H A&S 220c Energy and Environment: Life Under the Pale Sun
Essay/problems 3
Out: Tues 16 Nov 2004
Back: Tues 23 Nov 2004
In reading McNeill’s book, Something New Under the Sun, excerpts from Roberts’ The End of
Oil (handed out, see website) and now excerpts from Bjorn Lomborg’s Skeptical
Environmentalist you get a wide range of views of the problem of global energy supplies. The
conclusions of Lomborg are very different from most environmentalists and even from most
scientists, whatever their leanings.
This week, let us focus on oil. During the coming week read the Lomborg sections just
handed out, and make notes on areas where he disagrees with Roberts and McNeill. The goal of
your study is: “Is there an oil crisis?”
If you find extra information, add this to the debate. Also use your own knowledge and
observations of the environment to shape your discussion.
Hand these notes in with enough text to make it a ‘1st draft’ of an essay about the future
of oil, our dominant energy source. Length: 3 to 5 pages (1 ½ line spacing, for fontsize 12 Times
New Roman).
Notes: •Some important disagreement comes in areas very difficult for us to judge. For example,
there are severe differences regarding estimates of oil reserves for future use…that is, how many
barrels of oil will be accessible in the coming century, both ‘proven reserves’ and ‘undiscovered’
oil. Be sure to identify these differences in the above readings.
•Sometimes we are fooled by being forced to answer the wrong question. In the debate
over how big our energy supplies are, only a few people are saying, “Is this the right question, the
most important issue?”. Suggest new questions that improve this debate (remember the quote on
our website: “The problem is not that we are running out of oil, but that we are running out of
environment.”)
•Consider whether you are satisfied with basically economic arguments about the
environment. Thus consider the difficulty in putting a dollar value on the environment, or parts
of it when you see someone trying to do this. An economist, discussing the decimation of large
whales in the ocean, once said, “When we put a high enough dollar value on whales, then they
will be saved.” Is that convincing?
•Make a judgment over the issue of anthropocentric…that is, human-centered, judgments
about the environment: how do the different authors approach the problem of valuing ecosystems
and the physical environment, as contrasted by valuing human prosperity. See p.12 of ‘The
Litany’ of Lomborg. It is possible to argue that in our own selfish interest we should preserve the
vitality of other species and of the physical environment.
•Update some of the trends under discussion, for example the price of a barrel of oil, and
compare with the texts (today’s oil price has ‘spiked’ upward and may fall back down, but it is
worth trying).
•Avoid knee-jerk environmentalist responses. All the above authors have important
things to tell us, even though they disagree strongly.
•Challenge assumptions.
•Challenge data. Some of the most strident criticisms (in Scientific American magazine
and Nature magazine) accuse Lomborg of the selective use of numbers: some inaccurate, and
some being isolated examples that run counter to the general trend.
•Consider the web of interactions that is Gaia…our biological system riding on a small
planet. When Lomborg discusses the amount of fish being caught (p30, of The Litany) he says
that the world fish catch has increased by 75% (he later corrected this to 55%) since 1975.
However he includes fish farming in his curves; the more mainline Worldwatch Institute view
(run by Lester Brown, whom Lomborg roundly attacks) emphasizes the leveling off and
beginning decline of the catch of wild fish. Cod have disappeared from the western North
Atlantic Ocean, and from New York to Newfoundland fishermen are out of work. And fish
farming is expanding greatly yet there have been major setbacks, with disease infecting fish
farms, serious local pollution, and escaped ‘farm-salmon’ interbreeding with wild salmon, with
unpredictable consequences. Thus we add the next idea:
•Consider both global and local impacts of changes in energy, food, and other natural
resources. Lomborg in his introduction does advocate this, comparing the bad news of the caloric
intake of people in the African state of Burundi with the good news about Chad.
•What is the metric? Lomborg says the things may be ‘bad’, say with access to clean
water but they are ‘better’ than in the past. He also argues that with rapidly increasing
population, one should consider the % of people who are badly off, not the absolute numbers (p.5
of The Litany).
•Beware of this evasive tactic: the long argument that recyclable toothbrushes are
trivially unimportant (p10 The Litany) deflects our attention from the huge problem of waste
management and toxic waste and limited resources to continue producing it.
On p14 of The Litany, Lomborg confronts the claim that local ecosystems are beginning
to collapse (Worldwatch Inst.); the example of subSaharan Africa is given, where life expectancy
is falling as AIDS increases to decimate the population. Lomborg says this has nothing to do with
overdevelopment and fragile ecosystems. However if you look at the history of Sahel drought in
Africa, and of AIDS, you see a devastating confluence of several kinds of disaster: from
overstressed farmland, drought, disease, economic dislocation and civil wars. It ain’t simple. But
it also is not good. And, some authors (e.g., Richard Preston, The Hot Zone), ask whether
AIDS might indeed have emerged from the jungles of Africa when they became an
overstressed habitat for primates.
•Beware of predictions without some idea of their reliability. Test this by seeing what has
happened since the book was published. The price of oil comes up often; on p.14 of The Litany
Lomborg says “ the US Energy Information Agency expects an almost steady oil price over the
next 20 years of about $22 a barrel.” This autumn that price has ranged from $40 to $55 a barrel.
It may come down again, and in inflation adjusted dollars it is still cheap. But it is important to
see how the system can be upset by wars and terrorism as well as oil reserves.
•Related to this, in the web of interactions that determine our comfort level and that of
Gaia, be aware that the environment is close to the root of social injustice, poverty, and ethnic
wars (often disputes over land and resources), and not just the price of gasoline; look for concrete
examples relating to this.
•Consider the totally unexpected. The ozone hole was a near total surprise (though Paul
Crutzen won a Nobel Prize for predicting the effect of human generated CFCs on the ozone layer
high in the atmosphere). Somewhere in the text Lomborg gives statistics for literacy and
starvation in Iraq. Of course he did not know that some 100,000 Iraqis would die in a war soon
after his book was published, and did not acknowledge that, we are told, a million or more Iraqi
children died in the past decade due to poor water supplies and lack of medicine.