Some recent articles caught my eye. Here are three of them:
Crude oil is getting cheaper – so why isn’t gas? Short answer first: greed. Longer answer: the oil price reported in the media is West Texas crude. It’s currently selling for less than other oil grades around the world. The gas we fuel our vehicles with? It’s processsed from that foreign oil. The article actually mentions that refining capacity for West Texas crude is less than for other types of crude. Why aren’t more refineries built? Well, that would cost oil corporations money – money they’d rather see in executive bonuses and stock dividends. Don’t think this benefits your retirement account. As most of us are now aware, the only people who benefited from stock payouts were the already mega-rich. That won’t change anytime soon. So when you’re paying more than $2 per gallon again this year, keep in mind all the record profits the oil corporations posted last year. The money that we’re all paying at the pump every day could go to building refineries and lowering the price at the pump, but it’s not.
Escalation of troops in Afghanistan. I’d be happier to read news reports of large-scale, detailed plans to revitalize the infrastructure of Afghanistan. At this point, I think troops are necessary. But they’ll be worth less in the long-term if fundamental issues aren’t addressed at the same time.
New Antarctic research station is carbon-free. It won’t stop deniers/delayers from further beating their dead talking-point horses, but this article is good news for realists. The station uses wind mills, solar panels and water recycling … in Antarctica. If buildings in Antarctica can be built as zero-emitters, do you think they can be built on the rest of the continents? Darn right.
The only beef I have with the last article is its treatment of two separate facts. Both are important (and correct) alone, but the writer did nothing to merge them coherently. They are:
Scientists monitoring global warming predict higher temperatures could hasten melting at Antarctica, the world’s largest repository of fresh water, raising sea levels and altering shorelines. If Antarctica ever melted, world sea levels would rise by about 180 feet.
That would impact some 146 million people living in low-lying coastal regions less than three feet above current sea levels, researchers said.
On the path toward total Antarctic ice sheet melt (the continent itself can’t melt, by the way), sea levels would obviously rise 3 feet before they rose 180 feet. So if a 3 foot sea level rise would impact 146 million people, what kind of an impact would sea level rises between three and 180 feet have? More than the number indicated in the article.
A two-year old paper indicated over 400 million people for selected parts of the globe. That’s bad enough. When you factor in recorded sea-level rise amounts have already exceeded earlier estimates, that number is likely to be higher. And what about the rest of the globe that the study didn’t examine, such as the west coast of the U.S. and most of Africa?
While the article could have benefited from some additional context, I was glad to see the information that did make it in. We must rein in greenhouse gas emissions. Millions of peoples’ livelihoods and untold numbers of plants and animals depend on it.
