The world needs better planning

Hugh Holland.

Fifty million years ago, world temperatures were 10 degrees Celsius warmer than today and Alberta was a sub-tropical home to dinosaurs, whose fossilized skeletons are on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. About 20,000 years ago, much of North America and Europe was covered by thick ice, and about one million humans survived the ice age in sub-tropical Africa.
Scientists tell us that these dramatic shifts in temperature were caused by gravitational forces that over hundreds of centuries change the earth’s tilt and exposure to the sun.
Scientists are now telling us that global temperature is rising at a rate that cannot be explained by natural causes, and is due to a blanket of greenhouse gas resulting from deforestation and fossil fuel use.
The world is facing a classic dilemma. How can we:
1. Meet the resource needs of a world population that is projected to reach 10 billion by 2060?
2. Make a fast and massive transition from fossil fuel energy to renewable green energy?
3. Maintain a high level of education, health care, and help for the needy?
4. Improve the life of aboriginal peoples?
5. Keep world, national, state, and municipal deficits and debt within sustainable limits?
The short answer is we can’t, unless the UN, the IMF, and the G20 can work together to accurately identify the root causes of the biggest problems, and agree to a few key strategies to fix them.
Hundreds of environmental organizations are pressuring governments to take actions to reduce CO2 emissions. Actions are being taken, but we are fighting a losing battle because the other root-cause, a human population that is surging towards the earth’s carrying capacity, is not being addressed.
It took 20,000 years since the last ice age for world population to reach one billion in 1800, 160 years to reach three billion in 1960 when scientists began to raise warning flags about pollution and global capacity, but only 40 years to double to six billion by 2000, and it is projected to reach 10 billion by 2060.
About 20 per cent of the world’s population lives in the more-developed countries. We are consuming 80 per cent of the world’s resources and producing 80 per cent of the CO2 emissions. (Canada produces 1.8 per cent of world CO2.) But the growth rate of their native-born population has fallen below zero in those countries. The 80 per cent of the world population that lives in less-developed countries is growing at four per cent per year, which means they double every 18 years. They are mainly responsible for the ongoing deforestation to provide land for agriculture and living space for their exploding population. But more agriculture produces more CO2 and methane, and deforestation reduces the absorption of CO2.
There are a host of historical reasons for the imbalance, but what can be done about it now? Would cutting the GDP of developed countries by 50 per cent to 75 per cent solve the problem? Not likely. Developed countries must keep their oxygen masks on, so they can help the developing countries that desperately need help. Raising GDP for the 80 per cent in developing countries will further increase consumption and CO2.
But a solution in which the 20 per cent in more-developed nations reduced their use of fossil fuels and the 80 per cent in less- developed nations stabilized and reduce their populations could work to the benefit of all.
In developed countries, education (especially for women) changed aspirations and birthrates fell below replacement level. That could serve as a model for developing countries.
How can that model be replicated in places like Africa, where the population multiplied five times from 200 million to one billion since 1950? Developed countries need to provide more help for developing countries to achieve good government and better education (especially for women), through increased trade, aid, and likely some military interventions. That could take three or four generations.
Naïve? Impossible? Perhaps, but what is the acceptable alternative? It doesn’t take a genius to see that world population will eventually be stabilized and reduced by one means or another; if not by some humane means as suggested here, then by the continued depletion of forests, energy, water, food, and a series of climate-related catastrophes.
No political party anywhere gets a warm response when they ask any income group to give up anything to help reduce deficits or fund the energy transition. Thus trying to fund the transition too quickly would delay and diminish the ability of the 20 per cent to help the 80 per cent, and do more harm than good.
So for some time, the world will continue to need sources of oil that are affordable, and accessible with the least overall environmental risk. It is doubtful we can ever eliminate the need for oil as the fuel for agriculture and aircraft.
It is estimated that Canada’s oil sands could contain about half of the world’s remaining accessible oil. The oil sands are not the horror story they have been made out to be. With today’s in-situ methods, extraction from the oil sands poses less overall environmental risk than extraction from deep sea sources, especially in the Arctic. A recent study by Dr. Andrew Weaver, a respected climate scientist at the University of Victoria in B.C. concluded that burning all 170 billion barrels of proven oil sands reserves would raise global temperature by a further .03 C, 33 times less than the one degree Celsius of warming that would be induced by burning the world’s coal reserves.
What is the best way to transport oil sands product to markets? Pipelines pose less environmental risk than any other method. Surely when we can wirelessly receive, store, and send thousands of data, messages, pictures, videos, and songs with a single device the size of a granola bar, we can engineer and build a pipe, with remote wireless sensors and control valves, to safely transport oil. And surely we can engineer a fleet of ships sized to safely navigate the harbour at Kitimat B.C.
None of this is rocket science. All that is required is for provincial, state, and federal governments to impose a set of regulations and penalties that are rigorous enough to ensure that oil extraction and transportation systems are properly engineered, built, and maintained by the private sector.
Canada, a stable and generous nation, is blessed with a vital asset that can enable us to be a reliable source of the energy needed by the world, can play a major role in maintaining our education, health care, and lifestyle, and can enable us to help developing nations improve theirs. But for all of that to play out, voters and leaders must take the time to understand and connect the many dots.
Hugh Holland is a mechanical engineer and a retired auto-industry manufacturing executive. He retired to Huntsville in 1995 and is a member of the Rotary Club.

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