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.

Designed for yesterday's climate, and other stories

Climate adaptation: Trillions of dollars of infrastructure is designed for yesterday's climate (and sea level, for that matter). In warmer temperatures, railways buckle, highways crack, asphalt melts, cooling ponds overheat, electrical grids overload. "In general, nobody in charge of anything made of steel and concrete can plan based on past trends".

Groundwater depletion: Almost one-quarter of the world’s population lives in regions where groundwater is being used up faster than it can be replenished".

Arctic sea ice: Sea ice decimated by huge Arctic storm. There are all kinds of things going on here and the full effects of the week-long storm in the Arctic are yet to become apparent. Why do we care about a storm in the Arctic? Haven't they happened before? Yes, but not with sea ice this thin. Arctic sea ice is considerably thinner than at any time in recorded history, being up to 70% thinner during the summer months than it was back in the 70s. Thin ice is able to be broken up and moved around by large storms more easily. Without the protective cover of ice, storms also churn up the water more, mixing the very cold, fresher surface water (colder and fresher since it is just under the ice) with the warmer, saltier water further down. Warmer, saltier water is much more effective at melting ice.

Biofuels: George Monbiot laments once more the crazy logic of biofuels, which take food out of the mouths of the poor in order to make the rich feel less guilty about a problem to which it is probably a net contributor, rather than any genuine help.

US Drought: The future of drought. "Indeed, assuming business as usual, each of the next 80 years in the American West is expected to see less rainfall than the average of the five years of the drought that hit the region from 2000 to 2004."

Extinction: North American freshwater fish are going extinct at 800 times the background rate.

Tunisia, Egypt and the food in your shopping trolley

Popular uprisings as seen recently in Tunisia and currently underway in Egypt usually have a complex network of contributing and enabling causes. One of the triggers in both cases may well have been a spike in food prices. Both Tunisia and Egypt import much of their food and have large segments of the population for whom food purchases comprise a hefty chunk of the weekly budget. A similar price spike in 2008 likely contributed to protests, rioting and unrest in at least sixteen countries.

Why the spike in food prices? That too is complex, but significant elements in the present mix include speculation, high oil prices and a string of weather-related disasters affecting crop production around the globe. Why speculation? Partially because of the cheap money being poured into major economies (or rather, into the financial system) and the unattractiveness of some alternatives in a downturn, that is, such speculation is one manifestation of the ongoing debt crisis that first publicly reared its head in 2008. Why high oil prices? Again, partially due to financial speculation, but this coming on top of long-term supply issues related to the peaking of conventional oil. Why crop failures? Many reasons here too, but among them are a string of destructive weather events consistent with predictions of climate change.

Yes, there are many other causes: repressive governments, rising economies shifting the balance of economic and political power, trends in global consumption patterns, biofuel and agricultural policies, local population growth and migration patterns, corporate interests, and of course the particular contours of various national histories and the actions and beliefs of certain influential individuals. But the triple converging crises of debt, depletion and degradation (also known as economy, energy and ecology) are likely to continue to contribute to these kinds of headlines.

So if you've noticed that some of the food in your shopping trolley has jumped in price recently, don't neglect to join the dots. What is a mild frustration to me in my wealth can mean the straw that breaks the camel's back for a nation closer to the edge. What can you do about it? All kinds of things, because it doesn't have to be this way.

Things are worse than you thought: links to brighten your day

Why things are worse than you thought: Peak oil might not be a slope, but a cliff.
H/T Sam.

Guardian: the next food crisis?

BP gives 148 of its Alaskan pipelines an "F", meaning that they there are in critical danger of rupture.

CP: “There are very strong indications that the current rate of species extinctions far exceeds anything in the fossil record”.

Lake Chad down 90% since 1960.

Pacific fisheries face collapse by 2035: study.

Reuters: First generation biofuels worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

Michael Hudson: The end of the US dollar as reserve currency.

Independent: Climate disruption to bite into China's food supply over the coming decades.

Guardian: Tobacco companies put in charge of UK smoking policy. No, that would be silly. Instead, let's allow McDonalds, KFC and PepsiCo to help write government policy on obesity.

And for a laugh: Why we have nothing to fear from melting Arctic sea ice.

The Onion: Report: Global Warming Issue from 2 or 3 Years Ago Could Still Be a Problem.

Mainly bad news

A few things our new government largely ignores*

Total disaster: "Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the "natural" or "background" rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago. [...] The loss of biodiversity compounds poverty. Destroy your nature and you increase poverty and insecurity."

Big coal gets bigger: a bet that there will be no serious cost placed on carbon emissions.

Mangrove losses worse than thought. Less than 7% of remaining mangroves are protected.

Antarctica ought to be World Heritage listed.

Conservative conservation in the UK: a false dawn?

Mackerel wars: and Mackerel are often considered something a "success story" in the prevention of overfishing.

Scientists claim almost 80% of Gulf spill is still in the water, contradicting the government claim that most has been skimmed, burned, collected, evaporated or digested by microbes. See also here.

Corals dying: coral reefs are among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. Rising ocean temperatures, falling oxygen levels, rising acidity, falling fisheries, rising plastics - the bad news is pretty bad for corals.

Consumerism means "Earth Overshoot Day" arrives earlier every year. This year, the date on which we use all the resources that can be replenished in a year will be 27th September.

Desertification: "An area the size of Greece, or of Nepal, is lost every year to desertification and soil erosion, the world body said, equivalent to $42-billion in annual income."

The wake-up call: when my alarm goes, I usually hit snooze and roll over.

Now here's one biofuel I can get behind: made from whisky byproducts, it reduces the ecological footprint of water of life by reusing waste materials.

A small piece of "good" news: plummeting levels of phytoplankton might inhibit hurricane formation.

Priceless collection of crop biodiversity "saved" by Twitter. I'm not entirely sure whether this is good news (Russians are considering a halt to gross stupidity) or bad news (it took Twitter to achieve this).
*This post was scheduled a few days ago and this claim is more or less true on either outcome.

Finitude is a gift

Faced with ecological threats of various kinds, many people would rather not think about them. They retreat into denial, or a security based in the possibility of technological advances or the allegedly inevitable forces of the free market. The broad popularity of reaching for hope in the market or technological fixes can be seen in the frequency with which politicians draw upon these themes. We are comfortable and our inertia draws us to answers that require little thought and less change. We trust that the explosive economic growth of the last few hundred years is now the normal trajectory, able to be extrapolated into the foreseeable future.

Wendell Berry has written an excellent article titled "Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits" reflecting upon our collective obsession with the myth of infinite growth. He argues that the pursuit of limitless consumption, unbounded knowledge and endless control is not only a dangerous illusion destroying our planet, but an attack on our very humanity. We will ultimately lose not just the planet, but also our soul. He rediscovers a life-giving alternative (though he doesn't say so explicitly) in a Christian conception of creatureliness. Here is a taste of the essay's opening:

"The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such 'biofuels' as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that 'science will find an answer.' The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

"This belief was always indefensible—the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but—thank God!—still driving.)"

The full article is not short (approx. 4,000 words), but well worth reading and re-reading. H/T Roberto.

We are just starting phase two

Stages of Oil Depletion Grief

1. Denial. "Peak oil? Baloney! There's lots of oil left. No worries, mate."

2. Anger. "It's the damn ________'s (oil companies, governments, OPEC, etc.) fault that oil prices are going up. They're gouging us. The bastards!"

3. Bargaining. "But what about new oil discovery technologies? What about biofuels? I can keep my SUV, right? Someone, or some new discovery will save us ...right?"

4. Depression. "Damn... no renewable energy source is as energy dense as oil, or quickly scalable... Holy crap. We are _________ (in for a rough ride, doomed, etc.)"

5. Acceptance. "Ok, even if we are in for a rough ride, what I can do? What can I ask my government representatives to do? How can I make a difference? How can I prepare? How can we support research into potential technological breakthroughs?"

From here (H/T Sam). If you're still at stage 1 – or 0 (ignorance) – then check out the whole page, which is a good introduction to peak oil and why it worries lots of intelligent people.

I support McCain

...at least on how silly ethanol subsidies are. However, unlike McCain, I think the whole industry makes little sense. Turning food into fuel seems crazy, not least because almost as much oil-energy is used in the production of ethanol as is gained from the result. And so, by using one-quarter of its corn crop for biofuel last year, the US cut oil consumption by 1%. At the same time, they helped push up global food prices and delay investment in more rational forms of alternative energy.

Perhaps this is one of the biggest differences between Obama (who supports subsidies) and Santos (who didn't).* Oh, apart from the fact that Santos was a fictional character.

Since my (non)-vote in the US presidential election is going to be crucial to the outcome, I thought it was important to share that.
H/T Rev Sam for the image.

*UPDATE: Oops, my memory of West Wing series 6, episode 13: "King corn" was inverted. All three candidates knew how crazy ethanol subsidies are. Santos, the charismatic Democrat from a racial minority (his character was based on Obama years before Obama was a presidential nominee), caves in to pressure to pander to the Iowa corn lobby. Only Vinick, the spry Republican contender, actually makes a stand against it, despite the advice of his staff that it will be politically suicidal.

Loving meat: why I am a vegetarian (almost)

"Better a meal of vegetables where there is love
    than a fattened calf with hatred."         - Proverbs 15.17

A vegetarian friend used to quote this proverb in support of her practice. I would then gleefully point out that the proverb assumes the superiority of meat to vegetables in order to make its point, namely, that the superiority of love over hatred is even greater. Nonetheless, over the last year or so, and particularly in the last few months, this proverb lies at the heart of why I have become an (almost) vegetarian (technically, a semi-vegetarian or flexitarian).

Our planet produces an abundance of food, enough to feed over ten billion people, according to some estimates. Yet we are in the middle of a food crisis, with wheat prices more than doubling in the last twelve months and other grain prices not far behind, leading to riots and political unrest amongst many poorer nations. If we are growing so much (and last year broke all records for maximum production), where does the food go? Increasingly, much of it is turned into biofuels so that first-world drivers (and governments) can feel less guilty about our energy-intense lifestyles. The corn used to generate one large petrol tank of ethanol-based fuel would feed a person for a year. Nonetheless, biofuels, although growing rapidly, still take only about 5% of the world's grain production.

So why are we short of food? One major reason is because we eat so much meat. To produce one kilogram of beef, it takes around eight kilograms of grain.* Chickens have a better ratio, but whatever your fancy, it still takes more energy to produce meat than other kinds of food. This article summarises a number of the key statistics and links them to current food prices (H/T Nicole), as does this one and this one and this one. The bottom line is that the western meat-based diet (and its increasing emulation by China and India) is helping push those on the edge of poverty into malnutrition. There is indeed plenty to go around, but our opulent lifestyle consumes so much that others cannot afford even the basics.
*This is also an issue of water management. To produce a kilo of wheat takes between 1-2,000 litres of water; a kilo of beef takes between 10,000-13,000 litres.

So can we, out of love for our neighbour, reduce our consumption of meat? I think it both possible and desirable, and now try to avoid buying or consuming it wherever possible. This is not to say that eating meat per se is wrong (though certainly there is much mistreatment of animals in our current system - another genuine moral issue, though a discussion for another time). On the contrary, I give thanks for meat as a good gift of God, but I am trying to regard it as an occasional luxury rather than a staple. There used to be a slogan "Live simply so that others can simply live"; I think we can also say "Eat simply so that others can simply eat". Better a meal of vegetables for everyone than a fattened calf for some while others go hungry.

PS This article puts some of the concerns well.

PPS I note there is also a Wikipedia article summarising some of the concerns.