ENERGY, DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT

DEVELOPMENT VS. ENVIRONMENT?

Must we forget development if we want to preserve the environment? Can’t we upgrade efficiency of the tools for developoment?

ALTERNATIVE FOSSIL FUEL SOURCES: A STRONG CONTROVERSY

Exploitation of alternative fossil fuels such as shale gas, tar sands, fracking, etc. face an unsolvable controversy: desperately needed for development, and strongly promoted by oil companies as part of their monumental business, they are strongly opposed by environmentalists and neighbourhood  populations.  There is an urgent need to promote efficiency either through investment or through regulation.

The world seems to have an insatiable thirst for energy needed for development and its most readily available source are fossil fuels. But many argue that there are many environmentally clean sources of energy beyond fossil fuels such as eolic, solar, ocean, geotermal, etc. It is true that  fossil energy is a more or less readily available source of energy and it is, at the same time, a monumental business for the energy corporations. A clash between both interests, the environment and the oil industry is no doubt inevitable.

Among the environmentalists’ reasons to fight fossil fuels exploititation and use are, beside the emission problems and their climate change effects, the high risks of pollution that threat populated areas. The amounts of fuel that can be obtained through those technologies are immense. But the threats to nearby populations are also huge.

A recent article titled  ENERGY WARS: FIRST NATIONS GROUP SAYS PROCESS TO EXPAND OILSANDS 'LIKE AN ENVIRONMENTAL HORROR STORY’ (by: Les Whittington Ottawa Bureau reporter, thestar.com, Published on Mon Jun 02 2014, cited by EHN Monday, Above The Fold, 02-06-2014) describes the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s conflict with oilsand developers that has attracted international attention and their fight to slow oilsands expansion has run head-on into the far-reaching overhaul of federal environmental rules brought in by the Conservatives in Canada two years ago.

The Athabascans have survived for thousands of years hunting, fishing and trapping along the Athabasca River in northern Alberta, Canada. But today the 1,200 members of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) are caught up in one of the largest industrial developments on the face of the planet — the expansion of the sprawling, land-devouring oilsands operations intended to produce 5.2 million barrels of oil a day by 2030.

The oilsands boom is seen by petroleum companies and the Harper government as essential to Canada’s future economic strength. But to the ACFN, it means something entirely different: troubling cancer rates, contamination of vital waterways and damage to their homeland, livelihood and culture.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University, seriously explain the speed at which the Earth is approaching an environmental disaster due to its apparently unstoppable warming. In his article in La Nación, Economy, Sunday June 1st, 2014, Sachs mentions that between 1992 and 2013 emissions rose from 22,600 million tons of CO2 to 34,500 tons. He  says that “this is the major moral problem of our day: the use of fossil fuel threatens the poor, the most vulnerable to the climate change induced by man”. And he goes on reminding that “ the public opinion has blocked the construction of the Keystone XL oilduct which would accelerate the exploitation of Canada’s oil sands, something scandalous since neither Canada nor the US commited to a climate plan”. 

On last Saturday’s Opinion page of the already mentioned La Nación, Alieto Guadagni, member of the Argentine Academy fo Environmental Science, mentions that the Work Group I of the Interguvernmental Pannel on Climate Change warns that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is the highest of the last 800.000 years. The defunct Kyoto Protocol did not reach an international agreement on the remediation of the unstoppable increase in CO2 concentrations in the air: developed nations want to continue developing their economies at any cost and look away at the need of serious agreements regarding climate change. The most damaging effects of climate change will be suffered by the poor nations that are those that contribute less to the emissions.

This notwithstanding, a slight change in attitude towards the climate problem seems to begin to be noticed in the two countries that are the main responsible ones for most of the greenhouse emissions: the USA and China. Not that we can dream of significant changes to occur all of a sudden, but it is to be hoped that the authoirities of the emitting countries will put some pressure on the energy producing corporations, and either through suggestion or through the use of executive institutional power promote an increase in efficiency that will allow the signficant slow down on Earth’s downfall. There should be no opting between development OR the environment. A healthy balance could be reached resigning some inordinate expectations on both sides, and using the power of the economy and the mind to achieve reasonable objectives. Jorge Casale, Blog’s Editor.