Iraq and Global Warming

(Part 1)

It is a fact that the only thing that moves humanity is money; power and other accessories come with it. Therefore, money is the final answer to every conspiracy theory out there -about anything.

This pops up the most important question that the world faces right now. How do we stop Global Warming from destroying our planet? It also helps to answer a key question about George´s impulse to invade Iraq despite the lack of evidence against Saddam Hussein. Why did he do it?

Two hypotheses will be analyzed as I try to explain how money is the only determinant behind failed policies and also unprovoked wars.

First hypothesis: The only factor that will function in the race against Global Warming is taxes on everything that emits pollution.

Second hypothesis: The only reason why the United States attacked Iraq was money.

Just in case that you don’t find any connection between this two hypotheses learn this. The Iraq war is running at $5000 a second, according to Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times, but it is finance with debt, not with taxes as it should had been. If you tax people they will complain and the support for the war would had fallen years ago. So it is universal that if you want to change people’s behavior -as a government- you have to do it by affecting everybody´s income. That is why if you are talking on real terms about Global Warming, you need to tax polluters. This is a caveat that we need to address seriously, otherwise we will continue to hear Al Gore from years to come.

First of all we need to assume that there is Global Warming and that this is caused by man, we will leave other theories out because even if there is no Global Warming, and even if it is not caused by men, we need to acknowledge that our present level of contamination is bad enough on itself.

Let’s put Global Warming on a single person perspective. On your work place you see a lot of waste by most of your co-workers. They print too many things on new paper, they don´t recycle, they don’t turn their computers off after work, lights are usually on even when they are not needed, heating systems, cooling systems, and any other artifact that keeps the temperature as you want, are unnecessary set to high standards.

And that is just with things that are part of your working experience –feel free to add any other wasteful act or to demostrate that attitude. But if we go forward to a more expanded network of activities we see that our companies in general, are enclave in part of some serious natural damaging businesses.

Look at you production lines (not good examples of thrift) and try to come up with every item that pollutes in great scale some part of your environment. If you are into developing software, do you care if your computes will be recycled after you are done with them? If you export flowers, do you care if the boxes and paper that cover them will be recycled by the florists? If you work at a newspaper, do you care what happened to the millions of papers that you print every year? The examples could be infinite.

This is going forward in your business, what about going backward. Do you know where the paper that you use at the office comes from? What about the light that is provided to your company, or the new laptop that you bought? Is is part of your concerns to focus on where those new wooden desk come from? Were those trees planted specifically for industrial purposes? Or were those trees cut from a natural reserve forest?

A troubling study found out that Global Warming has a exponential effect –I will not get too much into technical details that you can easily research- on how it acts over delicate ecosystems. The study “quote needed” found that when trees are under extreme conditions of heat they stop emitting oxygen. This pose an uncontainable problem, if trees are located in extremely warm places in the world, they won't help in absorbing carbon dioxide but instead they will contribute to the already excessive pollution. Scared already? If they don’t convert carbon dioxide into oxygen the heat on the planet accelerates even further.

A separate study on the Arctic – by NASA- found that “emissions of black soot alter the way sunlight reflects off snow”. Therefore, energy that the sun emits to that particular place is absorbed, warming up the zone even more. So when the ice cap melts, the consequences are disastrous. There is no way to stop the sun from reaching those places, there is no way in the first place to keep that ice cap from melting. And you know what comes after this. The ice melts, it warms up the ocean, the sea level increases, the currents are altered and the extreme weather developments after this, run rampant tearing down the planet. It makes you begrudge the past or at least our present when you think about this perspective; billions of people that live in low areas will be affected by flooding, coastal areas will be swallowed by the ocean, and let’s not even talk about the increase of hurricanes, droughts, heaving rain, extreme weather conditions (torrid areas absorbing thousands of kilometers). What will happen to our offspring?

There are important questions to ask. Is it too late to stop the earth from overheating? What if we control the emission of green house gases, would that help? or could that only decelerates the inevitable? What if what we need to do is not just stop the current warming of the planet, what if we need to cool it down?

As far as we can see if our ice age is over and the uncontainable warming of the earth is not just a product of our human irresponsible behavior, any action that we take right now won’t stop the planet from getting hotter, it will probably just delay that. This doesn't mean that we should act as if the inevitable death is a blank check on our acts. As Robin Williams said when he played the role of Patch Adams in the movie with the same name. "Our job is improving the quality of life, not just delaying death”.

The main actions, thought comes to the inevitable. If we are to maintain our standard of living, we need to take serious improvements in our wanton behavior. If you have to pay too much for a specific service you have two options. The fist one is keeping your present consumption as if nothing has changed, the second one will be to lower your consumption.

But this will only work if we believe that man is driving the temperature to records high.

Let’s assume that this is the case, the green house gases that are thrown into the atmosphere are the only cause of global warming. So in order to stop global warming we need to stop emitting those green house gases. Industries don't have any reason to do that if there is no serious consequence on their actions, common citizens are unwilling to change their behavior for a good cause. That is why taxes come as the only predictable solution in the table -any other proposal is sophomoric.

Changing from fossil fuels to biofuels is not right either, on a Newsweek article Michael Grunwald talks about the enormous threat that this poses on the Amazon where deforestation is destroying the entire ecosystem. We are not only losing trees, as the Amazon is deforested carbon is free into the atmosphere, this has made Brazil “fourth in the world in carbon emissions”, according to the same article. The Amazon is being killed because as we embrace biofuels, they turn into a lucrative business that expands at a fast rate. Since there is no other place where you can grow crops to produce biofuel, the agriculture expansion has no other way to go but into the Amazon, which lost in the second half of 2007 a chunk the size of Rhode Island.

A way to change this is by enacting laws that punish people who are destroying the environment, it is also important to drive the international community to assume the responsibility of paying countries like Brazil so they can protect the Amazon. To do this you need political will, but this will is tie to electability, so members of the United States Congress –in general- won’t take their chance if this is not supported by the constituencies. This is why the whirlwind war in Iraq could be the best foreign policy decision that George has taken, even when the consequences are different from the original ones.

The fact is that when the war helped out to an unprecedented increase of the price of oil tied up to the devaluation of the dollar, people started taking serious steps in order to reduce oil consumption. This being the case, much of the next important inventions will be driven by energy promoted investigations, hybrid cars, cities run by renewable energy, thousands of solar panels, millions of wind turbines, etc. Which may end up provoking a radical change into our lives. Who gets this right will be the power of this century, too bad for China as it struggles with Tibetan monks while their water supplies are disappearing completely -and they don't even shudder-.

Such improvements won’t have enough resources unless governments keep the price of oil at the current level. What can be done is, as Thomas L. Friedman said before, tax oil consumption. This will mean that no matter what happens in the coming future, people will always pay high oil prices. So any other energy source will substitute petroleum without having to be competitive on regular basis. On the other hand this is also a much needed energy independence policy. Global markets won’t panic if the fact that middle east is at war, or if Chavez claims that the empire won’t get his oil, or if Russia threatens to cut gas supplies to Europe, or if Africa sums into a continental genocide.

Taxing just oil is not enough though. What needs to be done is to complement the global fight on high temperatures by reducing emissions in every direction possible. This means that companies should be more energy efficient, take for example what Texas Instruments did when it built its new eco-friendly plant (RFAB).

The transformation of our black world to a green world may take decades to complete, however, this may include side effects too. If you think that ethanol is the next big thing, there are thousands of considerations that you need to take. If the final product uses less energy than it produces, if the products where it comes from (corn for example) is threatening the food supply for millions -take what Jean Ziegler said to reporters in New York, “that converting crops such as maize, wheat and sugar into fuels was driving up the prices of food, land and water”, according to the UN News Center. If you go for nuclear energy, what about the threat of nuclear waste, where will you storage those? Solar power could be the answer, only if you have enough materials to make it true. Wind power will face the same consequences. The best solution could be to adapt them to every specific situation in each region, or to combine the best of them.

This development will only be expanded to the masses if the price is competitive. With the surge of India and China, followed by many other third world countries the balance between what is produced of oil and coal and what is consumed is negative. In the years to come what the price will do is to go up even more, destroying the economies that depend too much on it and also empowering undemocratic regimes all over the world.

To give you an idea of the scenario is the current China-Darfur situation. China gets oil from Sudan where it has heavily invested, which means that Sudan is protected by a superpower that will look to the other side when it agrees to its interests. Sudan will maintain its power as long as it holds large amounts of petroleum. The same will apply to Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, etc. All this petro-states will not have the wiliness to invest in alternative sources of energy as long as the price of oil is high. So the principal source for global warming will be there at the current level.

This is an important point to take into account when you try to understand how natural resources will be handled in the future. If it is settled that the current level of pollution will threaten the world, we need to reduce the amount of pollution, simple isn't it? But since the scenario will look like what was described above, the reduction can’t be a reality. Here is why:

Even if the United States, Europe and Japan lower their green house emissions, the rise of every other nation in the world and the incremental amount of resources and energy that they consume will overcome the reduction of emissions from this powers. Places like China will continue to rely on oil and coal to supply its much needed energy. Sudan and Nigeria will have the same autocrat governments repressing its own citizens with no serious punishment from the international community. What this means to the environment is that while much of the world will be transforming their current predator behavior, some other part of it will engage in just that.

What taxes could do on this case is to keep the price of oil high enough to make new developments available for the masses. So, my hope is that the United States and Europe set high standards to their industries, tax polluters and encourage entrepreneur spirit, therefore, at some point in the future the rest of the world will have cheap alternative sources and can detach itself from oil and coal.

This may not be enough, as I said before the chances that stopping our current levels of pollution won't horten the Armageddon. The earth is already feeling extreme heat and cold weather on diverse parts of it, simultaneously. A startling drought in the Amazon could destroy millions of trees turning green areas into desserts and vaporizing 20 percent of the global supply of oxygen. The discovery of alternative energy sources that replace entire lands of crops will starve millions of poor people. Our only hope? That our scientists are wrong and we still have time to change the future of the planet.

On the second part of this article I will analyze how the war in Iraq allocated billions of dollars that could had been used to improve the life of Americans in incalculable ways, in the hands of few corrupt companies that wasted the unique opportunity of creating a dream society -with élan- in the Middle East. I will also put in perspective the connection of Global Warming, Iraq and our priorities as society. How foreign policy is developed and how we are securing our natural resources.

I hope that for now Global Warming deniers at least take the plethora of opportunities in reducing pollution, even if they don’t believe in the end of the world, as we know it.