A new report from the UN advises ditching corporate-controlled and chemically intensive farming in favor of agroecology.

There are a billion hungry people in the world and that number could rise as food insecurity increases along with population growth, economic fallout and environmental crises. But a roadmap to defeating hunger exists, if we can follow the course — and that course involves ditching corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive farming.

“To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. And today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live,” says Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Agroecology is more or less what many Americans would simply call “organic agriculture,” although important nuances separate the two terms.

Used successfully by peasant farmers worldwide, agroecology applies ecology to agriculture in order to optimize long-term food production, requiring few purchased inputs and increasing soil quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity over time. Agroecology also values traditional and indigenous farming methods, studying the scientific principals underpinning them instead of merely seeking to replace them with new technologies. As such, agroecology is grounded in local (material, cultural and intellectual) resources.

A new report, presented today before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, makes several important points along with its recommendation of agroecology. For example, it says, “We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations.” Instead, it says the solution lies with smallholder farmers. The majority of the world’s hungry are smallholder farmers, capable of growing food but currently not growing enough food to feed their families each year. A net global increase in food production alone will not guarantee the end of hunger (as the poor cannot access food even when it is available), an increase in productivity for poor farmers will make a dent in global hunger. Potentially, gains in productivity by smallholder farmers will provide an income to farmers as well, if they grow a surplus of food that they can sell.

With its potential to double crop yields, as the report notes, agroecology could help ensure smallholder farmers have enough to eat and perhaps provide a surplus to sell as well. The report calls for investment in extension services, storage facilities, and rural infrastructure like roads, electricity, and communication technologies, to help provide smallholders with access to markets, agricultural research and development, and education. Additionally, it notes the importance of providing farmers with credit and insurance against weather-related risks.

In the past, efforts to help the hungry involved developing high yielding seeds and providing them along with industrial inputs to farmers in poor countries. However, in poor countries, smallholder farmers who often live on less than $1 or $2 per day, cannot afford industrial inputs like hybrid or genetically engineered seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, or irrigation. Many work each year to make sure their crops go far enough to feed their families, with little left over to sell. And for those who live far from roads and cities, there might not be a market to sell to anyway.

Agroecology requires replacing chemical inputs with knowledge, often disseminated by farmers who work together with scientists and aid organizations to teach their fellow farmers. “Rather than treating smallholder farmers as beneficiaries of aid, they should be seen as experts with knowledge that is complementary to formalized expertise,” the report notes. For example, in Kenya, researchers and farmers developed a successful “push-pull” strategy to control pests in corn, and using town meetings, national radio broadcasts, and farmer field schools, spread the system to over 10,000 households.

The push-pull method involves pushing pests away from corn by interplanting corn with an insect repelling crop called Desmodium (which can be fed to livestock), while pulling the pests toward small nearby plots of Napier grass, “a plant that excretes a sticky gum which both attracts and traps pests.” In addition to controlling pests, this system produces livestock fodder, thus doubling corn yields and milk production at the same time. And it improves the soil to boot!

Significantly, the report mentions that past efforts to combat hunger focused mostly on cereals such as wheat and rice which, while important, do not provide a wide enough range of nutrients to prevent malnutrition. Thus, the biodiversity in agroecological farming systems provide much needed nutrients. “For example,” the report says, “it has been estimated that indigenous fruits contribute on average about 42 percent of the natural food-basket that rural households rely on in southern Africa. This is not only an important source of vitamins and other micronutrients, but it also may be critical for sustenance during lean seasons.” Indeed, in agroecological farming systems around the world, plants a conventional American farm might consider weeds are eaten as food or used in traditional herbal medicine.

De Schutter does not dismiss the U.S. government’s preferred strategies of crop breeding and fertilizers as potentially helpful in the fight against hunger, but warns of caution in using them. Crop breeding, he notes, can be complementary to agroecology. Perhaps referring to efforts to develop drought-resistant maize, the report says, “Agroecology is more overarching [than crop breeding] as it supports building drought-resistant agricultural systems (including soils, plants, agrobiodiversity, etc.), not just drought-resistant plants.”

When asked to provide more detail about crop breeding, De Schutter responded that “most [agroecologists] are very careful with some of these [crop breeding] technologies, particularly genetic engineering.” He noted that genetically engineered crops not only carry environmental risks, but are also “associated with unsustainable farming practices and with a worrying concentration of the seed industry.” In contrast, he sees promise in marker-assisted selection and participatory plant breeding, which “uses the strength of modern science, while at the same time putting farmers in the driver’s seat.”

De Schutter also highlights the risks of using nitrogen fertilizer, which contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution, saying that, “the use of fertilizers [in Africa] could increase a bit without major environmental damages.” He sees many reasons why agroecology is a better choice than nitrogen fertilizer, pointing out that, “many agroecological methods simply outperform mineral fertilizers: they result in similar levels of return on investments if you measure only productivity, but they create systems that are more resilient to climate change, some of them produce additional fodder for animals (nitrogen-fixing trees for instance), or fruit (thus vitamins).”

He adds that agroecological gains can be achieved with local resources, “while fertilizers need to be imported. This is not a minor issue for the balance of payment of countries! A country could thus use its foreign exchange to build modern industries and create jobs rather than buying fertilizers.” However, when an urgent situation of hunger needs to be addressed, nitrogen fertilizers should not be dismissed if they can, in fact, provide the best outcome in a short-term emergency situation.

The report also warns of the harmful impact of allowing volatile prices and dumping of subsidized commodities in poor countries. Dumping occurs when a country that subsidizes its farmers (like the U.S.) promotes overproduction and causes prices to fall very low. When the excess, cheap commodities are exported to poor countries that have no trade barriers, local farmers cannot compete on price. De Schutter notes, “While not the single cause, the lowering of import tariffs in poor countries and the inability of these countries to support their small farmers” were major causes of “massive rural poverty, rural flight, and widespread hunger.” He adds, “I believe that it is vital for poor countries to be allowed to protect their farming sector and to be helped in supporting this sector.”

Will the United States heed De Schutter’s advice, adopting a development approach that embraces agroecology and seeks trade agreements that are more fair to poor countries? Recently history does not inspire much hope. De Schutter is not the first to recognize the potential of agroecology. In 2008, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report also concluded that agroecology offered farmers a powerful means to increase production on smallholder farms, and thus decrease hunger in the world. Both De Schutter and the IAASTD report seek more than just food production from agriculture; they see agroecology as a way to improve rural livelihoods, mitigate climate change and provide resilience in the face of climate extremes.

However, the United States was one of only three countries that failed to approve the IAASTD report, due to its critiques of unregulated trade and biotechnology. American efforts to fight global hunger, to date, have focused more on crop breeding, particularly genetic engineering, and nitrogen fertilizer than agroecology. Whereas the new UN report notes that, “perhaps because [agroecological] practices cannot be rewarded by patents, the private sector has been largely absent from this line of research,” the U.S. aggressively promotes public-private partnerships with corporations such as seed and chemical companies Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, and BASF; agribusiness companies Cargill, Bunge; and Archer Daniels Midland; processed food companies PepsiCo, Nestle, General Mills, Coca Cola, Unilever, and Kraft Foods; and the retail giant Wal-Mart.

The entire report on agroecology is available on the Web site of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Americans who are interested in seeing the U.S. follow the path outlined by De Schutter in this report should contact USAID and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Additionally, contact your members of Congress as well as the U.S. Trade Representative and the president if you wish to comment on American trade policy.

Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It..

Reposted from AlterNet.

http://www.alternet.org/story/148335/

Meeting the growing demand for energy in the U.S., even through sustainable means, could entail greater threats to the environment, new research shows.

The study was carried out by Circle of Blue, a network of journalists and scientists dedicated to water sustainability, and could have implications not just for the relationship between energy demand and water scarcity in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world, as well. “It is not just that energy production could not occur without using vast amounts of water. It’s also that it’s occurring in the era of climate change, population growth and steadily increasing demand for energy,” explained Circle of Blue’s Keith Schneider, who presented the findings in Washington Wednesday.

“The result is that the competition for water at every stage of the mining, processing, production, shipping and use of energy is growing more fierce, more complex and much more difficult to resolve,” he said. About half the 410 billion gallons of water the U.S. withdraws daily goes to cooling thermoelectric power plants, and most of that to cooling coal-burning plants, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Meanwhile, climate change is leading to decreased snowmelt, rains and freshwater supplies, says Circle of Blue.

One of the things missing from the discussion, then, is the recognition that saving energy also saves water, the group contends.

The U.S. government has not been blind to the conflict between energy and water needs. The first part of a report commissioned by the U.S. Congress in 2005 laid out the consequences of not paying enough attention to water supply issues in increasing energy production. The second part, which would have laid out a research agenda and begun developing solutions, has yet to be made public, says Schneider.

He says the U.S. Department of Energy has declined repeated requests to explain why the report has not been published.

Energy demand in the U.S. is expected to increase by 40 percent as the U.S. population rises above 440 million by 2050. The water supply will not be able to support that growth, Schneider says.

Renewable sources of energy will certainly be a large part of trying to meet that energy demand, but these, too, come with a hidden water cost.

In 2009, the U.S. dedicated 23 million acres of public lands in six states for new solar electricity-generating plants as part of its economic stimulus package, which apportioned nearly 100 billion dollars for clean energy projects. Though the plan appeared promising, environmentalists soon began to point it could have damaging, unintended consequences. Schneider notes that criticism of the impact the water-cooled solar plants could have on water priorities in the U.S. Southwest even came from within the government.

“In arid settings, the increased water demand from concentrating solar energy systems employing water-cooled technology could strain limited water resources already under development pressure from urbanization, irrigation expansion, commercial interests and mining,” wrote Jon Jarvis, then head of the National Park Service’s Pacific West Region, in a February 2009 internal memo. “Solar generating plants that use conventional cooling technology use two to three times as much water as coal- fired power plants,” Schneider noted.

In other countries, the threat of water scarcity is even more pertinent.

Egypt, for example, has a population of approximately 82 million, but an annual water quota of about 86 billion cubic metres – and the population is expected to rise by more than 10 million people in the next decade.

Yet 30 European blue chip companies are set to invest 560 billion dollars over the next 40 years to build solar power plants in North Africa as part of the Desertec Industrial Initiative. Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia have agreed to work with the initiative. Comparing this project with the U.S.’s, Schneider notes that in an environment that faces even greater water scarcity than the southwestern U.S., such projects could prove disastrous. Circle of Blue calls the intersection of a rising demand for energy and diminishing supply water a “choke point”, but energy development – whether of the fossil fuel or renewable variety – is just one aspect of the water scarcity crisis that is unfolding in various regions of the globe.

Yemen is widely seen as the place where this scarcity will hit first and hardest.

“Analysts are worried Yemen could be the first country in the world to effectively run out of water,” said Christine Parthemore, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where she studies the intersection of natural resources and security issues. She spoke at a separate event Wednesday.

Yemen, which has no rivers and cannot afford desalination, is drawing water at around 400 times its replacement rate, she says, and this looming crisis is compounding other issues in the region, like the fact that Yemen has become a key recruiting spot for groups like al Qaeda.

“We are about to see water wars in the future,” said U.S. General Anthony Zinni. “We have seen fuel wars; we’re about to see water wars.”

National Post

The “Peak Oil” concept — that the world’s petroleum-production rate will soon reach its maximum and commence an inevitable decline, with negative economic consequences — has been around in scientifically articulated form at least since 1998; long enough to see it confirmed in significant ways.

The rate of discovery of new oilfields has been falling since 1964. The biggest find in recent years is Tupi, in Brazilian waters, which is claimed to hold five-to-eight billion barrels of oil; but that’s only enough to slake the world’s thirst for 60 to 90 days. Most producing nations are past their domestic peaks and are experiencing slowing output, despite every effort to maintain flow rates.

Skeptics point out that total world oil reserves continue to grow. But this may not be a reliable indication of where we stand: Often, in nations that have seen a peak and subsequent decline in production, domestic reserves continued to rise right up to, or even past, the date of peak production. Why? Oil companies replace reserves of high-quality, cheaply-produced oil with reserves of low-quality, slow-, or expensive-to-produce oil or tar sands.

Rates of output decline in older, giant oilfields have proven to be more trustworthy indicators of long-term trends. (For instance, they’ve enabled successful peaking forecasts for the United States, the North Sea and other regions). For the world, the average decline rate from existing fields has been calculated by the International Energy Agency at 4.5% per year. The world needs to develop the equivalent of a Saudi Arabia’s worth of oil production capacity every four years to offset such declines. This is quite a burden for the industry, which must now look for oil in ultra-deep water, in polar regions, or in politically fractured nations, since all the easy-to-find, easy-to-extract oil already has been located and much of it pumped.

So far, the record year for world crude production was 2005, and the record month was July 2008. Tellingly, the leveling-off of extraction rates between 2005 and 2008 occurred in the context of rising oil prices; indeed, in July 2008, the price spiked 50% higher than the previous inflation-adjusted record, set in the 1970s. Yet as both oil demand and prices rose, production barely budged in response.

While many commentators believe the jury is still out on Peak Oil, the list of petroleum analysts who say world oil production has already peaked, or will do so in the next five years, lengthens almost daily, and includes CEOs and other well-placed leaders within the oil industry.

The argument that oil production could theoretically continue to grow past 2015 is mainly put forward by organizations such as Cambridge Energy Research Associates and Saudi Aramco, which explain away evidence of dwindling discoveries, depleting oilfields and stagnating total production by claiming that it is demand for oil that has peaked, not supply — a claim that hinges on the observation that oil prices are high enough to discourage potential buyers. But high prices for a commodity usually signify scarcity, so the “peak demand” argument doesn’t hold water.

Peak Oil has significant implications for our economy. In response to the 2008 price spike, the global airline industry nose-dived and auto companies suffered. Worldwide shipping slowed drastically and hasn’t recovered. Demand for oil plummeted in late 2008, and so did the price — temporarily. But today’s price is again high, almost to the point of nipping economic recovery.

What should we do about Peak Oil? Start with what the U.K. Industry Task Force on Peak Oil (which included Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines) has done: Acknowledge the reality of supply limits. Then study the vulnerabilities of transport and food systems to high and volatile oil prices, and start making those systems more resilient and less oil-dependent.

But do it fast. Adaptation will take decades, and we are starting very late.

Originally published March 19, 2010 on National Post

Everyone agrees: our economy is sick. The inescapable symptoms include declines in consumer spending and consumer confidence, together with a contraction of international trade and available credit. Add a collapse in real estate values and carnage in the automotive and airline industries and the picture looks grim indeed.

But why are both the U.S. economy and the larger global economy ailing? Among the mainstream media, world leaders, and America’s economists-in-chief (Treasury Secretary Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke) there is near-unanimity of opinion: these recent troubles are primarily due to a combination of bad real estate loans and poor regulation of financial derivatives.

This is the Conventional Diagnosis. If it is correct, then the treatment for our economic malady might logically include heavy doses of bailout money for beleaguered financial institutions, mortgage lenders, and car companies; better regulation of derivatives and futures markets; and stimulus programs to jumpstart consumer spending.

But what if this diagnosis is fundamentally flawed? The metaphor needs no belaboring: we all know that tragedy can result from a doctor’s misreading of symptoms, mistaking one disease for another.

Something similar holds for our national and global economic infirmity. If we don’t understand why the world’s industrial and financial metabolism is seizing up, we are unlikely to apply the right medicine and could end up making matters much worse than they would otherwise be.

To be sure: the Conventional Diagnosis is clearly at least partly right. The causal connections between subprime mortgage loans and the crises at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers have been thoroughly explored and are well known. Clearly, over the past few years, speculative bubbles in real estate and the financial industry were blown up to colossal dimensions, and their bursting was inevitable. It is hard to disagree with the words of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in his July 25 essay in the Sydney Morning Herald: “The roots of the crisis lie in the preceding decade of excess. In it the world enjoyed an extraordinary boom…However, as we later learnt, the global boom was built in large part…on a house of cards. First, in many Western countries the boom was created on a pile of debt held by consumers, corporations and some governments. As the global financier George Soros put it: ‘For 25 years [the West] has been consuming more than we have been producing…living beyond our means.’” (1)

But is this as far as we need look to get to the root of the continuing global economic meltdown?

A case can be made that dire events having to do with real estate, the derivatives markets, and the auto and airline industries were themselves merely symptoms of an even deeper, systemic dysfunction that spells the end of economic growth as we have known it.

In short, I am suggesting an Alternative Diagnosis. This explanation for the economic crisis is not for the faint of heart because, if correct, it implies that the patient is far sicker than even the most pessimistic economists are telling us. But if it is correct, then by ignoring it we risk even greater peril.

Economic Growth, The Financial Crisis, and Peak Oil

For several years, a swelling subculture of commentators (which includes the present author) has been forecasting a financial crash, basing this prognosis on the assessment that global oil production was about to peak. (2) Our reasoning went like this:

Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet. This is an axiomatic observation with which everyone familiar with the mathematics of compounded arithmetic growth must agree, even if they hedge their agreement with vague references to “substitutability” and “demographic transitions.” (3)

This axiomatic limit to growth means that the rapid expansion in both population and per-capita consumption of resources that has occurred over the past century or two must cease at some particular time. But when is this likely to occur?

The unfairly maligned Limits to Growth studies, published first in 1972 with periodic updates since, have attempted to answer the question with analysis of resource availability and depletion, and multiple scenarios for future population growth and consumption rates. The most pessimistic scenario in 1972 suggested an end of world economic growth around 2015. (4)

But there may be a simpler way of forecasting growth’s demise.

Energy is the ultimate enabler of growth (again, this is axiomatic: physics and biology both tell us that without energy nothing happens). Industrial expansion throughout the past two centuries has in every instance been based on increased energy consumption.(5) More specifically, industrialism has been inextricably tied to the availability and consumption of cheap energy from coal and oil (and more recently, natural gas). However, fossil fuels are by their very nature depleting, non-renewable resources. Therefore (according to the Peak Oil thesis), the eventual inability to continue increasing supplies of cheap fossil energy will likely lead to a cessation of economic growth in general, unless alternative energy sources and efficiency of energy use can be deployed rapidly and to a sufficient degree. (6)

Of the three conventional fossil fuels, oil is arguably the most economically vital, since it supplies 95 percent of all transport energy. Further, petroleum is the fuel with which we are likely to encounter supply problems soonest, because global petroleum discoveries have been declining for decades, and most oil producing countries are already seeing production declines. (7)

So, by this logic, the end of economic growth (as conventionally defined) is inevitable, and Peak Oil is the likely trigger.

Why would Peak Oil lead not just to problems for the transport industry, but a more general economic and financial crisis? During the past century growth has become institutionalized in the very sinews of our economic system. Every city and business wants to grow. This is understandable merely in terms of human nature: nearly everyone wants a competitive advantage over someone else, and growth provides the opportunity to achieve it. But there is also a financial survival motive at work: without growth, businesses and governments are unable to service their debt. And debt has become endemic to the industrial system. During the past couple of decades, the financial services industry has grown faster than any other sector of the American economy, even outpacing the rise in health care expenditures, accounting for a third of all growth in the U.S. economy. From 1990 to the present, the ratio of debt-to-GDP expanded from 165 percent to over 350 percent. In essence, the present welfare of the economy rests on debt, and the collateral for that debt consists of a wager that next year’s levels of production and consumption will be higher than this year’s.

Given that growth cannot continue on a finite planet, this wager, and its embodiment in the institutions of finance, can be said to constitute history’s greatest Ponzi scheme. We have justified present borrowing with the irrational belief that perpetual growth is possible, necessary, and inevitable. In effect we have borrowed from future generations so that we could gamble away their capital today.

Until recently, the Peak Oil argument has been framed as a forecast: the inevitable decline in world petroleum production, whenever it occurs, will kill growth. But here is where forecast becomes diagnosis: during the period from 2005 to 2008, energy stopped growing and oil prices rose to record levels. By July of 2008, the price of a barrel of oil was nudging close to $150—half again higher than any previous petroleum price in inflation-adjusted terms—and the global economy was beginning to topple. The auto and airline industries shuddered; ordinary consumers had trouble buying gasoline for their commute to work while still paying their mortgages. Consumer spending began to decline. By September the economic crisis was also a financial crisis, as banks trembled and imploded. (8)

Given how much is at stake, it is important to evaluate the two diagnoses on the basis of facts, not preconceptions.

It is unnecessary to examine evidence supporting or refuting the Conventional Diagnosis, because its validity is not in doubt—as a partial explanation for what is occurring. The question is whether it is a sufficient explanation, and hence an adequate basis for designing a successful response.

What’s the evidence favoring the Alternative? A good place to begin is with a recent paper by economist James Hamilton of the University of California, San Diego, titled “Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08,” which discusses oil prices and economic impacts with clarity, logic, and numbers, explaining how and why the economic crash is related to the oil price shock of 2008. (9)

Hamilton starts by citing previous studies showing a tight correlation between oil price spikes and recessions. On the basis of this correlation, every attentive economist should have forecast a steep recession for 2008. “Indeed,” writes Hamilton, “the relation could account for the entire downturn of 2007-08…If one could have known in advance what happened to oil prices during 2007-08, and if one had used the historically estimated relation [between price rise and economic impact]…one would have been able to predict the level of real GDP for both of 2008:Q3 and 2008:Q4 quite accurately.”

Again, this is not to ignore the role of the financial and real estate sectors in the ongoing global economic meltdown. But in the Alternative Diagnosis the collapse of the housing and derivatives markets is seen as amplifying a signal ultimately emanating from a failure to increase the rate of supply of depleting resources. Hamilton again: “At a minimum it is clear that something other than housing deteriorated to turn slow growth into a recession. That something, in my mind, includes the collapse in automobile purchases, slowdown in overall consumption spending, and deteriorating consumer sentiment, in which the oil shock was indisputably a contributing factor.”

Moreover, Hamilton notes that there was “an interaction effect between the oil shock and the problems in housing.” That is, in many metropolitan areas, house prices in 2007 were still rising in the zip codes closest to urban centers but already falling fast in zip codes where commutes were long. (10)

Why Did the Oil Price Spike?

Those who espouse the Conventional Diagnosis for our ongoing economic collapse might agree that there was some element of causal correlation between the oil price spike and the recession, but they would deny that the price spike itself had anything to do with resource limits, because (they say) it was caused mostly by speculation in the oil futures market, and had little to do with fundamentals of supply and demand.

In this, the Conventional Diagnosis once again has some basis in reality. Speculation in oil futures during the period in question almost certainly helped drive oil prices higher than was justified by fundamentals. But why were investors buying oil futures? Was the mania for oil contracts just another bubble, like the dot.com stock frenzy of the late ’90s or the real estate boom of 2003 to 2006?

During the period from 2005 to mid-2008, demand for oil was growing, especially in China (which went from being self-sufficient in oil in 1995 to being the world’s second-foremost importer, after the U.S., by 2006). But the global supply of oil was essentially stagnant: monthly production figures for crude oil bounced around within a fairly narrow band between 72 and 75 million barrels per day. As prices rose, production figures barely budged in response. There was every indication that all oil producers were pumping flat-out: even the Saudis appeared to be rushing to capitalize on the price bonanza.

Thus a good argument can be made that speculation in oil futures was merely magnifying price moves that were inevitable on the basis of the fundamentals of supply and demand. James Hamilton (in his publication previously cited) puts it this way: “With hindsight, it is hard to deny that the price rose too high in July 2008, and that this miscalculation was influenced in part by the flow of investment dollars into commodity futures contracts. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the two key ingredients needed to make such a story coherent—a low price elasticity of demand, and the failure of physical production to increase—are the same key elements of a fundamentals-based explanation of the same phenomenon. I therefore conclude that these two factors, rather than speculation per se, should be construed as the primary cause of the oil shock of 2007-08.”

Aftermath of the Peak

There is also controversy over to what degree troubles in the automobile, trucking, and airline industries should be attributed to the oil price spike or the economic crash. Of course, if the Alternative Diagnosis is correct, the latter two events are causally related in any case. However, it may be helpful to review the situation.

Everyone knows that GM and Chrysler went bankrupt this year because U.S. car sales cratered. The current forecast is for sales of about 10.3 million vehicles in the U.S. for 2009, down from last year’s 13.2 million and 16.1 million in 2007. U.S. car sales have not been this low since the 1970s. Sales of light trucks, the most profitable vehicles, took the biggest hit during 2008, as fuel prices soared and car buyers avoided gas-guzzlers. It was at this point that the auto companies really began feeling the pain.

The airline industry’s ills are summarized in a recent GAO document: “After 2 years of profits, the U.S. passenger airline industry lost $4.3 billion in the first 3 quarters of 2008 [as jet fuel prices climbed]. Collectively, U.S. airlines reduced domestic capacity, as measured by the number of seats flown, by about 9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008…To reduce capacity, airlines reduced the overall number of active aircraft in their fleets by 18 percent…Airlines also collectively reduced their workforces by about 28,000, or nearly 7 percent, from the end of 2007 to the end of 2008…The contraction of the U.S. airline industry in 2008 reduced airport revenues, passengers’ access to the national aviation system, and revenues for the Trust Fund.”(11)

For the trucking industry, fuel accounts for nearly 40 percent of total operational costs. In 2007, as diesel prices rose, carriers began losing money and added fuel price surcharges; meanwhile the volume of freight began falling. After July 2008, as oil prices crashed, tonnage continued to decline. Overall, the cumulative decrease in loads for flatbed, tanker, and dry vans ranged between 15 percent and 20 percent just in the period from June to December 2008. (12)

This last set of statistics raises a couple of questions crucial to understanding the Alternative Diagnosis: Why, if global oil production had just peaked, did petroleum prices fall in the last five months of 2008? And, if oil prices were a major factor in the economic crisis, why didn’t the economy begin to turn around after the prices softened?

Why Did Oil Prices Fall?

And Why Didn’t Lower Oil Prices Lead to a Quick Recovery?

The Peak Oil thesis predicts that, as world oil production reaches its maximum level and begins to decline, the price of oil will rise dramatically. But it also forecasts a dramatic increase in the volatility of prices.

The argument goes as follows. As oil becomes scarce, its price will rise until it begins to undermine economic activity in general. Economic contraction will then result in substantially reduced demand for oil, which will in turn cause its price to fall temporarily. Then one of two things will happen: either (a) the economy will begin to recover, stoking renewed oil demand, leading again to high prices which will again undermine economic activity; or (b), if the economy does not quickly recover, petroleum production will gradually fall due to depletion until spare production capacity (created by lower demand) is wiped out, leading again to higher prices and even more economic contraction. In both cases, oil prices remain volatile and the economy contracts.

This scenario corresponds very closely with the reality that is unfolding, though it remains to be seen whether situation (a) or (b) will ensue.

Over the past three years, oil prices rose and fell more dramatically than would have been the case if it had not been for widespread speculation in oil futures. Nevertheless, the general direction of prices—way up, then way down, then part-way back up—is entirely consistent with the Peak Oil thesis and the Alternative Diagnosis.

Why has the economy not quickly recovered, given that oil prices are now only half what they were in July 2008? Again, Peak Oil is not the only cause of the current economic crisis. Enormous bubbles in the real estate and finance sectors constituted accidents waiting to happen, and the implosion of those bubbles has created a serious credit crisis (as well as solvency and looming currency crises) that will likely take several years to resolve even if energy supplies don’t pose a problem.

But now the potential for renewed high oil prices acts as a ceiling for economic recovery. Whenever the economy does appear to show renewed signs of life (as has happened in May-July this year, with stock values rebounding and the general pace of economic contraction slowing somewhat), oil prices will take off again as oil speculators anticipate a recovery of demand. Indeed, oil prices have rebounded from $30 in January to nearly $70 currently, provoking widespread concern that high energy prices could nip recovery in the bud.(14)

A barrel of oil from newly developed sources costs in the neighborhood of $60 to produce, now that all of the cheaper prospects have been exploited: finding new oilfields today usually means drilling under miles of ocean water, or in politically unstable nations where equipment and personnel are at high risk. (15) So as soon as consumers demand more oil, the price will have to stay noticeably above that figure in order to provide the incentive for producers to drill.

Volatile oil prices hurt on the upside, but they also hurt on the downside. The oil price collapse of August-December 2008, plus the worsening credit crisis, caused a dramatic contraction in oil industry investment, leading to the cancellation of about $150 billion worth of new oil production projects—whose potential productive capacity will be required to offset declines in existing oilfields if world oil production is to remain stable. (16) This means that even if demand remains low, production capacity will almost certainly decline to meet those demand levels, causing oil prices to rise again in real terms at some point, perhaps two or three years from now. Volatile petroleum prices also hurt the development of alternative energy, as was shown during the past few months when falling oil prices led to financial troubles for ethanol manufacturers. (17)

One way or another, growth will be highly problematic if not unachievable.

Big Picture Diagnosis: Continuing the Trail of Logic

At this point in the discussion many readers will be wondering why alternative energy sources and efficiency measures cannot be deployed to solve the Peak Oil crisis. After all, as petroleum becomes more expensive, ethanol, biodiesel, and electric cars all start to look more attractive both to producers and consumers. Won’t the magic of the market intervene to render oil shortages irrelevant to future growth?

It is impossible in the context of this discussion to provide a detailed explanation of why the market probably cannot solve the Peak Oil problem. Such an explanation requires a discussion of energy evaluation criteria, and an analysis of many individual energy alternatives on the basis of those criteria. I have offered brief overviews of this subject previously and a much longer one is in press. (18)

My summary conclusions in this regard are as follows.

About 85 percent of our current energy is derived from three primary sources—oil, natural gas, and coal—that are non-renewable, whose price is likely to trend sharply higher over the next years and decades leading to severe shortages, and whose environmental impacts are unacceptable. While these sources historically have had very high economic value, we cannot rely on them in the future; indeed, the longer the transition to alternative energy sources is delayed, the more difficult that transition will be unless some practical mix of alternative energy systems can be identified that will have superior economic and environmental characteristics.

But identifying such a mix is harder than one might initially think. Each energy source has highly specific characteristics. In fact, it has been the characteristics of our present energy sources (principally oil, coal, and natural gas) that have enabled the building of an urbanized society with high mobility, large population, and high economic growth rates. Surveying the available alternative energy sources for criteria such as energy density, environmental impacts, reliance on depleting raw materials, intermittency versus constancy of supply, and the percentage of energy returned on the energy invested in energy production, none currently appears capable of perpetuating this kind of society.

Moreover, national energy systems are expensive and slow to develop. Energy efficiency likewise requires investment, and further incremental investments in efficiency tend to yield diminishing returns over time, since it is impossible to perform work with zero energy input. Where is there the will or ability to muster sufficient investment capital for deployment of alternative energy sources and efficiency measures on the scale needed?

While there are many successful alternative energy production installations around the world (ranging from small home-scale photovoltaic systems to large “farms” of three-megawatt wind turbines), there are very few modern industrial nations that now get the bulk of their energy from sources other than oil, coal, and natural gas. One example is Sweden, which obtains most of its energy from nuclear and hydropower. Another is Iceland, which benefits from unusually large domestic geothermal resources not found in most other countries. Even for these two nations, the situation is complex: the construction of the infrastructure for their power plants mostly relied on fossil fuels for the mining of the ores and raw materials, for materials processing, for transportation, for the manufacturing of components, for the mining of uranium, for construction energy, and so on. Thus a meaningful energy transition away from fossil fuels is still a matter of theory and wishful thinking, not reality.

My conclusion from a careful survey of energy alternatives, then, is that there is little likelihood that either conventional fossil fuels or alternative energy sources can be counted on to provide the amount and quality of energy that will be needed to sustain economic growth—or even current levels of economic activity—during the remainder of this century. (19)

But the problem extends beyond oil and other fossil fuels: the world’s fresh water resources are strained to the point that billions of people may soon find themselves with only precarious access to water for drinking and irrigation. Biodiversity is declining rapidly. We are losing 24 billion tons of topsoil each year to erosion. And many economically significant minerals—from antimony to zinc—are depleting quickly, requiring the mining of ever lower-grade ores in ever more remote locations. Thus the Peak Oil crisis is really just the leading edge of a broader Peak Everything dilemma.

In essence, humanity faces an entirely predictable peril: our population has been growing dramatically for the past 200 years (expanding from under one billion to nearly seven billion), while our per-capita consumption of resources has also grown. For any species, this is virtually the definition of biological success. And yet all of this has taken place in the context of a finite planet with fixed stores of non-renewable resources (fossil fuels and minerals), a limited ability to regenerate renewable resources (forests, fish, fresh water, and topsoil), and a limited ability to absorb industrial wastes (including carbon dioxide). If we step back and look at the industrial period from a broad historical perspective that is informed by an appreciation of ecological limits, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are today living at the end of a relatively brief pulse—a 200-year rapid expansionary phase enabled by a temporary energy subsidy (in the form of cheap fossil fuels) that will inevitably be followed by an even more rapid and dramatic contraction as those fuels deplete.

The winding down of this historic growth-contraction pulse doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the world, but it does mean the end of a certain kind of economy. One way or another, humanity must return to a more normal pattern of existence characterized by reliance on immediate solar income (via crops, wind, or the direct conversion of sunlight to electricity) rather than stored ancient sunlight.

This is not to say that the remainder of the 21st century must consist of a collapse of industrialism, a die-off of most of the human population, and a return by the survivors to a way of life essentially identical to that of 16th century peasants or indigenous hunter-gatherers. It is possible instead to imagine acceptable and even inviting ways in which humanity could adapt to ecological limits while further developing cultural richness, scientific understanding, and quality of life (more of this below).

But however it is negotiated, the transition will spell an end to economic growth in the conventional sense. And that transition appears to have begun.

How Do We Know Which Diagnosis Is Correct?

If the patient is an individual human and the cause of distress is uncertain, more diagnostic tests can be prescribed. But to what sorts of blood tests, x-rays, and CAT scans can we subject the national or global economy?

In a sense, the tests have already been done. During the past few decades thousands of scientific surveys of natural resources, biodiversity, and ecosystems have showed increasing rates of depletion and decline. (20) The continuing increase in human population, pollution, and consumption are likewise well documented. This information formed the basis for the Limits to Growth studies, previously mentioned, which use computer modeling to show how current trends are likely play out—and most resulting scenarios show them leading to an end of economic growth and a collapse of industrial output some time in the early 21st century.

Why are the results of such diagnostic tests not universally accepted as a challenge to expectations of continued growth? Primarily because their conclusion runs counter to the beliefs and proclamations of most economists, who maintain that there are no practical limits to growth. They deny that resource constraints provide an eventual cap on production and consumption. And so their diagnostic efforts tend to ignore environmental factors in favor of easily measured internal features of the human economy such as money supply, consumer confidence, interest rates, and price indices.

Ecologist Charles Hall, among many others, has argued that the discipline of economics, as currently practiced, does not constitute a science, since it proceeds primarily on the basis of correlative logic rather than through the building of knowledge by a continuous, rigorous process of proposing and testing hypotheses. (21) While economics uses complex terminology and mathematics, as science does, its basic assertions about the world—such as the principle of infinite substitutability, which holds that for any resource that becomes scarce, the market will find a substitute—are not subjected to careful experimental examination. (It is worth noting that Hall and others have made the effort to lay the conceptual foundations for a new economics based on scientific principles and methods, which they call “biophysical economics.” (22)

Moreover, mainstream economists failed on the whole to foresee the current crash. There was no consistent or concerted effort on the part of Secretaries of the Treasury, Federal Reserve Chairmen, or “Nobel” prize-winning economists to warn policy makers or the general public that, sometime in the early 21st century, the global economy would begin to come apart at the seams. (23) One might think that this predictive failure—the inability to foresee so historically significant an event as the rapid contraction of nearly the entire global economy, entailing the failure of some of the world’s largest banks and manufacturing companies—would cause mainstream economists to stop and re-examine their fundamental premises. But there is little evidence to suggest that this is occurring.

At the risk of repetition: physical scientists from several disciplines have indeed foreseen an end to economic growth in the early 21st century, and have warned policy makers and the general public on many occasions.

Whom should we believe?

The specifics of the Alternative Diagnosis are falsifiable. If economic activity were to rebound above 2007 levels, or if oil production were to rise above the July 2008 high-water mark, then the attribution of the current economic crisis to resource-tied limits to growth may be considered at least partly disproven. However, even if these things were to occur, the underlying reasoning behind the Alternative Diagnosis might still be correct. If the world oil production peak is delayed until, let us say, 2015 or 2020, and if another—this time bottomless—global economic crash results then, the ultimate outcome will be essentially the same. But if, meanwhile, the Alternative Diagnosis were to be taken seriously and acted upon, the consequences of doing so would be beneficial: a decade would have been spent preparing for the event.

Could the Alternative Diagnosis be altogether wrong? That is, might conventional economists be right in thinking that growth can continue forever? It is often said that anything is possible, but some things are clearly much more possible than others. The perpetual growth of human population and consumption within the confines of a finite planet seems like a very long shot indeed, especially since warning signs are everywhere apparent that ecological limits are already being reached and surpassed. (24)

What Not to Do: Prescribe Punishingly Expensive Placebos

If the physical scientists who warn about limits to growth are right, confronting the global economic meltdown implies far more than merely getting the banks and mortgage lenders back on their feet. Indeed, in that case we face a fundamental change in our economy as significant as the advent of the industrial revolution. We are at a historic inflection point—the ending of decades of expansion and the beginning of an inevitable period of contraction that will continue until humanity is once again living within the limits of Earth’s regenerative systems.

But there are few signs that policy makers understand any of this. Their thinking appears to be shaped primarily by mainstream economists’ assurances that growth can and must continue into the indefinite future, and that the economic contraction the world is currently experiencing is only temporary–a problem that can and must be solved.

Still, the problem is not a minor one in the eyes of economists and policy makers. Consider the gargantuan size of the Treasury and Federal Reserve bailouts and stimulus packages that have been deployed in the possibly futile attempt to end contraction and restart growth. According to the special inspector general of the U.S. government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), in remarks submitted to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 21, $23.7 trillion have been committed in “total potential federal government support.” This is expensive medicine indeed. It takes a moment to even begin to comprehend the enormity of the figure. It represents about half of annual world GDP, and is over three times the total amount spent by the U.S. government, in inflation-adjusted dollars, on all wars combined, from 1776 to the present. It is nearly fifty times the cost of the New Deal.

Other nations, including Britain, China, and Germany have committed to paying for stimulus packages and bailouts that, while much smaller in absolute terms, represent an impressive (or should we say frightful?) share of national GDP.

If the Alternative Diagnosis is valid, none of this will work in the end, because existing financial institutions—with their basis in debt and interest and their requirements for constant expansion—cannot be made to function in a context where energy and resource constraints impose effective caps on manufacturing and transport.

Are the bailouts and stimulus packages working? Much evidence suggests that they are not, except in limited ways. In the U.S., unemployment continues to increase, while real estate values continue to fall. And most of the reputed “green shoots” in the economy so far sighted amount merely to an arguably temporary decline in the rate of contraction. For example, the home price index released July 28 of this year showed that in May, seasonally adjusted prices fell just 0.16 percent from the previous month. That represents an annual rate of decline of a little under 2 percent, which is a substantial improvement over the annualized rate of more than 20 percent that prevailed from September 2008 through March of 2009. Many commentators seized upon this news as a sign of an imminent turnaround. Nevertheless, new home sales are down from 1.4 million per year in 2005 to 350,000 per year today, and house prices are down 50 percent from the bubble peak and still declining in most places. Moreover, manufacturing is still shrinking, small businesses are in trouble, there are still significant danger signs on the horizon, including a new round of mortgage resets, a likely dive in commercial real estate values, and the looming reality that toxic assets at the center of the banking crisis have yet to be dealt with. (25)

President Obama has made the argument that bailouts are justified to stabilize the system long enough so that leaders can make fundamental changes to institutions and regulations, enabling the economy to then go forward healthier and more immune to similar crises in the future. But there is little to suggest that the kinds of systemic changes that are actually needed (ones that would enable the economy to function during a prolonged period of contraction) are under way or even contemplated. Meanwhile, as growth-based institutions are temporarily propped up, the ultimate scale of the damage is likely only to increase: when the inevitable collapse of those institutions does come, the consequences will likely be even worse because so much capital will have been squandered in attempting to salvage them.

In using up non-renewable resources like metals, minerals, and fossil fuels, we have stolen from future generations. Now in effect we are stealing from those generations the financial wherewithal that could have been used to build a bridge to a sustainable economy. The construction of a renewable energy infrastructure (including not only generating capacity, but distribution and storage infrastructure, as well as post-petroleum transport and agriculture systems) will require enormous investments and decades of work. Where will the investment capital come from if governments are already buried in debt? If we have committed nearly $24 trillion to propping up an old economy with no real survival prospects, what’s left with which to finance the new one?

If the current prescription for our economic malady is wrong-headed, the same is true of many proposed cures for our energy problems. According to the Conventional Diagnosis, today’s high oil prices are due to speculation; the cure must therefore lie in the tighter regulation of oil futures trading (which may be a good idea, though it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem), while providing more opportunities to oil companies to explore for domestic oil (even though the likely production rates from currently off-limits reserves would be relatively paltry, and would have a negligible effect on oil prices). In fact, though, investing further in fossil fuel energy systems (including “clean coal” technology) will yield declining returns, given that the highest quality resources have already been used up; meanwhile, doing so takes investment capital away from the development of renewable energy, which we will have to rely on increasingly as fossil fuels deplete. (26)

What is required but is still utterly lacking is a fundamental recognition that circumstances have changed: what worked decades ago will not work now.

What To Do: Adapt to the New Reality

If the Alternative Diagnosis is correct, there will be no easy fix for the current economic breakdown. Some illnesses are not curable; they require that we simply adapt and make the best of our new situation.

If humanity has indeed embarked upon the contraction phase of the industrial pulse, we should assume that ahead of us lie much lower average income levels (for nearly everyone in the wealthy nations, and for high wage earners in poorer nations); different employment opportunities (fewer jobs in sales, marketing, and finance; more in basic production); and more costly energy, transport, and food. Further, we should assume that key aspects of our economic system that are inextricably tied to the need for future growth will cease to work in this new context.

Rather than attempting to prop up banks and insurance companies with trillions in bailouts, it would probably be better simply to let them fail, however nasty the short-term consequences, since they will fail anyway sooner or later. The sooner they are replaced with institutions that serve essential functions within a contracting economy, the better off we will all be.

Meanwhile the thought-leaders in society, especially the President, must begin breaking the news—in understandable and measured ways—that growth isn’t returning and that the world has entered a new and unprecedented economic phase, but that we can all survive and thrive in this challenging transitional period if we apply ourselves and work together. At the heart of this general re-education must be a public and institutional acknowledgment of three basic rules of sustainability: growth in population cannot be sustained; the ongoing extraction of non-renewable resources cannot be sustained; and the use of renewable resources is sustainable only if it proceeds at rates below those of natural replenishment.

Without cheap energy, global trade cannot increase. This doesn’t mean that trade will disappear, only that economic incentives will inexorably shift as transport costs rise, favoring local production for local consumption. But this may be a nice way of putting it: if and when fuel shortages arise, fragile globe-spanning systems of provisioning could be disrupted, with dire effects for consumers cut off from sources of necessary products. Thus a high priority must be placed on the building of community resilience through the preferential local sourcing of necessities and the maintenance of larger regional inventories—especially of food and fuel. (28)

It currently takes an average of 8.5 calories of energy from oil and natural gas to produce each calorie of food energy. Without cheap fuel for agriculture, farm production will plummet and farmers will go bankrupt—unless proactive efforts are undertaken to reform agriculture to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels. (29)

Obviously, alternative energy sources and energy efficiency strategies must be high priorities, and must be subjects of intensive research using a carefully chosen spectrum of criteria. The best candidates will have to be funded robustly even while fossil fuels are still relatively cheap: the build-out time for the renewable energy infrastructure will inevitably be measured in decades and so we must begin the process now rather than waiting for market forces to lead the way.

In the face of credit and (potential) currency crises, new ways of financing such projects will be needed. Given that our current monetary and financial systems are founded on the need for growth, we will require new ways of creating money and new ways of issuing credit. Considerable thought has gone into finding solutions to this problem, and some communities are already experimenting with local capital co-ops, alternative currencies, and no-interest banks. (30)

With oil becoming increasingly expensive in real terms, we will need more efficient ways of getting people and goods around. Our first priority in this regard must be to reduce the need for transport with better urban planning and re-localized production systems. But where transport is needed, rail and light rail will probably be preferable to cars and trucks. (31)

We will also need a revolution in the built environment to minimize the need for heating, cooling, and artificial lighting in all our homes and public buildings. This revolution is already under way, but is currently moving far too slowly due to the inertia of established interests in the construction industry. (32)

These projects will need more than local credit and money; they will also require skilled workers. There will be a call not just for installers of solar panels and home insulation: millions of new food producers and builders of low-energy infrastructure will be needed as well. A broad range of new opportunities could open up to replace vanishing jobs in marketing and finance—if there is cheap training available at local community colleges.

It is worth noting that the $23.7 trillion recently committed for U.S. bailouts and loan guarantees represents about $80,000 for each man, woman, and child in America. A level of investment even a substantial fraction that size could pay for all needed job training while ensuring universal provision of basic necessities during the transition. What would we be getting for our money? A collective sense that, in a time of crisis, no one is being left behind. Without the feeling of cooperative buy-in that such a safety net would help engender, similar to what was achieved with the New Deal but on an even larger scale, economic contraction could devolve into a horrific fight over the scraps of the waning industrial period.

However contentious, the population question must be addressed. All problems that have to do with resources are harder to solve when there are more people needing those resources. The U.S. must encourage smaller families and must establish an immigration policy consistent with a no-growth population target. This has foreign policy implications: we must help other nations succeed with their own economic transitions so that their citizens do not need to emigrate to survive. (33)

If economic growth ceases to be an achievable goal, society will have to find better ways of measuring success. Economists must shift from assessing well-being with the blunt instrument of GDP, and begin paying more attention to indices of human and social capital in areas such as education, health, and cultural achievements. This redefinition of growth and progress has already begun in some quarters, but for the most part has yet to be taken up by governments. (34)

A case can be made that after all this is done the end result will be a more satisfying way of life for the vast majority of citizens—offering more of a sense of community, more of a connection with the natural world, more satisfying work, and a healthier environment. Studies have repeatedly shown that higher levels of consumption do not translate to elevated levels of satisfaction with life. (35) This means that if “progress” can be thought of in terms of happiness, rather than a constantly accelerating process of extracting raw materials and turning them into products that themselves quickly become waste, then progress can certainly continue. In any case, “selling” this enormous and unprecedented project to the general public will require emphasizing its benefits. Several organizations are already exploring the messaging and public relations aspects of the transition. (36) But those in charge need to understand that looking on the bright side doesn’t mean promising what can’t be delivered—such as a return to the days of growth and thoughtless consumption.

Can We? Will We?

It is important to state the implications of all this as plainly as possible. If the Alternative Diagnosis is correct, there will be no full economic “recovery”—not this year, or the next, or five or ten years from now. There may be temporary rebounds that take us back to some fraction of peak economic activity, but these will be only brief respites.

We have entered a new economic era in which the former rules no longer apply. Low interest rates and government spending no longer translate to incentives for borrowing and job production. Cheap energy won’t appear just because there is demand for it. Substitutes for essential resources will in most cases not be found. Over all, the economy will continue to shrink in fits and starts until it can be maintained by the energy and material resources that Earth can supply on ongoing basis.

This is of course very difficult news. It is analogous to being told by your physician that you have contracted a systemic, potentially fatal disease that cannot be cured, but only managed; and managing it means you must make profound lifestyle changes.

Some readers may note that climate change has not figured prominently in this discussion. It is clearly, after all, the worst environmental catastrophe in human history. Indeed, its consequences could be far worse than the mere destruction of national economies: hundreds of millions of people and millions of other species could be imperiled. The reason for the relatively limited discussion of climate here is that (assuming the Alternative Diagnosis is correct) it is not climate change that has proven to be the most immediate limit to economic growth, but resource depletion. However, while there is not as yet general agreement on the point, climate change itself and the needed steps to minimize it both constitute limits to growth, just as resource depletion does. Moreover, if we fail to successfully manage the inevitable process of economic contraction that will characterize the coming decades, there will be no hope of mounting an organized and coherent response to climate change—a response consisting of efforts both to reduce climate impacts and to adapt to them. It is important to note, though, that the measures advocated here (including the development of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency, a rapid reduction of reliance on fossil fuels in transport and agriculture, and the stabilization of population levels) are among the steps that will help most to reduce carbon emissions.

Is this essay likely to change the thinking and actions of policy makers? Unfortunately, that is unlikely. Their belief in the possibility and necessity of continued growth is pervasive, and the notion that growth may no longer be possible is unthinkable. But the Alternative Diagnosis must be a matter of record. This essay, composed by a mere journalist, in many ways represents the thinking of thousands of physical scientists working over the past several decades on issues having to do with population, resources, pollution, and biodiversity. Ignoring the diagnosis itself—whether as articulated here or as implied in tens of thousands of scientific papers—may waste our last chance to avert a complete collapse, not just of the economy, but of civility and organized human existence. It may risk a historic discontinuity with qualitative antecedents in the fall of the Roman and Mayan civilizations. (37) But there is no true precedent for what may be in store, because those earlier examples of collapse affected geographically bounded societies whose influence on their environments was also bounded. Today’s civilization is global, and its fate, Earth’s fate, and humanity’s fate are inextricably tied.

But even if policy makers continue to ignore warnings such as this, individuals and communities can take heed and begin the process of building resilience, and of detaching themselves from reliance on fossil fuels and institutions that are inextricably tied to the perpetual growth machine. We cannot sit passively by as world leaders squander opportunites to awaken and adapt to growth limits. We can make changes in our own lives, and we can join with our neighbors. And we can let policy makers know we disapprove of their allegiance to the status quo, but that there are other options.

Is it too late to begin a managed transition to a post-fossil fuel society? Perhaps. But we will not know unless we try. And if we are to make that effort, we must begin by acknowledging one simple, stark reality: growth as we have known it can no longer be our goal.

Notes

1. “Pain on the Road to Recovery”. (http://www.smh.com.au/national/pain-on-the-road-to-recovery-20090724-dw6q.html?page=-1).

2. Here, for example, are a few relevant excerpts from the present author’s book The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2003): “Our current financial system was designed during a period of consistent growth in available energy, with its designers operating under the assumption that continued economic growth was both inevitable and desirable. This ideology of growth has become embodied in systemic financial structures requiring growth…Until now, this loose linkage between a financial system predicated upon the perpetual growth of the money supply, and an economy growing year by year because of an increasing availability of energy and other resources, has worked reasonably well—with a few notable exceptions, such as the Great Depression… However, [when global oil production peaks] the financial system may not respond so rationally…This might predictably trigger a financial crisis…”

3. See Albert Bartlett, “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” (lecture transcript). (http//www.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/645).

4. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972); Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, Beyond the Limits (Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green, 1992); Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2003). See also the recent CSIRO study, “A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality” (2009) (http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf).

5. See, for example, Robert U. Ayers and Benjamin Warr, The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity (Cambridge, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005); and Robert Barro and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) (http://www.bookrags.com/research/economic-growth-and-energy-consumpt-mee-01/).

6. See Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2003, 2005); Powerdown: Options and Actions for a PostCarbon World (2004); and The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse (2006); as well as books by Kenneth Deffeyes, Colin Campbell, and Matthew Simmons; and websites www.theoildrum.com and www.energybulletin.net. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil organizes international conferences to study issues related to oil and gas depletion (www.peakoil.net and www.aspo-usa.com), and the U.S. chapter of ASPO publishes a weekly survey of relevant news, “Peak Oil Review,” compiled by former CIA analyst Tom Whipple. At the annual Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference in Cork, Ireland, in September 2007, former U.S. Energy Secretary, James Schlesinger, said: “Conceptually the battle is over. The peakists have won. We’re all peakists now.” See also Steve Connor, “Warning: Oil supplies are running out fast,” The Independent, August 3, 2009 (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/warning-oil-supplies-are-running-out-fast-1766585.html).

7. The declining rate of discovery of new oilfields, and the list of past-peak oil producing countries, are widely documented; e.g.: Roger D. Blanchard, The Future of Global Oil Production: Facts, Figures, Trends and Projections by Region (Jefferson, NC: McFarlane and Co., 2005).

8. A May 4, 2009 report from Raymond James Associates (“Stat of the Week”) argued that world oil production peaked in July 2008 (http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/05/04/peak-oil-global-oil-productions-peaked-analyst-says/). In a subsequent interview, Marshall Adkins, author of the report, suggested that most knowledgeable players within the petroleum industry now accept the Peak Oil thesis in some form, whether or not they acknowledge it publicly (http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2009/07/interview-with-marshall-adkins/).

9. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, March 2009 http://eepurl.com/cSPu.

10. See Joe Cortright, “Driven to the Brink: How the Gas Price Spike Popped the Housing Bubble and Devalued the Suburbs,” Discussion paper, CEOs for Cities, 2008 (http://www.ceosforcities.org/).

11. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Commercial Aviation: Airline Industry Contraction Due to Volatile Fuel Prices and Falling Demand Affects Airports, Passengers, and Federal Government Revenues,” April 21, 2009 (http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-09-393). For a detailed discussion of the likely future impacts of high oil prices and oil shortages on the airline industry, see Charles Schlumberger, “The Oil Price Spike of 2008: The Result of Speculation or an Early Indicator of a Major and Growing Future Challenge to the Airline Industry?” Annals of Air and Space Law, Vol. XXXIV, [2009], McGill University (http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/the_oil_price_spike_of_2008).

12. American Trucking Association (http://www.truckline.com/Pages/Home.aspx).

13. This scenario is implied in Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek, and Robert Wendling, “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management” (U.S. Department of Energy: 2005): “As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically…” (http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf).

14. See, for example, “Troubling Signs That Oil Prices Could Hamper Recovery,” Wall Street 24/7, May 8, 2009 (http://247wallst.com/2009/05/08/troubling-signs-that-oil-prices-could-hamper-recovery/)

15. See, for example, James Herron, “Low Oil Prices, Credit Woes Could Spell Trouble for UK North Sea,” Rigzone, November 14, 2008 (http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=69507).

16. Jad Mouawad, “Big Oil Projects Put in Jeopardy by Fall in Prices,” New York Times, December 15, 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/business/16oil.html).

17. See David R. Baker, “Low oil prices take wind out of renewable fuels,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 27, 2008 (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/26/MNSK13NNK4.DTL).

18. See The Party’s Over, Chapter 4; Powerdown, Chapter 4; The Oil Depletion Protocol, pages 23-31. A longer treatment of the subject, tentatively titled Energy Limits to Growth, will be published by International Forum on Globalization and Post Carbon Institute in September.

19. This conclusion is echoed in, for example, Ted Trainer, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2007); and (with some reservations), David J. C. McKay, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air (Cambridge, UK: UIK Cambridge, 2008), (www.withouthotair.com).

20. Just one example, from a press release April 20, 1998 describing the results of a poll commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History: “The American Museum of Natural History announced today results of a nationwide survey titled Biodiversity in the Next Millennium, developed by the Museum in conjunction with Louis Harris and Associates, Inc. The survey reveals that seven out of ten biologists believe that we are in the midst of a mass extinction of living things, and that this loss of species will pose a major threat to human existence in the next century.”

21. Charles A. S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard, International Journal of Transdisciplinary Research, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006) (http://www.peakoil.net/files/the%20need%20for%20a%20new%20biophysical-based%20paradigm%20in%20economics%20….pdf) “The Need for a New, Biophysical-Based Paradigm in Economics for the Second Half of the Age of Oil,”, Charles A. S. Hall, D. Lindenberger, R. Kummell, T. Kroeger and W. Eichorn, “The Need to Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics.” Bioscience 51:663-673, 2001 (http://web.mac.com/biophysicalecon/iWeb/Site/Downloads_files/Hall_2001_NeedtoReintegrate.pdf).

22. Cutler J. Cleveland, “Biophysical Economics,” The Encyclopedia of Earth (http://www.eoearth.org/article/Biophysical_economics). See also the related field of Ecological Economics, especially the books of Herman Daly, including Toward a Steady State Economy (New York: Freeman, 1973); and, with Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (Washington: Island Press, 2004).

23. The quotation marks around the Nobel name are justified because the Nobel family has never acknowledged economics as a science: the so-called “Nobel prize in economics” is awarded by a Swedish Bank.

24. See The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx).

25. See, for example, J. S. Kim, “Irrational Exuberance of the Green Shoots,” July 24, 2009 (http://seekingalpha.com/article/151101-irrational-exuberance-of-the-green-shoots).

26. See Richard Heinberg, Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2009), pages 137-143, 145-168.

27. The opinion that banks and insurance companies should be allowed to fail rather than being bailed out was voiced by many knowledgeable observers throughout late 2008 and early 2009. See for example Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Let banks fail, says Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz,” London Daily Telegraph, Feb. 2, 2009 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/4424418/Let-banks-fail-says-Nobel-economist-Joseph-Stiglitz.html).

28. See Jeff Rubin, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization. (New York: Random
House, 2009).

29. See Richard Heinberg and Michael Bomford, “The Food and Farming Transition” (Sebastopol, CA: Post Carbon Institute, 2009) (http://postcarbon.org/food).

30. See Bernard Lietaer, “White Paper on All the Options for Managing a Systemic Bank Crisis” (http://www.lietaer.com/images/White_Paper_on_Systemic_Banking_Crises_final.pdf). JAK in Sweden is a cooperative, member-owned bank that operates without interest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAK_members_bank).

31. See Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2009).

32. The Passivhaus Institute pioneers construction methods that reduce energy input to buildings in many cases to zero. Roughly 20,000 Passivhauses have been built in Europe, only about 12 in the U.S. (http://www.passivehouse.us/)

33. See websites of Population Media Center (http://www.populationmedia.org/issues/), and SUSPS (http://www.susps.org/overview/immigration.html).

34. The organization Redefining Progress has developed a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) that incorporates many such indices ( http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm).

35. See, for example, “Understanding Human Happiness and Well-Being,” The Sustainable Scale Project (http://www.sustainablescale.org/AttractiveSolutions/UnderstandingHumanHappinessandWellBeing.aspx).

36. The burgeoning Transition Town movement (www.transitiontowns.org/) proceeds from the premise that “life can be better without fossil fuels.” YES! Magazine (www.yesmagazine.org) is a publication of the Positive Futures Network and highlights examples of low-impact ways of living that bring personal and social benefits. And the Simple Living Network (www.simpleliving.net/) provides “resources, tools, examples and contacts for conscious, simple, healthy and restorative living.”

37. See Jared Diamond, Collapse How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005); Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and John Michael Greer, The Long Descent (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2008).

Richard Heinberg is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and author of five books on resource depletion and societal responses to the energy problem. www.richardheinberg.com, www.postcarbon.org.

This piece was also published as Richard Heinberg’s Museletter #208. To subscribe to the Museletter visit http://richardheinberg.com/Museletter.html. Interestingly it was also picked up by Business Week.

COULD FOOD SHORTAGES BRING DOWN CIVILIZATION?

“In early 2008, Saudi Arabia announced that, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the non-replenishable aquifer it had been pumping for irrigation was largely depleted,” writes Lester R. Brown in his new book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (W.W. Norton & Company).

“In response, officials said they would reduce their wheat harvest by one eighth each year until production would cease entirely in 2016. The Saudis then plan to use their oil wealth to import virtually all the grain consumed by their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people,” notes Brown, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based independent environmental research organization.

“The Saudis are unique in being so wholly dependent on irrigation,” says Brown in Plan B 4.0.  But other, far larger, grain producers such as India and China are facing irrigation water losses and could face grain production declines.

A World Bank study of India’s water balance notes that 15 percent of its grain harvest is produced by overpumping. In human terms, 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced from wells that will be going dry. The comparable number for China is 130 million. Among the many other countries facing harvest reductions from groundwater depletion are Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen.

“The tripling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices between mid-2006 and mid-2008 signaled our growing vulnerability to food shortages,” says Brown. “It took the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression to lower grain prices.”

“Past decades have witnessed world grain price surges, but they were event-driven—a drought in the former Soviet Union, a monsoon failure in India, or a crop-withering heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt. This most recent price surge was trend-driven, the result of our failure to reverse the environmental trends that are undermining world food production.”

These trends include—in addition to falling water tables—eroding soils and rising temperatures from increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Rising temperatures bring crop-shrinking heat waves, melting ice sheets, rising sea level, and shrinking mountain glaciers.

 With both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting at an accelerating pace, sea level could rise by up to six feet during this century. Brown notes, “Such a rise would inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half of the rice in Viet Nam, the world’s second-ranking rice exporter. Even a three-foot rise in sea level would cover half the riceland in Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people. And these are only two of Asia’s many rice-growing river deltas.”

“The world’s mountain glaciers have shrunk for 18 consecutive years. Many smaller glaciers have disappeared. Nowhere is the melting more alarming than in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau where the ice melt from glaciers sustains not only the dry-season flow of the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers but also the irrigation systems that depend on them. Without these glaciers, many Asian rivers would cease to flow during the dry season.”

The wheat and rice harvests of China and India would be directly affected. China is the world’s leading wheat producer. India is second. (The United States is third.) With rice, China and India totally dominate the world harvest. The projected melting of these glaciers if we stay with business as usual poses the most massive threat to food security the world has ever faced.

The number of hungry people, which was declining for several decades, bottomed out in the mid-1990s at 825 million. It then climbed to 915 million in 2008 and jumped to over 1 billion in 2009. With world food prices projected to continue rising, so too will the number of hungry people, leaving millions of families trying to survive on one meal per day.

“We know from studying earlier civilizations such as the Sumerians, Mayans, and many others,” says Brown, “that more often than not it was food shortages that led to their demise. It now appears that food may be the weak link in our early twenty-first century civilization as well.

“The world is entering a new food era, one marked by rising food prices, growing numbers of hungry people, and an emerging politics of food scarcity. As grain-exporting countries restrict or even ban exports to keep domestic food prices from spiraling out of control, importing countries are losing confidence in the market’s ability to supply their needs. In response, the more affluent ones such as Saudi Arabia, China, and South Korea are leasing and buying large tracts of land in developing countries on which to grow food for themselves.”

Among the countries in which large tracts of land are being acquired are Ethiopia and Sudan, both already heavily dependent on World Food Programme lifelines to stave off famine. In effect, the competition for land and water, in the form of land acquisitions, has crossed national boundaries, opening a new chapter in the history of food security.

Our early twenty-first century civilization is showing signs of stress as individual countries compete not only for scarce food but also for the land and water to produce it. People expect their governments to provide food security. Indeed, the inability to do so is one of the hallmarks of a failing state. Each year the list of failing states grows longer, leaving us with a disturbing question: How many failing states before our global civilization begins to unravel?

“Will we follow in the footsteps of the Sumerians and the Mayans or can we change course—and do it before time runs out?” asks Brown. “Can we move onto an economic path that is environmentally sustainable? We think we can. That is what Plan B 4.0 is about.”

Plan B aims to stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty, and restore the economy’s natural support systems. It prescribes a worldwide cut in net carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2020, thus keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations from exceeding 400 parts per million. “In setting this goal,” says Brown, “my colleagues and I did not ask what would be politically popular but rather what would it take to have a decent shot at saving the Greenland ice sheet and at least the larger glaciers in the mountains of Asia.”

Cutting carbon emissions will require both a worldwide revolution in energy efficiency and a shift from oil, coal, and gas to wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The energy efficiency revolution will transform everything from lighting to transportation. With lighting, for example, shifting from incandescents to compact fluorescent bulbs can reduce electricity use for lighting by 75 percent. But shifting from incandescents to the newer light-emitting diodes (LEDs) combined with light sensors can cut electricity use by more than 90 percent.

At least one of the new plug-in gas electric hybrids coming to market can get over 200 miles per gallon of gasoline. In the Plan B energy economy of 2020, most of the fleet will be plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars, and they will be running largely on wind-generated electricity for the gasoline equivalent of less than $1 per gallon.

The shift to renewable sources of energy is moving at a pace and on a scale we could not imagine even two years ago. Consider the state of Texas. The enormous number of wind projects under development, on top of the 9,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity in operation and under construction, will bring Texas to over 50,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity (think 50 coal-fired power plants) when all these wind farms are completed. This will more than satisfy the needs of the state’s 24 million residents.

Nationwide, new wind generating capacity in 2008 totaled 8,400 megawatts while new coal plants totaled only 1,400 megawatts. The annual growth in solar generating capacity will also soon overtake that of coal. The energy transition is under way.

The United States has led the world in each of the last four years in new wind generating capacity, having overtaken Germany in 2005. But this lead will be short-lived as China appears set to blow by the United States in new wind capacity added in 2009.

China, with its Wind Base program, is working on six wind farm mega-complexes with generating capacities that range from 10,000 to 30,000 megawatts, for a total of 105,000 megawatts. This is in addition to the hundreds of smaller wind farms built or planned.

Wind is not the only option. In July 2009, a consortium of European corporations led by Munich Re, and including Deutsche Bank, Siemens, and ABB plus an Algerian firm, announced a proposal to tap the massive solar thermal generating capacity in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. A German firm calculates that solar thermal power plants in North Africa could economically supply half of Europe’s electricity. Algeria, which has already completed its first solar thermal plant, has signed an agreement to supply Germany with solar-generated electricity. The Algerians note that they have enough harnessable solar energy in their desert to power the world economy. (No, this is not an error.)

“The soaring investment in wind, solar, and geothermal energy is being driven by the exciting realization that these renewables can last as long as the earth itself,” says Brown. “In contrast to investing in new oil fields where well yields begin to decline in a matter of decades, or in coal mines where the seams run out, these new energy sources can last forever.”

The combination of efficiency advances, the wholesale shift to renewable energy, and expansion of the earth’s tree cover outlined in Plan B would allow the world to cut net global carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020. In contrast to today’s global electricity sector, where coal supplies 40 percent of electricity, Plan B sees wind emerging as the centerpiece in the 2020 energy economy, supplying 40 percent of all electricity.

We are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid the resulting rise in sea level? Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau? Can we stabilize population by lowering birth rates before nature takes over and halts population growth by raising death rates?

“Yes,” affirms Brown. “But it will take something close to a wartime mobilization, one similar to that of the United States in 1942 as it restructured its industrial economy in a matter of months. We used to talk about saving the planet, but it is civilization itself that is now at risk.

“Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us must push for rapid change. And we must be armed with a plan outlining the changes needed.

“It is decision time,” says Brown. “Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we have to make a choice. We can stay with business as usual and watch our economy decline and our civilization unravel, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that mobilizes to save civilization. Our generation will make the decision, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.”

In his article in the New York Times September 24, “Oil Industry Sets a Brisk Pace of New Discoveries”, staff reporter Jad Mouawad cites oil discoveries totaling ten billion barrels for the first half of 2009. The Tiber field in the Gulf of Mexico alone accounts for four to six billion barrels of crude that may eventually find its way into the world oil system. Indeed, this year has seen discovery results that could end up being the best since 2000. But, the article notes, the new oil was expensive to find, it will be expensive to extract, and both exploration and production are only possible because of high levels of investment and sophisticated, expensive new technologies.

To justify the needed level of effort, the oil industry requires prices in excess of $60 per barrel, according to Mouawad; otherwise, the new projects will turn out to be money-losers. Some analysts believe the magic break-even number is closer to $70. In any case, the figure is much higher than was required only a few years ago, and still-higher prices may be necessary to make exploration and production profitable for future projects—prices perhaps close to $80.

According to Mouawad, “While recent years have featured speculation about a coming peak and subsequent decline in oil production, people in the industry say there is still plenty of oil in the ground, especially beneath the ocean floor, even if finding and extracting it is becoming harder.” So the new discoveries presumably indicate that peak oil has been delayed, and that our concerns about the event have been misplaced.

Yet this would be a strange conclusion to draw from the facts cited, for two reasons.

First: The ten billion barrels of new discoveries reported so far do initially sound encouraging: if the second half of 2009 is as productive, that means a total of 20 billion barrels of new oil will eventually be available to consumers as a result of discoveries this year. But how much oil does the world use annually? In recent years, that amount has hovered within the range of 29-31 billion barrels. Therefore (assuming continued good results throughout 2009), in its most successful recent year of exploration efforts, the oil industry will have found only two-thirds of the amount it extracted from previously discovered oilfields.

When the “ten billion barrels” figure is framed this way, its “gee whiz: shimmer quickly fades. (Yes, the article discusses the phenomenon of “reserve growth,” which is supposed to render the pace of new discoveries less important—but that red herring has been exposed plenty of times, including here www.theoildrum.com/node/5811.) The Times article hints that 2009′s high discovery rate may be the beginning of a new trend, so that we may see even better rates in future years; but remember, that hypothetical outcome hinges on a crucial factor—increasing investment in exploration and production—which leads us to a second critical thought.

The staggering levels of investment that enabled drilling in miles of ocean water, so as to achieve the 2009 finds, were occasioned by historic petroleum price run-ups from 2004 to 2008—with prices eventually spiking high enough to cripple the auto industry, the airlines, and global trade. As petroleum prices climbed ever higher, oil companies saw sense in drilling test wells in risky, inhospitable places. But in recent decades oil price spikes have repeatedly triggered recessions. And clearly, as we all discovered rather forcibly last year, the global economy cannot sustain an oil price of $147 a barrel: as the economy crashed in the latter months of 2008, so did oil demand and oil prices (which hit a low in December-January near $30).

So, what is a sustainable price? A review of recent economic history yields the observation that when petroleum sells above about $80 a barrel (in inflation-adjusted terms) the economy begins to stall. Oil industry wags have begun to speak of a “Goldilocks” price range of $60 to $80 a barrel (not too high, not too low—just right!) as the prerequisite for economic recovery (www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/business/energy-environment/10opec.html). If prices are higher, the economy sputters, reducing oil demand and subsequently seriously undermining prices; if they drift lower, not enough investment will go toward exploration and production, so that oil shortages and price spikes will become inevitable a few years hence (indeed, since the oil price crash of late 2008 over $150 billion of investments in new oil projects have been cancelled). If the market can keep prices reliably within that charmed $60 to $80 range, all will be well. Too bad that petroleum prices have grown extremely volatile in recent years: we must hope and pray that trend is over (though there’s no apparent reason to assume that it is).

Let me summarize: the industry needs oil prices that are both stable and near economy-killing levels in order to justify investments necessary to possibly replace depleting reserves and overcome declining production in existing oilfields (I say “possibly” because we have insufficient evidence as yet to conclusively show that new discoveries enabled by expensive new exploration and production technologies can offset declines in the world’s aging giant oilfields).

Should this picture lead the viewer to come away with reassured thoughts of “No worries, happy motoring?” Or does this look more like a portrait of peak oil?

Several commentators (including analysts with financial services company Raymond James Associates and Macquarie, the Australian-headquartered investment bank) have concluded from recent petroleum statistics that global oil production peaked in 2008. Macquarie is saying that world production capacity is peaking this year, which is a nuanced way of saying the same thing, since currently production is constrained more by depressed demand than by immediate shortfalls in supply; in effect both organizations assert that the world will never see higher rates of extraction than the so-far record level of July 2008.

I see nothing in the recent discovery data that should call that conclusion into doubt.

Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow with Post Carbon Institute and author of several books on resource depletion, including The Oil Depletion Protocol and Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis.

Reposted from the  Post Carbon Institute.

Horror stories about the food industry have long been with us – ever since 1906, when Upton Sinclair’s landmark novel The Jungle told some ugly truths about how America produces its meat. In the century that followed, things got much better, and in some ways much worse. The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmland, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can’t even raise their wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals. Add to the price tag the acceleration of global warming – our energy-intensive food system uses 19% of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the economy.

And perhaps worst of all, our food is increasingly bad for us, even dangerous. A series of recalls involving contaminated foods this year – including an outbreak of salmonella from tainted peanuts that killed at least eight people and sickened 600 – has consumers rightly worried about the safety of their meals. A food system – from seed to 7‑Eleven – that generates cheap, filling food at the literal expense of healthier produce is also a principal cause of America’s obesity epidemic. At a time when the nation is close to a civil war over health-care reform, obesity adds $147 billion a year to our doctor bills. “The way we farm now is destructive of the soil, the environment and us,” says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). (See pictures of what the world eats.)

Some Americans are heeding such warnings and working to transform the way the country eats – ranchers and farmers who are raising sustainable food in ways that don’t bankrupt the earth. Documentaries like the scathing Food Inc. and the work of investigative journalists like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan are reprising Sinclair’s work, awakening a sleeping public to the uncomfortable realities of how we eat. Change is also coming from the very top. First Lady Michelle Obama’s White House garden has so far yielded more than 225 lb. of organic produce – and tons of powerful symbolism. But hers is still a losing battle. Despite increasing public awareness, sustainable agriculture, while the fastest-growing sector of the food industry, remains a tiny enterprise: according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), less than 1% of American cropland is farmed organically. Sustainable food is also pricier than conventional food and harder to find. And while large companies like General Mills have opened organic divisions, purists worry that the very definition of sustainability will be co-opted as a result. (See pictures of urban farming around the world.)

But we don’t have the luxury of philosophizing about food. With the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the inevitably rising price of oil – which will affect everything from fertilizer to supermarket electricity bills – our industrial style of food production will end sooner or later. As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy – demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 – but the earth can no longer deliver. Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs – and bland taste. Sustainable food has an élitist reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plants – and as every farmer knows, if you don’t take care of your land, it can’t take care of you.

See 10 things to buy during the recession.

See the top 10 food trends of 2008.

The Downside of Cheap
For all the grumbling you do about your weekly grocery bill, the fact is you’ve never had it so good, at least in terms of what you pay for every calorie you eat. According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. Those savings begin with the remarkable success of one crop: corn. Corn is king on the American farm, with production passing 12 billion bu. annually, up from 4 billion bu. as recently as 1970. When we eat a cheeseburger, a Chicken McNugget, or drink soda, we’re eating the corn that grows on vast, monocrop fields in Midwestern states like Iowa.

But cheap food is not free food, and corn comes with hidden costs. The crop is heavily fertilized – both with chemicals like nitrogen and with subsidies from Washington. Over the past decade, the Federal Government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop – at least until corn ethanol skewed the market – artificially low. That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 – a bargain, given that the meal contains nearly 1,200 calories, more than half the daily recommended requirement for adults. “Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that’s what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on,” says Gurian-Sherman. (See the 10 worst fast food meals.)

So what’s wrong with cheap food and cheap meat – especially in a world in which more than 1 billion people go hungry? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don’t receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories – some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s – but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it’s no surprise we’re so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin.

Our expanding girth is just one consequence of mainstream farming. Another is chemicals. No one doubts the power of chemical fertilizer to pull more crop from a field. American farmers now produce an astounding 153 bu. of corn per acre, up from 118 as recently as 1990. But the quantity of that fertilizer is flat-out scary: more than 10 million tons for corn alone – and nearly 23 million for all crops. When runoff from the fields of the Midwest reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it contributes to what’s known as a dead zone, a seasonal, approximately 6,000-sq.-mi. area that has almost no oxygen and therefore almost no sea life. Because of the dead zone, the $2.8 billion Gulf of Mexico fishing industry loses 212,000 metric tons of seafood a year, and around the world, there are nearly 400 similar dead zones. Even as we produce more high-fat, high-calorie foods, we destroy one of our leanest and healthiest sources of protein. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

The food industry’s degradation of animal life, of course, isn’t limited to fish. Though we might still like to imagine our food being raised by Old MacDonald, chances are your burger or your sausage came from what are called concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are every bit as industrial as they sound. In CAFOs, large numbers of animals – 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs – are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. But animals aren’t widgets with legs. They’re living creatures, and there are consequences to packing them in prison-like conditions. For instance: Where does all that manure go?

Pound for pound, a pig produces approximately four times the amount of waste a human does, and what factory farms do with that mess gets comparatively little oversight. Most hog waste is disposed of in open-air lagoons, which can overflow in heavy rain and contaminate nearby streams and rivers. “This creek that we used to wade in, that creek that our parents could drink out of, our kids can’t even play in anymore,” says Jayne Clampitt, a farmer in Independence, Iowa, who lives near a number of hog farms.

To stay alive and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. Overuse of antibiotics on farm animals leads, inevitably, to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the same bugs that infect animals can infect us too. The UCS estimates that about 70% of antimicrobial drugs used in America are given not to people but to animals, which means we’re breeding more of those deadly organisms every day. The Institute of Medicine estimated in 1998 that antibiotic resistance cost the public-health system $4 billion to $5 billion a year – a figure that’s almost certainly higher now. “I don’t think CAFOs would be able to function as they do now without the widespread use of antibiotics,” says Robert Martin, who was the executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.

See more pictures of what the world eats.

See photos from a grocery store auction.

The livestock industry argues that estimates of antibiotics in food production are significantly overblown. Resistance “is the result of human use and not related to veterinary use,” according to Kristina Butts, the manager of legislative affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. But with wonder drugs losing their effectiveness, it makes sense to preserve them for as long as we can, and that means limiting them to human use as much as possible. “These antibiotics are not given to sick animals,” says Representative Louise Slaughter, who is sponsoring a bill to limit antibiotic use on farms. “It’s a preventive measure because they are kept in pretty unspeakable conditions.”

Such a measure would get at a symptom of the problem but not at the source. Just as the burning of fossil fuels that is causing global warming requires more than a tweaking of mileage standards, the manifold problems of our food system require a comprehensive solution. “There should be a recognition that what we are doing is unsustainable,” says Martin. And yet, still we must eat. So what can we do? (See pictures of an apartment outfitted for goat-milking.)

Getting It Right
If a factory farm is hell for an animal, then Bill Niman’s seaside ranch in Bolinas, Calif., an hour north of San Francisco, must be heaven. The property’s cliffside view over the Pacific Ocean is worth millions, but the black Angus cattle that Niman and his wife Nicolette Hahn Niman raise keep their eyes on the ground, chewing contentedly on the pasture. Grass – and a trail of hay that Niman spreads from his truck periodically – is all the animals will eat during the nearly three years they’ll spend on the ranch. That all-natural, noncorn diet – along with the intensive, individual care that the Nimans provide their animals – produces beef that many connoisseurs consider to be among the best in the world. But for Niman, there is more at stake than just a good steak. He believes that his way of raising farm animals – in the open air, with no chemicals or drugs and with maximum care – is the only truly sustainable method and could be a model for a better food system. “What we need in this country is a completely different way of raising animals for food,” says Hahn Niman, a former attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice. “This needs to be done in the right way.”

The Nimans like to call what they do “beyond organic,” and there are some signs that consumers are beginning to catch up. This November, California voters approved a ballot proposition that guarantees farm animals enough space to lie down, stand up and turn around. Worldwide, organic food – a sometimes slippery term but on the whole a practice more sustainable than conventional food – is worth more than $46 billion. That’s still a small slice of the overall food pie, but it’s growing, even in a global recession. “There is more pent-up demand for organic than there is production,” says Bill Wolf, a co-founder of the organic-food consultancy Wolf DiMatteo and Associates. (Watch TIME’s video “The New Frugality: The Organic Gardener.”)

So what will it take for sustainable food production to spread? It’s clear that scaling up must begin with a sort of scaling down – a distributed system of many local or regional food producers as opposed to just a few massive ones. Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million – with the average farmer now feeding 129 Americans, compared with 19 people in 1940.

It’s that very efficiency that’s led to the problems and is in turn spurring a backlash, reflected not just in the growth of farmers’ markets or the growing involvement of big corporations in organics but also in the local-food movement, in which restaurants and large catering services buy from suppliers in their areas, thereby improving freshness, supporting small-scale agriculture and reducing the so-called food miles between field and plate. That in turn slashes transportation costs and reduces the industry’s carbon footprint.

A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits – and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades – that’s hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren’t the enemy – and they deserve real help. We’ve transformed the essential human profession – growing food – into an industry like any other. “We’re hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm,” says Hahn Niman. “We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it’s enjoyable work.”

See pictures of the global food crisis.

See pictures of the world’s most polluted places.

One model for how the new paradigm could work is Niman Ranch, a larger operation that Bill Niman founded in the 1990s, before he left in 2007. (By his own admission, he’s a better farmer than he is a businessman.) The company has knitted together hundreds of small-scale farmers into a network that sells all-natural pork, beef and lamb to retailers and restaurants. In doing so, it leverages economies of scale while letting the farmers take proper care of their land and animals. “We like to think of ourselves as a force for a local-farming community, not as a large corporation,” says Jeff Swain, Niman Ranch’s CEO.

Other examples include the Mexican-fast-food chain Chipotle, which now sources its pork from Niman Ranch and gets its other meats and much of its beans from natural and organic sources. It’s part of a commitment that Chipotle founder Steve Ells made years ago, not just because sustainable ingredients were better for the planet but because they tasted better too – a philosophy he calls Food with Integrity. It’s not cheap for Chipotle – food makes up more than 32% of its costs, the highest in the fast-food industry. But to Ells, the taste more than compensates, and Chipotle’s higher prices haven’t stopped the company’s rapid growth, from 16 stores in 1998 to over 900 today. “We put a lot of energy into finding farmers who are committed to raising better food,” says Ells. (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)

Bon Appétit Management Company, a caterer based in Palo Alto, Calif., takes that commitment even further. The company sources as much of its produce as possible from within 150 miles of its kitchens and gets its meat from farmers who eschew antibiotics. Bon Appétit also tries to influence its customers’ habits by nudging them toward greener choices. That includes campaigns to reduce food waste, in part by encouraging servers at its kitchens to offer smaller, more manageable portions. (The USDA estimates that Americans throw out 14% of the food we buy, which means that much of our record-breaking harvests ends up in the garbage.) And Bon Appétit supports a low-carbon diet, one that uses less meat and dairy, since both have a greater carbon footprint than fruit, vegetables and grain. The success of the overall operation demonstrates that sustainable food can work at an institutional scale bigger than an élite restaurant, a small market or a gourmet’s kitchen – provided customers support it. “Ultimately it’s going to be consumer demand that will cause change, not Washington,” says Fedele Bauccio, Bon Appétit’s co-founder. (See pictures of two farms in Nebraska.)

How willing are consumers to rethink the way they shop for – and eat – food? For most people, price will remain the biggest obstacle. Organic food continues to cost on average several times more than its conventional counterparts, and no one goes to farmers’ markets for bargains. But not all costs can be measured by a price tag. Once you factor in crop subsidies, ecological damage and what we pay in health-care bills after our fatty, sugary diet makes us sick, conventionally produced food looks a lot pricier.

What we really need to do is something Americans have never done well, and that’s to quit thinking big. We already eat four times as much meat and dairy as the rest of the world, and there’s not a nutritionist on the planet who would argue that 24‑oz. steaks and mounds of buttery mashed potatoes are what any person needs to stay alive. “The idea is that healthy and good-tasting food should be available to everyone,” says Hahn Niman. “The food system should be geared toward that.”

Whether that happens will ultimately come down to all of us, since we have the chance to choose better food three times a day (or more often, if we’re particularly hungry). It’s true that most of us would prefer not to think too much about where our food comes from or what it’s doing to the planet – after all, as Chipotle’s Ells points out, eating is not exactly a “heady intellectual event.” But if there’s one difference between industrial agriculture and the emerging alternative, it’s that very thing: consciousness. Niman takes care with each of his cattle, just as an organic farmer takes care of his produce and smart shoppers take care with what they put in their shopping cart and on the family dinner table. The industrial food system fills us up but leaves us empty – it’s based on selective forgetting. But what we eat – how it’s raised and how it gets to us – has consequences that can’t be ignored any longer.

- With reporting by Rebecca Kaplan / New York

The original version of this article mistakenly referred to the Bon Appétit Management Company as the Bon Appétit Food Management Company

See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

The Tale of Two Cattle
How did your hamburger get to your plate – and what did it eat along the way? The journey of beef illustrates the great American food chain

ORGANIC (1% of all cattle)
This is the way all beef used to be raised – and how some people still imagine it is. Bill Niman tends a small herd with one of the lightest hands in the business and produces what Bay Area chefs swear is unparalleled beef

Diet: Grass
Niman’s cows eat only grass, along with a smattering of hay. That’s the normal diet for cattle. Their rumen, a digestive organ, can break down grasses we’d find inedible

Supplements: None
Niman gives no supplements whatsoever to his cattle – no drugs, no hormones, no additives. That’s not ironclad for organic beef – some companies might use antimicrobials – but generally the animals are supplement-free

Environmental Impact: Living with the Land
To prevent his ranch from becoming overgrazed, Niman shifts his cattle around the land, ensuring that the grass has time to recover between feedings. The result is a surprisingly low-impact hamburger, since grass doesn’t need chemical fertilizer to grow and its presence helps prevent soil erosion. There’s no need to clean up manure – with Niman’s low cattle density, the waste just fertilizes the land

Human Impact: The Omega Effect
Beef has a bad rep among nutritionists, but that might be partly unfair for grass-fed steaks. According to research from the University of California, grass-fed beef is higher in beta-carotene, vitamin E and omega-3 fatty acids than conventional beef

CONVENTIONAL (99% of all cattle)
The vast majority of all American cattle start off on open ranges, but that’s where the similarity to their organic cousins ends. They’re shifted after a few months to the tight quarters of an industrial feedlot, to be fattened up as fast as possible

Diet: Grass and corn
Conventional cattle feed off grass pasture for the first several months, but at the feedlot, they’re switched to a heavily corn-based diet, which makes them gain weight faster but also makes them get sick more easily

Supplements: Chemicals
In part to help them survive the crowded conditions of feedlots, where infections can spread fast, conventional cattle are given antibiotics in their feed, and sometimes growth hormones, bloods and fats

Environmental Impact: Waste
A 1,000-head feedlot produces up to 280 tons of manure a week, and the smell can be powerful. All that feed corn requires millions of tons of fertilizer and, ultimately, a lot of petroleum

Human Impact: Fat Attack
Feeding corn to cattle for the last several months of their lives doesn’t just get them fatter faster; it also changes the quality of the beef. Corn helps produce that marbled taste many of us love, but it can result in beef that is higher in fat – helping to fuel the obesity epidemic

Reprinted from TIME.

If similar changes were to happen to the Earth’s climate today as a result of global warming – as scientists believe is possible – this might lead to drier tropics, more wildfires and declines in agricultural production in some of the world’s most heavily populated regions.

The findings were based on oxygen isotopes in air from ice cores, and supported by previously published data from ancient stalagmites found in caves. They will be published Friday in the journal Science by researchers from Oregon State University, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

The data confirming these effects were unusually compelling, researchers said.

“Changes of this type have been theorized in climate models, but we’ve never before had detailed and precise data showing such a widespread impact of abrupt climate change,” said Ed Brook, an OSU professor of geosciences. “We didn’t really expect to find such large, fast environmental changes recorded by the whole atmosphere. The data are pretty hard to ignore.”

The researchers used oxygen measurements, as recorded in air bubbles in ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland, to gauge the changes taking place in vegetation during the past 100,000 years. Increases or decreases in vegetation growth can be determined by measuring the ratio of two different oxygen isotopes in air.

They were also able to verify and confirm these measurements with data from studies of ancient stalagmites on the floors of caves in China, which can reveal rainfall levels over hundreds of thousands of years.

“Both the ice core data and the stalagmites in the caves gave us the same signal, of very dry conditions over broad areas at the same time,” Brook said. “We believe the mechanism causing this was a shift in monsoon patterns, more rain falling over the ocean instead of the land. That resulted in much lower vegetation growth in the regions affected by these monsoons, in what is now India, Southeast Asia and parts of North Africa.”

Previous research has determined that the climate can shift quite rapidly in some cases, in periods as short as decades or less. This study provides a barometer of how those climate changes can affect the Earth’s capacity to grow vegetation.

“Oxygen levels and its isotopic composition in the atmosphere are pretty stable, it takes a major terrestrial change to affect it very much,” Brook said. “These changes were huge. The drop in vegetation growth must have been dramatic.”

Observations of past climatic behavior are important, Brook said, but not a perfect predictor of the impact of future climatic shifts. For one thing, at times in the past when some of these changes took place, larger parts of the northern hemisphere were covered by ice. Ocean circulation patterns also can heavily influence climate, and shift in ways that are not completely understood.

However, the study still points to monsoon behavior being closely linked to climate change.

“These findings highlight the sensitivity of low-latitude rainfall patterns to abrupt climate change in the high-latitude north,” the researchers wrote in their report, “with possible relevance for future rainfall and agriculture in heavily-populated monsoon regions.”

Reposted from the Oregon State University

23/03/2009 2:01:00 PM

Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over.

The years in which more than 2degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay.

On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with 4degrees.

Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed, now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.

This was the repeated whisper at the climate change conference in Copenhagen earlier this month.

It is more or less what Bob Watson, the environment department’s chief scientific adviser, has been telling the British government.

It is the obvious, if unspoken, conclusion of scores of scientific papers.

Recent work by scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for instance, suggests that even global cuts of 3per cent a year, starting in 2020, could leave us with 4 degrees of warming by the end of the century.

At the moment, emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate.

If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten degrees? Who knows?

Faced with such figures, I can’t blame anyone for throwing up their hands. But before you succumb to this fatalism, let me talk you through the options.

Yes, it is true mitigation has so far failed. Sabotaged by Bill Clinton, abandoned by George W. Bush, attended halfheartedly by the other rich nations, the global climate talks have so far been a total failure.

The targets they have set bear no relation to the science and are negated anyway by loopholes and false accounting.

Nations such as Britain, which is meeting its obligations under the Kyoto protocol, have succeeded only by outsourcing it’s pollution to other countries.

And nations such as Canada, which is flouting its obligations, face no meaningful sanctions.

Lord Stern made it too easy, he appears to have underestimated the costs of mitigation.

As the professor of energy policy Dieter Helm has shown, Stern’s assumption that our consumption can continue to grow while our emissions fall is implausible. To have any hope of making substantial cuts we have to reduce our consumption and transfer resources to countries such as China to pay for the switch to low carbon technologies.

As professor Helm says, ”there is not much in the study of human nature and indeed human biology to give support to the optimist”.

But we cannot abandon mitigation unless we have a better option, but we don’t.

If you think our attempts to prevent emissions are futile, take a look at our efforts to adapt.

Germany is spending $US600million ($A871million) on a new sea wall for Hamburg and this money was committed before the news came through that sea-level rises this century could be two or three times as great as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted.

The Netherlands will spend $3.19billion on dykes between now and 2015 and again, they are likely to be inadequate.

The UN suggests rich countries should be transferring between $72billion and $109billion per year to poor countries now, to help them cope with climate change.

But nothing like this is happening.

Rich nations have promised $26billion to help the poor nations adapt to climate change during the past seven years, but they have disbursed only 5per cent.

Oxfam has made a compelling case for how adaptation should be funded. Nations should pay according to the amount of carbon they produce per capita, coupled with their position on the human development index.

On this basis, the US should supply more than 40per cent of the money and the European Union over 30per cent, with Japan, Canada, Australia and Korea making up the balance. But what are the chances of getting them to cough up? There’s a limit to what this money could buy anyway.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that ”global mean temperature changes greater than 4degrees above 1990-2000 levels” would ”exceed … the adaptive capacity of many systems”.

At this point there’s nothing you can do, for instance, to prevent the loss of ecosystems, the melting of glaciers and the disintegration of major ice sheets.

Elsewhere it spells out the consequences more starkly. Global food production, it says, is ”very likely to decrease above about 3degrees”. Buy your way out of that.

And it doesn’t stop there. The IPCC also finds that, above 3degrees of warming, the world’s vegetation will become ”a net source of carbon”.

This is just one of the climate feedbacks triggered by a high level of warming. Four degrees might take us inexorably to 5degrees or 6degrees, the end for humans of just about everything.

Until recently, scientists spoke of carbon concentrations and temperatures peaking and then falling back.

But a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that ”climate change … is largely irreversible for 1000 years after emissions stop”.

Even if we were to cut carbon emissions to zero today, by the year 3000 our contribution to atmospheric concentrations would decline by just 40per cent. High temperatures would remain more or less constant until then. If we produce it, we’re stuck with it.

In the rich nations we will muddle through, for a few generations, and spend nearly everything we have on coping. But where the money is needed most there will be nothing.

The ecological debt the rich world owes to the poor will never be discharged, just as it has never accepted that it should offer reparations for the slave trade and for the pillage of gold, silver, rubber, sugar and all the other commodities taken without due payment.

Finding the political will for crash cuts in carbon production is improbable. But finding the political will when the disasters have already begun to spend adaptation money on poor nations rather than on ourselves will be impossible.

The world won’t adapt and can’t adapt, the only adaptive response to a global shortage of food is starvation.

Of the strategies it is mitigation, not adaptation, which turns out to be the most feasible option.

Yes, it might already be too late even if we reduced emissions to zero tomorrow to prevent more than 2degreesC of warming. But we cannot behave as if it is, for in doing so we make the prediction come true.

Tough as this fight may be, improbable as success might seem, we cannot afford to surrender. Guardian

Reprinted From: 

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/opportunity-for-2-degrees-lost/1466204.aspx?storypage=0

Petroleum supplies slowly dwindle as demand rapidly soars. So the prices of gasoline and oil that supply modern societies with their industrial production of food will go up, up, and away. A radically different future than the oil-energized twentieth century is dawning.

Let’s face it: our world has become increasingly maddening. Bad news mounts each day: unending wars, financial crises, earthquakes, hurricanes and cyclones killing thousands, chaotic climate change, vanishing pollinating bees and polar bears, rising oceans, thinning forests and a host of human-created or – worsened threats. We live in uncertain times with an even more uncertain future. We face unprecedented, unpredictable converging threats. What can one do to remain somewhat sane? The ostrich approach of denial by burying one’s head in the sand will not be effective or life enhancing.

It is a good time for an increasing number of people to return to the multiple benefits and pleasures of growing at least part of their own food by gardening and farming. In addition to satisfying the need to eat and drink, farming can also help deal with depression, passivity, and other forms of psychological suffering. It can help treat both the body and the soul.

One of the many good things that farms based on nature’s patterns can do is help balance people. Much psychological suffering and even mental illnesses have to do with imbalances, which characterize modern society. Before turning to drugs, one can at least try visiting farms and perhaps volunteering to work there. Or one can connect with farms in collaboration with other treatment programs.

Farming can be done in ways that preserve the Earth and put humans in direct contact with it. “Small farms are the most productive on earth,” according to the May 11 New York Times article, “Change We Can Stomach,” by farmer and chef Dan Barber. “A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre,” he writes. “Farming has the potential to go through the greatest upheaval since the Green Revolution, bringing harvests that are more meaningful, sustainable, and, yes, even more flavorful,” Barber contends.

Since growing one’s own food is not possible for everyone, it is also a good time to establish direct relationships with local farmers and shop more at farmers’ markets, farm stands, and by subscribing to Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs). Urban agriculture, farms on the urban fringe, and rooftop gardening are becoming increasingly popular. The large city of Havana, Cuba, grows 70% of its own food. Necessity will change how people get their food in the near future.

Many Americans take their food sources for granted, assuming that super-markets will be able to always supply them with what they need. Having lived in Hawai’i when delivery disruptions and the lack of transportation across the ocean left bare shelves in food stores, I know the panic this can cause.

The “Silent Tsunami,” “Misery Index,” and Mud Cakes

A “silent tsunami” of hunger sweeps the globe, reports the head of the United Nation’s World Food Program, Josette Sheeran, speaking in late April at a food summit in London. The heightened hunger threat endangers 20 million of the world’s poorest children and is pushing 100 million people into poverty.

“This is the new face of hunger – the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are,” Sheeran reports. “The world’s misery index is rising.”

During 2008 food riots broke out in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. “You are seeing the return of the food riot, one of the oldest forms of collective action,” commented Raj Patel in an April 25 San Francisco Chronicle article. The University of California at Berkeley scholar wrote the new book Stuffed and Starved: Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

The World Bank estimates that food prices have risen 83% in three years; other estimates are in the 60 and 70 percent range. Even in the wealthy United States we have recently seen rationing of rice and other staples by food giants such as Costco and Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Clubs, the two biggest warehouse retail chains. Such trends are likely to continue and are creating stockpiling and hoarding.

“In the poorest districts (of Haiti), there is now a brisk trade in mud cakes,” writes Patel in an article titled “The Troubles with Food,” published at http://www.redpepper.org.uk/. “Mothers feed the biscuits, made with water, salt, margarine and clay, to their children. The cake puts a dampener on hunger, at least for a couple of hours, but leaves your mouth dry and bitter for several hours more,” he continues.

Industrial agriculture will be one of the many aspects of human life on the planet hit by the dwindle/demand oil trend and the related peaks of other fossil fuels, such as natural gas. Industrial agriculture depends upon petroleum in many ways – to run tractors and other machines, to make chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and to fuel the trucks that transport food an average of 1,500 miles from field to fork. Oil is the most important ingredient in most of conventional food. As the dwindle/demand rate intensifies, food will be less available and more expensive. Famine is likely.

Survival will require that more people return to an earlier energy supply – muscle power. As someone who made a transition in the early 1990s (while in my late 40s) from a livelihood based on college teaching and related intellectual activities to one based on farming, I can report that there are many advantages to such a change. I feel better as a result of living on the land, growing some of my own food, and sharing that organic food and the farm itself with others.

I have found my local place. In 2003 I accepted a great job offer in Hawai’i, but after a couple of wonderful years, I felt so homesick that I returned to my farm.

So this is a report from the farm front, which focuses on some of the psychological benefits of farming.

The multiple consequences of a diminishing supply of humanity’s major energy source at this point in history will include hardships, stress, and suffering. There are many ways of dealing psychologically with such matters, including with family, friends and professional counselors. This article will explore what I have come to describe as agropsychology and agrotherapy.

I was trained to be a counselor. Quite frankly, I was not good at doing individual therapy. I got too emotional and involved. I did not adequately develop the necessary professional armor and shield. I did not take enough distance from the people I was working with or have enough “impulse control.” So I shifted more to teaching, group work, and writing. In the time since my more conventional psychological training some forty years ago, self-disclosure and emotional men have become more acceptable as sex roles and professional codes have evolved.

Ecopsychology and Ecotherapy

Sierra Club Books published Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind in l996. The term refers to the emerging synthesis of the psychological and the ecological. The book’s editor, Theodore Roszak, writes that “ecology needs psychology, psychology needs ecology.” Roszak reports on a l990 conference entitled “Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered.”

The Sierra Club plans to publish the book’s sequel Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind in March of 2009. My chapter “Farming, Sweet Darkness, Poetry, and Healing” is scheduled to be part of that book. After finishing my contribution I began to realize that what I was writing about could be called agrotherapy, which is the practice of agropsychology, which are sub-sets of ecopsychology and ecotherapy. Farms have historically been healing places, for both those who live and work there and those who visit. Farm tours and even overnight farm stays are becoming increasingly popular as examples of ecotourism. The Small Farm Program at the University of California at Davis, Sonoma County Farm Trails, and Daily Acts are among the many groups that promote such tours.

Simply put, by living on a farm and working the land on a regular basis, I have become a healthier person – physically and mentally. In recent years I have been hosting an increasing number of farm tours at Kokopelli Farm in the Sebastopol countryside, Sonoma County, Northern California. Community, school, and religious groups, as well as families and friends, come to the farm, which grows mainly organic berries and fruit and cares for chickens.

My visitors tend to feel better from their time on this traditional farm; something positive usually happens to them. Being outside in nature can benefit people. People typically loose sight of chronological time. They can fall into berry time or chicken time, which tend to be slower than the human-made clock, and often more fun and stress reducing. They sometimes lose their restraint and order, wanting to sprint ahead, or go off the path, as if they were animals, which they are.

Chicken Wisdom and Agrotherapy

This year I returned to teaching psychology, part-time, at Sonoma State University. I sometimes take chickens as Teaching Assistants (TAs). For example, I took two sweet silkies on Valentine’s Day; they modeled being love birds as they cooed and cuddled, one even feeling safe enough to lay an egg.

Chickens can teach many things, such as surrender to what is, joy at the dawn, transformation of throwaways into jewels, and love of the Earth within which chickens take their dust baths to help them get rid of parasites. Chickens offer incredible eggs, humor, joy, and beauty. That other two-legged can teach chicken wisdom, that of a prey, to humans, who are predators. It includes, but is not limited to, the following: delight in simple things (like worms), keep dancing, recycle, snuggle into the earth, slow down, combine vulnerability and hardiness.

Agrotherapy is not therapy-as-usual. It happens mainly in the open, outside an office, a building, a city and without a defined time limit. The freedom to wonder and to meander characterize being outside. One does not enter the same human-made setting each time; farms are seasonal, as humans are, and are constantly changing. The therapists-of-the-outdoors include trees, berries, birds, bees, chickens, the moon and stars, the clouds, crow congresses and others who can help relieve stress, anxiety, suffering, and even sickness.

Tears sometimes come to the eyes of city folk when they sit on the ground beneath the giant redwoods or sprawling oaks at my farm. Something from their personal or collective memory seems to get activated. We listen to the wind and hear various sounds within it. Within just a few minutes I can usually feel a change in my guests. This is not a “talking cure.” It is non-talking, opening to the other senses. There is not therapeutic couch or chair; the forest provides a comforting bed upon which one can relax and reduce their stress.

My presence on such tours is more as a guide who can point things out, including patterns in nature and persons, and pose strategic questions, than as an expert to make book-based diagnoses and human-devised treatments. Farming – like therapy or personal growth – is a process with no clear beginning or end. There are products along the way, but the topsoil, for example, takes thousands of years to make. Perennial trees and berries planted by one family member can endure far beyond his or her lifetime into that of descendents, continuing to provide beauty and healing.

An email I sent to a local online listserve about agropsychology generated the following response from Jennifer York, the owner of the Bamboo Sorcery outside my hometown of Sebastopol:

“I can vouch for what you call “agropsychology.’ It saved me as a youth in my recovery from a traumatic childhood, and now in middle age. I am once again finding great healing, joy, and contentment in growing my own garden and raising my own farm animals (chickens, rabbits, and someday dairy goats, I hope!) for food, fun and deep connection with the cycles of life and death. For me it is a spiritual, as well as a practical avocation. I recommend it. Besides, it may come in very handy someday.

“In the meantime I am having fun, and feel good about sharing the experience with my six-year-old daughter. I believe it is creating a sound foundation in her for the future. I have great gratitude to my deceased parents who were Back-to-Landers in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, and who exposed me to this rich and life affirming way of life.

“My husband says he can tell how happy I am by how much dirt is under my finger nails…and it’s true.”

In his book Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines Peak Oil theorist Richard Heinberg includes a chapter titled “The Psychology of Peak Oil and Climate Change.” He writes, “The next few decades will be traumatic.” One resource that Heinberg refers to is the work of eco-philosopher Joanna Macy with respect to workshops on “despair and empowerment.” In them people are encouraged to deal with their grief, and thus feel their connection to the Earth.

Ecopsychology and ecotherapy can take many forms, including agropsychology and agrotherapy. These recently conceptualized fields can make a contribution to the larger fields of psychology and psychotherapy and thus to the healing of people and of the nature of which we are an integral part. Humans often seem to battle nature, whereas participation and collaboration with it seem more healthy, which these developing forms can support.

Reprinted from Dissident Voice.

At first blush, global warming seems to be a great hook for those of us promoting animal-friendly eating, but there are two problems:

1. Offering accurate information. Many people say that meat is the leading cause of global warming. But this is not true; the production of meat is not the leading cause of greenhouse gases — only more than transportation. From:

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607612562
Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health

Although the main human source of greenhouse-gas emissions is combustion of fossil fuels for energy generation, non-energy emissions (including from agriculture and land-use changes) contribute more than a third of the total greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide.

And elsewhere:

Greenhouse-gas emissions from the agriculture sector account for about 22% of global total emissions; this contribution is similar to that of industry and greater than that of transport. Livestock production (including transport of livestock and feed) accounts for nearly 80% of the sector’s emissions.

So livestock comes after energy generation and industry. And that is only globally; from the Salon article referenced below:

Here in the U.S., livestock’s impact is not quite so extreme: Six percent of our greenhouse gases come from livestock production, compared with 19 percent from cars, light trucks and airplanes.

See more here (scroll down to the update).

As we’ve said elsewhere, no meat eater is actively seeking to be a vegetarian; rather, people are looking for a reason to dismiss us. When we exaggerate or lie, that is all that is remembered — not the underlying reality. That worldwide meat production contributes more to global warming than all of transportation is accurate and striking; there is no reason to exaggerate.

2. The expected impact in the public mind, and how it thus actually affects animals. When the public hears “livestock” (as in “livestock causes more global warming than transportation”), they think cattle, and the conclusion is that they should eat less beef. Even when people hear “meat … global warming,” they think burping (or flatulent) cows. (Of course, the news is written by, and the media run by, meat eaters. So they will always choose the side that is least challenging to their habits / the status quo.)

For those that look into the science and aren’t already vegan, concern for global warming leads almost inevitably to more chickens being eaten (it takes about 190 chickens to provide the same number of meals as one steer; see “Suffering per Kilogram” and “Farm Animal Welfare, Legislation, and Trade” (pdf).

For example, from:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/22/peta/index.html

“Astonishingly enough,” says study coauthor Gidon Eshel, a Bard College geophysicist, “the poultry diet is actually better than lacto-ovo vegetarian.” In other words, a roast chicken dinner is better for the planet than a cheese pizza.

How about going vegan?

The average American is responsible for about 26 tons annually, so if the entire U.S. population went vegan, we’d reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by only 6 percent.

The vast majority of that 6 percent is from cutting out beef and dairy. (The entire article is worth reading for how “informed” opinion plays this out.)

Similarly:

Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States
Environ. Sci. Technol. In press

Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.

The LA Times shows “replace beef with chicken” in action:

“No hamburger patties?” asked an incredulous football player, repeating the words of the grill cook. He glowered at the posted sign: ‘Cows or cars? Worldwide, livestock emits 18% of greenhouse gases, more than the transportation sector! Today we’re offering great-tasting vegetarian choices.’ “Just give me three chicken breasts, please,” he said….

Here is another example. A final data point is that if Al Gore — who believes global warming is an existential risk — won’t change, it would appear that global warming/veg isn’t an incredibly compelling argument for veganism (see here, and comments).
My general impression (and I know there are exceptions to this and all arguments) is that global warming is another argument that makes sense to us, and makes us think, “Here is a great, self-interested hook I can use to convince others of veganism’s superiority!” But it isn’t a question of whether veganism is the best diet for addressing global warming (as far as I can tell, it is). The bottom line has to be the actual impact of the message we choose to present. In other words: we shouldn’t seek out and use arguments that seem to support veganism — veganism isn’t the point. If we take suffering seriously, we must seek to present a message that reduces the most suffering.

As Nobel Laureate Herb Simon discovered, human psychology / decision making is often determined by ‘good enough.’ People don’t hear about a concern (especially a relatively abstract issue like global warming) and take it to the fullest extent — e.g., stop driving at all — but rather, those motivated enough will do something (drive a bit less, drive a more fuel-efficient car) and feel good that they are doing something. (The same has held true for “the health argument“)

In this case, though, doing “something” means eating a lot more chickens. We can say, “But being vegan is even better!” till we’re blue in the face, but experience shows that this is effective only in the rarest of cases; the vast majority of people who will be moved at all about global warming are happy to be ‘taking action’ by eating a lot more chickens. (And it is the cattle industry that is worried about the global warming / diet argument, not the poultry industry — the latter loves anything that badmouths beef.)

Although the global warming / food connection seems clear to us and appears to justify our veganism, the bottom line is how it actually plays out in people’s minds via the actual media. When used on its own, I fear that the diet / global warming angle does significantly more harm (more chickens eaten) than good (people actually going veg who otherwise wouldn’t have if exposed to the realities of modern agribusiness).

For this reason, I think that we should be very careful how we use global warming. It is a hot topic, so it gives us an “in” with the media and environmental groups. But if we present it on its own, given human psychology, the case is almost always going to have the bottom line of eating more chickens. In my opinion, the global warming / diet connection does more harm than good when presented on its own, but can work as a hook to capture attention and allow us to draw attention to the horrors of modern agribusiness, with a special focus on cruelty to chickens.

PS On a related topic, there is growing recognition that increased usage of certain biofuels will exacerbate global hunger (e.g., http://tinyurl.com/5wmh3y). Of course, the same argument of resource usage can be made regarding using crops as animals feed (e.g., http://tinyurl.com/2lvbww) — according to the FAO, only 100m tonnes of cereal crops go to biofuel, while 760m tonnes go to animal feed — and the latter figure isn’t even counting soy. As pointed out here:

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, will feed people…. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals — which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.

Keep in mind, however, that beef is much, much less efficient than chicken (and eggs) — see, again, the Salon article:

Welcome, then, the savior of environmentally concerned carnivores everywhere: the chicken. Unlike cattle, chickens don’t burp methane. They also have an amazing ability to turn a relatively small amount of grain into a large amount of protein. A chicken requires 2 pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat, compared with about 6 pounds of grain for a feedlot cow and 3 pounds for a pig. Poultry waste produces only about one-tenth of the methane of hog and cattle manure.

Like thousands of activists over the past decades, I’d love to think there is some perfect, logical, self-interested argument that won’t just vindicate my veganism, but will convince large numbers of people to go vegan, while not leading others to eat more chickens. But this is not the case — there just aren’t lots of people out there who secretly want to be vegan but just need that one statistic. For nearly everyone, any change away from the status quo is difficult and resisted. As much as we’d love to argue otherwise, in response to health or environmental arguments, the first, easiest, most convenient, and socially acceptable step is to eat more chickens.

It is worth briefly considering why health and environmental arguments seem to be more easily “accepted” by people, and why most individuals are resistant and defensive when faced with the cruelty argument. Much of this could well be that health choices are personal (and easily overridden by habit, convenience, etc, even in the face of severe health issues), while environmental concerns are abstract and easily assuaged by taking some action (new lightbulbs, recycling) from the laundry list of suggested actions (“No one’s perfect!”).

The obvious cruelty and vicious brutality of factory farms, however, is both real, immediate, undeniable, and clearly an ethical challenge to our view of ourselves. For these reasons, the animals’ suffering can’t be easily dismissed and forgotten; thus it is important for meat eaters to avoid the issue as much as possible (and to make the messenger the issue, whenever possible). For the same reason, it is incumbent on us, as animal advocates, to actually advocate the animals’ case, so that no one can avoid facing the hidden reality.

As I’ve written elsewhere:

I’m not fooling myself – I know that exposing what goes on in factory farms and slaughterhouses isn’t going to reach everyone. But feel-good arguments that avoid the horrors of meat production are easily dismissed, and thus simply not compelling enough. We don’t want people to nod in agreement and continue on as before. It is far better if 95% of people turn away revolted and 5% open their minds to change, than if everyone smiles politely and continues on to McDonald’s for a chicken sandwich.

Let me repeat: Trying to appeal to everyone hasn’t worked, and it won’t work. It is well past time to give up the fantasy that there is some perfect self-centered argument that will magically compel everyone to change.

In deciding what to present to the public, our criteria shouldn’t be, “Does this seem to denigrate (some) meat and/or support veganism?” We shouldn’t be trying to justify our diet — we need to stand up for the animals. We don’t get to determine how people should react; we must consider how our chosen argument will actually play out to the general public and through the media. We must set aside our personal biases and needs, and honestly ask, “Is this the argument that will alleviate as much suffering as possible?” The animals are counting on us.

Reprinted from Vegan Outreach.

With April being a cold month in Toronto so far, it is hard to feel too concerned about global warming. But it is worth noting that the greenhouse effect can cause weather extremes in both directions.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar for best documentary in 2006. The clear message in this ground-breaking movie is that governments, industry and people must cut down on fossil fuel use, and soon.

We can also play a powerful role for positive change by adjusting what we eat. Global climate change is directly related to agriculture through the loss of wilderness to farmland, methane released from animals, and energy-intensive fertilizers, pesticides, food processing and transportation.

By eating low on the food chain, locally-grown and organic, you can make a significant difference.

Why didn’t Gore mention anything about agriculture in the movie? 

Likely Gore wanted to keep the message focused, and targeted to the political situation in the U.S.

The more in-depth book version of An Inconvenient Truth, does suggest buying local and eating less meat. On page 317 it says:

Americans consume almost a quarter of all the beef produced in the world. Aside from health issues associated with eating lots of meat, a high-meat diet translates into a tremendous amount of carbon emissions. It takes far more fossil-fuel energy to produce and transport meat than to deliver equivalent amounts of protein from plant sources.

In addition, much of the world’s deforestation is a result of clearing and burning to create grazing land for livestock. This creates further damage by destroying trees that would otherwise absorb carbon dioxide. Fruits, vegetables, and grains, on the other hand, require 95% less raw materials to produce and, when combined properly, can provide a complete and nutritious diet. If more Americans shifted to a less meat-intensive diet, we could greatly reduce CO2 emissions and also save vast quantities of water and other precious natural resources.”

When the movie was made, the role of diet may not have been as well known as it is now. An important report released in Nov. 2006 by the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization shows that livestock production is responsible for an incredible 18 percent of human induced greenhouse gas emissions worldwide – more than all of the world’s motor vehicles.

Agriculture plays a significant role

Agriculture emits carbon dioxide through transportation, fertilizer production and the energy used for factory farming.

Deforestation (partly to clear land for agriculture) is responsible for 13% of climate change through the release of stored carbon dioxide. Methane causes 17.3% of climate change due to livestock digestion, animal manure, rice paddies, dams, fossil fuel extraction, and landfills. Nitrous Oxide (N₂O) accounts for 5.4% mostly due to fertilizers.

Surprisingly, the actual burning of fossil fuels accounts for only 39% of climate change mostly from cars, industry and heating homes. (This accounts for 75% of CO₂ emissions. The rest is due to deforestation.)

Figures are from Story Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Warming, by Guy Dauncey, 2001

Deforestation

At least 13% of climate change is due to cutting down or burning forests. A lot of forest is cleared for agriculture, especially in rainforest regions.

The photo to the right is a satellite image of the Brazilian State of Rondonia. Intact wilderness is dark green. Farms and recently deforested areas are lighter colours.

Satellite data shows that 600 fires were started each day on average during 2004 to clear land for farming. The rate of destruction has doubled in the last decade. Rainforests are home to one third of land species.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7547087 (picture 5)

Burning of fossil fuel

About 39% of climate change is due to using oil, natural gas and other fuels. Some of this energy is used for the processing, packaging, refrigeration, and transportation of food, factory farms, and the production of fertilizers and pesticides.

A 2002 Worldwatch report says that a typical meal made with ingredients from a supermarket takes four to 17 times more petroleum consumption in transport than the same meal made from local ingredients. And a head of lettuce grown in California and shipped nearly 3,000 miles to Washington, D.C., requires about 36 times as much fossil fuel energy in transport as it provides in food energy when it arrives.

In terms of production, animal foods demand a lot more energy than plant foods. According to one study, meat production requires 10 to 20 times more energy per edible tonne than grain production. Growing feed crops requires extensive energy for ploughing, harvesting, pumping irrigation water, transportation, and producing fertilizer and pesticides. Once grown, the crops are dried and processed using additional energy.

Furthermore, the housing of pigs and chickens in huge windowless sheds requires energy for artificial ventilation, conveyor belts and electric lighting. Slaughterhouses are also energy intensive.

For harvesting fish, extensive energy and resources go into building, maintaining and fueling fleets of trawlers.

Methane

Methane is responsible for 17.3% of climate change. The high percentage is due to the fact that methane is 23 times more potent than CO₂. The good news is that its warming effect only lasts 10 years compared to 100 years for carbon dioxide. Scaling back methane emissions will lead to a quicker reduction in climate change due to the shorter lag time.

Livestock digestion (i.e. burps and farts from cows and sheep) accounts for 18% of total global methane emissions, and factory farm waste lagoons account for a further 7% of emissions. Combined, these two sources equal 4.3% of total climate change. Other sources include dams (accounting for 20% of emissions), fossil fuel extraction (20%) and landfills (10%). Rice paddies account for around 10%, but rice is a staple food for a lot more people (half the world’s population) than cow meat is, and BBC reports that there are varieties of rice being developed that emit much less methane.

Dams are often built to hold water for irrigating crops – especially feed crops such as corn and soy. In Alberta, most large rivers have been dammed for the main purpose of collecting water for irrigation.

Nitrous Oxide

Nitrous Oxide (N₂O) is a powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for 5.4% of climate change. It has one of the longest atmosphere lifetimes of the greenhouse gases, lasting for up to 150 years. Since the Industrial Revolution, the level of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere has increased by 16%.

About 70% of human induced N₂0 emissions is due to the widespread use of nitrogen-based fertilizers. Tilling soil, transportation and industry make up much of the rest.

Farming practices and the loss of CO₂ from soil

In Canada and United States, farming practices amount to 8% of climate change due to the release of methane, CO₂, and N₂O. This figure doesn’t include deforestation when new farms are created. In the rest of the world, where there are fewer cars and industry, farming accounts for a much higher percentage of climate change.

Tilling soil causes carbon dioxide to be released. There are roughly 44 tons of C0₂ in an acre of healthy soil. Tilling a field releases up to 4 tons of CO₂ per acre. The United States has lost a third of the original topsoil since settlement.

Every year, the planet’s soils absorb roughly 50 billion tonnes of carbon from decaying vegetation and release 50 billion tonnes through decomposition. But forest destruction and farming weakens the soil, causing 1.5 billion tonnes to be lost to the atmosphere. It is estimated that about 7% of CO₂ in the atmosphere is from carbon that has been lost from soil.

Photo: Healthy soil is full of life and capable of absorbing carbon dioxide.

What you can do

Eat low on the food chain

Moving toward a vegetarian diet is the most powerful food choice you can make to reduce climate change. A meat-based diet uses far more agricultural land than a vegetarian diet because domesticated animals must also be fed. Taking individual weights into account, food animals outweigh people in North America by a factor of four to one! All these animals need food, water and transportation. Most of our farmland is dedicated to feeding them.

By curtailing our meat consumption we could free up millions of acres of agricultural land that could be returned to forest and wild prairie, absorbing tons of CO₂ in the process.

Using less farmland also means less soil erosion, less irrigation water, less pesticide, less N₂O emissions, and less fossil fuel for farm machinery and fertilizer production.

The United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization issued a stunning report on global warming in Nov. 2006. Livestock production is responsible for more climate change gasses than all the motor vehicles in the world. In total, it is responsible for 18 percent of human induced greenhouse gas emissions. It is also a major source of land and water degradation.

A recent study at the University of Chicago, found that a vegan diet is the most efficient, saving a ton and a half of CO₂ or equivalents per year when compared to a standard North American diet. By comparison, the average American car driver emits 1.9 to 4.7 tons of carbon dioxide, depending on the vehicle model and fuel efficiency. The study found that red meat and, surprisingly, fish were responsible for the highest emissions. Most seafood undergoes energy-intensive long-distance travel from ocean to market. Energy used for food production accounts for about 17 percent of all fossil fuel used in the United States. Furthermore, livestock production emits greenhouse gases not associated with fossil-fuel combustion, primarily methane and nitrous oxide.

Also see Meat production’s environmental toll,
and Fish & seafood – the environmental costs

Eat locally grown and organic

Buying locally grown food greatly reduces the energy and resources necessary to transport and store foods. Typically, produce from Mexico or California is shipped in refrigerated trucks. When you buy long-distance food part of the price you pay is for fuel and the truck. Fresh food from other continents is typically flown in by airplanes. Planes require staggering amounts of fuel to lift produce and meat into the air and across oceans.

Buying organic foods supports farmers that are using alternatives to nitrogen-based and petroleum-based fertilizers. Organic farming methods also tend to be more gentle on the soil, helping to reduce soil erosion and CO2 emissions from soil.

See Eating Local and Organic

Reduce food and packaging waste

A 2004 study, from the University of Arizona, found that half of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten. The average family of four throws out $600 worth of good food every year.

There is a huge opportunity to reduce this wastage by adjusting shopping, storage and eating habits. For example, eating leftovers is a great way to reduce the amount of garbage that ends up being trucked to landfill sites. Landfills emit methane, and food wastage requires more agricultural land.

Look for foods that require little or no packaging, such as whole fruits, vegetables, and bulk dry goods. By eating vegetarian meals, you can avoid animal products that tend to require more energy for processing, packaging, and refrigeration than plant-based foods.

See Minimizing wastage for simple ways to reduce waste.

Story Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Warming, by Guy Dauncey, 2001

In July 4, 2006, Guy Dauncey (earthfuture.com) informed us that “all emissions related to food, including CO2, methane from cattle, and nitrous oxides from fertilizing, are included in both Kyoto and national greenhouse gas emissions figures.”

Reprinted from the Toronto Vegetarian Association.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-No Derivative Works 2.l5 License.

“Converting set-asides to corn-ethanol production is an inefficient and expensive greenhouse gas mitigation policy that should not be encouraged until ethanol-production technologies improve,” the study’s authors reported in the March edition of the research journal Ecological Applications.

Nevertheless, farmers and producers are already receiving federal subsidies to grow more corn for ethanol under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

“One of our take-home messages is that conservation programs are currently a cheaper and more efficient greenhouse gas policy for taxpayers than corn-ethanol production,” said biologist Robert Jackson, the Nicholas Professor of Global Environmental Change at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, who led the study.

Making ethanol from corn reduces atmospheric releases of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide because the CO2 emitted when the ethanol burns is “canceled out” by the carbon dioxide taken in by the next crop of growing plants, which use it in photosynthesis. That means equivalent amounts of carbon dioxide are removed from the atmosphere and “fixed” into plant tissues.

But the study notes that some CO2 not counterbalanced by plant carbon uptake gets released when corn is grown and processed for ethanol. Furthermore, ethanol contains only about 70 percent of gasoline’s energy.

“So we actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions only 20 percent when we substitute one liter of ethanol for one liter of gasoline,” said Gervasio Piñeiro, the study’s first author, who is a Buenos Aires, Argentina-based scientist and postdoctoral research associate in Jackson’s Duke laboratory.

Also, by the researchers’ accounting, the carbon benefits of using ethanol only begin to show up years after corn growing begins. “Depending on prior land use” they wrote in their report, “our analysis shows that carbon releases from the soil after planting corn for ethanol may in some cases completely offset carbon gains attributed to biofuel generation for at least 50 years.”

The report said that “cellulosic” species — such as switchgrass — are a better option for curbing emissions than corn because they don’t require annual replowing and planting. In contrast, a single planting of cellulosic species will continue growing and producing for years while trapping more carbon in the soil.

“Until cellulosic ethanol production is feasible, or corn-ethanol technology improves, corn-ethanol subsidies are a poor investment economically and environmentally,” Jackson added.

However, the report noted that a cost-effective technology to convert cellulosics to ethanol may be years away. So the Duke team contrasted today’s production practices for corn-based ethanol with what will be possible after the year 2023 for cellulosic-based ethanol.

By analyzing 142 different soil studies, the researchers found that conventional corn farming can remove 30 to 50 percent of the carbon stored in the soil. In contrast, cellulosic ethanol production entails mowing plants as they grow — often on land that is already in conservation reserve. That, their analysis found, can ultimately increase soil carbon levels between 30 to 50 percent instead of reducing them.

“It’s like hay baling,” Piñeiro said. “You plant it once and it stays there for 20 years. And it takes much less energy and carbon dioxide emissions to produce that than to produce corn.”

As part of its analysis, the Duke team calculated how corn-for-ethanol and cellulosic-for-ethanol production — both now and in the future — would compare with agricultural set-asides. Those comparisons were expressed in economic terms with a standard financial accounting tool called “net present value.”

For now, setting aside acreage and letting it return to native vegetation was rated the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, outweighing the results of corn-ethanol production over the first 48 years. However, “once commercially available, cellulosic ethanol produced in set-aside grasslands should provide the most efficient tool for greenhouse gas reduction of any scenario we examined,” the report added.

The worst strategy for reducing carbon dioxide emissions is to plant corn-for-ethanol on land that was previously designated as set aside — a practice included in current federal efforts to ramp up biofuel production, the study found. “You will lose a lot of soil carbon, which will escape into the atmosphere as CO2,” said Piñeiro.

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The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Center for Global Change at Duke University and by the Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnologíca of Argentina.

Other researchers in the study included Brian Murray, the director for economic analysis at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and a Nicholas School research professor; Justin Baker, a researcher with Murray and Jackson; and Esteban Jobbagy, a professor at the University of San Luis in Argentina who received his Ph.D. at Duke.

Reprinted from Duke University.

Rapidly warming climate is likely to seriously alter crop yields in the tropics and subtropics by the end of this century and, without adaptation, will leave half the world’s population facing serious food shortages, new research shows.

To compound matters, the population of this equatorial belt – from about 35 degrees north latitude to 35 degrees south latitude – is among the poorest on Earth and is growing faster than anywhere else.

“The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge, and that doesn’t take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures,” said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor.

Battisti is lead author of the study in the Jan. 9 edition of Science. He collaborated with Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford University’s Program on Food Security and the Environment, to examine the impact of climate change on the world’s food security.

“This is a compelling reason for us to invest in adaptation, because it is clear that this is the direction we are going in terms of temperature and it will take decades to develop new food crop varieties that can better withstand a warmer climate,” Naylor said.

“We are taking the worst of what we’ve seen historically and saying that in the future it is going to be a lot worse unless there is some kind of adaptation.”

By combining direct observations with data from 23 global climate models that contributed to Nobel prize-winning research in 2007, Battisti and Naylor determined there is greater than a 90 percent probability that by 2100 the lowest growing-season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will be higher than any temperatures recorded there to date.

They used the data as a filter to view historic instances of severe food insecurity, and concluded such instances are likely to become more commonplace. Those include severe episodes in France in 2003 and the Ukraine in 1972. In the case of the Ukraine, a near-record heat wave reduced wheat yields and contributed to disruptions in the global cereal market that lasted two years.

“I think what startled me the most is that when we looked at our historic examples there were ways to address the problem within a given year. People could always turn somewhere else to find food,” Naylor said. “But in the future there’s not going to be any place to turn unless we rethink our food supplies.”

The serious climate issues won’t be limited to the tropics, the scientists conclude. As an example, they cite record temperatures that struck Western Europe in June, July and August of 2003, killing an estimated 52,000 people. The summer-long heat wave in France and Italy cut wheat yields and fodder production by one-third. In France alone, temperatures were nearly 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term mean, and the scientists say such temperatures could be normal for France by 2100.

In the tropics, the higher temperatures can be expected to cut yields of the primary food crops, maize and rice, by 20 to 40 percent, the researchers said. But rising temperatures also are likely to play havoc with soil moisture, cutting yields even further.

“We have to be rethinking agriculture systems as a whole, not only thinking about new varieties but also recognizing that many people will just move out of agriculture, and even move from the lands where they live now,” Naylor said.

Currently 3 billion people live in the tropics and subtropics, and their number is expected to nearly double by the end of the century. The area stretches from the southern United States to northern Argentina and southern Brazil, from northern India and southern China to southern Australia and all of Africa.

The scientists said that many who now live in these areas subsist on less than $2 a day and depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods.

“When all the signs point in the same direction, and in this case it’s a bad direction, you pretty much know what’s going to happen,” Battisti said. “You are talking about hundreds of millions of additional people looking for food because they won’t be able to find it where they find it now.”

He said wheat makes up one-quarter of the calories consumed in India, but growth in wheat yields there have been stagnant for the last decade.

Temperature increases from climate change are expected to be less in equatorial regions than at higher latitudes, but because average temperatures in the tropics today are much higher than at midlatitudes, rising temperature will have a greater impact on crop yields in the tropics.

Recent UW research has shown that even with much smaller temperature increases in the tropics, the impacts of warmer climate will be greater there because life in the tropics does not encounter much temperature variation and so is less adaptable. That makes an even stronger case to begin now searching for ways to deal with substantially warmer conditions, Battisti said.

“You can let it happen and painfully adapt, or you can plan for it,” he said. “You also could mitigate it and not let it happen in the first place, but we’re not doing a very good job of that.”

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The National Science Foundation and the Tamaki Foundation funded the research.

For more information on the Program on Food Security and the Environment, a joint program of Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, see http://fse.stanford.edu.