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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 March 2000 Issue No. 473 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 March 2000 Issue No. 473
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Uncivil engineering
By Peter SnowdonWith the resignation of Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik last week, Norway became the first country in the world to see a government fall over the issue of global warming. Bondevik, who for the last 28 months led a minority coalition government that prided itself on its environmental correctness, finally lost the support of parliament through his unflinching opposition to a plan to build two new gas-fired power stations. His objection was grounded on the fact that if the project goes ahead -- as now seems likely -- Norway will no longer be able to meet its commitments under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 23 per cent by the year 2010.
Both Conservative and Labour opposition parties rushed to accuse Bondevik of green hypocrisy. Norway, the world's fourth-largest exporter of natural gas, currently has to import electricity from Denmark in order to meet its needs. This Danish electricity is produced by coal-burning plants, which are far more polluting than their gas-fired equivalents. For others, however, the real hypocrite in the piece is the young, charismatic and highly ambitious Labour leader, Jens Stoltenberg, who has taken advantage of the situation to wrest power into his own hands. Stoltenberg is expected to announce his government this week.
Part of Norway's problem is that the hydro-electric power on which it has relied in the past is no longer an acceptable solution, because of the damage which it does to the country's picturesque fjord landscape. Elsewhere in the world, however, people are refusing to have new dams imposed on them for more fundamental reasons than the merely aesthetic. Tuesday this week was designated an international day of action against large dams by activists across five continents. As funding for the highly controversial (that is to say, massively destructive) Three Gorges project in China is once again cast into doubt, communities around the world have been highlighting the damage done by these huge -- and hardly "civil" -- engineering projects, which wash away the livelihoods and homes of rural communities, so that benefits may accrue to a privileged urban-consumer class -- that is, when they materialise at all.
At Maheshwar in India, a new indefinite sit-in was launched by thousands of people hoping to stop construction work on a dam which will displace more than 61 villages and submerge some 5,700 hectares of land (see this column, passim). In Africa, meanwhile, activists were preparing to protest the construction both of Ghana's third major hydro-power dam at Bui, which will make some 30,000 people homeless, and of the controversial Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which has been mired in allegations of corruption for the past year.
While hydro-electric power may seem to offer an environmentally-friendly alternative to fossil fuels, it generates its own specifically ecological problems, in addition to consuming vast tracts of productive land and destroying the homes of entire communities. The huge weight of water behind large dams is now recognised as a primary cause of increased earthquake activity, as well as threatening disaster of a more self-sufficient sort should the barriers holding the water back chance to collapse. (Many dams have been, and still are being, built in geologically fragile areas, where no amount of engineering expertise can make their structures completely safe.) Moreover, projects such as the recently completed Urra dam in Colombia and the Tucurui dam in Brazil have led directly to the devastation of huge areas of virgin forest, the remains of which are simply left to decompose in the water, where they rapidly return whatever carbon dioxide they had fixed over their lifetimes to the atmosphere. Like industrial agriculture, which increases the quantities of greenhouse gases released by clearing woodlands, enlarging the livestock population, and dumping millions of tons of organo-phosphate fertiliser into the surface soil, hydro-electric power is one of the main causes of global warming, not part of the solution.
Of course, the vested interests, both material and psychological, of the urban-consumer classes mean that the reality of climate change is generally ignored, when it is not simply denied. After all, how well would you sleep at night, knowing that your oven-ready meals, your A/C units and your new Sting-Cheb Mami CD were not the intrinsic goods for which you innocently take them, fit to form the cornerstone of a thousand-year civilisation, but simply by-products of something far more insidious -- the disjecta membra of a Byzantine industrial-financial system that on the verge of making the entire surface of the planet more or less inhabitable to man?
Those who like horror stories will enjoy a new study of the retreat of the earth's ice cover released this week by the US-based World Watch Institute. According to the author, the Arctic ice cap has already shrunk by an estimated six per cent since 1978, a process equivalent to losing an area the size of the Netherlands each year, while its average thickness has reduced from 3.1 metres to 1.8 metres. Mountain glaciers throughout the world are also in rapid retreat and, if present trends continue, are likely to halve in size over the next 100 years.
The consequences of such large-scale dissipation of the planet's ice cover are hard to predict with certainty. But one thing is sure: there will be massive disruption for human communities, as well as for the environments with which their lives are intertwined. Sheet ice is one of the planet's main cooling devices, reflecting back sunlight which would otherwise be absorbed as heat. Thus, as the ice surface retreats, a positive feedback loop kicks in, accelerating the already-disastrous warming process.
The melting of the polar ice caps, combined with the thermal expansion of the oceans themselves, will inexorably lead to rising sea levels, rapidly submerging the coastal areas that are home to half the world's people. Global sea levels rose by as much as 10 inches over the last century; but that is simply a foretaste of what is to come. The loss of the Antarctic ice sheets would by itself raise them a further 70 metres. A mere six metre rise is all that is needed to submerge London, New York and Bangkok, along with most of the world's arable land.
Elsewhere, the erosion of glaciers threatens to decimate inland communities which depend on meltwater for their livelihoods, such as the cultures of the Ganges and Indus valleys in India, or the city of Lima in Peru. The likely result will be, first, massive flooding, followed by a long, perhaps permanent period of quasi-drought.
Yet still, none of the powers that be are really prepared to tackle the problem of what one journalist this week dubbed "the First World Debt."
Meanwhile, the damage caused by man continues to accrue disproportionately to the people of the South, who bear the least responsibility for it. The case of Mozambique is emblematic in this respect. Already facing the worst flooding in its recorded history, the people of the southern African country are now waking up to another deadly consequence of the last month's torrential rains. Artur Verissimo, head of the National Mine Clearance Institute, told reporters last week that hundreds of thousands of mines left buried after the civil war which ended in 1992 may have been dislodged by the wall of water which has swept across the country. As a result, existing maps of land mines will have been rendered useless. To date, only 10 per cent of mines laid are estimated to have been cleared.
Now, not only will the mammoth task of locating those still in the ground have to begin all over again, but the hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by the floods will be once more exposed to the risk of random injury and death as they return to their lands to try and reconstruct their daily lives.
