Lessons from the Tsunami

What we can DO NOW…Lessons from the Tsunami by EF&EG Staff   -5/2005-

“In location after location where the coral reefs were intact, the loss of life was far lower than in the places where the coral reefs were already damaged, said Cynthia Lazarus, director of the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation (PCRF). “The reefs offered protection, acting as a break against the tsunami that hit on December 26, 2004, resulting in smaller waves hitting the shore.”

Long-term environmental lessons will be drawn from Asia’s tsunami disaster, especially the consequences of ripping out mangroves and destroying coral reefs that help protect coasts from sea and storms, experts say.

“Places that had healthy coral reefs and intact mangroves were far less badly hit than places where the reefs had been damaged and the mangroves ripped out and replaced by beachfront hotels and prawn farms,” said Simon Cripps, director of the Global Marine Programme at the environment group WWF International.

Doug Masson, a senior researcher at Southampton University’s Oceanography Centre in southern England, said that even the best-managed coastal buffer offers no guarantee of a shield against a major tsunami, but it certainly helps to save lives.

“There is a big dampening effect if you have a coral reef. My feeling is that coral is what probably saved the majority of people in the Maldives. The reef broke up the tsunami and it travelled forward as a broken wave and so was far less deadly,” he said.

The only possible scenario for the dramatic loss of coral reefs in the Kanton area between the time of the last survey conducted by the New England Aquarium in July 2002 and the study by PCRF’s Heraclitus in 2004 is the rise of sea surface temperature during this period. This rare catastrophic event demonstrates the widening reach of global warming, reinforces the view of coral reefs as the indicators of oceanic health and provides a test bed for the study of the resiliency and sustainability of damaged remote coral reef ecosystems.

Conservative climate and hydrological models suggest that the average sea level will rise about a foot by 2050, regardless of what new actions we take to reduce greenhouse gases. In some cases, entire nations will disappear.

One of the paradoxes of global warming is that developing countries, which were not responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions that are changing the climate and did not reap the benefits of industrialization, will bear the brunt of the consequences One of these consequences will be rising seas, which in turn will generate a surge of “climate exiles” who have been flooded out of their homes in poor countries.

Renewable Energy, the Right Direction

Any energy program to move America away from petroleum dependence and forward into the 21st century must include a significant focus on energy efficiency and renewable energies.

“We must begin now to rapidly move renewable technologies into large-scale production and the marketplace”, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, Ph.D. (R-MD) recently told the House of Representative in a Special-order hour-long presentation on Peak Oil, where he called for a new Apollo-scale program to accelerate renewable energy into the main stream.”

No Nukes Is Good Nukes

• Nuclear is the most expensive, most dangerous and most toxic energy option and is not a substitute for oil.
• Nuclear plants pose high risks to the American people and to their investors. The liability is so great that no private insurance carrier will insure them. The American people have to carry this risk via the Price-Anderson act which makes the US Government liable for nuclear accidents.
• Nuclear plants are ideal targets for terrorists. Mock attacks on nuclear plants have succeeded over 50% of the time – even when plant security knew when they were coming.
• Nuclear plants produce weapons-grade materials as spent fuel, much of which is already missing and unaccounted for. Further, with increased nuclear dependence, we will face a world-wide uranium shortage.
• Nuclear waste is the most deadly material on the planet and must be guarded over for 250,000 years.

Clean Coal Is An Oxymoron

• While there are degrees of dirtiness, there is no clean coal. -Coal in any form is not a substitute for gasoline or jet fuel. It won’t help the high “prices at the pump”.
• There is near universal scientific consensus that Global Climate Change is the largest threat facing humanity. Coal is the greatest source of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants of all fossil fuels.
• While there are many schemes for carbon sequestering, they are all very expensive in terms of both cost and energy consumption. The very best method for carbon sequestering is to leave the mass of solid carbon (coal) in the ground unburned in the first place.

Yes, More Solar and Wind Energy Renewables are ready. They are proven, reliable and off-the-shelf. We have the tools and the technology to begin the transition to the post-petroleum era. We need only the political will to use them. *