Love Affair 2

There are so many things happening I am hard pressed to make some choices. I will certainly be back on the coming dirty tricks campaign being hatched against Barack Obama. But for the moment let me stick to the oil crisis.

In Love Affair 1 I wrote about my admiration for the internal combustion engine (ICE) and what precipitated its origins, i.e. the need for pumps to drain the water from the British coal mines that lead to the invention of the steam engine. That in turn sparked the development of the ICE and so on.

Okay, so here is the point of all this. It was the start of the Industrial Revolution. We, the western civilization, have been the privileged beneficiaries of that revolution. Our high standard of living for the past century is directly attributable to the dramatic increase in industrial productivity brought on by that revolution. There is a serious price to pay for that big long party and it is called the environmental degradation of the planet.

We have before us a living demonstration of what the industrial revolution might have looked like in Manchester England in the late 18 hundreds or Pittsburgh in the early 19 hundreds. Dirty coal burning steam engines, mill furnaces, home heating coal made the air unfit for humans. Want to see what it was like? Go visit China. They are in the cusp of an industrial revolution. People want to be off the farms into the cities with jobs that might let them afford a car, a home with television, microwaves the whole panoply of goodies that come with the new technology.

Unfortunately for the Chinese and other developing countries, they are late on the scene. The earlier industrial development didn’t know from air, water, or land pollution. So we went merrily along until we began to discover the down side of our great party. We did have some great achievements in overcoming our really bad habits. We were able to bring Lake Erie back to life after a hundred years of treating it, and so many waterways, as our sewer systems. Same is true of our improvements in cleaning up the air by installing emission systems in our cars. We still have not dealt with the pollution of our own coal-fired electric generating plants.

The Chinese are saying, “Heah, you guys dumped all your shit into the atmosphere, the lakes and the rivers, so now it’s our turn.” Precisely because of what we have learned from our disregard of the planet, we would like to see the developing countries not repeat our very costly mistakes. That idea does not seem to be well received.

We are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to lecturing the developing world on the consequences of the industrial explosion. Their very understandable reaction is, who are you folks to lecture us after you have been enjoying that almost endless party for a 100 years. It is a very sad dilemma that we are now caught up in. The hard fact is our party is coming to an end. That will have the effect of stalling the emerging industrialization of the developing world. The big issue is the increasing demand on the-declining amount of oil.

A previous blog talked about the “social unrest phenomena.” We are beginning to see unrest as a result of the rising cost of oil. Truckers in Europe and the US blocking highways in protest over high diesel oil prices. Food prices spiraling out of reach of the poorest in the world.

Perhaps it was the first walk on the moon that began an awareness of the planet as a unified system that affects us all. Big difference from back in Dickens time when all we saw was our own backyards. Now cleaning up the air in Beijing is as much the world’s problem as it is the Chinese. We need an international agency with clout that can lead in reducing the negative effects of industrialization. The challenge is made difficult because now is also when oil is starting to run out. We ain’t seen nothing yet!

Thanks Kate N.H.W.Y.