Ruminations

Peak food?

Image source: AFP/Getty

The big news occupying the headlines at the moment is that -- shock, horror -- food prices are rising because of short supplies. With burgeoning population growth (a doubling in the last half century!), climate change affecting harvests (e.g. Australia), an increasingly wealthy Asian population demanding a high protein diet (i.e. meat), and a declining area of arable land due to ecological degradation, you don't have to be a brilliant economist to calculate the effects of these market dynamics. It doesn't help, of course, that the price of oil continues to rise adding to farmers' costs. To address this problem some governments, in their infinite wisdom, have encouraged the production of biofuels, increasing the competition for land, and causing the price of foodstuffs to rise further.

Most at risk are the world's poor and there have been riots in the streets in places like Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Haiti in the past month. How much air time has been given to this unrest in the media? Very little when there are much more important issues to focus upon like the US Democratic Party primaries. In a globalised world, however, this is something from which the West cannot insulate itself. Famine in developed countries? As inconceivable as this sounds, without strong political leadership to address the sources of the current agricultural crisis, things can only get worse.

Cost = $1, benefit = $9

Tianjin, China (one of the ten most polluted places on the planet)
Image source: forbes.com

In the IHT this week, there is an interesting piece (together with the gruesome images) on the Top 25 Dirtiest Cities in the World. There are also slide shows on the world's densest cities and the world's most polluted places. These are not league tables that one would want to be part of and the sad thing is, to clean up the worst of the mess doesn't really cost that much vis-a-vis the benefits. According to WaterAid, for every $1 spent on improved sanitation, the benefit equals $9 resulting from decreased cost of health care and increased productivity. Seems like a good business proposition to me.

Not-so-eco eco-towns?

Image source: energysavingsecrets.co.uk

Early last year, the British Labour government announced -- with much fanfare -- that it planned to build five new carbon-neutral eco-towns. A classic win-win scenario, these new settlements would be built on 'brownfield' sites and, besides being eco-friendly, would provide affordable housing. Now things may not be as rosy as they first appeared, as it seems greenfield sites are being targeted. Let's hope there is a sufficient political backlash for the Brown government not to roll over for the developers.

A confessional on nuclear power

This article was first published in XL Magazine, volume 4, issue 2, February 2008.

If there is one issue that splits the green movement right down the middle it is nuclear power. At the risk of over-generalising, the two camps might be labelled the ‘idealists’ and the ‘realists’. Among the latter is a sub-group that might be described as ‘recently converted grudging realists’; a faction to which I was dragged kicking and screaming over the Christmas holiday when I read The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock. Lovelock is a boffin, brilliant-genius type, who New Scientist describes as ‘one of the great thinkers of our time’. Now in is eighties, his writing is as sharp and lucid as ever, and few books have so fundamentally challenged my beliefs as this one.

Pre-Christmas, I was very much in what I now recognise to be the idealist camp. While certainly not a tree-hugging, doctrinaire environmentalist, I was a little scornful of the increasing number of ‘born-again greens’ who think nuclear power is the escape route from global warming. My reasoning, simply, has been that aside from the dangers associated with nuclear power generation – especially in the wrong hands – it simply doesn’t make economic sense. As renowned physicist and environmentalist Amory Lovins recently commented, nuclear power has ‘died of an incurable attack of market forces’. The only reason it still exists today is that governments subsidise it to such a large extent. Then there is the question of the amount of greenhouse gas that is produced in the mining and milling of uranium, the construction and decommissioning of nuclear power stations, and the transportation and management of waste.

When in the idealist camp I have also publicly dumped on the Australian Labor Party (ALP) when, at its last party conference, a resolution was passed to allow new uranium mines. As Australian scientist Tim Flannery argues in his best-seller, The Weather Makers, given the widely acknowledged problems with nuclear power, it makes an inordinate amount of sense to explore this option only as a last resort. It is far better, says Flannery, to go as far as you can to reduce emissions by increasing the efficiency of energy use and exploring clean and safe renewable energy options. If future demand for energy can be met through these means, the taxpayer can save a whole lot of money, the environment will experience less damage, and the community will be a safer place to live in.

So what’s behind my change of heart on the question of nuclear energy? The short answer is that Lovelock is a very clever man, and he puts forward some very compelling arguments. The most persuasive of all is the issue of waste. I now recognise that I have been a little one-eyed in this regard, by not considering the dangers of nuclear waste relative to the dangers of carbon dioxide waste. Nuclear waste is buried in pits and only dangerous to those foolish enough to expose themselves to it. Carbon dioxide waste, on the other hand, is invisible to the naked eye, freely-released, and so deadly that if emissions go unchecked it threatens the whole planet. Furthermore, as Lovelock points out, burning fossil fuels produces 27,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year which, if solidified, would create a mountain nearly a mile high, with a twelve mile circumference. To produce the same amount of energy from nuclear fission reactions would produce two million times less waste, occupying only a sixteen metre cube.

Statistics such as these would appear to cast doubt on the long term viability of burying carbon dioxide waste in the ground (carbon sequestration). Nuclear waste, on the other hand, rather than threaten the environment might even be harnessed to protect it. Lovelock, referring to the Chernobyl disaster, points out that one of the most striking things about the area around the accident site is richness of the wildlife. Plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any reduction in their lifespan is far less likely than would be the case in the presence of people and their pets. Lovelock then goes on to suggest that tropical rainforests might be ideal sites for nuclear waste storage because it would protect them from farmers and developers, and allow them to continue to function as carbon dioxide sinks.

On the economics of nuclear power, Lovelock is a little vague, but what is now becoming abundantly clear following the pronouncements of the scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that there is little choice but to use nuclear power because renewable sources of energy (e.g. wind, solar) will not be sufficient to meet our needs quickly enough, to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. At the very least, therefore, it is not a good idea to decommission existing nuclear power stations, or defer plans to build nuclear power stations. They may be expensive, but not nearly as expensive as the dramatic climate change that will be forthcoming unless something is done to reduce emissions. In summary, nuclear power is not the answer, but it is certainly part of the solution.

Tipping points

Image source: AFP

According to The Guardian this week, (Global meltdown: scientists isolate areas most at risk of climate change), nine tipping points (points of no return) have been identified by scientists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the time expected for the transitions. These are:

*Melting of Arctic sea-ice (approx 10 years)
*Decay of the Greenland ice sheet (more than 300 years)
*Collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet (more than 300 years)
*Collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (approx 100 years)
*Increase in the El Nino Southern Oscillation (approx 100 years)
*Collapse of the Indian summer monsoon (approx 1 year)
*Greening of the Sahara/Sahel and disruption of the West African monsoon (approx 10 years)
*Dieback of the Amazon rainforest (approx 50 years)
*Dieback of the Boreal Forest (approx 50 years)

Also see here for the graphic. I used to worry for my grandchildren. Now there is a fairly high probability that I will experience the more severe effects of climate change at first hand.

GDP that kills GDP (as well as people)

Image source: Economist.com

An article appearing in The Economist last week, Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air (reproduced below), provides a commentary on the largely impotent State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) in China. The Deputy Director, Pan Yue, is one of the most outspoken Chinese bureaucrats you are ever likely to come across, but his dire warnings go unheeded, largely because SEPA does not carry much weight alongside the big Ministries.

Despite its best efforts, SEPA has been unable to secure support from the government to publish a green GDP because it was "not internationally accepted". Interestingly, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) did publish one figure; namely, that environmental damage in 2004 cost 3.05% of that year's GDP. Maybe this kind of statistic will resonate more deeply with the Chinese government than the number of deaths each year as a result of pollution. According to Pan Yue, 70% of China's more than 2 million annual deaths from cancer are pollution-related.