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Humans and greenhouse gases
Keep reminding yourself: Global warming is a natural process! The CEI will help.
This is just to give you an idea of how a species could use up half the planet’s known reserves of petroleum so quickly …. without really trying! And . . . where did all that fossil fuel end up??
Social processes
- Electricity generation (takes a lot of energy, and as the second law of thermodynamics says, that energy doesn’t disappear, it just gets transformed into less usable forms, often heat–think about how the energy of a light bulb turned on is transformed). And it matters how that electricity was generated. Fossil fuels come to mind as uniquely good at pumping heat-holding greenhouse gases when burned or decomposed.
- Human population growth — from one billion 250 years ago to over 8 billion today. To estimate doubling time, divide the population growth rate into 70. At the current rate of 1.2%, and assuming no change in resource availability, in 60 years there would be 16 billion humans on the planet.
- Food production, agriculture, husbandry (confined animals, nitrogen, fossil fuels). Our industrial agricultural system is totally dependent on fossil fuels to produce pesticides, fertilizers, to fuel the machines that do the work, and …. to help ensure 8 billion people can be fed (though for millions, rather poorly).
Transportation — hopefully you can see the contributions in transportation to greenhouse gas production. 70% of petroleum is refined into transportation fuels.
- Globalization and consumption — In a global economy, goods tend to get produced in en masse in countries with cheap labor, for consumption in mostly wealthier countries. How does it get ‘re-exported’ to the wealthy consuming societies?
- Waste production–Speaking of consumption, much of human consumption ends up in the landfill within a year. And landfills produce large volumes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that can persist up to 25 years in the atmosphere before breaking down.
- Industrialization India and China make up 1/3 of the world’s population, and both are rapidly industrializing. What happens when they’re fully on the electricity grid? They’ll look like the rest of the industrial world–profligate users of and aggressive competitors for energy and resources.
- Deforestation (land clearing, biomass fuel) — huge tracts of tropical forest are cleared continuously, to satisfy consumption needs in Countries of the Global North, and to clear land for agriculture and (later) grazing in those countries. Sometimes governments build roads into the forest (knowing that an urban exodus of squatters seeking land to farm will follow), to ease population pressure. ‘Slash and burn’ agriculture–cutting down and burning trees for the ash and fertilizer benefits–is practiced. After a few short years farmers move on to clear another plot, and ranchers often follow behind, grazing livestock. But tropical soils are old and nutrient-poor, and Tropical forest left without tree cover quickly deteriorates–all the nutrients are held in the vegetation. Cut the vegetation, and you’re left with grasses, which don’t have root systems capable of keeping nutrients near the surface where they’re available to plants. Not to mention that tropical forests sequester CO2 and fix carbon year-round (the don’t go dormant, as forests in the temperate regions are prone to do).
- Politics — the Oil and Gas Industry has never been more profitable (I first wrote this a couple decades ago. And it’s still true. Imagine). Exploration and drilling in the Arctic comes and goes, and it’s coming again, under the Trump Administration, to Alaska and beyond. The EPA and other environmental agencies are being run by oil and gas industry executives or lobbyists. Natural gas drilling and production have grown phenomenally in the last two decade in the US. The Trump Administration has worked to reverse some of the (previous) Biden Administration’s efforts to encourage renewable energy production and investment. Debates about energy in election campaigns never broach climate change, rather they are more likely to call for ‘energy security’ (through fossil fuels) and cheap gas, which politicians perennially promise come election time. Cheap gas, more consumed. Expensive gas, less consumed (but that would take a government that understood the importance of mitigating for adverse impacts on certain industries).
- Alternatives — What happens to the economy otherwise? If we converted to bicycles as our main source of transportation, we’d definitely have cleaner air, less congested cities, less greenhouse gas emissions. How would our economy look? What jobs would be lost?
- Economic systems — Capitalism and markets — capitalism operates on short-term horizons. Companies in it for the ‘ecological long haul’ will quickly get out-competed by companies making decisions that, though they may trash the environment, lead to greater profit in the short term. This is sometimes referred to as ‘externalizing’ of costs (to sell products more cheaply, because the true ‘cost’ of producing, marketing and selling products is not reflected in their price, but paid by others in various ways difficult to quantify). Transitioning to a ‘post-hydrocarbon’ economy would not be painless, politically, economically, culturally, or in most any other way.
