Since the Industrial Revolution oil, coal, natural gas, and metals have improved nearly every aspect of human life. Before then, a meager existence was the norm no matter what country one lived in. It is naïve to romanticize the eighteenth century as simpler, happier times–the lives of those farmers and townspeople were a constant struggle. Without fossil fuels and metals our lives would be very different. Indeed, today’s urbanization megatrend and gigantic cities would not even exist.
The modern city survives upon constant resupply from the outer natural world, from faraway fields, forests, mines, streams, and wells. We scour the planet for hydrocarbons and deliver them to power plants to zap electricity over miles of metal wire. We take water from flowing rivers with distant headwaters of snow and ice. Plants and animals are grown someplace else, killed, and delivered for us to eat. Wind, rivers, and tides flush out our filth. Without this constant flow of nature pouring into our cities, we would all have to disperse, or die.
This reliance of cities upon the outside natural world is a profound relationship to which their occupants give little if any thought. Unlike a hardscrabble Uzbek farmer, modern urbanites worry little about securing water and food, and instead focus on securing jobs and wealth. But a lack of awareness doesn’t make this dependency any less profound.
Most of the world’s oil still comes from giant and supergiant oil fields discovered more than fifty years ago. Many of them have now begun their decline, including Alaska’s North Slope region, Kuwait’s Burgan oil field, the North Sea, and Canterell in Mexico. Saudi Arabia is so far maintaining production from its massive Ghawar field currently providing over 6% of the world’s oil- but eventually it, too, must decline.
New oil is still being found, and exploration and extraction technologies continue to improve, but it is now quite clear that conventional oil production cannot grow fast enough to keep up with projected increases in demand over the next forty years.
Many of the fields awaiting development are in parts of the Caucasus and Africa that are dangerously unstable. It takes decades and enormous investments of capital to develop an oil field, and will cost increasingly more in blood and treasure than energy investors are accustomed to. Further supply tightening derives from the fact that oil producers have a long-term financial incentive in limiting production of what is, after all, a finite resource. A large fraction of the world’s oil is now controlled by national rather than transnational oil companies.
The most common biofuel today is ethanol made from corn lin the United States), sugarcane (Brazil), and sugar beets (European Union). Making ethanol is essentially the ancient art of fermenting sugars to make alcoholic drinks, meaning that corn-based car fuel is very similar to moonshine. It is commonly mixed with gasoline, and in Brazil, cars run on flex-fuel mixtures containing up to 100% ethanol. Ethanol has higher octane than gasoline and for this reason was used in early racing cars. In fact, when cars were first being developed about a century ago, their makers strongly considered fueling them with ethanol.
Coal is the dirtiest and most environmentally damaging fuel on Earth. Entire mountain tops are leveled to obtain it. Coal mining pollutes water and devastates the land-scape, covering it with toxic slurry pools and leaving behind acidic, eroding deposits upon which nothing will grow. I studied one of these places for my rather traumatizing master’s thesis. An hour’s fieldwork would leave me covered in black grime, hands and clothing stained orange from an acidic creek full of chemical leachate.”
Coal is worse than oil and much worse than natural gas when it comes to emissions of greenhouse gas, because its carbon content is the highest of all fossil fuels. To produce an equivalent amount of useful energy, burned coal unleashes roughly twice as much carbon dioxide as burned natural gas. It also releases a host of irritating or toxic air pollutants, including sulfur dioxide (SO,), nitrogen oxides (NO and NOz), particulates, and mercury. It makes acid rain. If converted to a liquid, it releases 150% more carbon dioxide chan oil fuels. To people hoping to bring our escalating release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere under control, coal is Public Enemy Number One.
The water crisis is about more than failing crops and unsanitary conditions. It is also about information or more precisely, the lack of it–for effective water management. Water is constantly on the move, but unbelievably, we have hardly any idea of where, when, or how much we have at any given moment. Our knowledge of Earth’s hydrology is extraordinarily data-poor.
Other than large rivers, few streams are measured. Outside the United States and Europe, the vast majority of water bodies receive no hydrologic monitoring whatsoever. We have basically zero information for small lakes, cattle ponds, and wetlands. Even the water levels behind dams, while monitored by their operators, are seldom released to the broader public in many countries.
Global sea levels are now steadily rising nearly one-third of a centimeter every year, driven by melting glacier ice and the thermal expansion of ocean water as it warms. 3 There is absolutely no doubt about this. There is absolutely no doubt that it will continue rising for at least several centuries, and probably longer. Sea-level rise really is happening. The big unknowns are how fast, whether it will progress smoothly or in jerks, and how high the water will ultimately go.
Source : The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7816424-the-world-in-2050
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