James Lovelock is the highly respected scientist responsible for the Gaia Theory, and in his book The revenge of Gaia, he says…
“Humanity, wholly unprepared by its humanist traditions, faces its greatest trial. The acceleration of climate change now under way will sweep away the comfortable environment to which we are adapted. Change is a normal part of geological history; the most recent was the Earth’s move from the long period of glaciation to the present warmish interglacial. What is unusual about the coming crisis is that we are the cause of it, and nothing so severe has happened since the long hot period at the start of the Eocene, fifty-five million years ago, when the change was larger than that between the ice age and the nineteenth century and lasted for 200,000 years…”
But now billions more want to join the party, and are increasingly able to do so. There is a massive transfer of wealth from the west to the east as the west imports cheap manufactured goods from the far east and energy from the middle east.
This is important for Peak Food, as our ability to grow enough food in the future depends on us reducing CO2 emissions enough to keep the earth from warming more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels and on slowing oil reserve depletion so that fossil fuel dependent farming can continue. As the fast developing nations with their huge populations become heavy consumers, this starts to look impossible.
As an example of what’s happening in the east, the Indian manufacturer Tata unveiled its new ‘people’s car’, the Nano. This car will cost about £1,300 in India before taxes, has a 32.5 bhp engine and will have 57 mpg fuel consumption. This has the potential to bring motoring to millions who are now becoming more prosperous but who had previously used mopeds, bicycles or just walked. Other makers have plans to produce similar cars and the sheer numbers involved will use massive resources both to build these vehicles and to power them.
We in the west should have expected that the rest of the world would want to share in the consumption of resources that has given us our high living standards, but the speed that it is happening at will impact on food production and consumption in a big way.
Peakfood has previously discussed the effect of climate change on snowmelt and river flow causing reduced amounts of water available for irrigation at the correct time of year. There is also the d
Yesterday (2/ 1/2008) West Texas intermediate crude hit $100 per barrel before ending the session at $99.62. This is the first time in history that such a price was reached and was partly due to political events in various parts of the world.
It does show how close supply and demand are balanced and although there will be many fluctuations, it looks as though we will never see really cheap oil again unless there is a severe world recession pulling down demand.
There is lots of oil left, but the easy stuff has already been discovered. It gets harder from now on but Europe and the US are in the uncomfortable position of becoming more and more dependent on supplies from unreliable and potentially unfriendly nations.
With regard Peak Food, the world has used fossil fuels to raise the carrying capacity of the Earth to a level many times higher than it would otherwise be; and yet there seems to be no plan in place to cope when oil and gas become really scarce due to depletion of reserves or to turmoil in the middle east or elsewhere. Indeed as the world population continues to rise and the developing world follows us into oil and gas dependent farming, the risk of severe and sudden shortages increases all the time, and that inevitably means severe shortages of food.
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