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14 comments on The Energy and Environment Round-Up: October 10th 2007
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Stoneleigh,
Even though I am depressingly aware of many of the ecological problems your articles raise, I rarely see them lined up as you have done. Achingly sad.
I keep wondering when the natural system will collapse, or deflate to the point where the consequences shudder like thunder through the global social fabric.
The system so far seems forgiving; men trundle on. Important wheat crops fail in Australia; Albertans are blind to the sewer that they are creating; massive man-made fires scorch the Brazilian rain forest...I could add my own list: Oceanic fish stocks may crash by 2050; Himalayan glaciers in retreat.
One event alone is not enough to crash the system. But some confluence of events will awaken us to the fact that the world is slowing dying. Even then, like the hardy Chinese, we will all wear masks outdoors--and go about our business. And when, like the citizens of Wuxi we awake to scum and filth for tap water, people from other cities will welcome the pollutors as bringers of wealth.
I fear we will slowly grow inured and indifferent to the growing poisons...as we slowly wither and die.
Just to clarify things (I don't want to look pedant, but I happen to be a bit informord about Brazilian situation), fire never spreaded that well at the Amazon florest.
The only reason that there is a florest there is because it rains all the time. The area that is now on fire has a yearly dry period, but it is quite short, normaly less than a month long. This year, Brazil is suffering a huge dry (except for the quite small south), and that is why fire is spreading so well.
Now, I can't tell you if climate change shares the guilty on those fires, we've even had similar years before... But there are some quite fast changes here, what is very odd.
I agree. Many thanks, Stoneleigh, even if the news are mostly quite depressing.
Not that it's anything new, it is just difficult to put all this into perspective: global warming, rain forest destruction, sea habitat destruction, groundwater depletion, fertile soil depletion, pollution and devastation from industrial activities, starting to run out of primary energy production growth - the lifeline of the economy and substituting with coal and other dirty alternatives.
Sure, this might be a 'train wreck in slow motion' as it's been coined. As such it will take (probably) decades, some parts even centuries to play out.
Still, here we are, sitting at the computer, thinking at the magnitude and what to do about it.
Think global - act local. Sure, but when that effect used to feel like a drop in the ocean before, now it feels like something even less: quite futile at most times and even ridiculous at other times.
However, there are no other alternatives, but to keep on keeping on and staying positive. To balance things out, once can also try reading 'positive' news from, say www.biopact.com, even if they are not all equally large in scale and don't balance out all the bad news.
Thanks Stormy and SamuM,
What we try to do here is to paint the big picture by looking for a wide range of information and arranging it so as to tell a coherent story. It's a deliberate wide-angle lens approach, because all these factors are interwoven in complex ways. For another important part of the big picture try the Finance Round-Up (covering the latest on the developing credit crunch).