From the perverse consequences file: there’s a story in the November 24, 2006 episode of Living on Earth about the booming fossil fuel exploration industry in Hammerfest, Norway. Hammerfest is analogous to Nome, Alaska: it is on the northern coast, and is amidst an enormously changing ocean landscape. And, you guessed it: the oil industry is all over it. There no doubt are amazing opportunities in both fossil fuels and shipping (now that Arctic pathways are opening, due to runaway heating of polar water). To an entrepreneur, these two industries would be the very paradigm of growth.

Be on the lookout for new markets created by our pathetically idiotic non-stewardship of the earth. They may well make you pessimistic.

If you’re following global warming studies, you already know that the peat bogs contain stupendous amongs of carbon, which burned, dwarfs the fossil-fuel carbon output of the entire world. However, this article about peat bog burning from Climate Ark states, among other things, that the global demand for biofuels is, uh, fueling the draining and burning of peat bogs in Indonesia.

In other words, the demand for biofuels, based in part on our belief that biofuels are a partial solution to global warming, is leading to the burning of peat bogs, which itself is one of the worst contributors of global warming.

Ethanol, to remind everyone, depends on large fossil fuel inputs: fertilizer for corn takes the most, and there are other fossil fuels which need to be burned for the farming, corn transportation, processing, and fuel transportation of the ethanol.
Let’s be on the lookout for these sort of unintended consequences, shall we? We’re engulfed in a web of relationships which enmesh us in carbon burning of all different varieties and variations, and trying to wiggle out — with biofuels — may simply make us more stuck.