greenhouse gas

Miller, Debra (ed) (2010) Conserving the Environment. New Haven, CT: Greenhaven Press.

This book is one of a series that lays out both sides of an issue, with authors presenting different points of view, which could make it a convenient teaching tool. This book covered climate change, biodiversity loss, and steps needed to protect the environment. That’s an odd assortment. You might assume that in the case of climate change, the debate would be between the doubters and the doomsayers. But that was not the case. Probably the most interesting insight for me was that the arguments against positions I might hold myself were less about questioning the need.

The authors, by and large, didn’t question the need to do something about climate change, for example. Their position was just that there was only so much money to go around and we shouldn’t forget other pressing issues like HIV/AIDS, malaria, etc. Mostly the issues were about clamoring for whose issue was the biggest, the one deserving the most attention. And to me, this was a symptom of the lack of systems thinking. Everything is connected, right? We have to solve all these problems. To me the issue is not money, it’s about will.

Margonelli, Lisa (2007) Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline. New York, NY: Doubleday.

The back cover of this book said it was humorous. After the horror in the Gulf of Mexico lately, I was all for a funny book about oil. Margonelli is a journalist with the descriptive capacity of Barbara Kingsolver. This book is really the back-story about how gas gets into your car. It’s a story most of us are blissfully ignorant of and dangerously incurious about.

Margonelli traces the supply chain backward from the gas station (yes, a whole chapter on the strange microcosm of our society) to the distributors (who live a gamblers existence, betting 24 hours a day on fuel prices and trying to get tankers to the gas stations before they run out.)

She goes to a refinery, but before she is let in, she gets training on all the safety warning signals, which ironically go off while she is there. She visits a drilling rig in Texas to discover people with nicknames like Midget, Worm and Lost & Found in a carefully orchestrated ballet, taking pipe in and out of the ground, fascinated with ancient geologic formations and the story they tell.

She is one of the rare individuals to get access to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve where she finds “Boy Scouts gone mad; they are always preparing to be prepared.” In her view the SPR is ineffective both for national security (it’s in the same Gulf area that likely will be hit by the same storms) and price control (where just the mere mention of increasing reserves sends panic waves through the markets.

Then she visits the trading floor, the NYMEX oil market with crude women and men in garish coats and ‘otter haircuts’ (you know, the slicked back wet look) who go berserk in the ‘crude pit’ where oil futures are traded.

And she visits where we get oil from: Venezuela, where the land around Maracaibo Lake is sinking as the oil is withdrawn, leaving the surrounding city with a dike to hold back the waters. She explores the odd dis-empowerment that comes with a petrostate and the forces encouraging them not to invest in improving their equipment.

She visits Chad and Iran and Nigeria where she uncovers the hidden costs of letting the oil companies manage our petro-diplomacy and the short-sighted missteps of our government, including in 1988  a nine-hour war the President Reagan unleashed on an oil platform to send a message to the Iran government but instead unleashing anger that is still harbored today.

She ends her world tour in China where she gets a nasty lung infection from the air pollution and meets people who feel they have got to have a car to be a respected part of society. While the central government is trying to radically improve fuel efficiency, they need the jobs a New Detroit could give them. They are investing heavily in new technologies (like the Aspire, part of the 863 Project) but at the same time, some cities like Guangzhou ‘have forbidden small cars from their streets on the grounds that they are beneath the dignity of a metropolis.

This book is sprinkled with factoids but is very readable. It provides important insights about this history and future of the petroleum industry and, not coincidentally, our future as well.

Paskal, Cleo (2010) Global Warring: How environmental, economic, and political crises will redraw the world map. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

No, that’s not a typo; it’s a play on words. Global Warring, not Warming. Think geo-politics meets climate change. Despite the book’s title, this is less about war and more about nation’s jockeying for position. Much of the book examines the positioning that is already underway to control the Arctic Sea once we’ve defrosted the last of the ice.

Paskal brings a historical perspective, drawing lessons from past fights over shipping lanes. You’d think in this modern age that ships would no longer be so strategic. For heavens sake, this isn’t the time of the British Empire. But in a globalized world, it is a lifeblood. She explains, “This expansion through importation is also what made most modern powers, which is why transportation routes are so critical.”

She also considers the impacts of rising sea levels to national security, mostly from the perspective of the US. For example, we may lose a vast portion of the Gulf Coast, from Houston to Mobile, in the next 50-100 years, (where ¼ of the oil and about 15% of the natural gas is produced and where a number of refineries are located). A storm surge less than that of Katrina also could flood a significant percentage of ports, interstates, railroads and even some airports.

The author reveals how much more strategic China is being, with their ‘nationalistic capitalism.’ A Chinese company, HPH, runs many of the ports and shipping choke points (including the Panama Canal.) As she puts it, “Countries in which national security policy makers don’t have control over energy supplies…are geopolitically more vulnerable than more politically integrated nations.” China is also seen by some as a better negotiation partner because their interests are clear and their policy is less likely to change than in the US where Congress changes its mind regularly.

She also examines the interests of many other nations. The arctic sea lanes are opening along Russia before Canada. India is considering requiring that all new infrastructure be ‘climate proofed. Europe may soon find dangerous heatwaves and every-other-year phenomenon.

This book will have you considering a whole new basket of issues to worry about. You better hope the policy wonks are reading this book.