| CHAPTER ONE TAKE HOLD OF THE FUTURE |
Solving the greatest sustainability challenge, which is the cost of changing how we live
12 January 2010, 2.31 am, –23°C, Muskeg River Mine, Alberta
The earth shakes and trembles under glaring floodlights as 80 tons of brown, oily sand thunder from a giant digger into the back of one of the largest dump trucks in the world.
Caterpillar 797B trucks have four jumbo wheels as tall as small houses, and lumber day and night across the uneven mine floor, each carrying over 400 tons of earth, in which there is 12,000 gallons of thick oil – around 30 gallons per ton. Their engines take colossal strain. One violent change of gear and the huge machine could be out of action. One burst tyre – and the waiting list for a replacement can be up to 18 months.
Our world uses 44,000 gallons of oil every second – so if these Canadian sands were all our oil, those same trucks would need to mine 1,500 tons of sand a second, 90,000 tons a minute, or 5.4 million tons of sand an hour.
They are certainly digging fast. Vast 1,450 ton shovels are eating away tens of thousands of square miles of the surface of Alberta, in search of more black gold. An ancient forest the size of Greece, or Bangladesh or Florida, is being destroyed in the world’s largest open pit mining operation. Over 54,000 square miles of wild, virgin landscape will be consumed in the next few years – and much of its native wildlife. All to get at hidden oil reserves that are greater than all the rest of the world’s put together – apart from Venezuela, which has even more oil sand of its own.
Some of these sands are only a few metres down, and can be mined by stripping the surface of trees, vegetation, soil and surface rock. Others are over 250 metres down – too deep to dig. But you can inject them with steam or hot water to melt the sticky bitumen out of the sand.
Either method uses vast amounts of energy – up to 25 per cent of all the carbon extracted is needed just to keep the machines going. And water too: over five gallons per gallon of oil, all of it grossly contaminated, stored in toxic lakes so large that they can be seen from space. These sands could produce over 3 million barrels of oil a day by 2015 – but at what price?
As diggers and trucks churn their way across the horizon, they are followed by giant land-fillers, to try to repair the damage, and then by tree planters.
Machines give us power to destroy at breathtaking speed. A single driver, sitting in a heated cab 30 feet above the Alaska sands, can dig 5,000 tons an hour – or 100,000 times faster than by hand.
But the oil beneath has gone forever.
We cut and burn rainforest the size of 30 football pitches every minute – 40 square miles a day, destroying 10 million tons of plants and animals. As a result, eight more species of plants and animals are lost forever every hour – extinct.
Future generations will be shocked at how fast we burnt the surface of the earth, as well as vast stores of ancient fossil fuels below. They will be astonished that we burnt 500 billion tons of carbon in 250 years – and were about to burn another 250 billion tons in the next 20 years.
They will try to understand how we allowed the earth’s human population to treble from 3 to 6 to 9 billion, from 1960 to 2000 to 2050.
They will learn that there were 1 billion children growing up at the same time in 2010.
Size of the problem
We are consuming the world’s resources 20 per cent faster than they can recover – whether fish in the sea, groundwater levels or forest trees.
We can continue our rape of the planet, or work together to save our future.
Our planet cannot possibly go on delivering the relentless, destructive economic growth that every nation seeks, as things stand today. We would need all the resources of two or three earths if the lifestyles of all those in emerging nations were the same as in wealthy nations.
Some say the answer is to consume less, buy less or do less. While that message may work with a few, it will not save our future – at least not in time. Of 9 billion people alive by 2050, at least 7.5 billion will be in Asia and Africa, most of whom will have known great poverty. They will expect to consume more, buy more and do more than their parents ever did.
Others say the main problem is over-population and the answer is birth control, but family size is already falling fast in most of the world, as incomes rise.1 Birth control is important and gives choices to women, but the greater challenge is supporting future lifestyle growth, rather than preventing more babies from being born.
More than 2 billion people will migrate to cities over the next 40 years, leaving their mud huts and other traditional dwellings. They will aspire to middle class lifestyles, and many will achieve them. But unless action is taken, most will end up in over-crowded slums with open sewers, toxic water and fumes, and will be vulnerable to disease, flooding, drought, hunger and despair.
Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are 40 per cent higher than 200 years ago. Our world warmed 0.74 per cent °C in the last 100 years, mostly since 1970.
Despite all these urgent and complex challenges, we believe that most of the human race will have a great future, even with more than 9 billion people living on earth at the same time. This book explains why and how, what is likely to be done, and actions that each of us can take in our business, homes and wider world.
At some point it will become clear to almost all humankind that the crisis we face is so serious, so severe and so immense, that massive action must be taken now, with a level of commitment that we have only ever seen before in a world war. We are being forced to act, not because we are certain of terrible catastrophes, but because such actions are the only insurance we have to reduce the risk of them happening.
That is why governments will introduce huge numbers of new taxes, regulations, laws and subsidies. Old business habits will land managers in prison. Old, lazy ...