BLESSINGS ARE OBLIGATIONS (Jeff Berg)
Posted @: http://www.safewatergroup.org/Specials/gaianicity_index.htm, February 23rd 2007
In her February 23rd article in the Canadian business magazine The Financial Post Diane Francis, a Senior Editor, writes:
“India and China were exempt, yet China is producing more than 50% of the carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere.” Diane Francis, FP.
This glaring example of an incredibly poor level of fact checking by Diane Francis and the fact checkers at the Financial Post is unfortunately not all that rare when it comes to the realm of energy and emissions. An area that the business community not only knows very little about but is seemingly dedicating most of its efforts at remaining in the dark. The result being their spreading of reams of misinformation (disinformation?) at almost every turn.
Now I do not know exactly how much CO2 China is responsible for emitting but what I and every one who knows anything at all about the subject of energy and emissions does knows is A) The U.S. is the largest C02 emitter in the world and B) they are responsible for producing about 25% of the CO2 going up into the atmosphere. What is also very likely true is that even Diane Francis knows this little bit of datum and still somehow manages to fail to connect this very well known truth to the following bit of rather elementary logic:
If the U.S. is the largest single CO2 emitter in the world. And they are at about 25% of the world’s total. Then asserting that China is producing more than 50% of the world’s total is quite obviously bonkers.
And yet not even to this level of “truthiness” could Ms. Francis and her team rise.
The other bit of very elementary understanding that she and her team failed to exhibit is the fact that:
A) Energy consumption and C02 are at least for now inextricably linked. (A linkage we are very much in need of breaking.)
B) What everyone who knows anything at all about this subject also knows is that the U.S. is easily the world’s largest gobbler of energy at about 25% of the world’s total. (i.e. 25% Energy & 25% Emissions. aka. No mere coincidence)
By the by I just Googled the question of C02 emitters by country and after an exhausting 1.2 seconds of searching Google gave me the UN list of countries ranked by C02 emissions. On this list China is ranked second at just slightly over half the US total. O.K. so let us do this incredibly complicated bit of ciphering shall we?
Since the U.S. produces 25% of the world’s total. And China’s total is just slightly more than half of the U.S. total. Then this is not exactly what anyone other than the mathematically challenged Diane Francis and her fact checkers at the Financial Post could call:
“…producing more than 50% of the carbon dioxide going up into the atmosphere” The part that I really love is her insistence on emphasizing “more than”. Utterly wrong AND emphatic about it.
Canada by the way is the 8th largest producer of C02 in the world about 1/7 of China’s total. Now I’m not exactly sure what the mathematical relationship of our population to their population is these days, and I’m way too tired from my last exhausting bit of fact checking to look it up, still I’m willing to guess 1 to 7 it ain’t.
(Oh alright I’ll look it up……the relationship is almost exactly 1 to 40. I will have to go have a bit of a lie down now though: that one took Google a whole 1.3 seconds)
It would be fish in the barrelish easy and over the top of me to go on like this through the whole of her article so I will merely conclude with this little gem from her piece:
“Canada is only 2% of a worldwide problem. Canada has absolutely no obligation to do anything that others aren’t doing.”
That’s one way to look at things I suppose . Another is absolutely no obligation other than:
1) Being signatory to an internationally binding treaty.
2) Being 32.8 million of the world’s population of 6.5 billion means we are over-represented by a factor of 8 in terms of our C02 emissions. (And the only reason we look even this good is the other very bad actors help out our average.)
3) Being perhaps the most uniquely advantaged country of the 21st century in terms of what nature has bequeathed means we will continue to have access to wealth and power (in the physics sense of the term) far beyond the wildest dreams Croesus ever had.
Given this truth to say we are under no obligation to lead is as nonsensical as it is morally and ethically reprehensible. To lead by definition means to go where others have not. And if not the richest and the most privileged then who? Especially given that our privilege arises in the whole mostly by the mere accident of our being born here.
Now I know I said I would only blast one more fish from her very small barrel and I’ve already done that but the following one is I’m sure you will agree quite simply irresistible.
“They would have us believe it’s all about capitalism and fat cats and Big Oil. But it’s not.”
In Thomas Homer Dixon’s latest book “The Upside of Down” he takes a look at the skew that exists in terms of the distribution of wealth amongst the various populations of the world. One of the most interesting revelations from his analysis of the data is how similar that skew is within the populations of the wealthy countries as it is between the populations of the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere. The upshot being that the top 10% is consuming an ever greater proportion of the world’s energy and resources and most of the growth in this percentile is coming from the top 1%.
What this has resulted in as most of you likely already know is an explosion in the numbers of millionaires and billionaires worldwide. An explosion happening at the same time that we are watching biomass, species and the middle classes disappear. The first two directly attributable to the power that oil, coal and natural gas have given us to maximize harvest unsustainably.
Finally, Mathew Simmons the founder of Simmons International the world’s largest investment bank for the Oil & Gas services sector, 37 years in the energy industry, said recently at an international energy conference, “After moving away from the day to day business of investment banking I studied for almost a year the per capita energy numbers and the per capita wealth numbers and it was the education of a lifetime.”
So what again is it about and not about ma chère Diane?
ton confrere,
Jeff Berg Post Carbon Toronto
p.s. “The darkest of ironies is that it now very much appears that we are using up our non-renewable resources at a rate and in such a way as to ensure that we run out of them at just about the same time that we will have finished the job of collapsing our renewable ones.” ~ Senor Juan G. Carbonel.