9/11.
Two planes on the twin towers, another on the Pentagon, and one crashing in a field in Pennsylvania. I'm sure we all remember where we were when the footage started coming out, and we probably watched those impacts in New York many times.
I remember a journalist saying on TV: "The world will never be the same again". I though at the time that he was exaggerating, but no, he was right. The world has not been the same since.
Now, I am not a conspiracy theorist, I believe it's very hard to conceal big things that involve lots of people for a long time (remember a secret is something you only share with one person at the time), and in this case, I am unconvinced, either way. I can't believe that a government would do this and get away with it, and at the same time I have reservations about the Pentagon plane, and am sort of not sure about the whole thing. Anyway, that's not really the point.
It happened, killed hundreds, and indeed the world has not been the same since.
There are few things that make me wonder however about the post - 9/11 era.
The first one is that I find it very coincidental that the moment the Berlin wall came down, we found ourselves a new enemy. Bloody commies didn't make it and raised the white flag, and bingo! Muslim fanatics pop up everywhere. There was no such thing prior to the late 90's, was there? Not in that structured, focused and dangerous way anyway (Ok, the PLO blew up a few planes, as did Gaddafi, but is wasn't really muslim fundamentalism, was it? It was local politics using violence to advertise their case as I recall). Mostly, anyway.
All of a sudden we have "Al Qaeda", a very sophisticated, well financed, global organization with a clear objective to impose a global caliphate, at least in the Middle East, but preferably world-wide.
Right.
What were these buggers doing when the wall was still up? And how come they only pop up their ugly heads after most of the wall was sold as souvenirs?
Secondly, after the Afghanistan invasion and the partial and temporary demise of the Taliban (nasty people, these, unless you like your women to be seriously obedient, don't drink, sing, dance or generally enjoy anything but beheading folks.....armed to the teeth by the Western world, I might add), some Texan schmock decides that Saddam is really a very bad guy, protects muslim fundamentalists (he never did, he quartered them), has weapons of mass destruction (anybody knows a weapon of no destruction? Oh, and he didn't by the way, which is what the UN said all along), and really, my dear, he is just a bad person, isn't he?
Now, North Korea has bad stuff - proven and tested. It has a very friendly little man as leader, right in the footsteps of his father and grand-father. OK, no muslims there, but still. No, he's ok, let's ship some fertilizers and stuff so these poor people don't starve.He's just a communist, they are not threatening are they?
Want a list of countries led by "bad" people (in the opinion of the Western world) and enjoy membership at the UNHCR, the commission for refugees, OHCHR, the commission for human rights, or other perfectly decent organizations?
Anyway, so Irak is invaded, the US makes a mess of it, and eventually leaves.
Meanwhile the "War on Terror" is launched. Homeland security is set up, new powers are granted to the "authorities" to "protect" the people (American people mostly that is, the others are just potential terrorists). Many countries follow suite. Too good an occasion to tighten the noose and get a grip on all those free thinkers that bother the smooth running of government.
Massive data basis' are set up, new detention powers granted, Guantanamo becomes the shame of the Western World, and... and we, the poor citizen of this world, we... get our mugs shot, fingers printed, passports changed to biometric, and then biometric mkII, our mails are collected and sometimes read, our phone conversations are listened to (ask Angela Merkel), and if you buy a rucksack AND a bottle of gas on the same day at the same shop, you risk the police raiding your house at dawn...
On a boat, we risk "hard boarding", i.e. armed people getting aboard never mind that your wife is naked in the shower (it happened to a catamaran in Trinidad not very long ago). We risk getting boarded by US coast guards in international waters, against all Maritime laws (also happened to some friends on a yacht not too far from Cuba (another dangerous place, that, hence the "embargo" without which, no doubt Cuba would invade the US).
We are all very thankful of all the attention. Nice change...
I obviously take exception to all of this. If it did make any sense at all, I may actually go along with it (reluctantly)(not really)(no. I probably won't go along with this at any time). But anyway, the thing is it DOESN'T make sense..
At all.
Imagine you are Al Qaeda. You are a bunch of very smart, well financed fanatics, dedicated to destroy this evil Western society and set up the law of Allah.
Just imagine.
Would you go only for airplanes and airports? And the odd embassy?
Would you attack only the best defended parts of Western society?
You: sophisticated, smart and well financed?
Would you?
I know there were attacks on the London tube and a couple of buses, as well as the Madrid railway station*. But frankly, how well are bus stops, railway stations and the tube defended? The answer is NOT AT ALL. Yet for some reason the incidence of attacks on these targets is extremely rare.
Now imagine you are really smart, well financed, etc... Wouldn't you go for other things than just planes? Bridges, tunnels, shopping malls, undergrounds everywhere, whatever makes a big bang with little risk? Disrupting the western world in a really big way (can't go to work, searched before shopping, infrastructure blown up left right and center). Boy that would mess up our system...
I took the TGV (French rocket train) from Paris to Brussels a few years ago. No controls upon entering the railway station or boarding the train in Paris (I think they carry about 1500 people at close to 400 km/h). In Brussels, I was taking a plane to Heathrow. I showed my passport about 6 times before boarding the plane, went through multiple "security" checks - by the way, those "security" people are obviously the cream of humanity - and they love to ask sexy girls to take off their boots, particularly if they have a short skirt and don't you dare challenging them... but that's beside the point (Is it?) - and guess what: I had to go through security again upon LANDING in London!
How come I am not checked going to Brussels, or taking the subway in Brussels or Paris, or anywhere, but I'm controlled so many times getting on a plane, or out of a plane for that matter? Will I blow up Heathrow, when I could have blown up the plane getting there? I probably would blow up the queue in Brussels, before the security check (there were hundreds of people waiting to be checked), as I mentioned to one of the security guys there (that was stupid, I was almost pulled out of the line for questioning, and probably would today)
Making a bomb is easy. Concealing it is easy. Sticking it in a shopping mall is easy.
Yet these Al Qaeda imbeciles use some liquid stuff (hence the 100 ml allowed on the plane) or shoes sole explosives (hence taking off your shoes) to down planes, after going through various types of controls.
Man they are stupid! WHY PLANES?
Need I go on ? (and please don't tell me there are no attacks on the targets suggested above because our security apparatus is so efficient. Please! Also, please don't tell me it's now the John Doe nut head that's attacking planes in the name of "Al Qaeda". If so, he/she is equally idiotic).
Conclusion, either:
1) Al Qaeda is really a bunch of pteromerhanophobics (look it up). They are afraid of planes, and just outright hate them. It's possible, and I could live with that, just like I can live with all sorts of phobic people. Many civil servants are one such group, they hate civilians who bother them while they are having their coffee (Know the joke about the civil service in Holland, where it is prohibited to look out of the window in the morning? Why? Because they would have nothing to do in the afternoon...). Ok I'm unfair. So are they most of the time. Anyway, who am I to complain, they are the "authority" (I have a phobia about authority).
2) Al Qaeda is seriously stupid, in which case we are quite safe. They never thought of anything else but planes. So it should be easy to keep them in check. But then, why the "security" apparatus (snooping etc...)?
3) They don't exist (at least not as described, or at least not any more)? Convince me they do exist, please, I really need the reassurance. Until anyone does, I will continue to think this is just a story made up to keep us within the confines of Georges Orwell's 1984 logic (invent an enemy, focus people's energy on fighting that enemy).
Meanwhile our civil liberties are going, going, gone. This IS IMPORTANT. It's impossible to regain civil liberties except via revolutions, and these, folks, are painful, bloody, and rare.
But this is all for our own good, right? Meanwhile we don't bother too much with drug money, how it's used (we are talking billions here, enough to finance a US presidential campaign every year or buy a few countries every month), about the lack of transparency in politics generally, about what government debt really means, about how good/bad our leaders are, about how to keep population growth in check (remember my earlier blog?), or any other such topic that really matters.
We are officially safe.
In the middle ages, there was a guy going round the walled city at night, shouting: "All is quiet, sleep tight". This was the precursor of Homeland security. W improved it. Obama changed nothing. Why?
NSA, thank you for listening. You are my best public.
Next blog: Sharks and whales and dolphins and lionfish. Dangerous vs. cute species, and why Spielberg is a dangerous fellow, and why we are wasting energy on the wrong topics.
Comments, as usual, are most welcome.
* I am not talking about bombs going off in many parts of the world on a regular basis. Doesn't impact the West, really, does it?
Sleep tight! Cheers.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Monday, May 5, 2014
Hearing impaired, surface technicians, blacks and other misnomers
Do you sometimes get fed up with the oppressive political correctness in our world?
Nobody is deaf any more, but hearing impaired. Surface technicians are the sweepers of old. Blacks are African or African Americans, or anything but black (As I recall, black is a color, not an insult. Maybe we will eventually have a traumatized eye and an African coffee? What if it comes from Colombia: African Colombian coffee? That's if Colombia becomes too synonymous with drugs, then it will be African coffee from South America, or maybe "Sleep Prone Remedy from Somewhere"? ).
Shell shock is no more. Nobody is handicapped or old or retarded. Everything is dandy, and as long as the appropriate term puts a veneer on things, all is good. Another good one is "authorities". Since when is Public Service an "Authority"? They are supposed to SERVE, not order around, but then maybe it's me who misunderstood?
There is a great book that deals with this, along with many other issues of how we went from the age of enlightenment to total horseshit: Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul (the full title is Volataire's Bastard: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West). Basically the book analyses the shift from reason to system, from free thinking to the straightjacket of organization, and the corresponding shift in language from clarity to "lingo".
Lingo is a way to appear knowledgeable. It's a code, used by specialists to communicate amongst each other and keep the rabble out of the conversation. Every profession has its lingo, codes, specific terminology, which could very well be expressed in layman's terms, but sounds so much better when interlaced with words that make the whole topic totally unintelligible.
This applies to professional communication, political rhetoric, and certainly to mankind's issues. Why can't I be critical of Israel without being labelled an anti-Semitic bastard? Why is Black a term to be used only as a primary color? Why is a senior or "third age" person not old? When one starts hiding facts behind cosmetics, and one is not allowed to address issues as they are without becoming the target of hundreds of pressure groups that will take exception to anything that is not smack on their agenda, human debate becomes sterile and progress becomes impossible. That's if I don't end up outright in jail...
I think one consequence of this very insidious process is that we are regressing back to the age prior to the enlightenment. These were times when dogma was prevailing over reason (religious dogma, royal autocracy, etc...). Now it's another form of dogma: the systemic one, where once the book is written, one has to stick to the book, never mind that it makes no sense any more, or never did.
In our travels, we have been confronted to rules and regulations in various countries that clearly make no sense, even to those who are supposed to implement them. But it's in the book, so it has to be done. Examples?
8 copies of every passport page (even the blank ones) to enter India by boat, plus 8 copies of the detailed inventory of how many cans of peas and beans and tomatoes we have on board, plus 8 copies of the list of navigation equipment - including serial numbers... That's about 4 inches high worth of paper, which gets filed in huge piles with nobody ever looking at it.
Or the story of this Thai girl trying to fly home to Bangkok from Grenada, via Trinidad and the USA, being held at Miami airport for 4 hours (when her confirmed onward flight to Bangkok was only 2 hours after her arrival), and then sent back to Trinidad because she had no "transit visa". Upon arrival in Trinidad, she applies for a transit visa, pays 120$, waits for a week (in a shitty hotel next to the airport - she speaks hardly English and has very little money), and her visa application gets rejected because she entered the country "illegally" when she first tried to get home. She ends up flying via Bogota and god knows where, and misses the cruise ship she was due to work on upon arrival in Bangkok. Wouldn't it have been easier to let her board her scheduled flight, she'd been out of the US two hours earlier...
Want more? Mandela's funeral was a grand event, as he deserved (although let's please remember he WAS a "terrorist" at one point)*, attended by all the great leaders of our world, most of whom have a serious problem with any dissidence on their own turf. Obama was standing tall but meanwhile Julian Assange is in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, basically a prisoner, and Edward Snowden is a host of the great Russian democracy. Will they be honored at some stage when it becomes clear that there is more than one way to be a good citizen? And by the way, what about what the ANC is doing to South Africa? How come the whole world went up in arms against Apartheid but remains perfectly still when it comes to the massive racism many African and Caribbean countries show towards the white (is that a Caucasian?), South Africa being a prime example...
My point is that seemingly minor lingual evolutions can be extremely dangerous. When one cannot call a cat a cat any more (we still can, I think, but I'm sure it will be "domestic feline" soon) one opens the way to a level of hypocrisy that leads to a loss of all we have gained over the 200 or so years when Western mankind liberated itself of some of the chains of dogma.
Society is moving towards a new form of dogma: the politically correct, the veiling of the truth in lingo and the drowning of liberties in loud assertions of concern for security. All these become a "System", where rational thinking takes second place to the "Rule", however stupid, irrelevant or counter-productive.
Reminds me of this joke where a female journalist interviews Ray Charles and tells him: "Oh Mr Charles, you are such a brilliant man, I admire your work so much, what a pity you are blind". And he answers: "It's OK my dear, it could be worse, I could be black"
Next blog: Security, Al Qaeda, airports and other nonsense. Hi NSA guys. You busy today?
* The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter depends on who wins in the end, not on the means used to achieve victory. Terrorists of the past include American colonists, French freedom fighters, PLO, ANC amongst others. At the same time Stalin's, Mao's or Genghis Khan's rule never were that bad, were they? How about water boarding or NSA snooping?
Nobody is deaf any more, but hearing impaired. Surface technicians are the sweepers of old. Blacks are African or African Americans, or anything but black (As I recall, black is a color, not an insult. Maybe we will eventually have a traumatized eye and an African coffee? What if it comes from Colombia: African Colombian coffee? That's if Colombia becomes too synonymous with drugs, then it will be African coffee from South America, or maybe "Sleep Prone Remedy from Somewhere"? ).
Shell shock is no more. Nobody is handicapped or old or retarded. Everything is dandy, and as long as the appropriate term puts a veneer on things, all is good. Another good one is "authorities". Since when is Public Service an "Authority"? They are supposed to SERVE, not order around, but then maybe it's me who misunderstood?
There is a great book that deals with this, along with many other issues of how we went from the age of enlightenment to total horseshit: Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul (the full title is Volataire's Bastard: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West). Basically the book analyses the shift from reason to system, from free thinking to the straightjacket of organization, and the corresponding shift in language from clarity to "lingo".
Lingo is a way to appear knowledgeable. It's a code, used by specialists to communicate amongst each other and keep the rabble out of the conversation. Every profession has its lingo, codes, specific terminology, which could very well be expressed in layman's terms, but sounds so much better when interlaced with words that make the whole topic totally unintelligible.
This applies to professional communication, political rhetoric, and certainly to mankind's issues. Why can't I be critical of Israel without being labelled an anti-Semitic bastard? Why is Black a term to be used only as a primary color? Why is a senior or "third age" person not old? When one starts hiding facts behind cosmetics, and one is not allowed to address issues as they are without becoming the target of hundreds of pressure groups that will take exception to anything that is not smack on their agenda, human debate becomes sterile and progress becomes impossible. That's if I don't end up outright in jail...
I think one consequence of this very insidious process is that we are regressing back to the age prior to the enlightenment. These were times when dogma was prevailing over reason (religious dogma, royal autocracy, etc...). Now it's another form of dogma: the systemic one, where once the book is written, one has to stick to the book, never mind that it makes no sense any more, or never did.
In our travels, we have been confronted to rules and regulations in various countries that clearly make no sense, even to those who are supposed to implement them. But it's in the book, so it has to be done. Examples?
8 copies of every passport page (even the blank ones) to enter India by boat, plus 8 copies of the detailed inventory of how many cans of peas and beans and tomatoes we have on board, plus 8 copies of the list of navigation equipment - including serial numbers... That's about 4 inches high worth of paper, which gets filed in huge piles with nobody ever looking at it.
Or the story of this Thai girl trying to fly home to Bangkok from Grenada, via Trinidad and the USA, being held at Miami airport for 4 hours (when her confirmed onward flight to Bangkok was only 2 hours after her arrival), and then sent back to Trinidad because she had no "transit visa". Upon arrival in Trinidad, she applies for a transit visa, pays 120$, waits for a week (in a shitty hotel next to the airport - she speaks hardly English and has very little money), and her visa application gets rejected because she entered the country "illegally" when she first tried to get home. She ends up flying via Bogota and god knows where, and misses the cruise ship she was due to work on upon arrival in Bangkok. Wouldn't it have been easier to let her board her scheduled flight, she'd been out of the US two hours earlier...
Want more? Mandela's funeral was a grand event, as he deserved (although let's please remember he WAS a "terrorist" at one point)*, attended by all the great leaders of our world, most of whom have a serious problem with any dissidence on their own turf. Obama was standing tall but meanwhile Julian Assange is in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, basically a prisoner, and Edward Snowden is a host of the great Russian democracy. Will they be honored at some stage when it becomes clear that there is more than one way to be a good citizen? And by the way, what about what the ANC is doing to South Africa? How come the whole world went up in arms against Apartheid but remains perfectly still when it comes to the massive racism many African and Caribbean countries show towards the white (is that a Caucasian?), South Africa being a prime example...
My point is that seemingly minor lingual evolutions can be extremely dangerous. When one cannot call a cat a cat any more (we still can, I think, but I'm sure it will be "domestic feline" soon) one opens the way to a level of hypocrisy that leads to a loss of all we have gained over the 200 or so years when Western mankind liberated itself of some of the chains of dogma.
Society is moving towards a new form of dogma: the politically correct, the veiling of the truth in lingo and the drowning of liberties in loud assertions of concern for security. All these become a "System", where rational thinking takes second place to the "Rule", however stupid, irrelevant or counter-productive.
Reminds me of this joke where a female journalist interviews Ray Charles and tells him: "Oh Mr Charles, you are such a brilliant man, I admire your work so much, what a pity you are blind". And he answers: "It's OK my dear, it could be worse, I could be black"
Next blog: Security, Al Qaeda, airports and other nonsense. Hi NSA guys. You busy today?
* The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter depends on who wins in the end, not on the means used to achieve victory. Terrorists of the past include American colonists, French freedom fighters, PLO, ANC amongst others. At the same time Stalin's, Mao's or Genghis Khan's rule never were that bad, were they? How about water boarding or NSA snooping?
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Hey, still alive here in Panama.
I went through the canal yesterday with some friends on a class 40 race boat! Great experience, with great people, and they somehow tickled me about this blog, dormant for a few months (I was busy working on the boat, my usual excuse).
There are still lots of topics I'd like to talk about, and after my last blog (I had one friend saying; "Stop this Olivier, believe in life and mankind's ability to sort things out"), I suppose it wouldn't hurt to go on a different tack and just focus on a given topic that either pisses me off or makes me wonder.
(It doesn't mean I am more optimistics about the issues related to population growth...)
By the way, the crew on this class 40 are man (professional racer with heaps of experience), wife (former journalist who went to Africa for years to report on slums and other hard topics), and 2 great kids aged 7 and 3.
They built their boat in a very interesting "social" context (see their website), forgo income to help worthy causes ("no child labor" is one), and have started a round the world trip with very little money on a very demanding boat (a race boat has none of the luxuries most circumnavigators consider "normal"). They made me think about some of the stress I am taking on to fix stuff on my boat - stuff they don't have and never will have. They also made me think about the difference between ranting and raving and just doing, with the humility of not trying to change the world, but just living with strong convictions and an open heart.
Thanks Ben and Anne Mai (and Isis and Miles) for the breath of fresh and clean air! (by the way, their website, somewhat inactive lately is: www.nacira-40.com I highly recommend it, and if you feel like going on a cruise with a REAL racer on a real racing boat, this would be the one to chose! You will learn a shitload, will enjoy the conversation and laugh your balls off at some of the stories and the humour...
So, anyway, my future blogs will be longer ( I re-read my past ones, and even with my attempts at staying short but dense, I feel the points are not getting across properly), more focused, and will come more from the amazing encounters I make on this 'round the world trip.
I will talk about Miguel, the 70+ year old Spaniard who lost his second boat in Port Elisabeth, South Africa (he lost his first one in Cuba), who has no money, except what he makes from selling puppets - and he's done that for 25 years! - and did his sea trials on the newly acquired beat up boat from South Africa to Brazil, all without papers, convincing the "official" in Brazil that the storm blew all his papers away...
I will talk about this Frenchman who was accused of murder in St Lucia, and is probably still in jail, although there is very good evidence that he never killed the guy.
Or the japanese single hander who managed to convince his wife, by washing up dishes for years, that she should let him go on a world cruise for 2 years (but NO MORE).
Hunting in South Africa. Yeah, HUNTING IN SOUTH AFRICA. Another topic that needs clarifying, so the usual politicaly correct bullshit gets sorted. I did hunt in South Africa. It changed my mind. I was educated, and I loved it.
Ariane rocket launch in French Guyana. Another great experience, and another source of thoughts...
And then there's T & T (I will not give their full name), a Dutch-American couple, who made us laugh and worry for the better part of a year with their antiques, running aground, breaking stuff, sailing to a different island from the planned one, without realizing... They are worth a book on their own.
Anyway, future blogs will change for theoretical ravings to experience learnt, and some thoughts deriving from that.
Another major change in this blog. Will I get it right this time?
Comments, as usual, are welcome.
I went through the canal yesterday with some friends on a class 40 race boat! Great experience, with great people, and they somehow tickled me about this blog, dormant for a few months (I was busy working on the boat, my usual excuse).
There are still lots of topics I'd like to talk about, and after my last blog (I had one friend saying; "Stop this Olivier, believe in life and mankind's ability to sort things out"), I suppose it wouldn't hurt to go on a different tack and just focus on a given topic that either pisses me off or makes me wonder.
(It doesn't mean I am more optimistics about the issues related to population growth...)
By the way, the crew on this class 40 are man (professional racer with heaps of experience), wife (former journalist who went to Africa for years to report on slums and other hard topics), and 2 great kids aged 7 and 3.
They built their boat in a very interesting "social" context (see their website), forgo income to help worthy causes ("no child labor" is one), and have started a round the world trip with very little money on a very demanding boat (a race boat has none of the luxuries most circumnavigators consider "normal"). They made me think about some of the stress I am taking on to fix stuff on my boat - stuff they don't have and never will have. They also made me think about the difference between ranting and raving and just doing, with the humility of not trying to change the world, but just living with strong convictions and an open heart.
Thanks Ben and Anne Mai (and Isis and Miles) for the breath of fresh and clean air! (by the way, their website, somewhat inactive lately is: www.nacira-40.com I highly recommend it, and if you feel like going on a cruise with a REAL racer on a real racing boat, this would be the one to chose! You will learn a shitload, will enjoy the conversation and laugh your balls off at some of the stories and the humour...
So, anyway, my future blogs will be longer ( I re-read my past ones, and even with my attempts at staying short but dense, I feel the points are not getting across properly), more focused, and will come more from the amazing encounters I make on this 'round the world trip.
I will talk about Miguel, the 70+ year old Spaniard who lost his second boat in Port Elisabeth, South Africa (he lost his first one in Cuba), who has no money, except what he makes from selling puppets - and he's done that for 25 years! - and did his sea trials on the newly acquired beat up boat from South Africa to Brazil, all without papers, convincing the "official" in Brazil that the storm blew all his papers away...
I will talk about this Frenchman who was accused of murder in St Lucia, and is probably still in jail, although there is very good evidence that he never killed the guy.
Or the japanese single hander who managed to convince his wife, by washing up dishes for years, that she should let him go on a world cruise for 2 years (but NO MORE).
Hunting in South Africa. Yeah, HUNTING IN SOUTH AFRICA. Another topic that needs clarifying, so the usual politicaly correct bullshit gets sorted. I did hunt in South Africa. It changed my mind. I was educated, and I loved it.
Ariane rocket launch in French Guyana. Another great experience, and another source of thoughts...
And then there's T & T (I will not give their full name), a Dutch-American couple, who made us laugh and worry for the better part of a year with their antiques, running aground, breaking stuff, sailing to a different island from the planned one, without realizing... They are worth a book on their own.
Anyway, future blogs will change for theoretical ravings to experience learnt, and some thoughts deriving from that.
Another major change in this blog. Will I get it right this time?
Comments, as usual, are welcome.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Hello, fellow lemmings!
Been wondering what all this raving and
ranting has been about?
Just an aging unemployed guy's way of
spending his time? Yes, indeed! But I am hoping that in the process
I might tickle your mind.
The media, politicians, our political
system, the environment, industrial risk. All matters of great
conversation around your 5 o'clock sun downer. Maybe 4 o'clock (I’m
still talking pm, so it's not too bad yet).
Anyway, surprise, surprise! There is
actually a system in this raving. Not that it's going to make any
difference to the way the world turns or humanity is screwing it up.
But somehow, I feel everything I read or hear in conversations on and
off the boat is quite off the mark, and find it very frustrating.
I want to talk about population growth.
Let's look at all the issues previously
touched on (I dare not say addressed, that would be presumptuous):
all of them have a common cause.
And that is population growth.
Allow me some statistics: Humanity
reached it's first billion in or about 1800. It took from the
beginning of times to the beginning of the 19th century to
reach 1 billion bodies (not sure about how many souls that is).
The second billion was reached around
1930, or just over 100 years later. Quite an acceleration, no? The
third billion was in 1960, or so. I was part of that third billion.
Darn! Vivien made up part of the 4th billion...
At the last estimate, we are about 7.1
billions now. That's 5 billion more in about 80 years, or about 600
million every 10 years. Estimates vary about future growth, with the
developed world not growing much any more (aside from migrations, but
let's remember the developed world is less than 1 billion people
today, depending on the definition), and the “third world”
continuing on it's trajectory. Some forecasts predict about 80
million more people every year for the foreseeable future, some see
it declining to 50 million per year (lots of models are out there,
one can argue with them, but for me the lower forecasts are
unrealistic) . Factors that impact this are:
- reduced infant mortality in most countries
- increased life expectancy in most countries
- Better health care pretty much everywhere
- reduction in birth rates in developed countries
- development rate of “second” world countries that slowly reach “developed” status
This exponential growth in population
has a number of consequences. All bad.
- Demand for food is increasing massively. Imagine the difference between feeding 10 guests, and feeding 70? Humanity had to find ways to increase food production, not by a factor of 7 in less than 200 years, but probably by a factor of 10, given improvements in quantity and quality of food between the mid 1800's and today. This means more land, more fertilizers, more pesticides, more GMO, more irrigation, more aquifer tapping... All bad.
- Demand for energy has gone up a factor of 200 in the same time frame. We've gone from the beginning of steam engines 200 years ago to a life style that demands enormous quantities of energy, both in industry and in households (remember the manual drill anyone? How about oil lamps?). Transportation requirements have gone through the roof, both for goods and for people (hello, holiday makers! Ibiza or Thailand this year?). Goods need to be transported increasingly far to bring food and energy from the production places to the consumption places. Industry needs a lot of power to produce efficiently what we all consume. Households use power like there's no tomorrow, from electric blenders, to air conditioning, multiple TV's and computers to huge refrigerators. And I'm not mentioning cars, they didn't exist 200 years ago... Imagine every Chinese with a car?
- Land usage has increased for all the uses this additional population has: countryside has yielded to suburbs to towns, road systems have exploded, industrial farming has expanded massively, rain forests have been cut down (and continue to be destroyed), industry has taken over former low yield farming land, coastlines have been transformed from beaches and cliffs to ports, river systems have been dammed, with entire valleys flooded. All bad.
- Political systems have gone from a “human” dimension to a professional system where the fundamentals of the original democratic idea are long gone. How many balloons are required to become president of the USA? How much input does one really have with ONE vote amongst 30, 50, 100, 300 million? The entire institution has become a joke. Bad, wouldn't you agree?
- Society is losing it's values. The family network (except in much of Asia, and maybe in some parts of Africa) is de-laminating. One parent families, bad education, loss of “human” values like honesty, work, charity, compassion, etc, are being diluted by materialism, short term gain and egocentricity. Not good surely.
- The social structure is affected: media doesn't play it's role of INFORMING. It sells advertising. It does not educate, it misinforms and becomes a propaganda tool. Quality education is available only to the few, and social networks benefit largely the parasites. Crime becomes a statistic, real or perceived insecurity is a problem, governments use technology to track their citizen against all the advances in civil liberties gained in the past 300 years (NSA, are you listening?). Societies are becoming ruled by systems, and civil servants expect you to serve them...
I could go on. But I think we all
perceive this, without really wanting to think about it. The bottom
line is more people means more of all of the above. Logically. It's
not a choice. That's just the way it is.
For me it's dramatic. I'm glad I'll be
dead in 50 years (more likely 30, but who knows, I like being a pain
in the backside...).
Communist China was the only country
EVER to try and address the issue. They imposed a one child policy.
Brutally at times (forced abortions and severe financial penalties in
some cases). It worked, insofar as the population growth has all but
stopped. Several side effects have come up however: one is the age
pyramid has gone upside down (too many old people, not enough young),
the other is the imbalance between genders, every family wanting a
boy, which leads to a male/female ratio of (depending on the source
of data) 1.15 to 1.25 to 1 (the biological balance is 1.03 males to
1 female, I wonder why?). Female fetus abortion and infanticide mean
that some 55 million male babies will not have a mate in China in 20
years.
No other country has ever tried this,
and by the way, China was criticized left, right and bloody center
for their “barbaric” ways in doing what they did (forced
abortion????). Nobody else tried, and one has to wonder if there is a
“good” way to do this
Now, some 50 years after starting the
process, China is relaxing the rules, partly because they found that
one cannot do this so quickly. It takes time to start a population
control policy. One generation is way too short (a generation is 30
years, folks).
So. If humanity wants to start
controlling it's population growth effectively, it will take, say, 2
or 3 generations before it has an impact. That's 60 to 90 years.
At a growth rate of 600, or even 500 or
400 million every 10 years, this means on the low end of the scale
2.5 to 3.6 billion more people BEFORE we start having an impact (it
means 3.5 to 5.5 billion more on the high end...). So we'll be 10 to
14 billion by then... Does this make the need for action urgent? I
think it does, big time.
Yet, who talks about it? Who is
instrumental in making a change effective?
NOBODY!
NGO's fight against pesticides and
GMO's and oil platform and nuclear energy, and advocate biodiversity
and the fight against infant mortality or malaria etc, all worthy
causes, but they don't attack the root cause, they attack the
symptoms ... Hardly anyone talks about the real root cause. It's not
sexy, doesn't sell (who will buy media not selling royalty and bad
news, but talking about not having children?), or is not politically
correct (forced abortion.... WHAT?). Who promotes population control
or even worse population reduction, and why would they do that? Can
Greenpeace raise money on this topic???
Churches promote zero family planning
(they promote abstinence, bloody criminals, and it goes beyond
population growth: AIDS actually works in this process, but at what
cost?). Governments all over the planet (with very few exceptions)
promote birth rates via children benefits, companies need more
customers, i.e. population growth, unions want more members, nobody
has an interest in stabilizing population, and even less in reducing
it. Every organized part of our society has a vested interest in the
continued growth of population. Ever heard of lemmings?
And by the way, how would we even start
to achieve a move towards population control? Education takes 2
or 3 generations. How would the Catholic church react? Or the Muslim
world? How would companies respond to a new economic model based on
NO growth? Is it at all possible? Is mankind able to do this
revolution?
I don't see it happening. Frankly, I
think we are doomed. The race for growth is on. Countries lagging
behind will continue to try and catch up and we can't blame them for
it. Nobody is interested in fixing the problem, least of all our
governments.
See you in 20 years, with another 1.5
billion people, less nature, more bad stuff in the rivers and
everywhere, more noise from anti-this or anti-that organizations,
none of which make any difference to the fundamental issue.
Sorry, I'm extremely pessimistic about
the outcome for mankind.
No worries about the planet. It will
fix itself once we're gone. Good luck to the next species!
Does this blog help? Probably not much,
but then the more of us realize that population control IS THE REAL
AND ONLY problem, the more of a chance we have to get something done
about it. Vote for anyone who wants to address the issue! Otherwise
nature will fix us, probably via a really good virus that will wipe
most of us out (wars don't kill enough people – the 2nd
world war hardly killed 40 million people, just 1 year's worth of
growth)
Comments welcome. Help me out of this
gloom!
Greetings from Roatan, Honduras. Nice
place.
Friday, December 6, 2013
The environment, industrial risk and shipping spills.
The environment, part 3.
Exxon Valdiz, Amoco Cadiz, Erika, tankers on the rocks, oil platforms blowing up, tens of thousands of gallons of oil, diesel, gasoline in the sea. Seagull stuck in muck, otters dying, turtles asphyxiated, oyster banks ruined, beaches a disgrace, fishing industries bankrupted. Terrible stuff!
Fukushima explosion and long term disastrous consequences - following Chernobyl..., refinery explosions, paper mill discharges into the rivers, airplane crashes, chemical spills, all with enormous environmental impact. Horrendous!
Every time, commissions analyzing, judges ruling, fines, monetary compensations, clean-up costs, and lots of finger pointing, someone has to be responsible, right?
Quite right, BUT:
Have you ever had an accident at home? Burning oil on a hand perhaps, or an electric shock, maybe? Falling from a ladder anyone? How about car accidents, a slight trace of ice in the winter, or a moment of inattention, a flower pot falling from the balcony, or a roller skate left unattended? Banana peels ring a bell?
These are accidents we could avoid, and given that it concerns us directly, we do make a great deal of efforts to avoid them. Yet they happen.
All the time.
Industry spends an extraordinary amount of time, effort and MONEY to avoid accidents. Accidents are bad in many respects: they cost a lot of money and downtime (more money), they hurt people, including staff members, they damage reputations, sometimes irretrievably. Companies have mind boggling procedures to avoid accidents, traning procedures, safety procedures, ISO standards, double redundant safety systems, and so on. As an example, I know one oil company that has the following before changing a light bulb (I am not kidding, guess who it is?):
1) Describe the problem in detail, check the description by another person, do an impact analysis of the problem. Check if any regulatory approval is required before any intervention.
2) Describe in detail the intervention procedure, vet it by another person, approve it at a higher level.
3) Describe all the "lock-up" requirement (in this case, turn off the power, lock the power switch by another persone, check the lock-up by yet another person). List and have approved at a higher level all personal safety equipment needed.
4) Prepare the intervention, e.g. build the scaffolding, check the scaffolding by another person, approve the scaffolding as built by yet another one.
5) Re-check all the above before the person starts climbing the scaffolding. Have a stand-by assistant nearby to help if needed, who also verifies that the safety equipment is properly worn.
6) Proceed with the change of the bulb. Test that the intervention has been done properly by another person.
7) Dismantle everything and prepare for restart.
8) Before restart, check again that all is ready, cleared and cleaned.
9) Restart
10) Issue an intervention report describing all the above.
This is for a light bulb (company is BP, would you believe it?)... Imagine for a major refinery refit?
Shipping companies have incredible constraints placed on them (from the qualification of the skipper and crew to the age and regular vetting of the ship, loading procedures, watch systems, redundant safety systems, etc...
Yet, accidents happen. Amazing no?
Oil tankers move about 2,000,000,000 metric tons of oil per year. This makes about 5.5 million tons per DAY. I couldn't find the average size of an oil tanker (they have increased in size over the years to reduce freight cost), but certainly to move 5 million tons EVERY day, means a very large number of tankers at sea at all times, particularly if one thinks that much of it comes from the Middle East or West Africa and has to travel across large oceans to reach Europe, Japan or the USA.
The average age of a tanker is 10 years. One third of them is 4 years old only. Big ones are newer, small coastal carriers are older.
All oil companies have a vetting system, basically disallowing the use of tankers more than 10 years old, requiring double hulls, recent inspections, and all sorts of constraints on the shipping company.
Accidents happen. Shit happens. It happens at home, on the road, and at sea. It happens in plants despite all the safety procedures., and it will continue to happen WHATEVER we do.
Considering the number of man hours worked, and the volumes produced and shipped, the accident rate in industry is extremely small, and a very small fraction of the accident rate in private homes or on the road. In other words, industry is about as safe as it can be, and the usual finger pointing that happens after an accident is totally unfair. How would you feel to be fined or jailed because your spouse fell off a ladder while unclogging the gutter? It is true that the impact of industrial accidents/spills is much greater that whatever can happen at home or even on the road, but it does not negate the fact that safety is a prime concern of industry and shipping.
Shit will happen. It's bound to, and CANNOT be entirely avoided. Or rather it can, no more spills if no more oil is transported. No more big bang in plants if we shut down the plants. No more car accidents if we just prohibit cars (reminds me of the joke: alcohol kills on the roads, let's prohibit roads) and so on. But are we prepared to go back to the caves? Can we feed the world, and house the population, and basically maintain some sort of developed living standards by doing so? Answer is obviously NO.
So, my point is: What kind of life style do we want? Developed? Means accidents will happen.
No accidents or spills? Means back to the caves.
No other option, so let's stop pointing fingers and damning industry and shipping. They do their very best (with some few exceptions, and in such cases the punishment must be massive), and have a relatively superb track record. The problem is not with industry. The problem is with the demand placed on industry (and shipping), given the size of the population and the living standards expected.
So, just like with food, and fertilizers, and pesticides, and the general power requirements, industry is doing what is needed to keep the system going. It is the system (i.e. numbers of people and individual requirement) that creates an unfix-able problem for the environment.
We need to talk about population control and/or reduction and life style expectations. This is the issue. Nothing else.
This will be the topic of my next blog.
Comments welcome.
Cheers from Roatan, Honduras.
Exxon Valdiz, Amoco Cadiz, Erika, tankers on the rocks, oil platforms blowing up, tens of thousands of gallons of oil, diesel, gasoline in the sea. Seagull stuck in muck, otters dying, turtles asphyxiated, oyster banks ruined, beaches a disgrace, fishing industries bankrupted. Terrible stuff!
Fukushima explosion and long term disastrous consequences - following Chernobyl..., refinery explosions, paper mill discharges into the rivers, airplane crashes, chemical spills, all with enormous environmental impact. Horrendous!
Every time, commissions analyzing, judges ruling, fines, monetary compensations, clean-up costs, and lots of finger pointing, someone has to be responsible, right?
Quite right, BUT:
Have you ever had an accident at home? Burning oil on a hand perhaps, or an electric shock, maybe? Falling from a ladder anyone? How about car accidents, a slight trace of ice in the winter, or a moment of inattention, a flower pot falling from the balcony, or a roller skate left unattended? Banana peels ring a bell?
These are accidents we could avoid, and given that it concerns us directly, we do make a great deal of efforts to avoid them. Yet they happen.
All the time.
Industry spends an extraordinary amount of time, effort and MONEY to avoid accidents. Accidents are bad in many respects: they cost a lot of money and downtime (more money), they hurt people, including staff members, they damage reputations, sometimes irretrievably. Companies have mind boggling procedures to avoid accidents, traning procedures, safety procedures, ISO standards, double redundant safety systems, and so on. As an example, I know one oil company that has the following before changing a light bulb (I am not kidding, guess who it is?):
1) Describe the problem in detail, check the description by another person, do an impact analysis of the problem. Check if any regulatory approval is required before any intervention.
2) Describe in detail the intervention procedure, vet it by another person, approve it at a higher level.
3) Describe all the "lock-up" requirement (in this case, turn off the power, lock the power switch by another persone, check the lock-up by yet another person). List and have approved at a higher level all personal safety equipment needed.
4) Prepare the intervention, e.g. build the scaffolding, check the scaffolding by another person, approve the scaffolding as built by yet another one.
5) Re-check all the above before the person starts climbing the scaffolding. Have a stand-by assistant nearby to help if needed, who also verifies that the safety equipment is properly worn.
6) Proceed with the change of the bulb. Test that the intervention has been done properly by another person.
7) Dismantle everything and prepare for restart.
8) Before restart, check again that all is ready, cleared and cleaned.
9) Restart
10) Issue an intervention report describing all the above.
This is for a light bulb (company is BP, would you believe it?)... Imagine for a major refinery refit?
Shipping companies have incredible constraints placed on them (from the qualification of the skipper and crew to the age and regular vetting of the ship, loading procedures, watch systems, redundant safety systems, etc...
Yet, accidents happen. Amazing no?
Oil tankers move about 2,000,000,000 metric tons of oil per year. This makes about 5.5 million tons per DAY. I couldn't find the average size of an oil tanker (they have increased in size over the years to reduce freight cost), but certainly to move 5 million tons EVERY day, means a very large number of tankers at sea at all times, particularly if one thinks that much of it comes from the Middle East or West Africa and has to travel across large oceans to reach Europe, Japan or the USA.
The average age of a tanker is 10 years. One third of them is 4 years old only. Big ones are newer, small coastal carriers are older.
All oil companies have a vetting system, basically disallowing the use of tankers more than 10 years old, requiring double hulls, recent inspections, and all sorts of constraints on the shipping company.
Accidents happen. Shit happens. It happens at home, on the road, and at sea. It happens in plants despite all the safety procedures., and it will continue to happen WHATEVER we do.
Considering the number of man hours worked, and the volumes produced and shipped, the accident rate in industry is extremely small, and a very small fraction of the accident rate in private homes or on the road. In other words, industry is about as safe as it can be, and the usual finger pointing that happens after an accident is totally unfair. How would you feel to be fined or jailed because your spouse fell off a ladder while unclogging the gutter? It is true that the impact of industrial accidents/spills is much greater that whatever can happen at home or even on the road, but it does not negate the fact that safety is a prime concern of industry and shipping.
Shit will happen. It's bound to, and CANNOT be entirely avoided. Or rather it can, no more spills if no more oil is transported. No more big bang in plants if we shut down the plants. No more car accidents if we just prohibit cars (reminds me of the joke: alcohol kills on the roads, let's prohibit roads) and so on. But are we prepared to go back to the caves? Can we feed the world, and house the population, and basically maintain some sort of developed living standards by doing so? Answer is obviously NO.
So, my point is: What kind of life style do we want? Developed? Means accidents will happen.
No accidents or spills? Means back to the caves.
No other option, so let's stop pointing fingers and damning industry and shipping. They do their very best (with some few exceptions, and in such cases the punishment must be massive), and have a relatively superb track record. The problem is not with industry. The problem is with the demand placed on industry (and shipping), given the size of the population and the living standards expected.
So, just like with food, and fertilizers, and pesticides, and the general power requirements, industry is doing what is needed to keep the system going. It is the system (i.e. numbers of people and individual requirement) that creates an unfix-able problem for the environment.
We need to talk about population control and/or reduction and life style expectations. This is the issue. Nothing else.
This will be the topic of my next blog.
Comments welcome.
Cheers from Roatan, Honduras.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
OK, so humanity and the environment.
Do you prefer "sustainable" energy or feeding the third world? Do you prefer primary rain forest and orangutang habitat maintenance and bio-diversity or increasing output to satisfy both of the above? Do you want "clean" energy or do you want to power the world?
Do you want to clean up the rivers by reducing or prohibiting pesticides and fertilizers, or grow enough food for the 80 million or so additional humans on this planet every year (not counting the huge amount of people who do not get enough already and starve more or less slowly)? Do you want to reduce wastage (which is huge) or plastic packaging and the cold chain? Do you want I-pad's and new techno-gimmics regularly (most people do apparently- see recent uptake of X-Box or I-phone 5S), new annual fashion, and brand names and super-duper cars, or a more reasonable use of the world's resources, in particular brain power? Organic (bio) food anyone (great stuff if you can afford it)?
I could go on for ever with all the issues hundreds of NGO's busy themselves with. The problem is one of conflict. Everyone seems to have his favorite battle (mine is sharks), but focusing on one single issue (pesticides, food, energy, biodiversity, etc...) is completely unproductive.
A recent and simple example I saw on Facebook was: This year, for Christmas, let's buy from small local businesses. I subscribe completely. BUT: let's imagine we all do that, and the large retail companies will miss the biggest sale of the year. What will they do? Close shops, Retrench people? I know it's not the environment, but what I'm trying to say is that every action leads to a re-action (Archimedes principle). Nothing is an easy fix, whenever you pull on a string, both sides of the string move.
Elaborating on the first paragraph:
- Vegetable oil can be used for food or biodiesel. Not both at the same time (given a certain production level - driven by cultivated land, pesticide and fertilizer use)! When German Mercedes users switch to biodiesel, they increase the price of vegetable oil to a level where the poor Indian consumers can't feed their children any more. The law of offer and demand.
- Food production (including veg. oil) is a factor of land and yield. Increased food production means either more land or higher yields. More land means converting more nature into productive areas (rain forest amongst others). Yields are driven by type of seeds (GMO, anyone?), fertilizer and pesticide use and irrigation. Increasing yields means better seeds (GMO, here we go again), more pesticide and/or fertilizer use and/or increased use of aquifers (or building dams, with other consequences), One CANNOT increase food production without one or the other.
- Some advocate the reduction of meat consumption in favor of a vegetarian diet. OK, but the flaw in the reasoning is first that many people like meat (including me), and that if meat stops being a major food ingredient, we will lose a lot of natural fertilizer, and probably find that cows, chicken, pigs, lambs, etc... end up on the endangered species list as well. Species seem to only survive when they make economic sense in our world.
- Organic food is a great idea, but how many people can afford it? It WILL cost more to produce good food, will use the same amount of land, and procure lower yields. This means higher prices, so in a way, people who buy Organics are actually making life more difficult for those who can't afford it. Provocative? I am listening...
- "Clean" energy is a flawed concept. It does not exist. Fossil energy (coal, oil, gas, nuclear) is not clean. Wind and solar power are not clean either. First they require large amounts of fossil fuel to build and maintain, they require massive amounts of storage, usually in the form of batteries, i.e. heavy metals, and need large amounts of space (want a HUGE wind generator in your backyard, anyone?). To equate the output of an average size nuclear reactor (there are usually more than one in one location) - 660MW- it takes about 86 of the largest type of wind generators (Enercon E-126 - 7.6MW capacity - not output, that's only about 4MW- 198m high). The largest solar plant in the world (in the Mojave desert in California) produces 75MW, so you need 9 of those, each one using 1600 acres ( 650 ha).That's 14500 acres, folks! I'm not advocating nuclear power, I'm just pointing to a conflict...
- Wastage comes from a number of factors, primarily loss in the supply chain and excess purchase in "rich" countries. Reducing wastage means improving packaging (multilayer plastics are an option, but of course they use fossil fuel), generalizing the cold chain (in the third world, a huge proportion of food is lost because products go bad before they reach the table), and that means more ozone depleting gases and a hell of a lot of energy required to power the system. As for the excess purchase in the rich world, I'm not sure how to stop it, and if one could, how to ship it to the part of the world that needs it?
- Resource optimization is another conundrum: Lots of "misfits" advocate very loudly their disgust with modern civilization, yet listen to music on their I-pod while using all the modern amenities of a developed world. I am yet to find a "green" person who is ready to let go of light, heating, music, movies, and so on. It is true that too much emphasis is put on non-essentials, too much brain energy used for little benefit. But that's what the majority of people demand, and are prepared to pay for.If only all this superb brain power was used to research better solar energy or low emission plants... Trouble is there is more money in I-phone 6, and don't blame the corporation making it, blame yourself if you buy it!
More than 5 minutes. I know this is provocative. I have another very provocative point to make. Stay tuned (it concerns the oil industry and industrial risk).
Comments, as usual, are welcome.
Do you prefer "sustainable" energy or feeding the third world? Do you prefer primary rain forest and orangutang habitat maintenance and bio-diversity or increasing output to satisfy both of the above? Do you want "clean" energy or do you want to power the world?
Do you want to clean up the rivers by reducing or prohibiting pesticides and fertilizers, or grow enough food for the 80 million or so additional humans on this planet every year (not counting the huge amount of people who do not get enough already and starve more or less slowly)? Do you want to reduce wastage (which is huge) or plastic packaging and the cold chain? Do you want I-pad's and new techno-gimmics regularly (most people do apparently- see recent uptake of X-Box or I-phone 5S), new annual fashion, and brand names and super-duper cars, or a more reasonable use of the world's resources, in particular brain power? Organic (bio) food anyone (great stuff if you can afford it)?
I could go on for ever with all the issues hundreds of NGO's busy themselves with. The problem is one of conflict. Everyone seems to have his favorite battle (mine is sharks), but focusing on one single issue (pesticides, food, energy, biodiversity, etc...) is completely unproductive.
A recent and simple example I saw on Facebook was: This year, for Christmas, let's buy from small local businesses. I subscribe completely. BUT: let's imagine we all do that, and the large retail companies will miss the biggest sale of the year. What will they do? Close shops, Retrench people? I know it's not the environment, but what I'm trying to say is that every action leads to a re-action (Archimedes principle). Nothing is an easy fix, whenever you pull on a string, both sides of the string move.
Elaborating on the first paragraph:
- Vegetable oil can be used for food or biodiesel. Not both at the same time (given a certain production level - driven by cultivated land, pesticide and fertilizer use)! When German Mercedes users switch to biodiesel, they increase the price of vegetable oil to a level where the poor Indian consumers can't feed their children any more. The law of offer and demand.
- Food production (including veg. oil) is a factor of land and yield. Increased food production means either more land or higher yields. More land means converting more nature into productive areas (rain forest amongst others). Yields are driven by type of seeds (GMO, anyone?), fertilizer and pesticide use and irrigation. Increasing yields means better seeds (GMO, here we go again), more pesticide and/or fertilizer use and/or increased use of aquifers (or building dams, with other consequences), One CANNOT increase food production without one or the other.
- Some advocate the reduction of meat consumption in favor of a vegetarian diet. OK, but the flaw in the reasoning is first that many people like meat (including me), and that if meat stops being a major food ingredient, we will lose a lot of natural fertilizer, and probably find that cows, chicken, pigs, lambs, etc... end up on the endangered species list as well. Species seem to only survive when they make economic sense in our world.
- Organic food is a great idea, but how many people can afford it? It WILL cost more to produce good food, will use the same amount of land, and procure lower yields. This means higher prices, so in a way, people who buy Organics are actually making life more difficult for those who can't afford it. Provocative? I am listening...
- "Clean" energy is a flawed concept. It does not exist. Fossil energy (coal, oil, gas, nuclear) is not clean. Wind and solar power are not clean either. First they require large amounts of fossil fuel to build and maintain, they require massive amounts of storage, usually in the form of batteries, i.e. heavy metals, and need large amounts of space (want a HUGE wind generator in your backyard, anyone?). To equate the output of an average size nuclear reactor (there are usually more than one in one location) - 660MW- it takes about 86 of the largest type of wind generators (Enercon E-126 - 7.6MW capacity - not output, that's only about 4MW- 198m high). The largest solar plant in the world (in the Mojave desert in California) produces 75MW, so you need 9 of those, each one using 1600 acres ( 650 ha).That's 14500 acres, folks! I'm not advocating nuclear power, I'm just pointing to a conflict...
- Wastage comes from a number of factors, primarily loss in the supply chain and excess purchase in "rich" countries. Reducing wastage means improving packaging (multilayer plastics are an option, but of course they use fossil fuel), generalizing the cold chain (in the third world, a huge proportion of food is lost because products go bad before they reach the table), and that means more ozone depleting gases and a hell of a lot of energy required to power the system. As for the excess purchase in the rich world, I'm not sure how to stop it, and if one could, how to ship it to the part of the world that needs it?
- Resource optimization is another conundrum: Lots of "misfits" advocate very loudly their disgust with modern civilization, yet listen to music on their I-pod while using all the modern amenities of a developed world. I am yet to find a "green" person who is ready to let go of light, heating, music, movies, and so on. It is true that too much emphasis is put on non-essentials, too much brain energy used for little benefit. But that's what the majority of people demand, and are prepared to pay for.If only all this superb brain power was used to research better solar energy or low emission plants... Trouble is there is more money in I-phone 6, and don't blame the corporation making it, blame yourself if you buy it!
More than 5 minutes. I know this is provocative. I have another very provocative point to make. Stay tuned (it concerns the oil industry and industrial risk).
Comments, as usual, are welcome.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Topic of the century: the environment (we used to call it nature)
Five minute on the environment. Sounds like world news in 2 minutes, or 'round the world in a day.
How much do you get?
So, I'll have to slice this into sub-topics again if I want to make my point clear.
We used to call this "nature", probably because there was still such a thing. We saw it as separate from us, like a shared rental: on one side, there was nature, living it's life, on the other, us living ours.
As we grew and multiplied, and as we developed technology to make use of our friendly neighbor, nature became the environment, something that is around us, but not different from us. Actually something that must be used (abused), that is there for us.
The concept already is shocking. It means that as the dominant life form on the planet (for how long?), we have every right to consider that everything not human must serve humanity. A little like Indians in the Western US owned the land, but served no purpose other than to be destroyed to gain the land and resources (a very good book on the topic is "I buried my heart in Wounded Knee", highly recommended).
So anyway, now it's called the environment, and more and more concern is expressed in various quarters about what humanity is doing to it (by the way, this is a recent thing, when I was younger, NOBODY talked about it). Looking from a high flying aircraft, human invasion looks like a cancer, concrete everywhere, roads, houses, cities, even the countryside in many places look like checkerboards, fields all nice and square and the odd farm in the middle. At night, our planet looks like a Christmas tree seen from space. Space itself, around our planet, is as congested (in relative terms) as the worst highways on earth.
It is estimated that almost 15% of the earth surface is used now for urban and industrial areas and intensive farming, with another 6 to 7% for "managed" pasture. That's more than 20% of the grand total, folks! And we all heard about how many football fields of primary forest disappears every minute to make room for more fields and pasture land.
And this is only the "blue sky" view (haven't seen a blue sky in some countries for years, it's more like bluish-grey, when it's not outright covered in haze). Looking at the environment from the smaller (!) side, human development has so far lead to a significant reduction in biodiversity, partly because of hunting (gone, the dodo!), largely because of destruction of habitat, and increasingly because of indirect causes like introduction of non-native species, pollution, and possibly climate change. How many species have disappeared is not really known, given that we hardly know all the species there were in the first place, but some scientists call it already the "anthropocene extinction", comparing it with past extinctions related to major climate changes or cataclysmic events of the distant past. Currently there are over 3000 species of animals (and 2600+ species of plants) on the endangered list (IUCN), not counting those we know diddle about.
This is just one angle. Species are living being we tend to care about. Aquifer over-exploitation, topsoil erosion, pollution of the oceans, ever-growing garbage dumps, and many other "environmental impacts" of similar concern, are somewhat less talked about, but are also becoming unmanageable (I don't use the word unsustainable for a reason, we'll get into that later).
Moreover, we are playing apprentice sorcerer in many fields (and I am not a science basher or a skeptic towards the scientific community) in areas like genetic modification, use of hormones, antiseptics or antibiotics, or messing up the food chain by feeding cattle with dead cattle (see the mad cow disease - also called Creutzfeldt Jacob disease). Fact is we don't fully understand what the hell we are doing, and economic pressure reduces the likelihood of wanting to dig deep before using new "fixes". Fukushima is one such example of madness, see ☢ Fukushima: Beyond Urgent ☢ on youtube...
So we are all mad. Or are we?
We are destroying the only planet with chocolate, reducing it's beauty and viability, putting our lives at risk, and more certainly that of our children, mortgaging the future, and crying victory when the newest technology has mastered another bottleneck in our development.
Now the question is "why do we do that"?
Obviously, human population is growing, humans thrive for better living, meaning security (no more large predators taking their nightly prey), assured food (who wants to hunt or fish for the daily ration?), comfort (running water, power, shelter, etc...), and hence not only are the numbers growing, but the overall demand for the satisfaction of the above increases. And the only way out, it seems, is to continue taking what is rightly ours, the dominant species, from the vast resources of our planet. Not that we don't mind that this type of animal or plant disappears, and of course we do mind that we are sawing the branch we are sitting on, both as persons, and as a society.
The problem is, at the same time, we all want child mortality to come down in Africa, we want to cure world diseases, we understand that we can't prohibit development in the third world, and desire shorter work hours in the first world, we want security, social services, good food, a healthy and long life, in a word, we want it all.
OK, more than 5 minutes already. Damn, time flies...
More to come on this topic.
Comments welcome
Cheers
How much do you get?
So, I'll have to slice this into sub-topics again if I want to make my point clear.
We used to call this "nature", probably because there was still such a thing. We saw it as separate from us, like a shared rental: on one side, there was nature, living it's life, on the other, us living ours.
As we grew and multiplied, and as we developed technology to make use of our friendly neighbor, nature became the environment, something that is around us, but not different from us. Actually something that must be used (abused), that is there for us.
The concept already is shocking. It means that as the dominant life form on the planet (for how long?), we have every right to consider that everything not human must serve humanity. A little like Indians in the Western US owned the land, but served no purpose other than to be destroyed to gain the land and resources (a very good book on the topic is "I buried my heart in Wounded Knee", highly recommended).
So anyway, now it's called the environment, and more and more concern is expressed in various quarters about what humanity is doing to it (by the way, this is a recent thing, when I was younger, NOBODY talked about it). Looking from a high flying aircraft, human invasion looks like a cancer, concrete everywhere, roads, houses, cities, even the countryside in many places look like checkerboards, fields all nice and square and the odd farm in the middle. At night, our planet looks like a Christmas tree seen from space. Space itself, around our planet, is as congested (in relative terms) as the worst highways on earth.
It is estimated that almost 15% of the earth surface is used now for urban and industrial areas and intensive farming, with another 6 to 7% for "managed" pasture. That's more than 20% of the grand total, folks! And we all heard about how many football fields of primary forest disappears every minute to make room for more fields and pasture land.
And this is only the "blue sky" view (haven't seen a blue sky in some countries for years, it's more like bluish-grey, when it's not outright covered in haze). Looking at the environment from the smaller (!) side, human development has so far lead to a significant reduction in biodiversity, partly because of hunting (gone, the dodo!), largely because of destruction of habitat, and increasingly because of indirect causes like introduction of non-native species, pollution, and possibly climate change. How many species have disappeared is not really known, given that we hardly know all the species there were in the first place, but some scientists call it already the "anthropocene extinction", comparing it with past extinctions related to major climate changes or cataclysmic events of the distant past. Currently there are over 3000 species of animals (and 2600+ species of plants) on the endangered list (IUCN), not counting those we know diddle about.
This is just one angle. Species are living being we tend to care about. Aquifer over-exploitation, topsoil erosion, pollution of the oceans, ever-growing garbage dumps, and many other "environmental impacts" of similar concern, are somewhat less talked about, but are also becoming unmanageable (I don't use the word unsustainable for a reason, we'll get into that later).
Moreover, we are playing apprentice sorcerer in many fields (and I am not a science basher or a skeptic towards the scientific community) in areas like genetic modification, use of hormones, antiseptics or antibiotics, or messing up the food chain by feeding cattle with dead cattle (see the mad cow disease - also called Creutzfeldt Jacob disease). Fact is we don't fully understand what the hell we are doing, and economic pressure reduces the likelihood of wanting to dig deep before using new "fixes". Fukushima is one such example of madness, see ☢ Fukushima: Beyond Urgent ☢ on youtube...
So we are all mad. Or are we?
We are destroying the only planet with chocolate, reducing it's beauty and viability, putting our lives at risk, and more certainly that of our children, mortgaging the future, and crying victory when the newest technology has mastered another bottleneck in our development.
Now the question is "why do we do that"?
Obviously, human population is growing, humans thrive for better living, meaning security (no more large predators taking their nightly prey), assured food (who wants to hunt or fish for the daily ration?), comfort (running water, power, shelter, etc...), and hence not only are the numbers growing, but the overall demand for the satisfaction of the above increases. And the only way out, it seems, is to continue taking what is rightly ours, the dominant species, from the vast resources of our planet. Not that we don't mind that this type of animal or plant disappears, and of course we do mind that we are sawing the branch we are sitting on, both as persons, and as a society.
The problem is, at the same time, we all want child mortality to come down in Africa, we want to cure world diseases, we understand that we can't prohibit development in the third world, and desire shorter work hours in the first world, we want security, social services, good food, a healthy and long life, in a word, we want it all.
OK, more than 5 minutes already. Damn, time flies...
More to come on this topic.
Comments welcome
Cheers
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