Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
World Trade Center, another smashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth
crashed into a Pennsylvania i eld on its way to the White House. h e
most destructive terrorist at acks in history prompted many Americans
to turn their minds to energy. Fit een of the nineteen at ackers were
Saudi Arabian nationals, and Riyadh remained the world capital of oil.
Washington and the nation began talking in earnest about the continu-
ing dangers of dependence on oil.
Four years later, environmental concerns vaulted to the core of the
energy agenda. On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina
struck land over southeast Louisiana. Later the same day, the levees
that were supposed to shield New Orleans from the ocean broke, dev-
astating the city, forcing more than a million residents to evacuate, and
killing well over a thousand residents. People were quick to draw con-
nections to climate change: scientists couldn't say that global warm-
ing had caused the hurricane, but with mounting emissions of carbon
dioxide from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, uglier weather
appeared to be in store.
h en, in 2008, those concerns were joined by economic ones. When
the world celebrated the beginning of a new millennium on December
31, 1999, a barrel of oil cost barely more than twenty-i ve dollars.
Beginning in 2002, though, crude prices began a steady march upward,
ultimately breaching $145 on July 14, 2008. Markets would eventu-
ally crash in September of that year, when Lehman Brothers declared
bankruptcy, ushering in the worst of the Great Recession. But the U.S.
economy had already begun to contract in late 2007. h e housing mar-
ket was front and center in the explanation, but many people, including
some prominent economists, blamed the rapidly rising cost of oil.
Energy was back at center stage. So was the classic trio of concerns—
economics, security, and environment—and the old debates and divi-
sions over what to do. Yet the world has changed dramatically since the
bat le lines were set in the 1970s. h e U.S. economy is now twice as large
as it was four decades ago, yet improved ei ciency means the average
American uses less energy than she did then.
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h e Cold War is over: no
longer must the United States worry that the Soviet Union might invade
the Persian Gulf, dominating global oil resources and denying them to
the free world. Climate change was barely a blip on scientists' radars in
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