How Globalisation is the answer to saving the planet

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How Globalisation is the answer to saving the
planet!

• VI form Science Club

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Things are not really all that bad..
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The Litany
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The problems
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The problems
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The problems
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The problems
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The problems
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The problems
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The problems
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The problems
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The problems
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The problems
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The state of the world today
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Other minerals

• The only minerals with seriously limited supplies
  are
• Gemstones 35 years
• Talc 36 Years
• Silver 28 Years

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Paul Ehlrich

• Psychologically, the population explosion first
  sunk in on a stinking hot night in Dehli. The
  streets were alive with people. People eating,
  people washing themselves, people sleeping,
  people working, arguing and screaming. People
  reaching their hands in through taxi windows to
  beg. People shitting, people pissing. People
  hanging off buses. People driving animals through
  the street. People, people, people.

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Growth of the cities

• The World Resources Institute
• Urban areas in developing countries produce 60
  of the GDP with just one third of the
  populationcities are growing because they
  provide, on average, greater social and economic
  benefits that no rural areas.

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Back to the litany

• The battle to feed humanity is over. In the
  course of the 1970s the world will experience
  starvation of tragic proportions hundreds of
  millions of people will starve to death
• Paul Ehrlich, 1968

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• Globally the proportion of people starving has
  fallen from 35 to 18 and is expected to fall
  further to 12 in 2010
• The proportion of children in the developing
  world considered to be undernourished has fallen
  from 40 to 30 over the past 15 years, and is
  expected to fall further to 24 by 2020

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• These changes have been bought about whilst the
  world population has doubled.
• The actual number of people starving in the Third
  World has fallen
• 1971 920 million
• 1997 792 million
• 2010 680 million

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• Today more than 2 billion more people are not
  starving.
• At the same time the price of food has continued
  to fall.

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Distribution of wealth

• Fantastic progress has been made in reducing
  poverty in developing countries. During the last
  40 years the social indicators have been improved
  in all regions. In the past two decades, poverty
  has been drastically reduced in East Asia from 6
  out of 10 living on less than 1 a day in the
  mid-1970s, to 2 out of 10 in the md-1990s World
  Bank

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Save the Forests!

• The WWF President said in a Press Conference in
  1997 I implore the leaders of the world to
  pledge to save their remaining forests now at
  the eleventh hour for the worlds forests
• Worldwatch Institute deforestation has been
  accelerating in the last 30 years

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• Global survey after global survey has shown an
  increase in the area of the world covered in
  forest over the last 30 years
• In 1991 Norman Myers claimed that by 2000 we
  would lose two thirds of the tropical rain
  forest.
• The latest actual estimate of loss of tropical
  forest 0.46 per year and slowing.

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Oil Reserves

• When I was at school we were told we would run
  out of oil by the year 2000!
• Latest KS3 text books suggest 2030!

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• As time goes on we continue to find more and more
  oil deposits
• As the price of oil goes up reserves that were
  once considered uneconomic become viable.

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• Should oil prices rise by about 33 shale oil
  would become a viable oil supply
• We would then have sufficient oil supplies for
  more than 5000 years.
• It is most unlikely that we will be relying on
  oil for that long.

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• The stone age did not come to an end due to a
  lack of stones.
• The oil age will come to an, but not due to a
  lack of oil!

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Water

• There has been a lot of hype about water
• A 1995 paper entitled Global water crisis the
  major issue of the 21st century, a growing and
  explosive problem
• The real data does not support this hype.

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Water

• We do need
• Better management
• Better pricing
• Import substitution
• There will be no wars over water!

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Air Pollution

• In 1257, the Queen of England, visited
  Nottingham, she found the stench of smoke from
  coal burning so intolerable that she left in fear
  of her life.
• In 1307, air pollution was so bad in London the
  burning of coal was banned!
• In 1661 most Londoners breath nothing but an
  impure and thick mist, accompanied by a
  fuliginous and filthy vapour, corrupting the
  lungs

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Air Pollution

• In the 18th century
• the city ditches, now often filled with stagnant
  water, were commonly used as latrines butchers
  killed animals in their shops and threw the offal
  of the carcasses into the streets dead animals
  were left to decay and fester were they lay
  latrine pits were dug close to the wells.
  Decomposing bodies of the rich in burial vaults
  beneath the church often stank out parson and
  congregation

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Air Pollution

• 1742 Dr Johnson
• great quantities of human excrement were cast
  into the streets at night time when the
  inhabitants shut up their houses

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Air Pollution

• The last severe smog in London, in December 1952,
  killed 4000 Londoners in 7 days.

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Water pollution
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Exxon Valdez a catastrophe?

• 1989 leaked 266,000 barrels of oil.
• (25 times smaller amount than that released
  during First Gulf War)
• Exxon paid 2.1 billion for the clean up

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Exxon Valdez a catastrophe?

• 9,000 miles of coastline affected
• 300 seals killed
• 2,800 sea otters
• 250,000 sea birds
• Pacific herring stock collapsed.
• oops sorry, nothing to do with Valdez, that
  was a virus.

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Exxon Valdez a catastrophe?

• 250, 000 birds lost terrible
• (that equals the number lost in the UK every 2
  days due to domestic cats)
• (or less than the number killed in 1 day by
  flying into windows in the USA)

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Exxon Valdez a catastrophe?

• Of the oil
• 20 evaporated
• 50 was broken down
• 12 is in lumps on the bottom of the ocean
• 3 is in non-toxic lumps on the beach.

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Exxon Valdez a catastrophe?

• Most of the marine life was killed as a result of
  pressure hosing the beaches.
• In beaches left un-cleaned, life returned to
  normal after 18 months.
• On the cleaned beaches it took over 4 years.
• The oil experts knew this to be the case, the
  Litany demanded a clean up!

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Exxon Valdez a catastrophe?

• Scientific American
• the public want the animals saved at 80,000
  per otter and 10,000 per eagle even if the
  stress of their salvation kills them.

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Exxon Valdez a catastrophe?

• The price of the cleanup totalled more than 2.1
  billion, and it probably did more harm to the
  natural environment than it did to repair it.
• What better use could that 2.1 billion have
  done?
• (Incidentally, it was less than 2 of the
  pollution caused by power boats in the USA each
  year).

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The problems
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Waste

• If ALL the USAs waste, for the next 100 years
  went into land fill sites, it would take up
  0.009 (one-12,000th) of the US land mass.

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The problems
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