Stardate 2050: Interstellar Search for Starbucks Begins
Tuesday, July 09, 2002
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
WASHINGTON — The planet is set to expire in the year 2050 due to the over-consumption of natural resources, with the United States being the worst offender, according to a report expected to be released Tuesday.
The World Wildlife Fund is keeping a tight grip on its “Living Planet” study, but the U.K.'s Guardian Unlimited Observer Monday said the report warns that the human race will no longer be able to sustain itself on this planet in 50 years.
“In a ****ing condemnation of Western society’s high consumptive levels, [the report] adds that the extra planets [the equivalent size of Earth] will be required by the year 2050 as existing resources are exhausted,” the Observer wrote.
Kyla Evans, a spokeswoman for the WFF in Sweden, said the general theme of the British article is accurate, adding that the report is meant to set off alarm bells against rapid resource depletion. But neither she nor members of the Washington, D.C.-based staff would comment further on the Earth’s expected expiration date.
“We’re continuing to look at the depletion of world resources,” Evans said. “In the report, we have figures for most of the countries in the world, how much they are using and what it means to each person.”
Not everyone is buying into the “chicken little” hysteria.
“At the end of the day I don’t think WWF credibility is much different from the World Wrestling Federation,” said Jerry Taylor, director of the Natural Resources and Environmental Studies Department for the Cato Institute, alluding to WWF’s recent success in a lawsuit against the wrestling organization that forced a name change to World Wrestling Entertainment to avoid confusion.
“I think someone needs to start drug testing employees of the World Wildlife Fund,” he added.
“It’s the ‘chicken little syndrome’ that we are all going to die unless we mend our evil ways,” said Myron Ebell, a global warming and environmental analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
The WWF’s 2000 “Living Planet” study found that the demands being placed on the Earth’s natural resources were already 30 percent higher than the Earth’s ability to sustain them. It said the planet lost more than 30 percent of its natural resources in the last three decades and that by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will be experiencing water shortages.
The international organization contends that such rapid depletion has already resulted in extended periods of drought and famine in underdeveloped, poor countries, and will continue to add to extreme weather patterns and natural disasters if consumption, which includes deforestation, fish depopulation and energy, is not curbed on a wide-scale basis.
In addition, Monday’s article said the study will also reveal that the world’s forest cover decreased 12 percent between 1970 and 2002, the Earth’s biodiversity dropped by a third and freshwater ecosystems shrank by 55 percent. It blames the United States for most of the burden on the environment.
Pro-environment officials like David Cherry, a spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the numbers are frightening and the race to industrialize the Third World creates a challenge, but he expressed concern that the WWF’s putting a date on the Earth’s inability to sustain itself gives detractors too much ammunition to attack their goals.
Ebell said that despite the WWF’s claims, other studies are widely available that indicate that not only is agricultural production higher than ever, air and water in developed regions are cleaner and energy sources are more abundant.
Ebell acknowledged that in the poorer areas of the world, such as the Amazon basin, forests are being depleted faster, but overall the loss is not as devastating as the WFF and supporters contend. And, he added, the panic-stricken don’t take into account “human ingenuity.”
“Our only limit to natural resources is human ingenuity,” he said. “For a while human beings had to use wood for energy and now we use coal and tomorrow we will use something else. If you agreed that the only place to find energy was in whale oil … well, yes, this would be conceived as a crisis, I suppose.”
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What can you say, your LEADER has a vested interest me thinks.
