Roman Ephesus, Keystone XL and Arctic Oil

Right-wing financial newsletters push investments in oil, and bitumen resources, like Canadian tar sands and even Venezuela's unconventional hydrocarbons, as well as fracking for natural gas. To them, it's a golden opportunity to make pots of money--and nothing else.

They act as if there never was any discussion of global warming, except by impractical people, who just don't want to make money. We've had the warmest years on record and Arctic ice is melting rapidly. There is the violent weather, forecast as a consequence of global warming. There are clear signs of climate change all around us, plus sufficient data, accepted globally except in the US, that it's caused largely by human activity--but these guys can't wait to get their money into the oil deposits newly accessible in the arctic seas!

In the first century, BC, Ephesus was the Asian capital and port for the Roman Empire. There's a page about it on this website. It was one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean world, with a population of 250,000. But it's port slowly silted up, because the surrounding hills were deforested for fuel, to fire the baths, and to build the cement forms needed for Rome's monumental buildings. There is graffiti from that period, memorializing public anxiety by the city's officials that their prime harbor would soon be unusable. Ephesus is now miles from the sea; it was largely abandoned when ships couldn't use the harbor. Afterwards, continued erosion covered the city with enough silt to preserve it; preserved for present day tourists (in Turkey, near Selcuk).

Now, consider: while the counselors cautioned against cutting down all the trees, there must have been businessmen who scoffed and said, we need fuel; people want the baths; you're being impractical. Besides, I can make thousands on this. (Numbers were smaller in those days).

Our "officials" appear much more timid than the Ephesians, because they're faced by the demands of rapacious capital, and the people who play with it to get rich regardless.

Obama's (temporary) blockage of the Keystone XL pipeline is a step in the right direction. A more significant (and painful) step is the movement by developing nations like Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria to nationalize their oil reserves, and limit production, which raises the price for oil. I don't like $4 gas, either. But we'll never get off fossil fuels, to slow global warming, unless higher oil costs drive us to solar, wind and bio-fuels.

It is the institutional power of fossil fuel industries worldwide, which drives our suicidal environmental policy, plus the logic of capitalism, which disregards environmental costs. There is also the military that makes all this possible. Now it's time to throw off their power, and with it, any need for empire.

Alternative energy might enable us not to have to abandon large swathes of this planet as uninhabitable--if we can learn from the Ephesians.

Mechanics That Are Beyond Us

We think we should be able to drill oil, mine coal, or tap natural gas wherever we find it, no matter how difficult the conditions. The technology for surface mining of coal--used in mountaintop removal--is fairly simple, if drastic environmentally. Oil drilling in deep sea, however, must use highly sophisticated technology.

Up until the Gulf disaster, the industry assumed that the redundant safety devices would prevent blow-outs. But they were using the technology at greater and greater depths, both of water and of earth beneath it. Deepwater Horizon is far from the deepest well, however.

They had four devices, each of which, alone, was supposed to prevent a blow-out. The first was a cement plug just above the tapped oil, the second, a similar plug several thousand feet below the sea floor (the oil is 13000' below it). The third was the blow-out preventer, which was supposed to be able to shut off the pipe, and the fourth was a shear in the preventer, that would snap off the pipe and clamp it shut.

All of those safety devices failed. It's argued that a second shear, often installed in a blow-out preventer as back-up, might have worked. It might have.

But, blind faith in a blind shear isn't just blind; it's hubris. Perhaps the technology, as sophisticated as it seems, isn't yet up to the task. Considering that an offshore well like Deepwater Horizon can commit ecocide on a huge scale, we can't settle for 9 out of ten, or 99 out of 100. We have to be absolutely sure that there will be no accidents, or that we can clean up any accident, regardless of size, before any environmental damage.

Or, build solar panels and wind turbines like mad.

I predict we won't do either. After all, well-drillers need jobs.

The Roman Empire contributed to the desertification of North Africa (it had been its granary), because it needed food for its huge population; it deforested the Mediterranean because it had to keep its baths good and hot. Wasteful patterns, once established, are hard to change. It's likely that Rome's ecological wastefulness contributed substantially to its impoverishment. The good counselors of Ephesus pointed out the danger of stripping the hills of trees, but the city's port became silted up anyway: probably, contractors to the baths had to keep cutting wood, until it was gone. And then Romans did the same thing in Rome and Ravenna.

Will we now poison the whole world in our inability to leave oil and coal behind, and use renewable, non-polluting energy?

The oil companies--and the coal companies--need their profits; the drillers and miners need their jobs. The companies are politically well connected. What do you think is the most likely outcome?

How can we change it?

Scream bloody murder--of the Earth. It's that serious.

Man The Gambler

Man the Gambler

Some of the most densely populated places on earth are either close to, or even below sea-level, and the seas are rising.

Many people cluster in places they know are high risk: of earthquake, flood, or volcanic eruption. These places happen to be some of the most fertile in the world, like the Nile Delta, and the Tigris and Euphrates in the ancient world, places like Java and the deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra in India and Bangladesh, or of the Mississippi delta in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Why do they have high populations? They are highly fertile, the basis for Empires like Egypt and Sumer. Adaptable humans are gamblers. Every farmer or peasant bets their crops will flourish; they don't always. A Javanese farmer can expect bumper crops because of benign climate and rich soil, but he might be ruined by a volcanic eruption. So, he cultivates crops, right up the slope of Mount Lurus, or any of the 33 other volcanoes on the island, and if it erupts, he could be wiped out. If not, for this season, he's golden.

Women are probably less gamblers than enablers. Their first priority is to protect their children by ensuring that a man supports them. If he insists that their land on the volcano is the best, they aren't going to demand that the family move--until it's too late.

Romans took another kind of gamble, when forests were cut down for Roman baths with the bet that nothing would change: as I describe on my Ephesus page, everything did: Ephesus, Rome's Asian capital before Constantinople, has been a ruin for two thousand years.

Which leads us to dangerous climate change (a label preferable to 'global warming'): aren't the deniers, like EXXON, Senator Inhofe and Rush, gambling with all our lives? They're gambling that dangerous climate change isn't going to happen, even though all the know-it-alls say it is. Everyone who denies climate change, or our part in it, is gambling that it just ain't so.

What happens to people who lose their gamble?

In places like Java or Bangladesh, farms, even farmers get burned out or washed away. Some who gambled don't survive.

In the case of dangerous climate change, we may all lose, eventually. However, the people who suffer first, are those least at fault, in poor, under-developed countries. Therefore, high stakes gamblers can keep on gambling, denying and "winning" through short-term "investments." Yet, even the winners lose if warming is unchecked, if we pass tipping points like the arctic tundra melting to release huge methane deposits.

Can't we gamble that preventative measures could work; instead of gambling that they aren't needed?