Environment 101

As I have been promising I am about to start on the environment crisis. Yes I said “crisis” as that is exactly what I mean. I consider the environmental issue far more serious than the economic one. Why? The periodic economic mess has been with us far longer than the environmental one. The latter started some time around the invention of the steam engine, 1775. The coming years saw the enormous increase in the use of powered machinery that began dumping its waste into the atmosphere.The sauce of global warming.

The periodic economic crisis can probably be dated much further back to Mercantile Capitalism around 1500. Some time in the fifteen hundreds when the first ships left Europe for Asia to bring back stuff for purchase in Europe. These ships were funded by bankers who lent them money and then took a percentage of there sales as part of the deal.

The thing about the periodic economic crisis, as predicted by Karl Marx, is that somehow we grow out of them until the next one. What we do in the meantime is make “imperfect adjustments.” Like The Poor Laws, Welfare, Medicare, Social Security etc. Then we fiddle with the imperfect adjustments until the next crisis and the process goes on adum finitum.

I am indebted to my friend Arron Wolf, a hydrologist, whose life's work is devoted to the problem of our shrinking water supply as the inspiration for this blog. I will primarily deal with the issue of water as it relates to the warming of the Planet. Water, I am referring to sweet not salt water. Sweet water is an absolute essential for all land living creatures. With the warming of the Planet it will increasingly be a life or death issue. Add to this the projected population increases in the poorest parts of the planet and there you have the recipe for a catastrophe of unheard of proportion. (Today we are 6.5 billion people. By 2025 we will be 8.5 billion and all needing fresh water to survive.) Where’s the crisis?

Well, consider the largest ice sheet in the world in Asia that is melting at an ever increasing rate. This highest ice sheet in the world covers an area as big as Europe. With nearly 37,000 glaciers on the China side alone. This ice give birth to the Yangtze, Yellow, Ganges, to the Mekong rivers. Some 2 billion people in more than a dozen countries are dependent on these rivers for their water supplies. Nearly a third of the worlds population. This has been called Asia's “fresh water bank account.”

Now here comes the crisis. This glacial plateau has been heating up 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit for the last century and in some parts even faster. This slight temperature rise has been devastating for the glacier. 95 percent are shedding more ice than they are adding. There may be some argument about how fast the glaciers are shrinking. There is none about the fact that it is happening. Delhi India’s water demand already exceeds its daily usage by over 300 million gallons a day. A Delhi environmentalist predicts that within ten years there will be a massive exodus as people move to other places looking for water.

We are going to see rising tensions over shared water resources including between farmers and cities. As is already happening in California’s Sacramento Valley. How about the struggle for water in our very own Southwest where golf course become a priority for their greens. Of course the developers out there for a long time have been eyeing the Great Lakes. The Great lakes folks have been saying, and “the pigs eye you do and we shoot you.” The Colorado river that is also very dependent on the ice melt has been constantly shrinking and at some times of the year it becomes a stream.

It is in Africa and Asia that the first full impact of the global warming will show up with severe water shortages, These shortages already exist with women in many parts of Africa walking as much as 8 miles every day in order to gather enough water for simple survival. In some ways the coming water crisis may be the “Canary in the coal mine” warning us about the catastrophe that Global Warming will wish on our planet.

What scares the hell out of me is a simple fact. Once the overheating of the planet takes its terrible toll there will not be any simple adjustments that might fix it. We will not be able to fix the Planets warming problem with some “imperfect adjustments.” (Forget desalinization. It’s very expensive and needs to be close to the oceans.) There simply will be no “imperfect adjustments.” What there will be is terrible conflicts between the haves and the have knots for resources essential for survival. If you think we got border problems now just try to imagine what happens when whole areas of the Planet turn into desserts while others are inundated by rising salt water floods.

So what’s to be done? What I learned in science 101 was, step one in finding solutions to a problem is to agree on the problem. We aren’t even close on that one. Why? Two reasons. First human nature is such that people don’t want to hear about problems that might cause them to reduce their own desires for fulfillment. Yes I believe we are basically selfish. Second, there are far to many stake-holders in the status qou world like the oil companies. BP comes to mind, who fight any effort to change human behavior that might have a negative effect on their earning power.

Finally, as I think about the shift in the poles of the declining number of people who believe the Planet is warming. I wonder if the movement for change beginning way back with “The Silent Spring” just peaked to early? Now people who would love to deny that it is happening at all are getting their reassurance. People like me are just a bunch of “Chicken Littles” worrying that the sky is falling. No it’s not the sky I’m worrying about it’s the Planet my great grandson Soren will inherit.