Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Joined: Mar 04, 2005 Posts: 2758 Location: New Zealand
Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 2:25 am Post subject: Heat: how to stop the planet burning
Heat: how to stop the planet burning
Quote:
In Heat, the environmental activist and thinker George Monbiot tries to bring the debate about climate change closer to known facts and reasonable conjecture, avoiding the woolly thinking that is so prevalent on the subject. The result is a book that anyone who thinks they know what should be done about global warming must read. One virtue of Monbiot's consistently heretical inquiry is that he recognises the magnitude of the danger: if present trends continue, the result could be a climate shift analogous to that which wiped out much of the world's biodiversity when the Permian era came to an abrupt end roughly 250 million years ago. Even if the change turns out to be much less dramatic, we can forget about carrying on with business as usual.
newstatesman _________________ Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. H. G. Wells.
Fatih Birol's motto: leave oil before it leaves us.
Joined: Oct 23, 2005 Posts: 1850 Location: East of Eden
Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 6:10 am Post subject: Re: Heat: how to stop the planet burning
A good review, thanks for posting it. The parallel to the Permian extinction was chilling. I was interested in the paragraph discussing biofuels production:
Quote:
Biofuels are a particularly dangerous panacea. To reduce our dependence on fossil fuels significantly, we would need to plant them on a vast scale, further reducing the world's shrinking inheritance of land and water. A large part of the present crisis is a result of the agricultural destruction of wilderness, which plays a vital role in maintaining global climate. Between 1985 and 200o, production of palm oil - currently the cheapest source of biofuel - accounted for nearly 90 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia. A large-scale shift to biofuels - as advocated by George W Bush, for example - could have a comparable effect worldwide, increasing the harm done by farming while diminishing food production. The result would damage human welfare and the biosphere as a whole. As Monbiot notes: "Biofuel production is a formula not only for humanitarian disaster but also for environmental catastrophe."
That's exactly what worries me most about Peak Oil: that in the scramble for alternatives, we'll conveniently ignore the greater disaster waiting in the wings and bring it on that much faster and harder. Peak Oil does not solve global warming, and may make it worse.
Though a serious, if short, read, I couldn't help but chuckle at this tidbit:
Quote:
Humanity at large is ridden with intractable conflicts, and delusional bigots rule its most powerful state.
Not that I really disagree. _________________ "If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst." — Thomas Hardy
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