On Hurricanes and Bicycles

Published October 12 2005
The Daily Targum

While yet another hurricane sweeps across the American Gulf Coast, killing at least 300 people in Central America, the Arctic Council of Indigenous Peoples are mounting pressure on nations such as the United States over the shrinking arctic icecap.

The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for the fourth consecutive year, according to a study released by US scientists, and September 2005 will set a new record minimum amount of Arctic sea ice cover.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center, which produced the new data, concluded that human-induced global warming is at least partly responsible for the arctic meltdown.

The Arctic Indigenous leaders are therefore calling for the United States, the world's biggest polluter, to cap emissions of heat-trapping gases from cars, factories and power plants, the sources most scientists blame for global warming.

This phenomenon of global warming could also, according to many leading scientists studying global weather patterns, be the cause of the recent rash of unusually strong hurricanes across the US gulf coast.

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, have analysed global tropical cyclone statistics since satellite records began and found that between 1975 and 1989, there were 171 severe hurricanes but the number rose to 269 between 1990 and 2004.

The author of the study, Dr Peter Webster, told the BBC News website: “The increase in intensity is probably accounted for by the increase in sea surface temperature and I think probably the sea surface temperature increase is a manifestation of global warming."

The United States pulled out of the Kyoto Agreement of 2001 amongst major industrial countries to cap emissions, because President George Bush declared the agreement would be too costly and would unfairly disadvantage developing nations.

Leading British Scientist and chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Sir John Lawton, has gone so far as to say, “if this makes the climate loonies in the States realize we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation.”

And indeed, through a strange series of events, the United States seems to be curbing its emissions, not because of the government’s guilty conscience over global warming, but because of the price of oil.

The two rising economic behemoths in Asia have long known the secret to low public fuel consumption – bicycles. The crouching Tigers of China and India rode to work for years, if they could afford a bicycle, on the cleanest and greenest mode of transportation besides walking before economic liberalization and development allowed them the luxury of buying cars.

Today, the biggest consumer of oil, the greatest polluter and producer of waste in the world, the United States, is following in the footsteps, or rather the tire tracks, of India and China.

According to the United States Chamber of Commerce, more bicycles have been sold than cars in the last 12 months. The reason – astronomical gas prices in the U.S that are forcing those who have cars out of their vehicles and onto the saddle. Americans considering buying cars have also turned to bicycles as a cheaper and more cost-effective alternative.

Tim Blumenthal, executive director of Bikes Belong, an industry association, told the AFP, “Bicycle sales are near an all-time high with 19 million sold last year -- close to the 20 million sold during the oil embargo in the early 1970s.”

Following the two hurricanes that have ripped apart the oil refining industry in the American Gulf Coast, the President of the United States, a professed Texas oil man at heart, has even started to encourage US citizens to take their pedals off the metal and try to conserve as much energy as possible.

Bush said last month, after a briefing at the energy department in Washington, that it was up to all Americans to "pitch in" by being better conservers of energy: "I mean, people just need to recognise that these storms have caused disruption and that if they're able to maybe not drive ... on a trip that's not essential, that would be helpful.”

If it makes sense for the American citizen to curtail non-essential travel, he added “We can encourage employees to car pool or use mass transit, and we can shift peak electricity use to off-peak hours. There's ways for the federal government to lead when it comes to conservation," he said.

The US President is even reported to have been pottering around the White House, reminding staff to turn off lights.

Has Mr. Bush had a change of heart? Is he going green? Not likely. The president of the United States is encouraging his citizens to consume less oil because the cost to US treasuries of subsidizing oil following Hurricane Katrina is probably keeping him up at nights.

The price of oil per barrel broke records, rising to around $70 a barrel on August 30^th this year, just after Hurricane Katrina. While that number has gone down to around $62 a barrel, the US energy department said that refineries were operating at just 69.8% capacity in the last week of September and a dozen refineries in the US Gulf of Mexico region are still shut after being damaged by the two storms.

The International Energy Association has offered to release 2 million barrels of petrol a day (the amount Kuwait puts out) to the US, but the American government is already using its own Strategic Petroleum Reserve stocks to counter the sharp rise in gas prices.

It is here we come to the tail end of the cycle that put Americans on their cycles. Meteorological experts around the world have been warning for over a decade that at the rate we release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, global warming is becoming a significant and imminent threat.

And the United States, world leader of industry and development, has ignored these warnings until now, when two hurricanes, very probably enhanced in their strength and ferocity by global warming caused by US fuel emissions, have ravaged the very industry that caused them.

If this isn’t Mother Nature’s revenge, it certainly makes for an extraordinary coincidence.