[Vision2020] "Five Thousand Gulf Oil Spills" 168 Responses
Paul Rumelhart
godshatter at yahoo.com
Sun Jul 4 10:36:19 PDT 2010
The BP "spill", "disaster", "gusher", or whatever you want to call it is
a direct threat to the wildlife in the area and to the pocketbooks of
thousands of people that live off of the fishing and tourism industries.
On the other hand, with respect to those 5000 concurrent "oil
disasters", at least we are getting something out of it. Like moving
goods from point A to point B, creating fertilizers and plastic, heating
our homes, providing the energy we need day-to-day for a variety of
tasks, and so forth. And despite a tremendous effort to say otherwise,
there is reason to believe that the effects of all those "oil disasters"
might not be as bad as they would like us to believe. It all goes back
to the question of feedbacks, and what their magnitude is.
Having said that, oil is a dirty technology that we would be better
suited moving away from. It pollutes, it keeps us tied politically to
unsavory foreign countries, and there exists the capacity for BP-style
oil spills.
I wish the folks in charge would try to hammer that message home.
Paul
Ted Moffett wrote:
> I agree that "spill" is not an accurate word to describe the Gulf of
> Mexico oil disaster. I have heard the word "gusher" used... This
> conveys the event more accurately.
>
> But the point of the Realclimate post and discussion is not on the oil
> gusher impacts alone, but that global fossil fuel use and land use
> emissions into our atmosphere equals the carbon contained in five
> thousand of these oil disasters happening at once.
>
> I have not verified the accuracy of this number. But no doubt the
> amount of carbon being dumped into our atmosphere by global fossil
> fuel use alone, or even just total US use of coal, oil and natural
> gas, must be many many times the amount of carbon contained in the oil
> gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
>
> The science regarding the impacts of 5000 Gulf of Mexico oil disasters
> worth of carbon being dumped into our atmosphere for decades and
> decades is compelling, that this ongoing environmental disaster as it
> induces extreme climate change and ocean acidification, will long term
> be of a far far greater and global magnitude than the impacts from the
> Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.
>
> Yet there is not the same level of political and public urgency and
> action to address this much greater environmental disaster:
>
> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/06/five-thousand-gulf-oil-spills/
> --------------------
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html
>
> August 9, 2009
>
>
> Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security
>
> By JOHN M. BRODER
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/john_m_broder/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
>
> WASHINGTON — The changing global climate will pose profound strategic
> challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the
> prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent
> storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and
> intelligence analysts say.
>
> Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist
> movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at
> the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are
> taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate
> change
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.
>
> Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next
> 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa,
> the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect
> of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by
> climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or
> military response.
>
> An exercise last December at the National Defense University
> <http://www.ndu.edu/>, an educational institute that is overseen by
> the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in
> Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into
> neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of
> contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets real
> complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant
> secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon
> group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security
> strategy planning.
>
> Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused
> on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that
> contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an
> international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.
>
> But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising
> temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to
> the national interest.
>
> If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel
> consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of
> this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and
> possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to
> address.
>
> This argument could prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next
> month when it takes up climate and energy legislation passed in June
> by the House.
>
> Lawmakers leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to
> make the national security argument for approving the legislation.
>
> Senator John Kerry
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/john_kerry/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign
> Relations Committee <http://foreign.senate.gov/> and a leading
> advocate for the climate legislation, said he hoped to sway Senate
> skeptics by pressing that issue to pass a meaningful bill.
>
> Mr. Kerry said he did not know whether he would succeed but had spoken
> with 30 undecided senators on the matter.
>
> He did not identify those senators, but the list of undecided includes
> many from coal and manufacturing states and from the South and
> Southeast, which will face the sharpest energy price increases from
> any carbon emissions control program.
>
> “I’ve been making this argument for a number of years,” Mr. Kerry
> said, “but it has not been a focus because a lot of people had not
> connected the dots.” He said he had urged President Obama
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
> to make the case, too.
>
> Mr. Kerry said the continuing conflict in southern Sudan, which has
> killed and displaced tens of thousands of people, is a result of
> drought and expansion of deserts in the north. “That is going to be
> repeated many times over and on a much larger scale,” he said.
>
> The Department of Defense’s assessment of the security issue came
> about after prodding by Congress to include climate issues in its
> strategic plans — specifically, in 2008 budget authorizations by
> Hillary Rodham Clinton
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/hillary_rodham_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
> and John W. Warner
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/john_w_warner/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> then senators. The department’s climate modeling is based on
> sophisticated Navy
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/us_navy/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
> and Air Force weather programs and other government climate research
> programs at NASA
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_aeronautics_and_space_administration/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
> and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
> <http://www.noaa.gov/>.
>
> The Pentagon and the State Department have studied issues arising from
> dependence on foreign sources of energy for years but are only now
> considering the effects of global warming in their long-term planning
> documents. The Pentagon will include a climate section in the
> Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February; the State Department will
> address the issue in its new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.
>
> “The sense that climate change poses security and geopolitical
> challenges is central to the thinking of the State Department and the
> climate office,” said Peter Ogden, chief of staff to Todd Stern, the
> State Department’s top climate negotiator.
>
> Although military and intelligence planners have been aware of the
> challenge posed by climate changes for some years, the Obama
> administration has made it a central policy focus.
>
> A changing climate presents a range of challenges for the military.
> Many of its critical installations are vulnerable to rising seas and
> storm surges. In Florida, Homestead Air Force Base
> <http://www.homestead.afrc.af.mil/> was essentially destroyed by
> Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and Hurricane Ivan badly damaged Naval Air
> Station Pensacola <https://www.cnic.navy.mil/Pensacola/index.htm> in
> 2004. Military planners are studying ways to protect the major naval
> stations in Norfolk, Va., and San Diego from climate-induced rising
> seas and severe storms.
>
> Another vulnerable installation is Diego Garcia, an atoll in the
> Indian Ocean that serves as a logistics hub for American and British
> forces in the Middle East and sits a few feet above sea level.
>
> Arctic melting also presents new problems for the military. The
> shrinking of the ice cap, which is proceeding faster than anticipated
> only a few years ago, opens a shipping channel that must be defended
> and undersea resources that are already the focus of international
> competition.
>
> Ms. Dory, who has held senior Pentagon posts since the Clinton
> administration, said she had seen a “sea change” in the military’s
> thinking about climate change in the past year. “These issues now have
> to be included and wrestled with” in drafting national security
> strategy, she said.
>
> The National Intelligence Council, which produces government-wide
> intelligence analyses, finished the first assessment of the national
> security implications of climate change just last year.
>
> It concluded that climate change by itself would have significant
> geopolitical impacts around the world and would contribute to a host
> of problems, including poverty, environmental degradation and the
> weakening of national governments.
>
> The assessment warned that the storms, droughts and food shortages
> that might result from a warming planet in coming decades would create
> numerous relief emergencies.
>
> “The demands of these potential humanitarian responses may
> significantly tax U.S. military transportation and support force
> structures, resulting in a strained readiness posture and decreased
> strategic depth for combat operations,” the report said.
>
> The intelligence community is preparing a series of reports on the
> impacts of climate change on individual countries like China and
> India, a study of alternative fuels and a look at how major power
> relations could be strained by a changing climate.
>
> “We will pay for this one way or another,” Gen. Anthony C. Zinni
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/z/anthony_c_zinni/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> a retired Marine and the former head of the Central Command, wrote
> recently in a report he prepared as a member of a military advisory
> board on energy and climate at CNA, a private group that does research
> for the Navy. “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today,
> and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind.
>
> “Or we will pay the price later in military terms,” he warned. “And
> that will involve human lives.”
>
> ------------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>
>
> On 7/1/10, *keely emerinemix* <kjajmix1 at msn.com
> <mailto:kjajmix1 at msn.com>> wrote:
>
> Good point, Warren. I don't believe there's a word to adequately
> convey the magnitude of what happened here. "Spill" is what
> happens when I knock over my glass of Cabernet. This is not that,
> and what's happened in the Gulf isn't a "mishap" or "error,"
> either. It's a horror, a grievous disaster, and an unmitigated
> tragedy. That it may not be a crime in no way reflects any
> lessening of its severity, only decades of governmental
> indifference to environmental concerns.
>
> Keely
> www.keely-prevailingwinds.com <http://www.keely-prevailingwinds.com/>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: whayman at roadrunner.com <mailto:whayman at roadrunner.com>
> To: starbliss at gmail.com <mailto:starbliss at gmail.com>;
> vision2020 at moscow.com <mailto:vision2020 at moscow.com>
> Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:51:20 -0700
> Subject: Re: [Vision2020] "Five Thousand Gulf Oil Spills" 168
> Responses
>
>
> I think we should try to keep our vocabulary in line with
> actuality. The Gulf oil disaster/irruption is not a spill. Such a
> term possibly reflects a misunderstanding of both magnitude and
> geology.
>
> Warren Hayman
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Ted Moffett <mailto:starbliss at gmail.com>
> *To:* Moscow Vision 2020 <mailto:vision2020 at moscow.com>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, June 30, 2010 7:38 PM
> *Subject:* [Vision2020] "Five Thousand Gulf Oil Spills" 168
> Responses
>
>
> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/06/five-thousand-gulf-oil-spills/
>
> Five Thousand Gulf Oil Spills
>
> Filed under:
>
> * Climate Science
> <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/>
>
> — david @ 16 June 2010
> That’s the rate that people are releasing carbon to the
> atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation
> today. I know, it’s apples and oranges; carbon in the form of
> oil is more immediately toxic to the environment than it is as
> CO_2 (although CO_2 may be more damaging on geologic time
> scales). But think of it — five thousand spills like in the
> Gulf of Mexico, all going at once, each releasing 40,000
> barrels a day, every day for decades and centuries on end. We
> are burning a lot of carbon!
>
> Comments (pop-up) (168)
> <http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=4120>
> -------------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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