There are no merely local famines

In a globalised society, there are no merely local famines, or revolutions, or failed states.

Many of our most severe ecological threats converge on the stability of the global food supply. The most explosive consequences of food shortages are not population decline from starvation, but civil unrest and conflict (as well as increasing vulnerability to disease/pandemic). During the 2008 food price spikes, there were riots in sixteen countries. And the most visible political consequence of the 2010 food price spike was the Arab Spring (though again there were protests and riots in many other countries). Yes, of course there are other underlying factors in every country affected, but the spike in the price of bread was the initial spark in nearly every country that saw significant instances of civil unrest in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The protests that ultimately brought down governments in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt (and possibly Syria) all had the price of bread as their trigger (as did those in Bahrain and elsewhere). And why were prices so high in 2010? Again, all kinds of systematic reasons (biofuels taking an increasing share, changing diets, speculation, government hoarding in response to an initial rise), but the short term trigger was almost simultaneous crop losses from extreme weather events in Argentina, Australia, Pakistan and Russia (which famously stopped exporting wheat after its six sigma heatwave). Food price spikes are inconvenient in the west, where we spend less than 15% of our income on food, but disastrous in the many places with otherwise somewhat stable governments where large parts of the population spend more like 75%+ of their income on food.

The consequences of political unrest are not confined to the poor country. To pick one consequence: our taxes here in the UK recently went towards funding war in Libya, despite an austerity programme of slashing government services in response to the worst recession since the Great Depression. Refugee flows from all the various places involved have also increased. Major protests in the US and elsewhere this time last year questioned the direction of the present economic order. These explicitly drew both inspiration and organisational links from elements of the Arab Spring before being brutally suppressed - perhaps not as brutally as in Syria, but if you had your eyes open last autumn there was plenty of state-sponsored violence happening against protesters in free(r) countries, much of which was never acknowledged or addressed by the justice system.

This is not at all to claim that climate change "caused" the Occupy movement in any straightforward way, simply to chase one strand of causal links as an illustration of the global implications of crises in a single region.

Failed states have all kinds of knock-on effects on their neighbours and the rest of the world. Think about the extra costs to global shipping due to Somalian piracy (leading to many shipping companies eagerly awaiting the further opening up of Arctic shipping lanes to avoid the area entirely), about the seedbed of terrorism that Afghanistan has represented since the US turbo-charged the factions against Soviet invasion, about the effect on global oil prices (and hence the global economy) of war in Libya (or Iran...), about the ongoing repercussions of the Arab/Israeli conflict partially driven by the planned failure/sabotage of the Palestinian state. And so on. The global system can handle a few failed states, but since it does so by distributing the costs across the whole system (UK taxpayers paying for wars in Libya), it does so by increasing the stress on the system as a whole. Electricity grids are a good analogy here, actually - grids can handle the sudden failure of a certain number of elements in the grid, but do so at the cost of placing the entire grid at greater risk of collapse. Globalisation is a super-grid for economic and political stability: failure in one part can be accommodated by increasing stress across the board. But only to a point.

This is why Joseph Tainter says in the final chapter of his intriguing and seminal book, The Collapse of Complex Societies that there can be no local collapses in a global system. The term "catabolic collapse" is sometimes used, which refers to a collapse in one part of a system becomes self-reinforcing and ends up taking down the whole show (see here for a much more detailed and insightful discussion of this concept by John Michael Greer).

So when you read about the coming food price spike of late 2012 as the effects of the US drought kick in, don't just think about poor Indians struggling to put food on the table, but also think about the $700b-odd the US spends on its military (over $1t on "national security" as a whole), about the possible break-up of the EU (troubles in Greece are complex, but one of the causes/manifestations/worsening of their crisis is the fact that they receive per capita more refugees and undocumented immigrants fleeing struggling MENA countries than almost anywhere else in the EU and it has seen a big jump in recent years), about deforestation in Indonesia and elsewhere (which is linked, in complex ways, to food prices), and so on.

Global crises require global (as well as local, provincial, national, regional) responses. We can't simply pull up the drawbridge and hope to weather the storm.

Our climate challenge in three numbers

"When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers."

- Bill McKibben, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math.

Apart from missing "s" in the title and a dodgy stat in the opening paragraph, McKibben's compelling 5-page piece is a good summary of some important elements of the challenge we face. The bottom line of his three numbers is that, according to our best understanding, if we want at least an 80% chance of staying under the internationally agreed (but still very dangerous) 2ºC limit we can only burn about 20% of our current fossil fuel reserves (not resources, but reserves, i.e. what is known and could be profitably brought to market under present conditions). This is the kind of statistic that can really serve to focus the attention. We need to leave four out of every five known and already profitable barrels of oil, tonnes of coal, cubic metres of natural gas underground.

Of course, the great difficulty is that no one country wants to do anything other than burn every last molecule of fossil hydrocarbon that can be brought to the surface unless all other countries agree to limit themselves also. And when some countries have far larger reserves (and so far more at stake economically in leaving 80% of them in the ground), then reaching such an agreement is basically impossible under present political assumptions. If you look at where the blockages in international negotiations are coming from, then it's no great surprise that these are also the countries with the largest reserves of fossil hydrocarbons: China, USA, Russia, Australia, Canada, various middle eastern states. Countries with tiny (or largely depleted) reserves are the ones at the forefront: small island nations, non-oil-based African nations and the EU (esp UK and Germany, which have historically had huge fossil carbon deposits, but have already burned most of their easily accessible stuff).

And so we are left with an international multi-player game of chicken, with no country wanting to blink first and lose market advantage, ensuring that all countries suffer horrendously as a result. The fact that those with least to contribute to the problem generally have greater vulnerability only serves to entrench both the injustice and the intractability of the issue.

The slim silver lining in recent extreme weather in the US is that it might bring home to US voters and policymakers that there are no winners in a game of chicken. Even if others are going to suffer more and sooner, the US is far from immune, especially to precisely these kinds of threats (droughts, wildfires, heatwaves, water stress). Russia is facing its own wildfires and floods. China has had large areas in drought almost constantly for the last five years and a flood this week has a death toll that could pass 100. Canada has simultaneously faced deadly floods and serious drought in the last couple of months. Middle Eastern petro-states are all too aware of their dire water situation as they rapidly go from grain exporters to zero wheat production within a decade (Saudi Arabia) after basically exhausting their fossil water. And Australia has all too quickly forgotten its own droughts, bushfires and floods just a couple of years ago.

Further complicating the picture is that it is not simply countries that are making these decisions. Apart from some nationalised oil companies, most of these reserves are held by for profit corporations with very, very deep pockets and who are generally not shy at throwing their weight around, spending up big on lobbying, misinformation and propaganda at every level in order to convince us all that without them we'd be living in caves and that they are struggling to get by in tough conditions.

Yet according to the most recent data, fifteen out of the thirty most profitable companies in the world are directly fossil fuel related (many of the remaining fifteen also have significant, if slightly less direct, links).

1. Gazprom: US$44.5b
2. Exxon Mobil: $41.1b
4. Royal Dutch Shell $30.9b
5. Chevron: $26.9b
8. BP: $25.7b
11. Vale: $22.9b
12. Petronas: $21.9b
13. VW: $21.4b
14. Ford: $20.2b
15. Petrobras: $20.1b
22. China National Petroleum: $16.3b
26. GE: $14.2b
27. Statoil: $14.1
29. Rosneft Oil: $12.5b
30. ConocoPhillips: $12.4b

The bottom line is that until a very wide audience grasps just how dire our situation is and starts to demand something different from our corporate and political leaders, then none of key climate numbers are likely to improve.

For me, the most telling number in McKibben's piece is the one that he doesn't mention. McKibben is an author with a string of respected publications about environmental and economic issues. He was the first popular writer to publish a book on climate change back in the 80s. Yet in the last three or four years he has re-invented himself as an activist after becoming convinced that writing alone is too slow to effect the changes that need to happen. He has built and become the public face of the world's largest climate movement, a movement named after and dedicated to a number: 350. His organisation, 350.org, refers to the highest concentration of CO₂ in parts per million considered "safe" by some of the world's leading climate scientists. We are currently over 390 ppm and rising rapidly. For most commentators, 350 ppm is seen as a pipe dream, an impossibility, well outside the realm of the thinkable, let alone the achievable. International negotiations talk about 550 and occasionally 450, but many commentators think we'll be lucky to stay below 650 and our current path is heading for 750 or significantly higher. In this context, McKibben and 350.org have served as a witness to how far from a just and sustainable world we are currently travelling. And yet here, in one of his highest profile pieces to date, he doesn't mention the number to which he has dedicated the last few years of his life and of which he is a relentless promoter. Is this because he has been so successful in publicising 350 ppm that he felt he could move on? Or because he decided that this idea is now so detached from reality that he needed to lower his sights?
Image by ALS.

I support WikiLeaks*

"Publishing improves transparency, and this transparency creates a better society for all people. Better scrutiny leads to reduced corruption and stronger democracies in all society's institutions, including government, corporations and other organisations. A healthy, vibrant and inquisitive journalistic media plays a vital role in achieving these goals. We are part of that media."

- WikiLeaks.

Of course, if you currently try to follow that link, you'll find that it gives an error message, thanks to the US government's ruthless harassment and attempts to ostracise WikiLeaks (ironically, a strategy that was outlined in a US Department of Defence document itself leaked by WikiLeaks earlier this year). You can also try here.

There is much to say about the role of WikiLeaks over the last four years. They have broken a wide variety of important information about corruption and abuses of corporate and state power. Not every leak has been equally useful or important, and sometimes perhaps more has been released than was necessary to hold the powerful to account, which may or may not be the case in the current controversy (though currently, only a small fraction of the total files have been released). Nonetheless, from what has already been released, the prima facie case for the release being in the public interest is strong. While we might not need to know internal US diplomatic gossip about which world leaders are liked or disliked (often not that much of a secret in any case), finding evidence that seems to indicate that the US government has been breaking treaties and encouraging other nations to break treaties is no small matter, nor are revelations of the UK Parliament apparently being misled by the Foreign Office.

Yet the most common reaction to these revelations follows the lead of the government currently most damaged by them: distraction through counter-accusation. I am not aware of the legality under US or international law of what WikiLeaks have done (though Assange points out that WikiLeaks have been involved in over 100 legal attacks over the last four years and won them all), but I am aware of at least some of the illegalities exposed. The hunt for Julian Assange is a distraction, as is the witch hunt being put together to assassinate his character (or his person, if some are to be believed). This is what ought to be happening at the very least: resignations of those whose actions have been shameful.

Yet when Assange called on Clinton to resign for issuing instructions to diplomats that apparently break international treaties concerning the UN, the reaction from the White House was "I'm not entirely sure why we care about the opinion of one guy with one website". This response shifts the focus from the substance of what Clinton (and Rice before her, for that matter) has done and onto the journalists who broke the story, blaming the messenger. The question is not whether they care about one man and his website, but whether we all care about what government officials do in our name.

There seem to be plenty more stories yet to come out of the cables. The next major release due sometime in the new year is said to contain evidence of corruption and malpractice at a major US bank.
*The fine print is that I don't agree with everything that WikiLeaks has done, and think that Julian Assange can come across with characteristic Aussie bluntness (rudeness) at times, yet the role that WikiLeaks has already played and continue to play is a very important one. Democracy relies on accurate and relevant information available to those who participate in public deliberation. Where corporations or governments seek to hide information that is relevant to matters of public deliberation on the common good, then they ought to be held to account and whistleblowers deserve principled protection.

UPDATE: If you're having trouble getting to the WikiLeaks site, this site is keeping track of the hundreds of mirroring sites and you should be able to find access.

Pentagon and Bundeswehr on peak oil

I know it's been out for a while, but back in April, the Pentagon released a report on global energy outlook that turned a few heads. Here are some key quotes:

"By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.* [...] While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India. [...] One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest."

*To get a sense of the scale of this warning, the total global consumption is around 85 million barrels per day.

It is also worth considering the recently leaked draft report of a think tank employed by the German military (known as the Bundeswehr), which advises that in order to maintain its supply, Germany may need to revise its foreign policy: friendlier to Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran; a little less friendly to Eastern Europe and Israel. It also warns of the dangers of restricted supplies of energy in a globalised marketplace, when oil is involved directly or indirectly in the production of over 95% of food and industrial goods: "In the medium term the global economic system and every market-oriented national economy would collapse [... making] room for ideological and extremist alternatives to existing forms of government."

The challenge of the next two or three decades is going to be avoiding massive political instability and resource wars while expanding global food production in the face of rapidly declining soil health, water stress and an increasingly unstable climate, all with ever increasing shortfalls in energy production. Current rates of oil field decline mean that we need to bring a new Saudi Arabia online every three years just to maintain current production and current rates of demand growth (largely in the developing world) mean that on top of that we need another Saudi Arabia every seven years. If you're banking on Canadian tar sands or US shale oil making up the shortfall, you're dreaming. Or perhaps, starting a nightmare, since these would only cover part of the likely shortfall and would singlehandedly ensure we'd be at the worse end of climate predictions. The extraction of tar sands and shale oil are slower, more energy and water intensive, more expensive and especially more polluting (of both water sources and the atmosphere) than conventional oil extraction.

We face massive technical, economic, ecological, social and political challenges in the coming years. I currently don't see how widespread unrest, price shocks, rising international tensions and increasingly desperate grabs at remaining resources are not going to be a large part of the likely storyline of the next few decades.

If the significant risk of such scenarios is not factored into our thinking, I suggest we're out of touch with reality. It is no virtue to have one's head in the sand.

More doom and gloom

Asian floods affecting more people than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, plus the 2005 Kashmir and 2010 Haiti earthquakes combined says UN.

Russian heat wave unparalleled in 1,000 years and could kill tens of thousands of people. What is the global cost of Russia's heat wave? When you take into account the highest cost of wheat caused by Russia's cancellation of all wheat exports for the rest of the year, it runs into billions.

But before we begin pitying Russians too much, this piece of lunacy is one of the most depressing things I've heard this week.

The largest iceberg seen in almost fifty years recently calved off Greenland. Arctic melt this year is likely to be second or third worst on record, though will very much depend on prevailing weather conditions over the next few weeks. You can follow it here. But a soot cloud from burning Russian peatland could prove to be a wild card.

Fire and rain: how can we tell when extreme weather is linked to climate change?

Commodity speculation: the price of bread depends on the whims of Wall St, not just the productivity of farms. But remember that "for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature we can expect a reduction in grain yields of 10 percent".

Big coal will continue to ensure US climate inertia, and without US momentum, the rest of the world will only reach small-scale and thoroughly inadequate agreements.

But at least we are cutting our throat more slowly in the Amazon.

Finally, perhaps the worst news of all comes from the Onion: Ecological disaster as millions of barrels of oil safely reach port.