Made on Earth (2 page)

“Next up we have the fleece items,” says the director of the company.

Mr Wittkowski hits the brakes on ordering stock from China. “We’ve
always
ordered our stock from BGI (Bangladesh Garni International) in Bangladesh. Their prices are fair, and the products are good quality.”

“At the end of the day, quality in this business is
not
important,” interrupts Ms Unruh. “Our customers don’t care whether their clothes last five years or one winter. They care about fashion. There is only one trend in the textile industry, cheap, cheaper,
cheapest
. The Chinese manufacturers can make clothes that look as good as named brand products, which are also dirt cheap.”

“But we have always ordered our stock from Bangladesh!” protests Mr Whittkowski. “Don’t we have a certain obligation to them?”

“No! We can order stock from wherever we like,” replies Ms Unruh.

“We have an obligation to our shareholders,” the director interrupts. “They want to see growth.”

“But what about our customers?” says Mr Wittkowski. “They want a fair price for good quality products. Will the Chinese company keep to the shipping schedules and delivery dates? Will the quality of the stock be consistent and of a high level? Will they use non-toxic dyes? BGI have consistently delivered high quality products at reasonable prices for the past thirteen years.”

“That settles it then,” replies the director, who has the final say in the matter. “This year, we will continue to order our fleece products from Bangladesh.”

The director’s PA sends out the orders after lunch. They are signed off by both Mr Wittkowski and Ms Unruh before they are faxed directly to China and Bangladesh. Included in the final order are 1,000 fleece body warmers, made of 100 per cent fleece fabric, with a central zip fastening and pockets, to be supplied in a range of colours including green, blue, grey and brown. Strangely, it seems that bright red fleeces aren’t on the list.

2

Can Money Really Buy Everything?

11 August 2005

It’s night, and the crude oil that will one day become my fleece is here. But where are we exactly? We are at sea, but close to the coast. Even though it is late in the evening, there is a warm breeze across the water. Around us are burning towers that look like huge, fiery Christmas trees poking up out of the sea. These are platforms where crude oil is drilled for 24 hours a day. The light from the flare stacks can be seen for miles and miles around.

The oil fields here are different to those on land (like in Siberia), and in the north (off the coast of Norway, for example). They are also different to those in Sudan and South America, near Venezuela. These are the oil fields of the Middle East. Here, the land glows like a huge fairground. Aeroplane passengers twist and turn in their seats so they can look down on the bright lights from 10,000 metres above. Many of them will spot a huge spit of land, shaped like an encircled palm tree sticking out of the coast. This man-made island is unmistakable. We are in the Persian Gulf in the sheikhdom of Dubai. Dubai is part of the United Arab Emirates, a country made up of seven individual sheikhdoms that have become super-rich through selling oil. The burning flares and glowing city lights shine all day, every day. When you have a
seemingly
endless supply of natural gas and crude oil, you don’t have to worry about your gas and electricity bills.

20 August 2004

It is early in the morning. A drill stands on an oil platform off the coast of Dubai, ready to burrow into a huge underground reservoir of petroleum. The thick black oil explodes up into the sky the moment the drill breaks through the final tightly sealed layer of rock. Over a period of approximately 150 million years, vast amounts of gas have been compressed under immense pressure, resulting in the formation of oil. In the past, oil prospectors would unleash huge fountains of oil that would sometimes catch fire. These days, the oil is safely piped away, day in and day out.

But how is crude oil created? To find out we must go back in time, to between 200 and 900 million years ago. At this point in history, there was only one vast sea, known as the primal ocean, and all the continents were still part of a single connected landmass. Around part of this landmass was an area where the seabed was flat, which we refer to today as the Wadden Sea. It’s here that life on Earth began. The first living organisms were blue-green algae; followed by tiny jellyfish-like creatures, the first forms of coral, and
echinoderms
– the forerunners of sea urchins and starfish.

As the Earth’s mantle (the planet’s rocky outer shell) wasn’t as solid as it is today, it could still move around. Over time, increasingly large cracks called basins appeared in the ocean floor. In these basins lived vast amounts of sea creatures that sank to the bottom when they died. There were so many of them that they couldn’t all be eaten by other creatures or destroyed by bacteria. Without oxygen they could not rot. Instead they turned the ocean floor into a black marshy expanse. Over thousands and thousands of years, sand and rocks settled on top of this gooey mass. As the dead matter became trapped from all sides, immense pressure built up, which also generated heat. This combination of extreme heat and intense pressure helped to turn the dead organisms into natural gas and crude oil.

Even today, the finer details of how petroleum is created are only just beginning to be understood. In spite of this, for modern humans petroleum is a miracle substance, a form of almost pure energy. If nature hadn’t created huge amounts of oil, natural gas and coal millions of years ago, we’d probably all still be travelling by horse and cart and using sailing boats to cross the oceans. Globalisation, as we know it, would not exist. However, these natural energy resources are not equally distributed across the globe. Some countries have very few fossil fuel resources, or none at all, while other countries, like the United Arab Emirates, have vast supplies of fossil fuels such as petroleum.

11 August 2005

Back to the 11 August 2005. The petroleum has been found, drilled for, and pumped out of the ground. Several oil tankers have moored close to the oil platform off the coast of Dubai to collect the oil, including the 187 metre long
Madras
. However, the petroleum is not immediately pumped into the waiting tankers, but runs through a pipeline on the seabed to a storage container on land. At this stage the thick black liquid is a mixture of oil, gas, saltwater and other impurities. It is not yet ready to be transported and sold as it contains too many extra worthless materials.

Once on land, the mixture is moved to a container to be pressurised. The natural gas is extracted and filtered off, which is then used to run Dubai’s huge power stations. In another tank the heavy saltwater sinks to the bottom and is pumped away. Using heat, electricity and chemical reactions, the remainder of the water and other waste products are removed. The resulting pure crude oil is now ready to be transported by tankers or through pipelines.

Most tankers drop anchor off-shore while they are waiting for an oil pick-up. The wait can last for several weeks, however the
Madras
only has to wait for 72 hours. In the mornings and evenings when the air is cooler, Captain van der Valt stands on the bridge of the
Madras
watching the coastline through his binoculars for hours on end. Every time he sails to Dubai, he feels like he’s arrived on the set of a science-fiction film. The top floors of the skyscrapers glow blue and look like giant, alien heads. Other constructions look like docking stations for missiles, although in reality they are brightly lit building sites surrounded by cranes, the birthplaces of future skyscrapers.

14 August 2005

The opportunity for the
Madras
to dock in the Jebel Ali Port comes at sunrise. Dubai’s new harbour, which was created to cater to huge cargo ships, is the largest port in the Middle East. Due to the enormous size of oil tankers however, oil shipments have to be exchanged outside of the main harbour. At about 8:00am in the morning the
Madras
enters the filling station. Three massive hoses are lowered by crane onto the deck of the ship and positioned so that the crude oil can be pumped into the ship’s storage tanks. It takes well over a day for the tanker to be filled.

While this is happening, Sadek, an immigrant from India, is finishing breakfast with his housemates in a simple apartment on the outskirts of Dubai. Sadek and his friends are part of the foreign workforce that make up more than three quarters of Dubai’s population, and who undertake almost all of the manual labour in the city. Immigrants like Sadek work on oil rigs and on building sites, they cook and wait on tables in restaurants, and they work in the homes of some of the wealthiest people in Dubai. They take care of private and public gardens, clean the streets and drive taxis. These workers earn around £100 to £120 pounds a month. They send most of this money home to their families, who must survive on this source of income alone. Immigrant workers can often earn more than double the wages they could in their homeland working as skyscraper construction managers, vets on camel farms or engineers on the drilling platforms.

Sadek, however, earns his money by loading and unloading small boats in the old port. The old port is situated in an estuary that extends almost ten kilometres into the heart of Dubai. The estuary has served as a natural harbour for centuries, and throughout this time the dhows, the traditional wooden boats of the Arabian Gulf, have anchored here. Forty years ago Dubai was just a small trading post. Only a few of the houses were made of stone, and most were built from clay and had roofs made of palm fronds. Although the town has changed completely in the last few decades, the dhows still transport almost all trade goods in the Persian Gulf, including car tyres, non-perishable goods and electrical supplies from the Far East. While Sadek and his colleagues move crate after crate onto land in the heat, an Arabian dhow captain watches and grumbles to himself. But the dock-workers are happy because the port is busy. Sometimes they have to sit for hours in the shade waiting for boats to come in.

When Captain van der Valt first sailed a ship to Dubai in 1990, the eight-lane Sheikh Zayed road which runs parallel to the coast had just been built. Many foreigners mocked the so-called ‘Grand Boulevard of Dubai’, as the road ran through undeveloped wasteland. Now however, the highway is surrounded by high-rise offices, hotels and apartment complexes. Construction goes on uninterrupted day and night. Today in Dubai, over 200 skyscrapers have been built, surpassing the number in Hong Kong and New York City. Only the smaller high-rises are simple in design and construction. The large skyscrapers revel in how elaborate and complicated they are; the luxury Burj al-Arab Hotel for example, looks like an upturned ship, while the Jumeirah Beach Hotel looks like an enormous slide. These buildings, however, pale in comparison to the Burj Khalifa. It is currently the tallest structure in the world, measuring 829.84 metres high. The Burj Khalifa has 160 floors, with a hotel at the bottom, a viewing platform at the top, and offices and luxury apartments in the middle.

The ‘Miracle of the Persian Gulf’: Dubai

Dubai is one of seven small sheikhdoms in the middle of the Persian Gulf, which together make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE or Emirates, for short). The country is hailed as the ‘Miracle of the Persian Gulf’. While bloody conflicts raged on around it, Dubai became an oasis of peace and economic growth, where people from different races and religions could live side by side. Thanks to its rich oil supplies and shrewd economic policy, Dubai has become one of the ‘winners’ of globalisation. It is, per person, one of the richest countries in the world. In order to show the world just how rich the Emirates are, they have built the highest skyscrapers, the largest man-made islands, and are in the process of building the world’s largest theme park (Dubailand).

Despite its wealth however, three quarters of Dubai’s population are not actually made up of citizens of the United Arab Emirates, but poorly paid immigrants with temporary work permits.

What the Emirates lack, however, is a good supply of natural drinking water. In spite of this, they use more than a million cubic metres of water a day. Only the USA and Canada use more water per person per day. The UAE’s fresh water supply comes from desalination plants, which are powered by locally sourced natural gas and petroleum. The Arabians in the Gulf still have plenty of these fossil fuels available, but they will, eventually, run out. This is the reason why the government sees the country’s future in trade, finance, retail and tourism. Hotels and parks attract tourists, and man-made islands, luxury apartments and docks for private yachts attract wealthy immigrants. In addition to expanding the country’s aeroplane fleet, the government is also building two new airport terminals, one for passengers and one for cargo.