by John Browne
83. Ibid., p. 2.
84. Following the publication of the Global Witness report, De Beers moved to guarantee that 100% of its diamonds are conflict free, and since its inception in 2003 has so certified them through the Kimberley Process.
85. A Crude Awakening (London: Global Witness, 1999).
86. In 2003, shortly after the EITI began, a similar ‘transparency’ initiative was created specifically for the selling of diamonds. The Kimberley Process requires compliant nations to sell diamonds in tamper-proof containers with a document which certifies they were not mined to fund war. In doing so it hopes to help restrict the profits from mineral wealth being used to fund conflict in the Congo, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. However, in 2011, Global Witness withdrew from the Kimberley Process saying that ‘the scheme has failed’. In particular they cited crimes against humanity committed in attempts to profit from diamond mining in Zimbabwe. The scheme only covers diamonds used by rebel movements or their allies, making it toothless against ‘legitimate’ regimes, such as Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF.
87. In 2004, Angola began publishing data on its oil production and exports. Although the situation continues to improve, oil revenues are still not fully disclosed. A report published late in 2011 by Global Witness found a gap of $8.5 billion between the oil revenues reported by the Angolan Finance and Oil Ministries and what Sonangol (Angola’s national oil company) recorded in its accounts.
88. As part of the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act in the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled in August 2012 that all US-listed companies in the extractive industries must disclose details of payments made to foreign governments. At the time of writing, the European Union is on the path to a similar ruling.
89. John Browne, ‘Europe must enforce oil sector transparency’, Financial Times, 25 April 2012. www.ft.com
90. Cannonball was the first platform to be designed and constructed in Trinidad and Tobago, costing $250 million, www.bp.com
91. The energy equivalence of one barrel of oil in the form of natural gas would fill a volume of 160 cubic metres, almost the same volume as two Routemaster London double-decker buses.
92. At first the technology was very dangerous. The first commercial LNG plant, built in Cleveland Ohio, suffered an explosion in 1944 that killed 128 people. LNG did not take off until the 1960s when technology for shipping LNG was developed. Before then, LNG could only be used as an expensive means of gas storage.
93. In the middle of the nineteenth century, James Prescott Joule and William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) studied the equivalence of heat and mechanical work. The cooling of gas in LNG trains works because of this equivalence. When gas is slowly forced from a container of small volume and high pressure into a container of larger volume and lower pressure, work is done by the gas on both sides (‘work’ is done when energy is used). But less work is done by the gas in the large-volume, low-pressure container than in the small-volume, high-pressure container. This difference in work (as long as the energy of the entire system remains constant) results in a temperature change in the gas.
94. Trinidad and Tobago experienced sixteen consecutive years of real GDP growth previous to 2008 as a result of economic reforms adopted in the early 1990s.
95. The price of natural gas may never converge to a single international price as, unlike oil, the costs of shipping natural gas in a liquefied state are likely to remain a large proportion of the overall price.
96. In the US, about a third of natural gas in consumed to produce electricity. Slightly less is used in industry and the rest for heating and cooking in the homes and in the commercial sector.
97. In 2011, Trinidad only exported 20 per cent of its LNG to the US, down from 70 per cent in 2007. It now increasingly relies on export markets in Europe, South America and Asia.
98. Gasland (2010), Josh Fox, New Video Group; and State of Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, Gasland Correction Document, 2010.
99. Following the 1973 oil embargo Nixon announced Project Independence declaring: ‘Let us set as our national goal, in the spirit of Apollo, with the determination of the Manhattan Project, that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source.’ Yergin, The Prize, p. 599.
100. ‘America’s New Energy Reality’, New York Times, 9 June 2012. www.nytimes.com
101. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of population (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 62.
102. The Limits of Growth (1972), the Club of Rome, Earth Island Limited, London.
103. The Green Revolution was a series of advances in agricultural technology, such as new high-yield varieties of wheat, fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation infrastructure, that swept through the developing world from the 1940s to the 1970s.
104. The fourth IPCC assessment report, released in 2007, connected two stark and simple facts. First, the concentration of carbon dioxide, the predominant greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere is increasing because of human activity. Second, the temperature of the earth’s surface is increasing. It stated that these two observations, were ‘very likely’ (meaning greater than 90 per cent probability) to be linked: increased greenhouse gas emissions are ‘very likely’ to be increasing the average global temperature.
105. Actual risk, as opposed to perceptions of risks, is simply the likelihood of an event happening multiplied by the damaging nature of the consequences of the event. Even if the chance of a catastrophic climatic event is very small, the consequences are so harmful that risk remains high.
106. The IPCC was set up in 1988 to examine the current state of scientific knowledge on climate change and the potential future environmental and socio-economic impacts.
107. ‘IPCC Third Assessment Report, Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’, Technical summary, Group 1, p. 79. Climate change results from an imbalance in the Earth’s emissions and absorption of carbon. While we understand the natural factors that alter this balance, the anthropogenic factors are not well understood. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) and aerosols have the greatest anthropogenic impact on the energy balance and have opposite effects: GHGs lead to warming and aerosols (except black carbon) lead to cooling. The cooling effects of aerosols are much more uncertain than the warming effects of GHGs. Uncertainty about aerosols is so large that models do not exclude that their cooling compensates almost entirely the greenhouse warming. Even more uncertainty emerges when trying to model the future climate because of feedback effects. These result from changes to water vapour concentration, cloud and snow cover that occur as the Earth warms. Feedback effects are expected to multiply the effect of global warming, yet by how much is very uncertain.
108. According to Popper, no single experiment can ever wholly prove a scientific finding; rather additional experiments that are in agreement with the finding serve to corroborate it. Conversely, if a new, and reputable, observation is in disagreement then the scientific finding is said to be falsified. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2002. Originally published in German in 1934).
109. Browne, Beyond Business, pp. 76–89.
110. Addressing Climate Change, 1997. www.bp.com
111. ‘The Nobel Peace Prize 2007’. Nobelprize.org, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006.
112. Leaders agreed that they would work towards a new global treaty agreement in 2015, to be enforced in 2020. This would replace the Kyoto Protocol. The new agreement will remove the division between developed and developing countries, who are currently under no obligation to cut emissions. A commitment was also made to the creation of a new climate fund to help developing nations develop clean energy sources and adapt to any damaging consequences of climate change.
113. In The Politics of Climate Change, Giddens writes of the Giddens Paradox: ‘Since the dangers posed by global warming aren’t tangible, immediate or visible in the course of day-to-day life, however awesome they ap
pear, many will sit on their hands and do nothing of a concrete nature about them. Yet waiting until they become visible and acute before being stirred to serious action will, by definition, be too late’. The Politics of Climate Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), p. 2.
114. The percentage of Americans and Western Europeans who view global warming as a threat fell by 10 per cent during the late 2000s financial crisis. Gallup Poll, 20 April 2011.
115. G. Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162 (3859): 1243–8 (1968).
116. China, and perhaps the US, are the only nations who could take unilateral action against climate change and see a noticeable and beneficial result as a change.
117. Quoted in Shogren, ‘Kyoto Protocol’, AAPG Bulletin, October 2004, V. 88, No. 9, pp. 1221–2.
118. This is known as the Jevons Paradox, first described by English economist William Stanley Jevons in The Coal Question (1865). Jevons was yet another reincarnation of Malthus, concerned that coal resources would soon run out because of over-consumption. He warned against the idea that more economical use of coal would prevent this ‘Malthusian Catastrophe’; using coal more efficiently would conversely increase our consumption of it.
119. The IPCC concluded that there is a potential of at least 2,000 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide of storage capacity in geological formations, about two orders of magnitude more than total worldwide carbon dioxide emissions each year.
120. In 2006, as the Miller oilfield in Scotland came to the end of its life, BP sought to implement just such an EOR project. The empty pipeline through which to pump carbon dioxide back into the field was already in place and would spark new life into the nearly depleted reservoir. Ultimately the project never happened because of delays in regulatory and financial support from the British government, on whom BP was dependent to make the project economically viable. As long as the costs of CGS remain lower than the revenue it can generate from enhanced oil recovery, there exists potential for CCS to be adopted as part of the upstream oil and gas industry. Carbon dioxide injection now accounts for more oil production in the US than any other enhanced oil recovery method.
121. EU member states have committed to cut emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. The EU Emissions Trading System is the first and largest international carbon-trading scheme in the world. Under the scheme, factories and power plants have a cap on their yearly emissions, but within this cap they are granted emissions allowances which can be traded.
GOLD
1. ‘Eldorado Raft’, c. AD 700–1600. The raft measures approximately 10 by 20 centimetres. It was cast in one single piece using the lost-wax technique in a clay mould. It is made from a mixture of gold, copper and silver, known as tumbaga, the low melting point of which makes the material even easier to work.
2. The El Dorado ritual was described by historian Juan Rodriguez Freyle in Conquest and discovery of New Granada (1636). The ritual at the lake had ceased before the first Spaniards arrived in Colombia, but the story was passed on from descendants of the tribe to Freyle. However, the exact root of the legend of El Dorado is disputed. The legend was not connected with the Muisca area until many years after the first expeditions that sought to find the city of gold, El Dorado.
3. In contrast to Xue, the villainous moon Chíya signified darkness, sorcery, instinct and the sinister side of human nature.
4. Before gold’s modern denotation as Au in the eighteenth century, the chemical symbol for gold was a representation of the Sun. Even Au is the stem of aurora, the Latin for ‘shining dawn’.
5. There are exceptions to our universal desire for gold. In the mid-nineteenth century, Fijian islanders captured a chest of gold coins from a trading brig close to the islands. When Captain Cook arrived on Fiji, he found them skimming them across the water. Again, in Africa early traders happily swapped gold in favour of salt, which they considered far more useful.
6. Peter Bernstein, The Power of Gold (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), p. 121.
7. Wama Poma, Andean chronicler. Michael Wood, Conquistadors (London: BBC Books, 2000), p. 134.
8. John Hemming, The Search for El Dorado, (London: Michael Joseph, 1978), p. 126.
9. One tribal leader, known as Delicola, hearing of the fates of other chieftains, created a story about a great empire of gold that served to heighten the delirium of Pizarro’s men for gold and send them on further into the jungle.
10. In 1548, Pizarro was hanged outside Cuzco after rebelling against the New Laws for the government of the Americas; he believed them to be too liberal.
11. By 1700 the world stocks of gold and silver were five times those of 1492.
12. During the sixteenth century Europe suffered a period of immense inflation, known as the Price Revolution. These financial problems were largely the result of profound social and political changes that were sweeping through Europe long before Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. The large influx of gold into Spain only exacerbated the problem. The value of a precious metal is not absolute. When gold becomes more plentiful, its value decreases, causing the price of other commodities, which are bought with gold, to soar. The greed of the conquistadors was the seed of their own destitution.
13. B. Hammer and J. K. Norskov, ‘Why gold is the noblest metal of all’, Nature, Vol. 376, 20 July 1995.
14. The Mold gold cape is a piece of ceremonial dress made of solid gold dating from the European Bronze Age. It was found near the Welsh town of Mold by workmen quarrying for stone in the nineteenth century. The sheet of gold from which it was created was beaten out of single gold ingot and then embellished in astoundingly intricate detail so as to mimic strings of beads and folds of cloth.
15. The nomadic tribes of Scythia, an area that spread across parts of Central Asia and Eastern Europe, produced ornate decorative objects in gold, silver, bronze and bone from the seventh to the fourth centuries BC. The Hermitage owns the most spectacular collection of Scythian gold artefacts, such as shields, combs and bowls depicting wild animals and fighting warriors.
16. Marshall puts the date somewhere between 18 and 20 January. However, one of his workers writes in his diary entry on 24 January: ‘This day some kind of mettle was found in the tail race that looks like goalds, first discovered by James Martial, the boss of the mill.’ John Walton Caughey, California Gold Rush (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
17. H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold (London: Arrow, 2006), p. 16.
18. Ibid.
19. Peter Browning, Bright Gem of the Western Seas (Lafayette, GA: Great West Books, 1991), p. 3.
20. On 29 May the Californian newspaper announced: ‘The whole country from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the sea shore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds to the sordid cry of gold! GOLD!! GOLD!!! while the field if left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pick axes … ’ Caughey, California Gold Rush, p. 21.
21. In one particularly brutal attack in 1850, labelled the ‘Bloody Island Massacre’ after the incident, a United States Cavalry regiment killed more than fifty native Pomo in Lake County, California. The attack was retribution for the killing of two brutal and sadistic settlers by a group of Pomo, and led to a foundation being set up by a survivor’s descendants to improve relations between the Pomo and other residents of California.
22. An early method of assaying the purity of a coin was to use a ‘touchstone’. The edge of the coin was rubbed on the stone and then compared to a series of stones rubbed with gold of a known purity. However, touchstone sets were often inaccurate and could be manipulated by the owner of the set for his own benefit.
23. Non-metallic coins were used before the inventions of gold and silver coins, such as the mollusc shells, called cowries, that were used by the ancient Chinese. But these objects were only of use for small transactions and were not valued outside their own culture.
24. In the British Museum in London, where I was a Trustee betw
een 1995 and 2005, they own a large collection of Lydian coinage, from misshapen electrum lumps to the intricately stamped pure gold coins of Croesus.
25. King Croesus was concerned about the growing power of the Persians and so consulted the oracle at Delphi on the matter. The oracle told him that if he made war on the Persians he would ‘destroy a great empire’. The oracle was renowned for the accuracy of its prophecies, and this one was no exception; a great empire was indeed destroyed, but, unfortunately for Croesus, it was his own. Bernstein, The Power of Gold, p. 35.
26. A gold ducat weighs 3.5g and is 0.997 fine, giving it a full quota of 24 carats (essentially 100 per cent pure).
27. Frederic Lane and Reinhold Mueller, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice: Vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. xiii.
28. A circle of raised beads was designed to be aligned with the edge of the coin metal to reduce this practice, but, apart from the ducat, the alignment of this circle was often off centre.
29. In one trial in March 1393, a man called Leonardo Gradengio was suspected of clipping in Alexandria. The Venetian consul in Alexandria investigated and found nearly three hundred clipped ducats in his strongbox. He fled but was tried in absentia in Venice, where he was found guilty and charged with the loss of his right hand, both eyes and banishment. Fifteen years later his wife pleaded for a pardon on the basis of his youth at the time of the offence, and it was given. But when he was caught in Venice in 1413, the sentence was carried out anyway.
30. Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), p. 59.
31. Newton is also celebrated on the British two-pound coin, which is engraved with a quotation from one of his letters to Robert Hooke: ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’.
32. Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), p. 112.
33. William Jennings Bryan, ‘Cross of Gold Speech’, 1896. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/