Our planet is burning, yes, and what?
Oil, coal and gas create billionaires and monsters!
States, international corporations and people with many billions of dollars in the banks of the world are capable of waging any kind of war, with physical, financial and information bombs to sell their oil, gas or coal!
It is true, they also have enthusiastic buyers of energy, as long as they can still dictate the prices and quantities of fossil fuels, in competition with the prices and quantities of renewable or synthetic fuels.
Does anyone seriously believe that Russia will give up more than half of its national budget generated by the export of natural gas and oil?
What else could Russia offer to the humanity? Advanced cars, OLED TVs, microelectronics, industrial robots, fashionable clothing, smartphones, Nike and Adidas shoes, supercomputers? No, only other states, from China, Korea or Japan to Germany, can do that, but they all urgently need energy.
(The US has a privileged position, selling and buying many state-of-the-art products, selling and buying so much energy! ).
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Should Saudi Arabia give up 42% of its gross domestic product generated by oil sales?
Or Kuwait to give up 90% of export revenues?
A look at the list of the world's largest oil producers can be very revealing:
The US leads the ranking with 19%, followed by Saudi Arabia (12%) and Russia (11%), followed by Canada, China, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Iran and Kuwait with about 5% each. The US, Saudi Arabia and Russia produce almost half (42%) of the world's oil. And how these states "participate" in international climate conventions can be daily seen in the media.
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On the other hand, the world's largest oil exporter is Saudi Arabia with a world market share of 15.4%, followed by Russia with 11.4%, Iraq (8.4%) and Canada (7.8%). As expected, the largest importer of oil is China with a share of 17.9%, followed by the USA (16.8%) and India (9.3%).
However, it is interesting in which regions of the world this oil is consumed: Asia (this time clearly China, Japan, Korea) "swallows" 63%, although only 14% were produced in these areas.The Middle East, on the other hand, consumes only about 10% of the 53% produced.
In America, there is a clear parity between production and consumption, even if at first glance this is just a simple balance sheet: America exports a lot of oil, but also imports a lot, with the reasons for these transactions being purely financial.
The world's largest exporter of natural gas is Russia with a global share of 19.1% (2019), followed by Qatar and the US with about 10% each. The world's largest importer of natural gas is Germany with 10.8% (2019). China is "only" in second place with 10.1%!
The largest natural gas producers in the world are North America, the Middle East, the former Soviet republics, but also some countries in Asia. The situation is different when it comes to consumption: Asia needs more than it produces, but the situation only becomes clearer when the analysis partly concerns Asian countries. The Middle East sells more natural gas than it produces, as do the former Soviet republics. Europe is the big consumer of natural gas, but here
too the analysis needs to be differentiated. Norway, for example, exports a lot of natural gas (4th place in the world), but imports and consumes no natural gas at all!
In North and South America, the production and consumption of natural gas are largely
balanced.
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In terms of coal production and consumption, Asia and the Pacific region have an overwhelming share of the world.
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Africa has so far had a very moderate share of coal consumption. But what will happen if China wants to build so many coal-fired powerplants in Africa? The Chinese, of course, as I mentioned earlier, will also bring the coal with them.
In all these cruel struggles for energy and the money swindled from it, people ignore an essential threat! Our planet is now in a crucial moment as far as the warming of the atmosphereis concerned!
Instead of just doing our best to make “our Europe” an exemplary, prosperous and advances region, we had better try to urgently save so many poor countries in Africa, Asia and South America from the scourge of oil, gas and coal !
By continuing to burn fossil fuels in solid, liquid and gaseous form, our planet will quickly burn
itself!
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The average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere of about 15 °C is a consequence of the natural greenhouse effect produced by polyatomic gases such as water vapor (62.4%), carbon dioxide (21.8%), ozone (7.3%), methane and nitrous oxide (8.5%). However, to the carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere is added annually a percentage of 0.6% caused by human activities, namely the burning of fossil fuels (coal, diesel, natural gas, gasoline). This cumulative annual surplus in the atmosphere increases the proportion of carbon dioxide in the
mentioned balance.
The calculations show that without the natural greenhouse effect these gases produce (i.e. without the excess of carbon dioxide that has intervened over time), the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere would be lowered by 33 °C, which would mean minus 18 °C. The natural greenhouse effect can also be explained in a simplified, less scientific form, for more
clarity: The sun's rays are moving towards our planet with great intensity and frequency. These two components form the energy flow of each beam. A ray of sunshine that crosses the atmosphere reaches the Earth and releases part of the heat flow to the Earth's crust, fauna, flora and water of the seas and oceans. The heat flow represents a power (kilowatts, kW) which is converted over time into heat (kilowatt-hour, kWh). The sun's ray is then reflected towards the atmosphere, but its intensity and frequency become less given the part of the energy that has been let to the Earth. Due to the multiatomic gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, which resemble silicon dioxide in structure (this is glass, which usually also covers classic greenhouses), it cannot completely penetrate this gaseous roof back to the cosmos. So it is partially diverted back to Earth. And this coming-and-going is repeated many times, and the
beam, even if weakened, leaves some warmth for the fauna, flora, crust of the earth and waters
each time.
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Since the beginning of industrialization, after the invention and introduction of the steam engine (1712), the Earth's atmosphere has heated up by about 1°C in this way. It is worth noting that at the same time, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has increased from 280 [ppm] (parts per million – the volume of CO2 per million air parts) to 417 [ppm] (measured in July 2021 at Mauna Loa Station, Hawaii). Climate researchers at the IPCC
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) believe that this increase in the amount of carbon dioxide anthropogenic produced in the Earth's atmosphere is responsible for the temperature increase at least in the last 5-6 decades.
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At the current rate of carbon dioxide emissions, the increase in atmospheric temperature could reach 5.8°C by the end of this century. So we have a duty to act quickly: the current goal of the international community is to limit the warming of the Earth's atmosphere to 1.5°C by the end of the century by drastically reducing man-made carbon dioxide emissions.
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The problem, however, is that there are far too many "salon philosophers" in the world: "What the heck, the additional carbon dioxide emitted is taken up again by the many forests and plants of the earth anyway!" Is that so? The scientists disagree:
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In 2020, the total emission of carbon dioxide on a global scale was 34.8 billion tons (de.statista.com). 60 years ago, in 1960, there was an emission of "only" 9.3 billion tons. The burning of fossil fuels has therefore undeniably polluted the atmosphere: the generation of electricity and heat with a share of 42%, transport of 25%, industry of 19%, and so on.
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It is true that some of the anthropogenic emissions are absorbed by the Earth's oceans and vegetation. Earth's oceans absorbed no less than 34 billion tons of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere between 1994 and 2007, accounting for 31% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions during that period (/doi/10.1126/science.aau5153). The main
negative effect of this absorption is an increase in the acidity of the water, which affects both the marine flora and marine fauna.
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The world's forests absorb 0.55 billion tons annually, making they the largest "absorbent" on land. This amount is not immediately "processed" by photosynthesis. The storage capacity of carbon dioxide in the trees and in the land below them is huge, but it has reached saturation: 295 billion tons of active biomass, 300 billion organic mass from the soil under the trees, 68 billion tons in "dead" wood (DOI: 10.1399/ NuL.2021.12.01).
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Another difference might be: there are trees and trees, there are plants and plants. Corn and millet cannot grow faster as the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air increases. In contrast, soybeans and wheat grow faster. In tropical forests, lianas grow much faster than other plants due to the increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. However, the side effects must also be considered: lianas hinder the development of trees, which are large absorbers of carbon di oxide.
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A tree absorbs an average of 10 kg of carbon dioxide per year, but again, there are differences, both between regions and between tree species. In Latin America, the average absorption is well above the general one, instead of 10 kg, the trees there absorb an average of 16 kg of CO2 per year. On the other hand, a beech tree absorbs an average of 12.5 kg of CO2 per year in the first 20 years of growth.
The process of exchanging carbon dioxide between the Earth and the atmosphere is very dynamic, in some regions of the world carbon dioxide is only absorbed by the environment, in others it is only emitted.
The planet's vast steppes and savannahs also absorb about a third of the annual anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide.
Earth's flora even absorbs some of the extra carbon dioxide emissions caused by humans: clear evidence is the acceleration of vegetation growth by 2.3% per decade, satellite measurements show.
The journal "Nature Sustainability" recently published an article showing that this behavior is caused by increased emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: as long as water, solar radiation and minerals are sufficiently present on and in the earth, the increase in photosynthesis processes can be explained by an increase in the carbon dioxide content in the air. But there was another cause of vegetation growth: China and India, the countries with the most inhabitants in the world, have planted so many plants and so many trees since the year 2000 that they have caused a third of the growth of the above vegetation through this measure alone!
At the opposite pole of active vegetation, fossil fuels (lignite, hard coal, peat, natural gas, petroleum) were formed in prehistoric geological periods (about 100-200 million years ago), which were produced by the degradation of dead plants and animals. On the contrary, renewable fuels comparable to gasoline, diesel or natural gas, such as methanol and ethanol, are obtained from plant residues, which are usually regenerated annually. These plants absorb
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis for the production of their own "food," involving solar radiation in the light spectrum, water, and minerals in the earth.
The connections are therefore clear.
Regardless all that, there are hundreds of international and national climate change organizations on the planet that have set themselves the goal of reducing anthropogenic gas emissions by burning petroleum products, natural gasand coal.
The best known of these organizations are the following:
UNFCCC - United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which deals with the prevention of anthropogenic disturbances and measures to slow global warming. The UNFCCC Secretariat in Bonn alone employs 450 people.
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UNEP - United Nations Environment Programme based in the Kenyan capital Nairobi with 800 employees.
WWF - World Wide Fund for Nature. It was founded in 1961 and is one of the largest international organizations for the protection of nature and the environment. It employs 6,200 people and generates an annual turnover of almost 700 million euros.
In addition, internationally, but also in almost every state, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of environmental organizations with similar goals.
What are all these organizations, all these people, doing who have huge resources at their disposal to counteract the sharp increase in carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere?
We have an urgent need for truly viable climate-free energy sources, at affordable prices and
in sufficient quantities! There are solutions, but all these organizations must be implemented
in a concrete and well-coordinated way!