The First World Is Destroying the Third World Through Climate Change By Nathan Curry
As the effects of climate change in the Third World worsen, developing nations may soon face a massive influx of refugees. Image via Flickr About 500 years ago, capitalism started to displace feudalism as the dominant socioeconomic system on the planet. There were about half a billion humans wandering around then, and about 80 percent of them were living hand-to-mouth existences and relying on subsistence agriculture. It wasn’t until the replacement of animate energy (biomass) with inanimate energy (fossil fuels) in the West during the 19th century that the global population started to grow exponentially, ballooning to its current level of over 7 billion. (To understand what powered this increase, consider that a teaspoon of diesel fuel contains as much energy as a human can expend in a day.) This transition from diffuse/currently available solar energy to stored/concentrated solar energy transformed every aspect of society, from manufacturing to agriculture to transportation to life expectancy. Basically, the last 200 years of exponential industrial and population growth have been subsidized by ancient, compacted sunlight. It took about 200,000 years for the human population to reach 1 billion (~1800 CE), 130 years to reach 2 billion, 30 years for 3 billion, 15 years for 4 billion, and around 13 years each for 5, 6, and 7 billion. The UN is predicting that reaching 8 and 9 billion will take 16 and 19 years respectively, meaning the rate of population growth might have peaked around the year 2000. It’s probably not a coincidence that this growth corresponds pretty closely with the easy availability of ancient stores of fossilized energy. It has been argued that without fossil fuels, the carrying capacity of Earth would be around 1 to 2 billion humans. To put it bluntly, we’re reaching peak everything. We’ve blown through our one-time inheritance of natural capital (fossil fuels, topsoil, groundwater, biodiversity) like the crazy, hairless apes we are. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius—the Swedish polymath, future Nobel Prize winner, and founder of physical chemistry—was the first to propose the idea that burning fossil fuels could raise our planet’s temperature. After doing a bunch of “tedious” calculations, he concluded that by “evaporating our coal mines into the air,” humans could raise the temperature of the planet by five or six degrees Celsius. This is eerily close to modern predictions made by computer-aided climate models. In the last few decades, humans have finally started to understand and accept that industrialization and infinite-growth capitalism—those systems that have given some of us in the developed nations the luxuries of modernity—have also increased atmospheric greenhouse gas levels to the point where we’re all headed toward a hotter, more unstable home planet. The shittiest, most ironic thing about it all is that in the next few decades, as our oil-soaked socioeconomic systems continue to unravel, the poorest and least developed populations with the lowest CO2 emissions will face the most dire consequences of human-induced climate change. Enter the era of justifiable Climate Rage. Poor countries in Latin America, South America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia are demanding rich countries that have benefitted from 150 years of unabated carbon dioxide emissions pay their dues. They claim that if the developed nations want to restrict the emissions of the developing nations, they need to pay for the technological leap to bypass the early, dirty stages of modernization and energy production as well as provide funding to deal with the current and future effects of climate change. full: http://www.vice.com/read/the-first-world-is-destroying-the-third-world-through-climate-change _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
