A Weekend of Learning

It's Sunday afternoon... it's been a lazy weekend of much reading and a little documentary-watching... I watched "An Inconvenient Truth" last night. Yikes! Al Gore makes a very strong case that global warming is even more severe than I'd realized and that it's time to take action NOW! Definitely a piece that everyone should see -- he shows that carbon levels in the atmosphere are much, much higher than they have ever been in the last 650,000 years... that yes, there have been cycles of increasing then decreasing carbon levels... but that now we are so far off the charts that there are very real threats. He concludes but listing 8-10 major initiatives that would put carbon levels back to the 1970 level -- which would be a big step in the right direction. He also points out -- as I mentioned in a previous post -- a study of 928 scientific, peer-reviewed publications over the past 10 years found that NONE of them disputed that global warming is happening and is caused by human activity... which contrasts sharply with the public media in which 53% of stories present global warming as a controversial "theory." Gore makes a point that tobacco industries did the same thing years ago when trying to dispute medical claims that smoking causes cancer...

I also watched a 30-min episode of PBS's NOW that interviewed the director of "Who Killed the Electric Car?" -- I believe this documentary is coming (did?) out this summer... and should be quite interesting. Historically (1890-1910) my understanding is that electric cars were very competitive with cars powered by internal combustion engines -- but gas won out because electricity was relatively more expensive and harder to find, whereas gas was a waste product from oil production. Electric cars have really never had much market since, though there were a 1,000 or so in the late 1990's when California had legislation requiring that vehicles with zero emissions be brought in. Of course, US automakers and oil companies lobbied heavily - and won - the changing of those requirements. That's as much as I'll say, because I think the doc goes into detail -- and probably does so with much more accuracy then I'll be able to right now.

Robert Newman's "History of Oil" was also on my watch list... he's an intelligent British gent that spends an hour on a stage recapping the fights for oil over the last 100 years or so -- beginning with World War I and going on to explain the far-too-complicated-for-my-simple-mind idea that the US's interest in Iraq is as much about oil currency as the oil itself. Basically... the US dollar is the currency in which oil is traded. In 1970, when the US military was active in Vietnam, Nixon allowed the US gold reserves to be disconnected from the dollar itself -- so that for every dollar printed there did NOT have to be gold in reserve. The strength, then, of the US dollar became oil... other countries needed dollars in order to buy oil, which created global demand for dollars, which allowed the US's economic growth to continue. Somewhere between 2000 and 2002, Iraq began to trade oil in Euros... the new (1999) European currency used by a population comparable to that of the US (and with a probability for growth as more countries used the Euro in following years). This greatly threatened -- and continues to threaten -- the US dollar. And that's as far as I can go -- only wish that I would have studied a wee bit more economics in college.

Yikes. What else should I say... it's a beautiful day here -- upper 60's -- so a little cool, but a long-sleeve shirt is comfortable. I went for a short run this morning -- there's a great trail that goes along the water for several km... otherwise I've been reading, writing, and studying for this week's exam. I love being able to focus on little other than learning -- I find that as I'm reading assigned texts and articles, I'll go off on dozens of tangents... and for right now anyway I have time to just go off and look things up!

A couple of days ago I did some pretty extensive looking into land use worlwide and how it has changed over the last 300 years. (Did I write about that already??) I created a couple of charts -- one which shows a funnel as cropland has increased (3.1% of total land use in 1700, up to 13.8% in 1990) whereas the other side of the funnel is primarily two types of land: forest (down from 41.2% in 1700 to 35.6% in 1990) and savannah/grassland (down 24.6% in 1700 to 20.7% in 1990). That all came from Land area in database at http://www.sage.wisc.edu/ -- Center for Sustainability and Global Environment. This has all kinds of implications for us.

There's another interesting stat that I came across today -- it takes 10 calories of energy to produce/transport every 1 calorie of energy that an American eats. (Taken from / Read more at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html) This is fascinating, because it has changed so much over the last 100 years... I can't find a stat on it right now, but in the days before mass use of oil (for diesel in farm equipement and trucks, fertilizers, etc.) the ratio was at worst 1:1 -- and if logic works, should have been substanitally better than 1:1 or everyone would have been hungry... because before fossil fuel dominated food production, the way food added energy value was by converting energy gained from sunlight. Clearly sun still provides a significant source of energy for agriculture production... but if we're putting so much oil + sun's energy into getting just a little food out, AND we know that oil production is peaking someday sooner rather than later... seems like we might be in trouble somewhere within my lifetime. I'm thinking I might want to get back to the farm and make sure I know how to grow vegetables, add more stock fish to the pond, and plant some nut trees! Read more about what some US farmers are doing/thinking in this article: http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/41023/?comments=view&cID=202632&pID=200581

So. It's all pretty cool stuff -- but it's also VERY scary to think of the hole that we've gotten ourselves into on a global level. Hope y'all are taking heed and starting to do what you can to be part of the solution!