I was sitting in a small guest house in Leh, India (way up in the
Himalayas next to the Tibetan border) last week watching CNN with a
bunch of Spaniards and Swiss folks. They were showing that rather
silly story about Russia planting a claim to the shelf extending under
the north pole, as well as some dubious estimates of mineral wealth
lying in wait under the ice ("hundreds of billions to trillions of
dollars" and "a quarter of the world's oil"). They than moved to
interview an "arctic explorer" with the tagline that not everyone was
in favor of developing the arctic's mineral resources.
The unnamed "arctic explorer" made the point that, perhaps, if our
actions are causing unprecedented ice melt in the arctic, than using
that ice melt as an opportunity to extract and consume more fossil
fuels might not be the best of ideas. It was met by a rather
enthusiastic round of applause from my European comrades.
Seriously, though, its a rather ironic example of a positive feedback,
and perhaps a sign that we are still largely blind to the problem when
it comes to substantive decisions.
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