Dear Editor,
The Guyana coastland area, a few miles wide on the eastern side of the continent and a few miles north to south is the main agricultural area producing sugarcane and home of seventy per cent of the country’s population of 800,000 plus.
This area lies approximately five foot six (5’6″) below the adjacent sea level. A stone and concrete wall has been built to keep the sea out but at high tide over-topping of this wall takes place.
At very low tide it is possible to see evidence of former households sticking up above the soaked and exposed ‘ground.’ While the rivers still wash down and deposit sediment the periphery ocean current moves the sedimented river water and also erodes existing formations exposing household items or parts of buildings of former settlements that had to be abandoned years ago. With the scientific prediction of a 16 foot rise in ocean level, a proposal to build a wall to keep the sea out for miles along the coast, a wall which would have to be 5’6″, plus 16′ plus 4′ or 5′ for wave action, that is about 26′ high stretching the length of the low-lying coast, would be impractical considering its total mass and required strength of foundation and far too costly.
The only sensible alternative appears to be a relocation of the capital Georgetown to some higher location that offers safety from the rising ocean level with good communication possibilities supporting agricultural areas, good drainage, reasonable rainfall conditions and admirable landscape aspects. All other homesteads in this coastal area should also be relocated upwards. Unfortunately, apparently influenced by the appalling indifference of the USA to the problems of climate change and global warming, very little is being done by the authorities in Guyana in response to the increasing evidence of approaching catastrophic conditions.
While Guyana’s population residing on a flood plain created by the sedimentation of a few rivers live with an abundance of water in constant threat of inundation, the population of Shijiaszhuang on China’s North plain, with industrialization running apace now is faced with diminishing reserves of potable water.
In general, China’s rapid improvement of her world status as a developed, modern country with industrial ‘double digit rates” has not improved her people’s lives, when, according to some economists, “the damage to air, land, water and human health are considered.”
The normally accustomed fluctuations of cool or cold and warm periods in world climate has changed markedly with the Arctic this century showing the greatest warming in a thousand years, a change which was reported as several times faster than most of the rest of the planet.
This marked increase in warming has been the result not of Nature which no doubt has registered its usual or slightly increased amount of warming but from a rise in the amount of CO2 and other heat entrapping gases produced or resulting from the rush to raise the economic living conditions of many countries but mainly of well populated countries considered underdeveloped like China. The mad rush to improve the lives of the millions of Chinese has not only imitated the course taken by Western countries which, while being successful in raising living standards has also created serious problems in some areas in her attempt to improve existing industries. One such case is China’s fish farming industry, one of the fastest growing suppliers of the United States’ seafood. This industry, over the last two decades has made China “the biggest producer and exporter of sea food in the world.”
Acute water shortage and the use of murky brown, filthy water “contaminated by sewage”, industrial waste and agricultural run-off that includes pesticides are the two most glaring environmental weaknesses that threaten the growth of this essential Chinese industry.
The most important ‘problem’ confronting the capital of North China’s plain, Shijaszhuang is the fact that its underground water table already more than a hundred feet below ground is sinking about four feet a year.
The important aspect of any development process is, of course, the availability of energy, the traditional source of which has, for most countries been coal. China has been fortunate in this area relying for about two-thirds of its energy needs on its abundant resource, burning more coal than the USA, Europe and Japan combined though many of its newest coal-fired power plants and industrial furnaces are inefficient, using pollution controls considered inadequate in the west. While this obtains however, China’s steel production “now exceeds that of Germany, Japan and the USA combined.”
It is now about thirty years since China was set on a market-oriented style of growth and “rapid industrialization and urbanization have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty” and made China the world’s largest producer of consumer goods.
Europe had already established itself as an industrialized entity while the USA was the acknowledged leader of the industrialized countries just a few of which have developed nuclear power and are capable of producing, if they have not actually produced, nuclear warfare weapons.
To date only the USA has actually used a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) which, with attacks on two locations effectively put a stop to Japan’s aggressive intentions. Having already acquired world leadership in trade, her possession of nuclear power was now used to prevent if possible, other nations from following that route. An edict from the United Nations was used to prohibit any country from using or developing WMDs the process of development for which entailed the production of nuclear energy.
If the edict is respected the continued leadership of the USA in the world trade will be maintained as nuclear energy allows for easy and economical development of electricity. With no edict or if the edict is ignored and with the abundance of cheap labour, the masses of unemployed and under employed in Third World countries particularly China, India, Pakistan, North and South Korea and probably African and South American countries can become involved in raising the standard of living in their respective countries. Only a few however with economic, political and leadership potential will be capable of embarking on this course of development hampered, as they will be by the more developed and most developed capitalist countries.
The combination of unemployed, cheap labour with available required amounts of electricity in one or two of these ‘poor’ countries along with the required technical and scientific skills in the leadership could, in a comparatively short space of time, approach, equal or even surpass China’s technological revolution. To take this road, however, requires fundamental changes in the ideology of the masses and leadership of the respective populations. These considerations are necessary in spite of the conclusions arrived at by “a team of 265 development experts and economists.” China’s production and export of “so many goods once made in the West” has allowed many Western countries “to boast of declining carbon emissions even while the world’s overall emissions are rising quickly.”
These changes that are necessary to remove poverty, small and medium-sized changes, advocated and effected by several countries are however often violently opposed.
The overall living conditions in several countries continue to worsen.
Unemployment increases, health conditions deteriorate and death rates increase with resulting emigration of skilled and semi-skilled citizens providing the profitable back-up and strengthening of the developed world.
Being the first on such a course the negative aspects of production based on oil and the burning of fossil fuel that gave the USA its high standard of living and world leadership, were not as noticeable or harmful to other countries as China’s present understandable urgent industrialization efforts.
< p>While the ruling class in the USA can see no reason to change its mode of production and China’s efforts are noticeably increasing atmospheric pollution the hope for a better future for the world’s population may now rest with the leadership of such countries as China, Brazil a country that has switched to ethanol more than thirty years ago, Venezuela, Columbia and North and South Korea where socialistic governments respect the interests of the majority of their citizens and where the future of all countries may ultimately depend.
Yours faithfully,
Prof. R.O. Westmaas
