Lost Threads

According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it's grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world's people. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.

Monbiot on oil and food security - again, the question on everyone's lips is "why is the government not taking action to address this urgent issue now?" Oh well, if we really are nine meals from anarchy at some point soon, maybe the government will have the decision made for them...

If we’re going to feed the nine billion people projected to be alive by 2050 ethically and sustainably, we all need to eat less meat and dairy produce (both major sources of greenhouse gas emissions and also unhealthy fat in western diets). And when we do eat it, it should have been raised to higher environmental and welfare standards...

We could be supporting an army of artisan food producers to take back control of the food system, use sustainable ingredients and open local shops and markets. How better to cut transport fuel than re-creating the ability for people to be able to buy their food a short walk away – and have pleasurable interactions with their community in the process?

Another excellent article from Red Pepper. One fifth of the UK's emissions are from food and farming, but the Government's approach to tackling this problem and increasing "food security" is fragmented, ineffective and often relies on individual businesses and suppliers to "do the right thing". Surely the Government should be taking a strategic lead on this issue.

The problem of course as we now have witnessed through two US administrations, and numerous foreign ones, is how does a government start to explain the phenomenon, peak oil, and more importantly the extreme sacrifices required to mitigate its occurrence to its citizens. Suppose the President gave a prime-time speech describing the evidence for the proximity of peak oil and laying out proposals to the Congress as to what needs to be done. It does not take a rocket scientist to deduce that there would be a huge political flare-up and likely a collapse of the equity markets. The President's political opposition, which has yet to figure out just why polar ice caps are melting, would go completely berserk at the hint of restrictions either through taxes or other means on energy consumption.

What will happen in several years' time? Will politicians look back on 2009 as the year they should've seen peak oil coming? This Falls Church News-Press article addresses the dilemma faced by revealing the oncoming crisis now, made more acute by the fact that we're in the midst of a great recession. Arguably though the crash to come will be even greater if we don't start to face reality now.

The lesson of recent years would appear to be that apocalyptic threats — when their impacts are relatively far off in the future, difficult to imagine or visualize, and emanate from everyday activities, not an external and hostile source — are not easily acknowledged and are unlikely to become priority concerns for most people. In fact, the louder and more alarmed climate advocates become in these efforts, the more they polarize the issue, driving away a conservative or moderate for every liberal they recruit to the cause.

Fascinating discussion from Yale Environment 360 in the Guardian of why, despite steadily increasing media coverage over the past 20 years and high profile "celebrity" endorsement by the likes of Al Gore, not many people really care about climate change.

I guess the same points would apply to the related issue of peak oil and the energy crisis, though it's by no means as widely discussed in the media -- although it will lead to similarly reduced standards of living among those of us addicted to fossil fuels.

A bit of climate change denial debunking: the sea level rises quoted in the IPCC report exclude the possibility of any major ice sheets melting, which would push up sea levels much further -- possibly between 0.8 and 2.0m by the end of the century.

Capitalism was able to prolong its existence by subjecting the former communist territories to the process of transforming the real world, nature and working people, into means for capital accumulation. Yet the crises of finance, economy, energy, limited raw materials, food and social security, climate, pollution, extinction of species and so on show clearly that the time for quantitative growth in a limited earth and, therefore, for capitalism, is running out. This system needs growth because by definition capital is property which goes beyond satisfying the needs of the owners to be invested for the accumulation of more property, measured in monetary terms. It will implode as did socialism because it destroys the sources of its own wealth. This will not be changed by governments, kidnapped by capital power, in hectic activism trying to repair the system by socialising the losses of the capital owners who had privatised the profits. This political response to the crisis only serve to postpone the urgently needed general conversion from a destructive paradigm to a life-giving civilisation while the crises with their dramatic ecological and social effects are accelerating.

Some thoughts on the forthcoming death of capitalism seen through the lens of the East German revolution in 1989.

"Addressing this planetary emergency will require a new map, Dumanoski said - a rethinking, in effect, of civilization itself. Social systems must be retooled to withstand severe disruption. Climate change must be seen as far more than just an "environmental" dilemma or even an energy issue. Indeed, she added, humanity must come to see that seemingly small, inconsequential choices in every aspect of modern society can have - and are having - a profound and deleterious impact on the planetary system.

"There is no hope for accommodation in the current path," she said."

Yet another climate change article in the run up to Copenhagen in December (not long now!). The article presents the issues very clearly, although I don't think it's possible for billions of the world's poor to "partake in a First World economy without cooking the planet" (p2) -- standards must be raised for those in poverty, but we should be talking about a drop in our own comfortable living standards first and foremost, as suggested by the quoted section above. However, even more utterly depressing is the fact that over half the comments either dismiss climate change altogether or say that technology will provide a solution.

Is this the way the majority of people feel about climate change? Are our oil-driven Western comforts really that hard to let go?

The day that the food starts to run out in the world may come far more quickly than most of us imagine. At present, there are more than a billion people going hungry even though there is no shortage of food. The very poor don’t eat enough because they don’t have enough money. The underlying problem is one of social inequality, of the highly skewed distribution of financial resources in the world.

Over the next century much worse food shortages may emerge. The climate crisis is already arriving far more quickly than scientists expected and proving far more dangerous. For a while, many scientists believed that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be partly compensated for by an increase in plant growth, caused by the greater availability of CO2. But now it seems that carbon fertilisation, as it is called, will not happen or will happen far less reliably than was once imagined.

One of the most comprehensive models of the impact of climate change, carried out in 2007 by William R Cline, predicts that, without carbon fertilisation, crop productivity in the developing world is likely to decline drastically, by 21 per cent over the next 80 years. And these predictions may also be underestimates, as they haven’t taken into account all the so-called ‘positive feedbacks’ – the melting of the ice sheets in the Arctic and the Antarctic, the melting of the glaciers, the much greater frequency of forest fires, the growing water shortage and so on – which will make everything worse. Indeed, many of the nations that are scouring the world for arable land will have been warned by their own scientists that a world of dire shortages lies ahead.

Brilliant article on the social injustice of food. Summary: rich countries, realising they can't be self-sufficient to feed their growing populations, are grabbing land, mostly in Africa, to ensure their own "food security" (an awful phrase) at the expense of the world's poor.

The uncomfortable fact is that our economies are addicted to liquid hydrocarbon transport fuels, the consumption of which creates a catalogue of negative side effects. And we cannot hope to address this addiction by way of our "dealers" developing even more damaging derivatives of the same drug.

A thoughtful piece on the twin predicaments of peak oil and climate change, with grim speculation on the "future" of the oil industry. The major players are apparently aware that the game cannot continue forever, even as they trumpet big finds off the Gulf of Mexico and talk of the "untapped reserves" in the Canadian tar sands. The Guardian article is also useful as an introduction, since it makes the key point that it's not when the oil runs out that's the problem, but the decreasing availability of "easy" cheap oil.

Constantly relying on consuming to feel content
But only because we lost touch with this home that we've spent
Trillions of dollars tainting for our wants and not our needs
And now we're growing tired of planting bleary-eyed seeds

When it comes to music about Western civilization's current predicament, it can be tricky to strike the right balance between overbearing preachiness and incisive social commentary. Enter Shikari tend towards the former rather than the latter - reminding me variously of Rage Against the Machine, The Prodigy, Scooter, System of a Down, and, er, The Streets - but maybe we need a bit of shouty post-hardcore trance to shake us out of our complacency.

You can listen to the full album on Spotify, if you have an account: http://bit.ly/1RoqLR

When listening to Juggernauts, try to imagine it being screamed in the face of a group of self-satisfied bankers, Come to Daddy style...