No subject

for agriculture are particularly worrisome. According to the UN's World
Food Program (WFP), 57 countries - including 29 in Africa, nineteen in
Asia and nine in Latin America - have been hit by catastrophic floods
during the past few years. Harvests have been affected by drought and
heat waves in South Asia, Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay
{8}. In 2007 the Australian government said drought had slashed
predictions of the coming winter harvest by nearly forty percent, or
four million tons {9}.

Altogether, human-induced climate change constitutes an environmental
impact of a scale never before seen during the period of human
civilization. Because coal produces higher emissions per BTU of energy
yielded than does oil or gas, as these other fossil fuels deplete and
become more scarce and expensive, and as higher-quality coal depletes
and nations turn to lower-quality coals, the climate crisis will only
grow worse - unless cleaner sources of energy are developed quickly, or
unless total energy use declines.

Efforts to capture carbon at power plants and sequester it in deep
geological deposits could theoretically reduce the environmental burden
from coal consumption, but there are snags and tradeoffs to that
solution, as we will see in chapter eight.

There is currently an enormous push underway to develop a global
agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, using cap-and-trade
mechanisms to ration rights to emit carbon. This may turn out to be the
most significant global policy discussion in world history, and it will
have enormous implications for, among other things, the problem of
global economic inequity - since national levels of per-capita energy
consumption correlate closely with per-capita GDP.

Such a policy would also significantly impact the development of coal
industries worldwide, and entire national economies that depend on coal.
But if size of the coal resource base is smaller than is generally
believed, this would also have enormous implications for climate
science, climate policy, and economic planning at all levels of society.


In short: two of the defining trends of the emerging century - The
Development of the Asian Economies, and Climate Change - both center on
coal. But coal is a finite, non-renewable resource. Thus any discussion
of the future of coal must also intersect with a third great trend of
the new century: Resource Depletion.

These three overarching trends, which will determine the future of our
species, must inevitably coalesce - but how? Can current trends in coal
consumption be sustained? If not, what does this mean for the global
economy and for the environment? If such trends cannot be sustained, how
will our energy future unfold? These are, of course, enormously complex
questions - which we will attempt to unpack during the course of this
book. But it is probably best to begin with a more rudimentary,
apparently mundane question upon which these others directly or
indirectly pivot: How Do We Know How Much Coal We Have?

Notes

1. John Gever, Robert Kaufmann, David Skole, and Charles Vorosmarty,
Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades
(Ballinger, 1987), page 87

2. Richard Heinberg, The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil
Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse (New Society, 2006)

3.
http://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2001rank.html

4. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3854/is_199901/ai_n8833707/pg_1

5. Appalachian Voices website:
http://www.appvoices.org/index.php?/site/mtr_overview/

6. Robert J Saiget, "China's Coal Addiction Causing Environmental
Disaster", Terra Daily website (November 06 2006)
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/China_Coal_Addiction_Causing_Environmental_Disaster_999.html

7. "Is the Ocean Carbon Sink Sinking?", RealClimate website (November 01
2007)
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/11/is-the-ocean-carbon-sinksinking/

8. John Vidal, "Global Food Crisis Looms as Climate Change and Fuel
Shortages Bite", The Guardian (November 03 2007)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange

9. Ibid.

http://globalpublicmedia.com/heinberg_museletter190


http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
http://www.ashisuto.co.jp

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/