O'Byrne wrote: >You'd probably hope that humanity had learned what happens when wild >resources get exploited on a commercial scale. [...]
We are heading for 9 bn people, and the world economy will be twice as large in 2037 as it is now (3%, 20 years.) There was an area the size of Australia under cultivation world-wide in 1900; there will be a wilderness area (excluding oceans and deserts) about the size of Australia left in the 2030s. However, one plays this, a great number of habitats will be erased, and those which remain will be thoroughly altered. For example, combustion fixes around twice natural background levels of Nitrogen from the atmosphere, will falls everywhere as Nitrate. By 2030, this will be four to nine times background. The same sort of thing is true of Sulphur and trace elements. Tree growth rates have roughly doubled in a century as a result, and as we all know, epiphytes like sparse, slow growing forest and open stable shrub land. So even the conserved areas will change quite radically. Now, there are three approaches to this. One is to demand that It All Stops, which - excepting bird flu and bioterrorism - is not going to happen. The second is to shrug, to erect some glass houses and to fence some reefs, and then hope for the best, rely on seed banks and gene pools. The third is to set up conservation programs so that key areas of biodiversity are preserved, and ringed by areas which have some degree of preservation as a key part of their management. Scale is essential, as small areas - 'islands' - are insufficient to retain the complexity and resilience to natural cycles that habitats undergo. Happily, policy seems to have embraced the third option, at least to the extent of study and definition. (Mind you, some of them - southern Sri Lanka as a centre of forest diversity, for example, seem more political than real, but there you go.) Whether this analysis will be followed by investment has yet to be seen. Biodiversity is a poor cousin when compared to climate change (where one can earn carbon credits, for example) and environmental management is anyway a poor cousin when compared to the sincere desire to get rich. >But how about the environmental-related industries ? Surely the >Greens would avoid such catastrophic errors ? [..] >A Malaysian company has started building a biofuel plant in Perak to >convert the sap of the Nipah palm into export-quality ethanol for >biofuels. What is inexcusable, however, is the adoption of lunatic policies under a seemingly green guise. One of these is the current approach to biofuels. At risk of boring this audience, there are two approaches to this. One - as currently adopted - is to take a food crop such as oil palm, sugar cane, corn - and extract a more or less pure chemical (such as oils or ethanol) and burn this. The resulting overall efficiency is a few percent energy recovery from the original solar input, and usually a net production of greenhouse gasses. However, subsidy makes the whole thing economic, and drives a further expansion in land use. The second approach still uses biomass, but sets out to use the entire plant in an efficient manner. This involves burning to syngas and reconstitution into hydrocarbon fuels or electricity, at much, much higher efficiencies. The cropped area is smaller, and is usually cycle-cropped on a four year rotation, allowing wild life to live in it. All this is well known and -proven (e.g. the 250kTpa Shell plant in Germany) but somehow evades legislator attention. And why? Subsidy to conventional crops is easy to understand. Rural votes are important to some political parties; so does one need to say more? ______________________________ Oliver Sparrow +44 (0)20 7736 9716 www.chforum.org _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
