.


"We've been eating bitterness for 20 years, but now we've got paradise in sight," Genesio Donizete, an official of the miners' cooperative here, said enthusiastically. "The government knows this is a powder barrel that could explode at any moment, and it is finally going to do the right thing by us."


Mr. Donizete was referring to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that has been wending its way through Brazilian courts since 1986. The cooperative charges that the government agency that had a legal monopoly on purchases of precious metals here systematically understated the degree of purity of the gold it bought from miners.


As a result of that sleight of hand, which the government now acknowledges, a ton of gold went unrecorded and unregistered and eventually became property of the state. Significant amounts of platinum, silver and palladium, an element used in armaments that fetches an even higher price than gold, were also recovered and sold.


With interest and adjustments for inflation, the value of the hoard has surpassed $50 million. Though courts have ordered the Federal Savings Bank to pay that sum to miners who worked at Serra Pelada in the early 1980's, the decision has repeatedly been appealed, and lawyers familiar with the case describe the miners' hopes as exaggerated.


"Serra Pelada is basically a hospital for people infected with gold fever," said Sergio Frazão do Couto, who has represented the main miners' cooperative at various stages of the proceedings. "The production of gold has stopped, but they still retain the illusion that they are going to become millionaires overnight."


In 1992, the Brazilian government declared Serra Pelada a national historic reserve, effectively ending any possibility of prospecting legally here. But in 2002, the Brazilian Congress overturned that decision and gave the miners title to the original pit and the area around it.


Luciano Rodrigues Sardinha is a former solderer who came here in 1982 from Iraq, where he had been working on a construction project for a Brazilian company. At one point, he had recovered more than 30 pounds of gold and, he said, could afford to send his children to the United States to be educated.


But he invested his earnings back in the mine and eventually lost his entire stake. He now lives in a small shack at the edge of the pit.


"I had 10 miners working for me back then, owned a lot of equipment, too, and used to fly in and out instead of taking the road," Mr. Sardinha, now 52, recalled. "I'm still alive, I'm still battling, but I'm barely surviving, so that money can make a big difference for me."


But it is not only the money from the government stash that is firing hopes here. Miners' groups have more recently been bedazzled by the $240 million down payment that an American mining concern has promised to pay for the right to resume prospecting in a 247- acre area that the miners now legally control.


Late in June, the American company, Phoenix Gems Ltd. of Waterford, Mich., signed a contract that calls for production to resume here by the end of the year. Though some veterans here question whether enough gold remains in accessible locations to be extracted profitably, Brent Smith, the leader of the consortium, talks of an additional 250 tons of gold.


"Core drill samples and other documents show a tremendous amount of gold underneath the original pit," Mr. Smith said in a telephone interview from his headquarters outside Detroit. "That gold was not extractable manually in the early 1980's, but through current technologies with the proper equipment we definitely believe we can get it out."


But the tensions between two rival cooperatives claiming to represent prospectors have grown. Late in 2002, for instance, the leader of a group that favors expanding the list of miners who should share in any payout from Serra Pelada was fatally shot.


"Any money from the mine obviously belongs to the owners, but just who are the owners?" said the group's treasurer, Alexandre Rodrigues. "The prospectors. But which prospectors? That's the problem."


Mr. Smith said: "Most of the men are now in their 50's and 60's, which means they are too old to be involved in any mining activities. They're just along for the ride and will be collecting royalties from what we extract, payments which will go on indefinitely, as long as there is production."


As they wait for the big payday, some miners are working the tailings, or refuse, produced by the pit, somewhat clandestinely. Others grow their own food to get by, or perform odd jobs.


"This money is our retirement, and I'm not leaving until I get my share," said Alfio Zucatelli, an electrician who came here from São Paulo in 1983. "We suffered one calamity and humiliation after another, and I'm sure that one day the government and the justice system will recognize that.'

Poverty

From the movie Baraka

Our World

Our Modern World

War and Oil

Review of "The 11th Hour"

Helpful Hints for Saving the Planet
By MANOHLA DARGIS

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the environment, blah, blah, blah, melting ice caps.

To judge from all the gas-guzzlers still fouling the air and the plastic bottles clogging the dumps, it appears that the news that we are killing ourselves and the world with our greed and garbage hasn’t sunk in.

That’s one reason “The 11th Hour,” an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing. It may not change your life, but it may inspire you to recycle that old slogan-button your folks pinned on their dashikis back in the day: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

The problem looks overwhelming, literally, as demonstrated by the images of overflowing landfills and sickeningly polluted bodies of water that flicker through the movie like damning evidence. Structured in mainstream fiction-film fashion (in other words, like a term paper), it opens with an introduction that presents the case, builds momentum with an absorbing analytical middle section and wraps up with just enough optimism that I didn’t want to run home and stick my head in an energy-efficient oven.

No matter how well intentioned, political documentaries that present problems without real-life, real-time, real-people solutions — an 800 number, an address, something — just add to the noise (pollution), becoming another title on some filmmaker’s résumé as well as a temporary salve for the audience’s guilt.

Written and directed by the sisters Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, and narrated on- and off-camera by Leonardo DiCaprio, who served as one of the producers, “The 11th Hour” attempts to stave off helplessness, and the nihilism that often follows it, mostly by appealing to our reason.

In one interview snippet after another, dozens of scientists, activists, gurus, policy types and even a magical-mushroom guy go through the arguments, present the data and criticize the anti-green faction, putting words to the images that are liberally interspersed between these talking heads like mortar. Every so often, Mr. DiCaprio pops up on screen to interrupt this show and tell, squinting into the camera and pushing the narrative to the next topic.

If your head isn’t lodged in the sand, much of what’s said in the movie will be agonizing and familiar. Gasping children, disappearing animals, gushing oil, billowing smoke, dying lakes, emptying forests, warming weather — the list of ills is numbingly familiar. In the movie’s eye-catching opener, the directors riffle through a veritable catalog of timely snapshots, some obvious (a smoggy skyline), others less so (a human fetus).

Effectively blunt, this sequence provoked a colleague to invoke the name of the avant-garde giant Stan Brakhage, but the truer visual and structural model here is a film like “Koyaanisqatsi,” with its streaming global landscapes. The difference is that the images in “The 11th Hour” are pointedly horrifying, not reassuring, pacific or aestheticized.

That can make it tough to watch, which the directors clearly know. They whip through the pictures and the interviews fast — at times a little too fast — and keep the information flowing as quickly as the visuals.

This swift, steady pace means that you receive a lot of bad news from a lot of different sources. The ecologist Brock Dolman explains, “When we started feeding off the fossil fuel cycle, we began living with a death-based cycle.”

From there the topic nimbly jumps to climate change, national security (courtesy the former director of the C.I.A., R. James Woolsey), Katrina, asthma and the stunning news from the oceanographer and author Sylvia Earle that “we’ve lost 90 percent of most of the big fish in the sea.”

Yes, it’s bad, but it’s not over yet. Many of those same sober talking heads also argue with equal passion that we can save ourselves, along with the sky above us and the earth below. The capacity for human beings to fight, to rise to the occasion, as Mr. Woolsey notes, invoking America’s rapid, albeit delayed jump into World War II, gives hope where none might seem possible.

It is our astonishing capacity for hope that distinguishes “The 11th Hour” and that speaks so powerfully, in part because it is this all-too-human quality that may finally force us to fight the good fight against the damage we have done and continue to do. As the saying goes, keep hope alive — and if you’re holding this review in your hands, don’t forget to recycle the paper.

“The 11th Hour” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has freakily scary environmental images.