posted Nov 25, 2009 9:05 PM by Joseph Robertson
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updated Nov 25, 2009 9:25 PM
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Water resource depletion leads not only to chronic scarcity of clean, safe drinking water for increasing numbers of people, but means arable land is harder to cultivate and to maintain. Persistent drought and accelerated desertification (the expansion of deserts into the farmed and/or built environment) are results of water resource depletion.
But the most insidious and threatening long term effect is the erosion of the overall human food supply. With climate destabilization accelerating, arable land increasingly hard to come by, and grain harvests collapsing, the global food supply is under serious threat. Long term political stability, and the defensibility of political borders, is linked to a sustainable food supply.
As Lester Brown notes, in his report “Rethinking Food Production for a World of Eight Billion“:
Farmers are faced with shrinking supplies of irrigation water, a diminishing response to additional fertilizer use, rising temperatures from global warming, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, rising fuel costs, and a dwindling backlog of yield-raising technologies. At the same time, they also face fast-growing demand for farm products from the annual addition of 79 million people a year, the desire of some 3 billion people to consume more livestock products, and the millions of motorists turning to crop-based fuels to supplement tightening supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Farmers and agronomists are now being thoroughly challenged.
The shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology and the associated loss of momentum in raising cropland productivity are found worldwide. Between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed by 2.1 percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in the world grain harvest. From 1990 to 2008, however, it rose only 1.3 percent annually. This is partly because the yield response to the additional application of fertilizer is diminishing and partly because irrigation water is limited.
Best-practice water productivity measures, in activities ranging from farming and industry to infrastructure and personal home and garden use, are central to fostering a climate of cooperation and political security in the emerging culture of global food politics. The vanishing of Saudi Arabia’s grain supply, along with China and India’s massive grain import demand, are part of an established trend that is destabilizing food supplies around the world and driving prices up, even in the most productive regions of the US, Brazil and Europe.
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posted Oct 27, 2009 8:38 AM by Joseph Robertson
Even as momentum gathers for major collaborative climate-linked emissions regulatory policy, aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions like carbon dioxide (CO2), some in industry remain convinced of an outdated theory that assumes emissions reduction must be bad for business. The US Chamber of Commerce (CC), a leading business lobby, is devoting $150 million to fight regulation of carbon emission and prevent a transition to clean energy, and to “kill” much needed healthcare reform. The CC project is rooted in the theory that only if status quo practices are encouraged and extended can business as we know it thrive. Critics argue such lobbying efforts are, far from market-oriented, in fact part of a quest to establish or maintain a rigged game in which narrow interests can prosper without having to compete, improve or innovate. The result is that one after another major firm, including Apple, Nike, Johnson & Johnson and GE, is walking out of the Chamber of Commerce in protest. Even local chambers of commerce are ending their support for the national organization due top the radicalization of its agenda. But while some business interests cling to the outdated idea that burning more (carbon-based fuels) means earning more, industry broadly —including major industrial consumers, like the US military— is moving more toward a paradigm shift focused on fuel economy, reduced emissions and sustainability. The US Navy, for instance, is preparing to unveil its first hybrid ship, which is projected to be able to go two additional months before refueling and to power up and mobilize more quickly. The CEO of the Huntsman chemical company has told the Financial Times the US and EU need to enact aggressive emissions reductions and regulations and raise environmental standards for industrial manufacture. Peter Huntsman also said the world’s two leading economic producers need to ensure that such regulations are enacted in conjunction with global agreements that prevent competitors abroad from cheating such standards in order to compete unfairly. The United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol largely as a result of its inability to constrain the expansion of carbon emissions in competitive and rapidly growing developing economies, like China and India. It is expected China, which is already consuming more in raw numbers than the US in some heavy commodities, could soon be the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide. The old standard thinking on this point was that China’s expanding emissions make it ever more competitive as against any wealthier nation that puts environmental issues ahead of raw GDP growth. But this is no longer a viable argument over the long-term. It is increasingly evident that major and compounding advances in clean energy technologies mean the nations that most pervasively and most expeditiously transition from the combustible fuel era to the clean energy future will be the most competitive and resilient. The glut of combustible fuels on which the present conventional economy depends is not sustainable, and the natural world whose regularity and productive services are the basis of our global civilization cannot absorb its emissions without serious destabilizing side-effects. Harvest-collapse, chronic drought, rivers running dry and mass migration are real effects already evident in many places around the world. Cynics hav argued that as scarcity becomes more common and good prices soar, demand for fuel will increase and fossil fuels will see their fortunes turning brighter than ever. But, that assumes 1) that fossil fuels are the only game in town; 2) that massive price increases don’t cause a backlash and spur interest in renewable resources, as they have over the last two years; 3) that a ripple effect doesn’t cripple consumer spending ability and undermine the economy so much that we approach another collapse and the bottom falls out in terms of demand. It must be remembered, for the most part the immense prosperity of oil companies has been consistently dependent on a constant significant global increase in demand for their product, made more lucrative still by massive government subsidies and by a speculative marketplace that unlike most has very direct, though remote, impact on prices everywhere.  Read more at CafeSentido.com |
posted Jun 20, 2009 1:21 PM by Joseph Robertson
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updated Nov 25, 2009 9:27 PM by Joseph Robertson
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NOW, with David Brancaccio, travels to the Indian Himalaya, to examine the problem of persistent accelerating ice melt which is speeding the erosion of glaciers that feed the Ganges River, which in turn provides water for hundreds of millions of people and sustains a precarious but massive food economy.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finds global warming is causing glaciers to melt on every continent, and glacial melt is accelerating. It is expected land-based ice-melt could lead to a 3-foot rise in sea levels by the end of this century, a tidal surge, however gradual, that could displace 2-3 billion people living in coastal regions around the world. But the immediate problem examined by NOW in this video is the potential worldwide food crisis resulting from failing river systems, starved of water fed from glacial sources at the top of their watersheds.
The president of the Earth Policy Institute says the resulting scarcity and price-distortions could become a global security threat.
Lester Brown explains that what happens to India's wheat harvest and its agricultural supply chain, including and in large part due to the resulting effect on food prices, will determine the economic status of everyone everywhere, as scarcity and price pressures alter the base economy of every nation around the world.
Population growth and depletion of water resources are determining the future sustainability of an affordable food supply at high volume. With over 500 million people entirely dependent on the Ganges for drinking water and crop irrigation, even the massive US agricultural export base will not be able to prevent price rises at home.
The one river feeds more people than live in the entire 27-nation European Union. Glacial melt is so severe and the reduction in river flow already so marked that there is no tap water in some districts even within Delhi. Water-scarcity riots are already commonplace as residents scramble to siphon as much clean water as possible from the government trucks that distribute the slim supplies day after day.
Disappearing Himalayan glaciers are also causing the thinning of river systems in China. Western China is already experiencing extreme-velocity desertification, in part due to land-use missteps and in part to broader climate phenomena; the depletion of its river systems could be catastrophic.
The world's two most populous nations face drinking-water and irrigation scarcity from glacial melt, threatening the stability of the global food supply.
In the US, Glacier National Park is dying. The glaciers themselves are vanishing; they have already retreated as much as 70% since 1910, and will likely vanish entirely by 2030.
India's Gangotri Glacier, one of the largest Himalayan glaciers and a major source of fresh water for the Ganges River, is receding at extremely accelerated rates, more than three times the historic average over the last 6 years.
Dr. Vandana Shiva says the glacier "looks like a war zone, as more and more of the glacier retreats", leaving behind the scarred mountain terrain underneath. Shiva says the disappearance of the Gangotri is a story of human devastation and the very real ongoing emergence of water-based conflict and economic hardship.
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posted Jun 20, 2009 1:17 PM by Joseph Robertson
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updated Jun 20, 2009 1:10 PM
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A coalition of German firms has answered a call to study making an investment of 400 billion € in solar energy across North Africa. The plan, initiated by the Club of Rome, which has been promoting sustainable development and sustainable economic growth practices, since 1972.
Reuters reports from Frankfurt:
Munich Re has invited several companies, including Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE), Siemens (SIEGn.DE), E.ON (EONGn.DE) and RWE (RWEG.DE), to meet on July 13 to agree on a joint project, said a foundation organised by members of the Club of Rome.
"We have approached Munich Re to get industrial companies on board and Munich Re organised the meeting with the other companies," said a spokesman for the Desertec foundation, which is fostering the idea to generate solar power in Africa.
    The initiative would be the largest single renewable energy project ever undertaken, and would include multinational industrial production capacity. Undersea cables would carry electricity from North Africa across the Mediterranean to the European Union, supplying up to or possibly more than 20% of all EU power needs by 2050. In the short-term, heavy financial backing for such an initiative could relieve some market pressures on EU states' need for combustible fuels from Russia and other eastern trading partners.
The first major solar farm is expected to be a 2-gigawatt production-capacity installation in the Tunisian desert, transmitting electricity to Italy, possibly within 5 years. A solar power station in western Europe with 100 gigawatts of production capacity would be able to power an estimated 28 million homes, and the solar intensity is far less in western Europe than in the Sahara. |
posted Jun 20, 2009 10:41 AM by Joseph Robertson
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updated Jun 20, 2009 10:43 AM
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 There are still skeptics who say that wind power cannot generate enough power to be useful, or that the transition to renewable sources of energy is not really of urgent necessity. Here I offer some ideas to counter that argument. First of all, the US is shamefully behind in developing wind power generation, but that doesn't mean it will never happen, as some suggest.
A quick look at Europe, which is far ahead on this, from Lester Brown, one of the most respected sources on ecological science and renewable energy, for four decades:
Europe is leading the world into the age of wind energy. In its late 2003 projections, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) shows Europe's wind-generating capacity expanding from 28,400 megawatts in 2003 to 75,000 megawatts in 2010 and 180,000 megawatts in 2020. By 2020, just 16 years from now, wind-generated electricity is projected to satisfy the residential needs of 195 million Europeans, half of the region's population.
Read more about this at the Earth Policy Institute. These are serious people, doing real science, and real economic analysis. Their research is read by world leaders and UN agencies. Anyone who wants to understand the global economy as we shift to a less primitive, less dangerous way of harvesting energy would do well to read their work.
The US Department of Energy found in 1991 that Texas, Kansas and North Dakota alone had enough wind "resources" to generate 100% of US domestic electricity needs. Almost 20 years later, the standard wind turbine is more than twice as tall, with much larger blades, and is able to capture a much greater supply of wind energy. Advances in efficiency and delivery mean that those three states alone could potentially account for all US energy consumption, via wind power. If the infrastructure is built, that is.
The ONLY reason it is not considered the cheapest, most efficient method of producing a reliable energy flow is because our infrastructure is designed to harvest carbon for combustion, and our government literally pays the oil companies to do what they do. If the infrastructure is built, and the subsidies shift, you'll start to hear industry types complaining about how hard it will be to be in the oil business, and you'll see quieter, subtler minds figuring out how to make huge profits from wind power.
In a recent debate on the issue of climate destabilization and the potential fallout from glacial melt in the Himalayas, a critic of the carbon-free vision of the future suggested that it is "alarmist" to express concern about people whose life-sustaining resources are being rapidly depleted. The Gangotri glacier, which feeds the Ganges, and a vast network of river systems across south Asia, is melting at an unprecedented rate.
We know that burning carbon-based fuels contributes to the warming of the global climate. A mere 1 degree increase in the annual average global temperature started the process. The annual average global temperature has risen another 2 degrees since that time, and in the course of just one century, the glacier, which took millions of years to form, has retreated by 70%.
500 million people rely on the river systems that are fed by that one glacier in order to survive. Bangladesh and India have already come close to armed conflict over these water resources. There are 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayan range. Over 1 billion people across the region depend on those glaciers for fresh water. Scientists estimate that at the current rate of melt, every Himalayan glacier will be gone by the year 2035.
This is not alarmism. This is happening now.
"Nature" can survive burning a little more petroleum, of course, even a lot more, but not every ecosystem and not every species will survive the changes "nature" will undergo. We knew in the 1950s that the Gangotri glacier was melting at three times the rate for the previous 200 years, yet nothing was done to prepare to make responsible changes. Even now, when the rate of melt is by far the fastest on record, there is still a prevailing skepticism about what practical measures might be taken to slow melt.
If you study the history of the relationship between climate and human civilization, you find that relatively minor climate variations have brought an abrupt end to periods of great prosperity: ancient Sumeria is one case; ancient Egypt is another; the Mayan civilization as well; and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was a man-made climate disaster. Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China also saw tens of millions each die from environmental degradation and agricultural collapse.
Lester Brown, whom I mention above, actually helped to save hundreds of millions of lives in India, in the 1960s, by working with the UN to prevent famine. Those kind of things can only be accomplished once we learn to pay attention to the relevant facts. We have learned from those experiences, or at least some of us have, and responsible nations have established methods of preventing the collapse of harvest yields, fisheries and other environmentally sensitive sectors of the economy.
But those are just baby steps.
We have not even begun to apply most of what we already know, and weaning ourselves off carbon-based fuels is part of what we need to do. Other nations may indeed continue to rely on carbon-based combustible fuels for their energy they may lag dramatically in making the shift, which would reduce the overall usefulness of efforts to cut emissions and combat climate change.
This is often cited as a reason why we should also voluntarily lag, and invest in more oil, and coal, and not in renewables. That plan is not sound economics, however.
In fact, it would be like economic suicide, because we have the wealth, the science and the technology to speed our transition to renewables, so that we don't have to compete for the overpriced oil of 10 to 15 years from now and bankrupt ourselves in the process. Doing nothing will make us far more vulnerable to oil shocks, perpetuating unnecessary economic weaknesses we could overcome by innovating now.
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