The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Today's New York Times highlights an intriguing business story with a major environmental component. The first three paragraphs of the lengthy Times piece convey the gist:

Oil refineries across the country have been plagued by a record number of fires, power failures, leaks, spills and breakdowns this year, causing dozens of them to shut down temporarily or trim production. The disruptions are helping to drive gasoline prices to highs not seen since last summer's records.

These mechanical breakdowns, which one analyst likened to an "invisible hurricane," have created a bottleneck in domestic energy supplies, helping to push up gasoline prices 50 cents this year to well above $3 a gallon. A third of the country's 150 refineries have reported disruptions to their operations since the beginning of the year, a record according to analysts.

There have been blazes at refineries in Louisiana, Texas, Indiana and California, some of them caused by lightning strikes. Plants have suffered power losses that disrupted operations; a midsize refinery in Kansas was flooded by torrential rains last month.

The article goes on to note that many of the breakdowns at U.S. refineries have been linked to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which damaged some facilities, strained others through overuse, and encouraged oil companies to delay necessary maintenance as they ramped up production to take advantage of record-high prices.

I'm not a climate scientist, but it doesn't take any special expertise to sense a common thread among many of the problems mentioned by the Times. Hurricane Katrina . . . unusual lightning strikes . . . floods . . . torrential rains . . . aren't these just the kinds of weather anomalies that many climatologists have warned might be exacerbated by global warming?

If so, perhaps we are entering a period when the world's energy problems could begin to spiral out of control thanks to a new kind of vicious cycle: Reliance on fossil fuels promotes climate change; climate change helps produce more extreme weather conditions; extreme weather events damage oil production facilities, thereby lessening availability of fossil fuels. (And just to make the pot bubble a little faster, has anyone calculated how much more electricity people will be using to rev up their air conditioners if global warming raises average summer temperatures by a degree or two?)

Obviously, there's a limit to how far this cycle can continue without causing huge disruptions to our middle-class way of life. (As economist Herb Stein used to say, "Things that can't go on forever don't.") News like today's may mean that the day when all of us--business leaders, policy makers, and the general public--will be forced to alter our energy-consumption habits is a lot closer than we assume.

Labels: Climate and Carbon, energy, Supply Chain