Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
average annual rate of 1.5 percent between 1980 and 1990, to 0.9 percent
between 1990 and 2005, and a projected 0.4 percent average annual rate
from 2005 to 2030. So even in the one country in the world with a policy
of regulating or taxing population growth, the energy impact of that
policy has been undermined by income growth.
Keeping people in poverty is clearly not the solution to the fossil-fuel
crisis for many reasons. For one thing, energy is essential to achieve
a number of development goals, such as providing people with water,
food and health care. For another, the renewable and low-carbon energy
sources needed to replace hydrocarbons are usually much more expensive
than the hydrocarbons - poorer nations will need subsidies and support
from rich nations in order to afford them.
And adapting to a warmer global climate will cost money. Indeed, the
argument of climate-change sceptics such as BjØrn Lomborg is that, if
man-made global warming is actually occurring, money is better spent
on adaptation than mitigation. In other words, countries would be better
advised not to throw their money at a climatic trend they cannot prevent,
but to focus on straight economic development and use their resulting
extra wealth to build defences against rising ocean levels - such as higher
sea walls around their port cities.
However, the probable scale of climate change's effects - as examined
later in this section - make these economic arguments seem more than a
little short-termist.
Mobility
Mobility is perhaps
the
defining feature of our globalized economy and
way of life. Raw materials and goods are constantly being shipped around
the world. The Chinese economy depends on imports of raw material
and uses them to churn out manufactured products that are exported
throughout the globe. All this transport and transformation of materials
and goods increases energy use. But mobility is of course by no means
confined to produce. Economic migrants move to other countries to bet-
ter themselves, become richer and, as a consequence, use more energy.
Then there is the personal mobility revolution provided by the car. As
with everything else, car-use is proceeding apace in China. The number of
vehicles there rose from 5.5m in 1990 to 37m in 2006. Nearly two-thirds
of these were private cars, and until the world-wide downturn of 2008-09
this number was accelerating. The annual increase in new-car sales in
China between 2000 and 2006 was 37 percent, and China surpassed
