|
Civil servants of the Pyeongchang county office in Gangwon Province ride bicycles as part of an energy saving campaign amid spiking oil prices Wednesday. / Yonhap |
 By Rick Ruffin
High oil, corn and wheat prices just might save the human race. That's because when the government fails to act, and when people fail to act, the market steps in and sets things straight.
We have been spoiled by years and years of cheap oil. Malaysia subsidized oil for its consumers for decades, then raised the prices 40 percent overnight.
China, also a subsidizer of oil, raised diesel and gasoline prices about 15 percent overnight. These measures were only taken after years and years of government subsidies that have made people view relatively cheap oil as normal.
However, some people, in spite of high prices, still refuse to consume less. South Koreans are a perfect example. While in the United States people are consuming 5 percent less oil than a year ago due to rising fuel costs, in South Korea people are driving just as much as before.
A recent article in The Korea Times showed that bus companies are threatening to curtail their services because of high fuel costs. That's pretty strange.
These high petrol prices should be a boom to public transportation everywhere. Buses should be SRO (standing room only) because of the current high fuel prices.
If we really want to see lower oil prices, we should start driving less. According to the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, more than 50 percent of all oil in the U.S. is consumed by individuals driving private automobiles. Maybe we will stop driving so much when the price of oil hits $200 a barrel.
Why do people need to drive less? Well, for one thing, people in the Third World aren't getting enough to eat because the corn they normally eat is going into the petrol tanks of SUV's in America.
America is the world's largest grain exporter, yet one in four bushels of corn is converted to ethanol so Americans can drive their cars 500 meters to the convenience store to buy nachos and cheese.
Why do we need to consume less? Because worldwide grain stocks are the lowest they have been in history. Because for seven of the last eight years, the human race has consumed more food than it has produced.
In his book ``Collapse,'' Jared Diamond writes that the demise of every great civilization begins with food shortages.
China, now an affluent nation, is converting 1.3 billion people to meat consumption. This is going to put enormous strain on agriculture everywhere. Raising livestock is a hugely inefficient undertaking.
According to Lester Brown, producer of the ``State of the World'' report, approximately 1.4 billion people could be fed from the grain and soybeans used to feed U.S. cattle alone.
A report recently published forecasts a world population of 7 billion people by the year 2012, but I don't think that's going to happen. High food and energy prices are going to put a huge brake on human population growth, which will in turn put a lot less pressure on resources and the environment.
In short, the current energy and food crisis is a good thing, a blessing in disguise. The question is, can we learn from our mistakes? History shows we are condemned to repeat the past.
Lester Brown was recently in South Korea. The Harvard trained PhD and founder of World Watch Institute coined the phrase ``sustainable development'' back in the early seventies, about the same time that the Club of Rome published their report ``The Limits of Growth.''
Brown advocates a new world order. A complete revamping of the current tax structure, and a complete revamping of the current energy structure.
``We must,'' he says, ``discourage inefficiency and waste.'' He is leading by example. Brown has no private automobile, and lives in a small apartment, without air conditioning. He advocates production of local foods, instead of relying on importing food from far away.
The money that President Lee Myung-bak is putting aside for a cross-country canal project, says Brown, should be used instead to develop renewable energy resources. That means wind, solar, geothermal and tidal energy.
Korea, with its long coastline and huge tidal variation in the West Sea, could put the money earmarked for the canal project to much better use.
Thomas Malthus, the English economist and demographer, correctly predicted that if humans didn't reign in their growth, nature would do it for them. He was speaking more than 200 years ago.
Paul Erlich, a Stanford professor, published ``The Population Bomb,'' 30 years ago, and when his predictions failed to materialize (because of the Green Revolution), he became the laughing stock of academia. He too was right, but he was simply ahead of his time.
The aforementioned scholars, along with the Club of Rome and visionaries such as Brown, foresaw all the current problems and wrote about them, but nobody bothered to listen to what they had to say.
And still few people are listening. Instead, George W. Bush is calling for drilling of all the remaining oil. Open up the national parks, he says, so we can suck those few remaining drops of black gold out of the ground.
U.S. presidential candidate John McCain is also frantically flying around, spewing CO2 out the tail end of his jet while proclaiming, drill, drill, drill, the mantra of all good politicians.
In the Amazon and in Borneo, multinational corporations, with complicity from the governments of Brazil and Malaysia, continue to destroy rainforest by planting soybean and palm oil plantations to produce biofuels so that we can all keep driving.
South Korean President Lee, a man with little imagination, likewise doesn't have a clue what to do. He should listen to Brown. Scrap the canal project. Take that money and put it all into renewable energy sources. And tell everybody to drive, and consume, less.
The writer, a graduate of University of Texas, Austin, now writes from Gangneung, Gangwon Province. He hasn't owned a car since coming to South Korea in 1996. He can be reached at rick_ruffin@yahoo.com.
|
