I am a Sad Cinderella

It is nearly midnight, and like a woebegotten Cinderella, I sit in the lab-or-atory obsessing over my poster presentation. I attempted to derail myself last week by pretending that I am not the anal perfectionist that I know I am - but to no avail. Today, I slowly became immersed in creating the images for my poster on seedling growth trait plasticity and adult anatomical plasticity. They are just so pretty - and I need to get the lines exactly even or else. You all know what I mean. Anyways, luckily for you guys, I have managed to pry my eyes away from the upcoming presentation in order to give you a few snippets of news. First, I got an email from Experience today about a cool Earthwatch contest they are hosting. I suspect that many of you, like myself on occasion, delete Experience emails or are not even on their listserve. I am going to give you all two peices of advice. First, it was just such as email that landed me this job (an excellent, fulfilling and rewarding job at that). Additionally, the email I received today looks like an amazing opportunity for those interested. All you do is send in a photo about why the environment is important and a caption explaining the photo. If you win, you get to go on a cool Earthwatch trip to Costa Rica, Kenya, Fiji or others. The trip and airfare are both included if you win the top prize. Anyways, plenty more details at thte website below:

http://www.experience.com/alumnus/channel?channel_id=earthwatch&page_id=home

In other news, the Green Room at BBC has published yet another disappointing piece which caters to the Liberal Litany of guilty environmentalism without properly citing any statistics or justification. You will see what I mean. Today's Green Room View point is entitled "Focus on carbon 'missing the point'" and is written by Eamon O'Hara, an Irish political advisor to the UN. He believes that climate change and carbon emissions are merely the symptom of a greater problem, the excessive lifestyles of developed nations at the detriment of the global poor.

Eamon O'Hara writes:

"Ultimately, our problem is consumption, and the environment is not the only casualty. The modern Western lifestyle also has an inbuilt dependency on the cheap resources and the low carbon footprint of developing countries, which has compounded global injustice. Worse still, maintaining our relatively wealthy, comfortable and unsustainable lifestyles is now dependant on maintaining this imbalance. Seventy-five percent of the world's population - more than 4.5bn people - live on just 15% of the world's resources, while we in the West gorge on the remaining 85%. The world simply does not have the resources, renewable or otherwise, to sustain Western lifestyles across the globe."

I have several responses. First, I do believe that certain aspects of the developed world lifestyle have been bought with the suffering of the global poor. This is unacceptable, immoral and inhuman. I hope our generation will begin to honestly confront these issues. I also believe that the developed world does not give enough in terms of money, medical supplies and food to developing nations. However, I do not agree with O'Hara's fundamental premise - that consumption in and of itself is evil, and I find his attempt to moralize carbon emission disturbing. Emissions in and of themselves are not moral in my mind. Carbon is emitted when ambulances speed down the streets, bringing the sick to hospitals and carbon emission have allowed us to increase our standards of living drastically within the last 100 years (globally as well as nationally). We realize now that carbon emissions are causing the world to slowly warm, and that each degree rise may be globally detrimental - but lets not moralize carbon emissions. No matter what environmentalists and others like to insinuate with their addiction analogy, oil is not herion. Secondly, I believe (and this has been well supported in the past) that the wealth of developed nations is not dependent on the poverty of developing nations, and furthermore, that there is not a finite amount of wealth available. Therefore, I believe it is possible to continue to increase the global standard of living and at the same time cut down on carbon emissions.

There have been plenty of papers justifying the fact that many world resources (such as oil) are not yet at their peak. Additionally, according to most life standard statistics, global suffering has been decreasing each decade for hundreds of years (For more information on these statistics, check out "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Lomberg or google economics papers on peak oil reserves). I am not saying we don't need to continue struggling to make the world a better place - we do, because it is not nearly good enough yet. But neither should we fall prey to this unwarranted gloominess, this feeling that the our own "sinful" lifestyle is responsible for global warming. Consumption, economic growth - these things are not morally wrong. They are the lifeblood of the world -and we can make them less dependent upon carbon without slowing growth. At the very least, this should be our goal.

A few more points. Mr. O'Hara does not cite any of his statistics - be very wary of this in general. He also seems to believe that renewable resources are not truly renewable - arguing that biofuel is not renewable. However, few could argue that the traditional renewable sources of energy, the ones which hold the most promise in my mind are solar and wind. And these two are renewable.