It is a sign of the times that the craziest thing I have seen this week was not Daryl Hannah licking surplus fuel off the petrol cap (or whatever she would call it) of her 1960s-era Chevrolet El Camino.
“It has a toxicity level somewhere between table salt and maple syrup,” declared Madame Splash, as she slurped biodiesel sourced from recycled restaurant cooking oil.
Drinking the stuff that fuels your car is triumphantly sane compared with the thinking that is now driving the race to exploit oil and gas reserves in the Arctic.
The warming planet is causing ice to melt at the poles. This is resulting in more of the Arctic becoming ice-free. This is great news! Less ice means easier access to Arctic oil.
Let’s be quite clear about the thinking here. Global warming, caused in part by the burning of fossil fuels, is irreparably changing our planet.
But don’t worry. It also opens up opportunities — to extract and burn more fossil fuels.
If this is what passes for solutions, we’re sunk.
What it shows is that the two faces of our great global energy crises have become messily conflated — blended in the public mind — when their solutions are so different as to be almost opposite.
The bigger issue is global warming. Lives, wars, ecosystems, disease patterns, economic growth, migration patterns, the future of species — nothing is immune.
But it’s the price of oil, not climate change, that’s the No. 1 issue in the US and pretty much everywhere else. People are looking to their politicians to “do something.” The rallying cry is “More drilling!”
But the professionals know cheap oil is gone and won’t be coming back. And no amount of drilling will alter that fact.
Consider this. Oil companies have a strong interest in telling people that oil prices will come down. That way, people are not inclined to change their fundamental habits; they’ll just ride out the bumps until fuel is cheap again.
So when Big Oil is not making that claim, we should sober up and listen.
BP chief executive officer Tony Hayward says trillions of dollars of new investment will be needed to access the 1.24 trillion barrels of oil he believes still exist on the planet.
Even assuming that investment comes — and doubtless it will — that oil will run out in a little more than 40 years at current consumption. And it’s worth noting that in this current debate, Hayward counts among the optimists.
The “easy oil” from Alaska and the North Sea that eased the 1970s oil shock can’t help this time.
“There is hardly any additional access to easy oil,” Shell chief Jeroen van der Veer says. “Most of the new supplies will be difficult oil.”
Iraq, ironically, shows promise. There’s drilling that can be done off the beaches of California and Florida. And yes, lest we forget, Russia, the US, Canada, Norway and Denmark — the five states that have rights to claim in the Arctic — have all formally lodged papers with the UN body that will ultimately decide who gets to explore where.
None of these options is cheap, safe or politically easy. All simply delay the inevitable. And all contribute to climate change. Make no mistake, expensive oil is hard to take, for commuting workers, for middle class families, for businesses — but especially for the poor on the planet who feel the costs most keenly in the rising price of their food.
But as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man in charge of some of the most car-dependent people on Earth, puts it: “To look for new ways to feed our addiction is not the answer.”
Is he right?
My question is this: Would it be a good thing for oil prices to stay just where they are?
Let me know. Post a comment to “Sound Off” below my blog at www.cnn.com/goinggreen.
Hugh Riminton’s “Going Green” appears in the Taipei Times every day this week until Saturday. CNN’s special coverage of “Going Green: Search for Solutions” continues until Sunday.
Also See: UN environmental agency hails green energy ‘gold rush’
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS