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| <back | home More Excerpts... We Americans need to get out of our SUVs and learn the harsh lesson of Katrina and Rita: We are all to blame by Jeremy Rifkin http://www.guardian.co.uk/hurricanes2005/story/0,16546,1576714,00.html Make no mistake about it. We Americans created monster storms Katrina and Rita. We’ve known about the potentially devastating impact of global warming for nearly a generation. Yet we turned up the throttle, as if to say: “We just don’t give a damn.” What did anyone expect? SUVs make up 52% of all the vehicles owned in America, each a death engine, spewing record amounts of CO2 into the earth’s atmosphere. How do we explain to our children that Americans represent less than 5% of the population of the world but devour more than a quarter of the fossil-fuel energy produced each year? How do we say to the grieving relatives of hurricane victims that we were too selfish to allow even a modest five-cent tax increase on a gallon of gas in order to encourage energy conservation? And when our neighbors in Europe and around the world ask why America was so unwilling to make global warming a priority by signing up to the Kyoto treaty on climate change, what do we tell them? In the coming weeks and months, millions of Americans will reach out to assist the victims of Hurricane Katrina with offerings of food, shelter and financial assistance. Why can’t we muster up the same passionate response when the Earth itself is crying out for help? Shame on the United States of America and the peoples of other countries — we’re not alone — who have put their personal, short-term whims, desires and gratifications ahead of the welfare of the planet. Of course, even Americans are now paying the price. We’re caught up between two storm fronts. On the one hand, global oil demand is, for the first time in history, eclipsing global oil supply. The price of a barrel of oil is hovering at $70 on world markets; gasoline and heating oil are rising as fast as the flood waters in the Gulf states once did, in part because the storm knocked out oil rigs across the Gulf of Mexico and crippled a large portion of the US refining facilities. We are entering the last few decades of the oil era, with ominous consequences for the future of a global economy utterly dependent upon it. While our petro-geologists are not sure when oil production will peak — the point when half the world’s recoverable oil is used up (and that’s the easily retrievable half) — it is clear to all but the few delusional souls in the oil industry that the beginning of the end is now in sight. Meanwhile, our biosphere is convulsing from the build-up of CO2, and the repercussions are trapping all of us in an unpredictable new period in world history. There will be thousands of memorial services in coming weeks to pay respects to the dead and the missing. There will be hand-wringing and recrimination: why did the dikes protecting New Orleans and the Gulfport region fail, why was the relief effort too little, too late. Still, what we are not likely to hear from George Bush or from business leaders — or for that matter from all of us still driving our SUVs — is a collective “We’re all to blame!” President Bush has called on the American people to rally to the task, to help restore the dikes and the causeways, to patch up the streets and rebuild the homes and communities that were lost. But to what end, if we leave the demon of global warming unchecked? The danger is that next time it will be a series of category-5 storms, or something even worse and unimaginable. If I could get the ear of George Bush, for just a moment, I would say: “Mr. President, if you had looked deeply into the eye of the storm, what you would have seen was the future of the planet we live on.” It’s time to tell the American people and the world the real lesson of Katrina: that we need to mobilize our talent, energy and resolve to wean ourselves from the oil spigot that’s threatening the future of every creature on earth. President Bush, spare us your homilies about American determination to “weather the storm and persevere.” Tell us the truth about why Katrina and Rita really happened. Ask us to consider a change of heart about our profligate, energy-consuming lifestyle. Call on us to conserve our existing fossil-fuel reserves and make sacrifices. Provide us with a game plan to move America to a new, sustainable energy future based on renewable sources of energy and hydrogen power. We’re waiting. m Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Hydrogen Economy: the Creation of the World Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth, jrifkin@foet.org. Mother Nature’s Message: Katrina and Rita, warning shots about our dependence on oil by Mitch Anderson Slightly more than halfway through the 2005 hurricane season, the U.S. National Hurricane Center is already running out of letters in the alphabet. Latest is Hurricane Rita, the third most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, with winds more than 280 km/h. This, before the gruesome accounting of Katrina’s deadly wrath is tallied. The obvious question is: What the heck is going on with our climate? Simply put, hurricanes are heat engines. When tropical ocean temperatures heat up due to climate change, hurricanes have more fuel and can become much more powerful. Ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are now the second highest on record. Professor Kerry Emmanuel of MIT reported in the journal Nature in August that warmer oceans worldwide are making hurricanes more powerful and longer lasting. He found the destructive power of hurricanes worldwide had increased by 70 per cent in the last 30 years. Another paper, in the journal Science, backing up Emmanuel’s findings, reported that the number of deadly Category 4 and 5 storms worldwide has almost doubled in the last 35 years. This is no act of God. The authors of both these papers attributed this disturbing trend at least in part to human-induced climate change. Emmanuel states that “future warming may lead to ... substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the 21st century,” also noting “an increasing coastal population.” The city of Biloxi lay directly in the wake of Katrina and was almost wiped off the map. In one neighborhood, virtually every building was gone, swept away by a 20-meter wall of water and winds in excess of 250 km/h. The emerging science raises an obvious point: Our addiction to fossil fuels is making future disasters like Katrina more likely. Yet President George Bush commented this summer with no sense of irony that he chose not to sign the Kyoto Protocol because it would have “wrecked the economy.” It is hard to imagine that the unprecedented destruction of hurricanes like Katrina is a bargain in the eyes of the president. This is already the most expensive disaster in U.S. history, with upwards of $35 billion in insured property losses. Estimates of total economic losses from Katrina are as high as $300 billion — as much as the combined U.S. military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last four years, with fully 400,000 lost jobs. If our best science is correct, we can expect more such expensive and deadly calamities in the future. While the U.S. administration continues to believe we cannot afford to deal seriously with climate change, the simple fact is we cannot afford not to. In the same way that initial Katrina relief efforts were woefully inadequate, so is Washington’s response to the looming crisis of climate change. The U.S. government spends less than $5 billion annually on alternative fuel research — some 2 percent of what Katrina might ultimately cost. Canada is arguably doing even worse. Of all of the G7 nations, it ranks dead last in reducing emissions. While Ottawa has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, they have, at present, increased by 20 percent. The bottom line is that there is no free lunch. Oil has been a remarkably lucrative source of cheap energy for a long time, but we are beginning to see some of the externalized costs. The bright side — if there is one — is that Mother Nature is telling us something. We have an opportunity to learn and act. Weaning ourselves from our oil addiction will have to happen sooner or later. Further delay will only cause the inevitable transition to be more expensive and more tragic. While no single storm can be attributed to climate change, Katrina and Rita have an important message for us. We ignore that message at our peril. Will 2005 be remembered as the year of the hurricane? Actually, that was last year ... Mitchell Anderson is a Vancouver freelance writer who specializes in environmental issues. <back | top^ |