Coal 1, Tuna 0

BP may at last be on the verge of permanently capping the Deep Horizon gusher, while much of the rest of the world, from Moscow to New York, swelters in a global heat wave. Even as we may have averted the worst-case short term consequences of the oil spill, our long term trend is still headied in the wrong direction.

Last month I read an article on the continuing coal age in the New York Times that seemed another omen of a bleak future. You might think that coal is in decline given it's sorry reputation in the U.S., but worldwide the opposite is true. According to Stanford University researcher Richard Morse:

Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel (for the 8th year now) and likely will be for the next 10-20 at least. According to BP’s 2010 Statistical Review of World Energy released this month, coal now occupies a greater share of the world’s energy mix than at any point since 1970.

This doesn’t receive much attention in the U.S. because our coal market is essentially disconnected from global markets and the domestic trend is quite the opposite. But there is a reason my colleague calls the global energy era we are embarking upon the “renaissance of coal.” China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and most of the rest of Asia are predicating their growth on coal....

In my view climate regimes that don’t address the coal issue — via addressing mitigation in developing world power sectors at a much larger scale than Kyoto ever accomplished — don’t have much hope from a mitigation perspective. And that is going to be really, really hard. Thus the game is looking more and more like adaptation. As we can see in China and India, they view development of a coal-based electricity infrastructure as essential to economic development.

I've been meaning to post about this article for over a month now, particularly because just three days later a piece was published in the New York Times Magazine about the imminent demise of the bluefin tuna:

What was in the water that day was a congregation of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a fish that when prepared as sushi is one of the most valuable forms of seafood in the world. It’s also a fish that regularly journeys between America and Europe and whose two populations, or “stocks,” have both been catastrophically overexploited. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, one of only two known Atlantic bluefin spawning grounds, has only intensified the crisis. By some estimates, there may be only 9,000 of the most ecologically vital megabreeders left in the fish’s North American stock, enough for the entire population of New York to have a final bite (or two) of high-grade otoro sushi. The Mediterranean stock of bluefin, historically a larger population than the North American one, has declined drastically as well. Indeed, most Mediterranean bluefin fishing consists of netting or “seining” young wild fish for “outgrowing” on tuna “ranches.”

An inability of the world's fishing nations to agree on limits that would ensure the sustainability of the remaining bluefin stocks may mean the loss of a truly unique animal:

There are two reasons that a mere fish should have inspired such a high-strung confrontation reminiscent of Greenpeace’s early days as a defender of whales. The first stems from fish enthusiasts who have for many years recognized the particular qualities of bluefin tuna — qualities that were they land-based creatures would establish them indisputably as “wildlife” and not just another “seafood” we eat without remorse. Not only is the bluefin’s dense, distinctly beefy musculature supremely appropriate for traversing the ocean’s breadth, but the animal also has attributes that make its evolutionary appearance seem almost deus ex machina, or rather machina ex deo — a machine from God. How else could a fish develop a sextantlike “pineal window” in the top of its head that scientists say enables it to navigate over thousands of miles? How else could a fish develop a propulsion system whereby a whip-thin crescent tail vibrates at fantastic speeds, shooting the bluefin forward at speeds that can reach 40 miles an hour? And how else would a fish appear within a mostly coldblooded phylum that can use its metabolic heat to raise its body temperature far above that of the surrounding water, allowing it to traverse the frigid seas of the subarctic?

Yes, bluefin tuna are warmblooded.

This may be our future. One where coal wins and the bluefin loses.

BILL GROSS, MEANWHILE, reports on the absurdity of automatic toilets in his latest commentary. He goes on to make the argument that our economic troubles in the coming decade or two may stem from this fact: capitalism depends on growth, and ultimately economic growth depends on population growth. In an era of a stabilizing world population, we may be in for long period of economic malaise.

How ironic: our insatiable appetite is cooking the planet and devouring its bounty, yet we may suffer financially because we've finally gotten the growth of our own species under control.