I enter the supermarket and a pile of apples from China greets me. They are only Rp 2000 more than apples from East Java. How can this be?
I compare the price of premium petrol I put in my car in Jakarta and the price in the petrol station in Delhi, and the price of diesel in Brussels. Delhi and Jakarta drivers pay the same, Brussels diesel drivers pay only 20 percent more. How can this be?
Back in the 1960s, I learned about Earth Day, ozone holes, smog and how the planet was actually a limited resource. I was 8. Now I am 50 and environmental NGOs are telling me the planet is a limited resource, and, by the way, there is this problem with smog and greenhouse gases and Planet Earth is running a slight temperature. Didn't we already learn that?
Economics journalist Jeff Rubin has set out to convince us that what we know to be true is true. Perhaps for a younger generation, his reasoned presentation of serious depletions of fossil fuels will be news. He gives straightforward exposition of the interconnected issues of globalization (let's all loathe the word together for a moment), ever more depleted oil and gas reserves, human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and basic economic drivers (read greed).
It's a fun doomsday book, though, because Rubin dishes up the issues with lucid metaphors. On depleted oil reserves: "When you don't have enough money in your pocket to get on the subway, finding some change between the cushions of your sofa can seem like a pretty important discovery. . But if you depend on finding spare change to get to work each and every day, you might start looking for a job closer to home."
As a Canadian, Rubin focuses particular attention on the Fountain of Youth aspects of extracting oil from sand in that country. How high must prices go before it becomes a worthwhile venture to invest in this costly process, the 21st century equivalent of getting water from rock?
Rubin also susses out what is really going on beyond biofuel production worldwide. Since today's large-scale monoculture production of anything requires fertilizers derived from fossil fuels, corn comes from oil: "Three quarters of the energy in a gallon of corn-based ethanol comes from the combustion of natural gas, diesel and coal used during the various stages of growing corn, transforming it into ethanol and then transporting it," he writes.
And Rubin brings the hard-to-face facts closer to home: "Biodiesel derived from palm oil grown in Indonesia is in fact 10 times more damaging to the climate than conventional diesel. Meanwhile, it is expected that the Indonesian rainforest will be 98 percent gone by 2022, cleared away in order to make room to grow this supposedly *green' fuel."
He is also a master at putting key global facts side by side. Fact 1: "Roughly 90% of every barrel of oil consumed in the world goes for transport fuel like gasoline and diesel." Fact 2: "Within five years, the world's *cars* will be on the crowded roads of India and China, teeming with first-time drivers."
Who wouldn't have fun with a book like this? Rubin has lined up an army of facts, so anyone writing on this topic can benefit, but, like most journalists, he focuses on the problems but offers few solutions.
Instead, he closes thus: "Get ready for a smaller world. Soon, your food is going to come from a field much closer to home, and the thing you buy will probably come from a factory down the road rather than one on the other side of the world. You will drive less and walk more and that mean you will be shopping and working closer to home. Your neighbors and your neighborhood are about to get a lot more important."
That makes sense. Yet we are not intractably bound by greed and denial. A generation ago people lived through the Great Depression in the US and kept warm and fed with sustainable practices because it was the frugal way to live. And Rubin fails to paint a picture of living with less in a smaller world, like bygone eras, but with the Internet, which has created boundless communities and opportunities for self-development that reach every continent. If we keep our rickshaws, turn to wind-powered archipelago travel and use our fossil fuels to get more satellites up in the sky, what could we accomplish in Indonesia?
Why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller: Oil and the end of globalization
by Jeff Rubin
Random House Canada, 2009
265 pages
Available at Aksara bookstores
