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Seeing the Future Dimly

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

By David L. Brown

One of the news websites, Fox News (here), today featured excerpts from a number of predictions made 25 years ago by “science thinkers,” predicting conditions in our time of 2012. I recognize the names of most of these “science thinkers” and they are actually “science fiction writers,” but that’s okay because they’re in the business of imagining the future as much as anyone. I’ve always had a passing interest in futurism, the attempt to predict how things will be in future times. In general, these tend to be wildly inaccurate due to the many uncertainties and the phenomenon of straight line thinking. Too often futurists tend to look at what’s been happening recently and simply project a straight line into the future.

Even a cursory look at history will knock enough holes in this procedure to make Swiss cheeses look like solid objects. Imagine the application of straight line thinking to the U.S. economy in the summer of 1929, the likelihood of war in Europe in 1913, the future well-being of the little Roman village of Pompeii in 78 AD (Mount Vesuvius erupted the following year), and so many more examples of unexpected and unpredictable events that dramatically change the future.

One thing that struck me abut these predictions was that they were for the most part pessimistic, in contrast with the usual fol-de-rol about a Jetsons future with flying cars and an abundance of everything. Here are some excerpts with my comments:

Isaac Asimov: “Assuming we haven’t destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet and widespread hunger.”

Isaac’s view was fairly accurate, even though he was a little on the low side on population (it’s actually just something over 7 billion). He was dead on about the looming hunger, hastened by this year’s worldwide drought.

Jack Williamson: “If we had a time-phone, now in 1987, we would beg you to forgive us. We have burdened you with impossible debts, wasted and polluted the planet that should have been your rich heritage, left you instead a dreadful legacy of ignorance, want, and war.”

Of all the predictions, I nominate this one as the most accurate. I have expressed similar thoughts myself, many times. Anyone who looks around the world today with open eyes can recognize Williamson’s vision of our time.
Sheldon Glashow: “The American economy will have experienced a gentle yet relentless decline. Our children will not live such comfortable lives as we do. The spread between the rich and the poor will have grown, and crime will have become so prevalent as to threaten the social fabric. The rich and the poor will form 2 armed camps.”
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Posted in Conflict and War, Energy Technology, Essays and Opinion, Extinction, Famine, Fossil Fuels, Medicine, Politics, Population Issues, Resource Depletion, Space Exploration, Technology | Comments Off

Technology—Promise or Curse?

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

By David L. Brown

Historian Niall Ferguson in an article published in The Daily Beast raises a question that’s long interested me. He asks, in effect, which vision of the future we should embrace: The idea that technology will make the world a better place, or the vision of a world in catastrophic economic decline?

Here”s a brief excerpt from the beginning of his essay, titled “Don’t Believe the Techno-Utopian Hype” (you can read the whole thing here):

Are you a technoptimist or a depressimist? This is the question I have been pondering after a weekend hanging with some of the superstars of Silicon Valley.

I had never previously appreciated the immense gap that now exists between technological optimism, on the one hand, and economic pessimism, on the other. Silicon Valley sees a bright and beautiful future ahead. Wall Street and Washington see only storm clouds. The geeks think we’re on the verge of The Singularity. The wonks retort that we’re in the middle of a Depression.

Let’s start with the technoptimists. Last Saturday I listened with fascination as a panel of tech titans debated the question: “Will science and technology produce more dramatic changes in solving the world’s major problems over the next 25 years than have been produced over the last 25 years?”

They all thought so. We heard a description of what Google’s Project Glass, the Internet-enabled spectacles, can already do. (For example, the spectacles can be used to check if another speaker is lying.) Next up: a search engine inside the brain itself. We heard that within the next 25 years, it will be possible to take 1,000-mile journeys by being fired through tubes. We also heard that biotechnology will deliver genetic “photocopies” of human organs that need replacing. And we were promised genetically engineered bugs, capable of excreting clean fuel. The only note of pessimism came from an eminent neuroscientist, who conceded that a major breakthrough in the prevention of brain degeneration was unlikely in the next quarter century.

Ferguson,  a professor at Harvard and also associated with Oxford University in England and The Hoover Institution at Stanford, takes the same point of view that has always struck me as the right path. In effect, he asks: What is the value of technology that merely puts people out of work and provides wonderful whiz-bang stuff that has no real benefits for anyone. He points out that fifty years ago we were promised flying cars, and instead we have Twitter.

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Posted in Conflict and War, Economics, Energy Technology, Politics, Resource Depletion, Technology | Comments Off

My New Book

Sunday, October 31st, 2010

By David L. Brown

depcovercropI am pleased to announce the publication of my new book DEAD END PATH: How Industrial Agriculture Has Stolen Our Future. This work, in the form of an extended essay, is the result of a lifetime of experience and study. It is written in an easy-to-read style and thoroughly documented with more than 250 footnotes and a bibliography of nearly 150 volumes included in its nearly 300 pages.

DEAD END PATH is unusual in that it is part essay, part memoir, part speculative journalism and part research-based analysis. It examines the serious challenges that face the human race, including the unhappy facts that as human population continues to grow the resources on which our technological civilization depends are being depleted through runaway “progress” and “development,” code words for the destruction of the environment in the interests of profit for the few.

Many of the ideas in this book have been discussed in this weblog, including population issues, resource peaks, and economic considerations. The main argument of DEAD END PATH is that while most of the structural problems of our civilization can be traced to over-population, that core fact itself rests on the short-sighted use of industrial methods to produce more food in the short term than the Earth can sustain. As resources peak and begin to decline, a food crisis looms ahead of us at the terminus of the path we have taken.

To give you the general flavor of this work, here is the official description from the publisher’s website:

DEAD END PATH is an important book because it describes in simple, jargon-free words the critical dangers facing humanity, including many facts that the media seldom report. It’s an extended essay on how industrial agriculture has led us down an unsustainable path that threatens our very civilization. The danger is real and looming before us in the here-and-now. Our petroleum-based technology is reaching its limits and the coming collapse will likely trigger a domino-like food crisis that will change the world forever.

Readers will learn how machine technology has transformed food production and pitted the human race against Nature herself. Topics include over-population, resource depletion, climate change, economic realities and the long-term outlook for human survival. Part journalism, part history, part memoir, part essay — this book aims to entertain and inform curious readers in non-technical language. The subjects of this book are possibly the most important issues of the 21st Century, a stark reality that is little reported by the media and largely ignored by world leaders. Every thinking person should be aware of this looming threat to civilization, the real-life story that unfolds in the pages of DEAD END PATH.

To help bring the message of DEAD END PATH to a wider audience, I have begun to create a new website at www.agdeadend.com. It is only partially constructed, but you may find it interesting to visit it now to read the text of the Author’s Note from the book in which I explain my personal life’s journey and how it resulted in the writing of this book. Please bookmark and return to it as it takes form. It will contain news and commentary relating to the subject of the book.

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Book Reviews, Desertification and Soil Loss, Economics, Essays and Opinion, Famine, Fossil Fuels, Politics, Resource Depletion, Technology | Comments Off

A Realist Looks at the Year Ahead

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

By David L. Brown

Good morning everyone. If you woke up this morning (as I presume you did since you are reading this) you were probably surprised to learn that we have entered a New Year, Anno Domini 2009. I certainly was, but then these things have been sneaking up on me for a long time so I should have expected something like that.

Anyway, Happy New Year.

Now it’s time for the completely de rigueur Review of the Past Year, followed by Predictions of Things to Come.

First, let’s review a few highlights from Star Phoenix Base during the year just ended.

On January 2, 2008 in an essay titled “Looking Ahead to a Very Different Future,” I wrote: “Most predictions of the future rely on the old tried-and-true (and desperately false) technique of looking backward, then extending the trendlines of the past into the future. In some cases that has worked, but the technique has little chance of accurately predicting the future from our present position. The reason is that we are reaching the end of an era of rapid growth built on depletion of non-renewable resources.”

We wrote about ethanol and how turning food into fuel was a terrible mistake. We wrote about the climate change denial that has become even more strident in recent months. We noted the likely return of inflation and even its evil twin stagflation. And we hammered several times on the mistaken economic assumption that any commodity that is depleted will be replaced by something just as good.

In June I predicted a financial crisis that would probably lead to a new Great Depression. That may have seemed extreme back then, but how about today? Oh, wait, no problem, the government bailouts will surely prevent anything like that from happening. (Nevermind that investors have lost trillions of dollars and the world’s capital markets have declined by nearly 50 percent. That can’t be important, can it?)

In early July I predicted the impending demise of General Motors, writing: “the entire American auto industry seems to be in a downward spiral from which there may be no return. But it is almost inconceivable how fast the bad news has been coming.” Yeah, and it kept coming didn’t it?

In September I suggested that the financial crisis could be bad news for the “financial elite,” the ultra-rich. Didn’t seem likely those smart people would get caught off-base…until along came Bernie Madoff, the new Robin Hood who stole from the rich to give to…well, we aren’t sure where the money went.

Also in September I wrote about how “insourcing” was bringing manufacturing and jobs back to the U.S. More on that later.

In October I stated that “Much of today’s ‘money’ is a phantom, something that exists in computer networks and can flit around the globe at the press of a key. It is a fiction, a mere cloud of bits and bytes, and there is where the trouble starts.” We have seen that playing out at defunct or struggling financial institutions around the world. We have been living on the back of an imaginary economy where money isn’t real, but something based entirely on trust. There is an old saying of Ronald Reagan’s, originally used in the context of Soviet disarmament: “Trust, but verify.” Too many people trusted that their “money” actually existed, and too few verified. Again, Bernie Madoff is the poster child for what happened. One might expect that Bernie was not the only charlatan loose in the financial world and I expect that far more examples will emerge.

Also in October I wrote about the freeze of international trade due to the credit crunch. We don’t hear much about that, but it is a huge and growing problem. More on that below.

In November I shook off my previous mode of thinking, pessimism, and embraced realism. That was a liberating decision. You can read my thinking on this in the essay titled “Realism: The Emerging New World Order,” November 28, 2008. I concluded with this:

We see our once and future leaders acting as would-be saviors of the old world order advocating putting trillions of dollars into failed institutions in the apparent hope that if only those outdated corporations and other entities can be put back on their feet, things will return to “normal.” Well, here’s a hot tip: There is no more “normal” any more. “Normal” fell out of the nest some while back and was replaced by its evil twin, “Abnormal”. The idea that we can somehow transform the “abnormal” present back into the “normal” world we once knew is an impossible dream, a vain hope, and a disaster in the making. No, Humpty is well and truly broken and to spend trillions trying to glue and patch and stitch him back together is a foolish and pointless exercise in futility.

Notice that in my new “realism” mode I was not saying that everything was hopelessly screwed up, but only that mistakes were being made. That change would have to take place. That’s the realist’s view, to see things as they are and to reject wishful thinking.

So there’s some background on what was discussed here during the year just passed. What do I see in the year ahead? Well, I would surely like to put on a Pollyanna persona and tell you that all the dark clouds are going to blow away and the bright Sun shine through on a new day of happiness and prosperity for Humankind. I really wish I could, but as a realist I cannot because the facts dictate otherwise.

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Posted in Economics, Essays and Opinion, Politics, Population Issues, Resource Depletion | Comments Off

More Panic Among Oil Producers

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

By David L. Brown

Russia has suggested it will join OPEC to cut petroleum exports and thus raise the price of oil. According to a story on Bloomberg.com this morning:

“We have to defend ourselves,” [Russian President Dmitry] Medvedev said in the Ural Mountains city of Kurgan today. “This is our revenue base, both from oil and from gas,” he said. “I believe that we mustn’t rule out any options.”

Defensive measures may include “cutting the volume of oil production and participating in existing organizations of suppliers, and in new organizations, if we can reach such an agreement,” Medvedev said in comments broadcast on state television.

OPEC members will meet on Dec. 17 in Oran, Algeria, to discuss oil output targets. OPEC President Chakib Khelil said Saudi Arabia supports a production cut. Russia, the largest non-OPEC supplier, backs a cut and the country’s deputy prime minister and energy minister will attend the meeting, Khelil said.

“The Oran meeting will decide a severe production cut to stabilize the oil market,” Khelil, who is also Algeria’s oil minister, said in an interview on state radio today. “There is a consensus to reduce production.” The minister didn’t specify the size of the output cut that he would seek.

This is more evidence of the panic that is setting in among oil producers now that prices have dropped far below the levels they were counting on to maintain and even increase their national budgets.

The question is what exactly Russia has to “defend” itself from. The only plausible answer is, from the laws of nature and economics. This is a tinfoil hat response to the drop in oil prices. And it will backfire because by limiting exports the oil producing nations will merely succeed in pushing the world economy downhill further and faster, while encouraging the kind of changes that will reduce the need for oil. Already Americans have reduced their driving by billions of miles since the oil spike earlier this year. Habits are hard to change, but once they do change they tend to stay changed.

In the past OPEC tended to cut oil prices whenever it appeared that the commodity was priced high enough to change demand and encourage alternatives. Now they are on the other side of the equation, trying to push prices as high as they can. This is economic suicide for them.

Don’t get me wrong: I do believe that oil prices will go back up, and they need to because we cannot expect producers to deliver oil at below the cost of production. If on the average it it costs around $80 a barrel to produce oil, then we will have to pay at least that much or supplies will dry up. Only those with low-cost production will be able to continue, and that would mean even worst economic trouble for the West not to mention the collapse of the producing nations’ economies.

Those with production costs at the high end of the scale will probably cease to produce oil, meaning that supplies will drop no matter what OPEC and Russia do. But the oil price spikes of the past year have demonstrated that the world economy has no ability to support oil prices in the $140 range. That event has triggered an unprecedented economic crisis, affecting not least the auto industry.

As we have discussed here many times, the world economy was based on growing supplies of cheap oil. Now we are facing falling supplies of ever more expensive oil. We are on the downhill side of the Peak Oil curve, and no amount of “defensive” actions by Russia and OPEC will change that fact. The more they try to force prices higher, the faster the world will back away from the petroleum economy.

A price in the range of $80 to $100 a barrel can be expected, and that will actually be good for the West because it will allow our economies to stabilize while still providing plenty of incentive for development of alternative energy resources, conservation, and other moves away from addiction to imported oil. It would have the further benefit of moderating the instability on the producing side of the economic see-saw without giving dangerous nations such as Iran, Russia and Venezuela massive infusions of cash that would likely be put to use for evil purposes.

And, why should Russia have to join OPEC to lower its exports? Why, I’m glad you asked that question. The answer is: Because OPEC is an international cartel that amounts to a criminal conspiracy against the West and thieves, like birds, flock together.

It’s time to put everything we can into knocking the underpinning out from under the conspirators and sending them back to their traditional roles as goat herders, camel merchants, vodka consumers or what have you.

Posted in Age of Oil, Economics, Global Security, Politics, Resource Depletion | Comments Off

When Things Go Horribly, Terribly Wrong

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

As nay-sayers continue to deny that global warming is real, scientists now say that not only is it real, it’s probably too late to do anything about it. Here’s a rather lengthy excerpt from an article appearing today on the web site of The Guardian, a leading British newspaper:

At a high-level academic conference on global warming at Exeter University this summer, climate scientist Kevin Anderson stood before his expert audience and contemplated a strange feeling. He wanted to be wrong. Many of those in the room who knew what he was about to say felt the same. His conclusions had already caused a stir in scientific and political circles. Even committed green campaigners said the implications left them terrified.

Anderson, an expert at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University, was about to send the gloomiest dispatch yet from the frontline of the war against climate change.

Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings, the media headlines and the corporate promises, he would say, carbon emissions were soaring way out of control – far above even the bleak scenarios considered by last year’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern review. The battle against dangerous climate change had been lost, and the world needed to prepare for things to get very, very bad.

“As an academic I wanted to be told that it was a very good piece of work and that the conclusions were sound,” Anderson said. “But as a human being I desperately wanted someone to point out a mistake, and to tell me we had got it completely wrong.”

Nobody did. The cream of the UK climate science community sat in stunned silence as Anderson pointed out that carbon emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than anyone thought possible, driven mainly by the coal-fuelled economic boom in the developing world. So much extra pollution is being pumped out, he said, that most of the climate targets debated by politicians and campaigners are fanciful at best, and “dangerously misguided” at worst.

What would it take to head off this scenario? Anderson says that “Only an unprecedented ‘planned economic recession’ might be enough.” He added: “The current financial woes would not come close.”

Ooops, a “planned economic recession.” That sounds like something that would be about as popular as a piranah in the punchbowl. Ain’t gonna happen. And, if my read on the depth and seriousness of our present “financial woes” are anywhere near right, the world economy is already facing unprecedented economic disaster—and yet Anderson says that wouldn’t even start to solve the problem.

The Guardian article continued:

Anderson is not the only expert to voice concerns that current targets are hopelessly optimistic. Many scientists, politicians and campaigners privately admit that 2C is a lost cause. Ask for projections around the dinner table after a few bottles of wine and more vote for 650ppm than 450ppm as the more likely outcome.

Bob Watson, chief scientist at the Environment Department and a former head of the IPCC, warned this year that the world needed to prepare for a 4C rise, which would wipe out hundreds of species, bring extreme food and water shortages in vulnerable countries and cause floods that would displace hundreds of millions of people. Warming would be much more severe towards the poles, which could accelerate melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.

Watson said: “We must alert everybody that at the moment we’re at the very top end of the worst case [emissions] scenario. I think we should be striving for 450 [ppm] but I think we should be prepared that 550 [ppm] is a more likely outcome.” Hitting the 450ppm target, he said, would be “unbelievably difficult”.

As we have been warning here, the problem of climate change is so serious that it could literally destroy civilization. Because of the possibility of sudden feedback and tipping point effects, the climate disaster could come quickly, far faster than humans could act in response. The only hope was (notice the past tense here) to take action in advance of the events. Unfortunately, we seem to be unwilling to do anything significant to avoid the climate crash, any more than the dinosaurs took heed of approaching asteroids. It’s business as usual with politicians, businessmen, and most everyone else on the planet.

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Posted in Climate Change, Melting Planet, Politics, Population Issues, Resource Depletion | Comments Off

Realism: The Emerging New World Order

Friday, November 28th, 2008

By David L. Brown

I have failed to contribute to this blog in recent weeks, for which I apologize. It has been a time of chaos in the world, beset with financial doom, political uncertainty, growing threats from every side. No matter where you look—Wall Street, Pakistan, India, Detroit, Russia, Venezuela, Washington, Iran—the world is churning toward disaster. Anything I might have written about on any given morning would likely have been turned on its head by the time the six o’clock news came on the air. Thus I have been in a watch-listen-learn mode, an observer to the on-going collapse of the world as we have known it.

I have never been known as an optimist, and have proudly laid claim to that opposite position called pessimism. For two and a half years this weblog has reflected those darker interpretations of the facts, based on my study of science, politics, economics and other factors that have been in play. My pessimism has been well-founded, at least to my own satisfaction, the result of analysis, research, logical thought and plain old common sense.

But I am now denouncing pessimism because I no longer accept that it is possible to be pessimistic about the future.

What? How can that be? Well, don’t get your hopes up that I have suddenly consumed leftover Kool-Aid from the Jonestown Massacre and bought into the HopeyChangey optimism that is the present public delusion. No, I am seting aside pessimism because it is no longer adequate to define the seriousness of the situation in which we, the human race, now finds itself. I am forsaking pessimism in favor of realism, which is a far more rational response to the facts as they presently exist.

Pessimism is a vague sort of idea, usually interpreted as describing a general suspicion that the future might be worse rather than better. Such a position, although usually based on at least some fact, requires a level of doubt or uncertainty. The facts that are presently sweeping across the globe have become so indisputable that they preclude nearly all doubt about the direction in which our planet is going.

To put the differences between pessimism and realism into perspective, let us imagine a scenario in which a mountaineer is climbing on an unstable rock face high on Mount Everest. The situation looks dangerous and thus a certain amount of pessimism is an appropriate response. He is a pessimist.

Now let’s assume that the climber’s pitons have pulled out of the rock, his companions have cut his rope in order to save themselves and he is falling ten thousand feet to an icy glacier far below. Can we call him a pessimist now? No, for the facts are plain, there is no doubt. He cannot grow wings and fly to safely so his future is certain, if short. The only description that can apply to him now is “realist.”

A “realist,” according to one dictionary definition, is “a person who accepts the world as it literally is and deals with it accordingly.” A synonym is “pragmatist,” which is defined as “somebody who only considers things as they are or appear to be, and avoids ideals and abstractions.” (Sources: The Free Dictionary; Encarta)

The transition of the climber in our scenario from pessimist to realist is analogous to the world situation now. The problems we face are real, indisputable, and innumerable. Not only that, there are no practical solutions to most of the problems. It used to be said that every problem held within it an opportunity. That aphorism may no longer hold true in the post-growth world that we have entered. The old economic model of “progress” as defined by never-ending growth is crashing on the reality of resource depletion, acerbated by over-population, greed, political and religious strife and a multitude of other factors including, and far from least, the on-going collapse of the Earth’s environment.

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Posted in Economics, Essays and Opinion, Politics, Resource Depletion | Comments Off

Looking Beyond the Multiple Resource Peaks

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

By David L. Brown

We write endlessly about the changes that are taking place in the world, and there is mounting evidence that we are at a cusp of history, a brief moment in time after which things will be far different than they have been in the past. In this essay we are going to look a bit further down the road and see just how different the future is going to be.

Readers of Star Phoenix Base and perhaps anyone who drives a vehicle know of the challenge of Peak Oil, which was predicted more than half a century ago and is now taking place.

To give you an idea of what an unusual position we are in history, and how the future will not be anything like the present (although not exactly like the past either), here is a graph that gives a long view of fossil fuel energy use by the human race, over a period of four thousand years, starting at the time of Christ and extending to 4000 A.D. That puts our present era right in the middle, and it provides a little perspective on the subject:

energycurvehistory3_op_800x203.jpg

In effect this graph is a condensed, long-term view of the bell curve used by M. King Hubbert to predict future oil resources, the so-called Hubbert Curve. That same curve can be applied to other non-renewable resources as well. We have in recent months discussed the concept of Peak Food, a time when the world’s ability to produce food is falling behind the needs of the human population. This is a very real phenomenon, and is likely to result in another culminating event: Peak Population.

The UN continues to blithely assume that population growth will continue for another generation or so, reaching something like 10 billion humans by the middle of this century, and then (almost magically) leveling off and remaining stable into the far future. (I am reminded of my image of the Rabbit of Unreasonable Hope hopping out of a magician’s top hat, my analogy for the denial that is so widespread in the world today.

Well, there are more things going on than that, my friend. Everywhere you look there are peaks looming. Some of these will not yield quite so dramatic a curve as the one shown above, but let’s take a look at a few of the resources that may soon reach peaks or have already done so:

WATER — The world is running out of water everywhere. Not only are underground aquifers being pumped dry to irrigate crops and provide water to expanding metropolises, but the very rivers are drying up. It has long been the case that the Colorado River never reaches the sea, because every last drop is used up before it gets there. The same is rapidly becoming true of major Asian and European rivers as well, and not only because humans are using so much of the water but also because the Winter snowpack and glacial melt in high mountains is diminishing. Instead of steady flows of water, the pattern is shifting to Spring flooding as rapid melting occurs, followed by a drop in water flow during Summer when the water is most needed for crops. We have probably passed Peak Water, although it is not a strictly limited resource.

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Posted in Age of Oil, Agriculture Issues, Conservation Issues, Resource Depletion | 1 Comment »

Farmers Choosing Mammon Over Conservation

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

By David L. Brown

As we have predicted here the ongoing ethanol mania, now magnified by rapidly rising food prices and impending Third World famine, is causing farmers to plow up fragile lands that have been protected by conservation programs.

According this article in yesterday’s New York Times,

“Thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate. They are spurning guaranteed annual payments for a chance to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybeans, corn and other crops. Last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.”

The farmers are giving up modest payments they have been collecting, many for decades, to keep land in the Conservation Reserve Program. Most of that land is better served by being kept out of production because it is prone to erosion. The conservation acres also provide an environment for wildlife such as pheasants and ducks. But now that those big shiny dollars are beckoning as ethanol and biodiesel plants turn food into government-subsidized fake fuel, farmers who once were happy to take handouts to keep fragile acres from under the plow are even happier to rip up that precious soil and plant corn, soybeans or wheat.

Writes the Times’ David Streitfeld:

Environmental and hunting groups are warning that years of progress could soon be lost, particularly with the native prairie in the Upper Midwest. But a broad coalition of baking, poultry, snack food, ethanol and livestock groups say bigger harvests are a more important priority than habitats for waterfowl and other wildlife. They want the government to ease restrictions on the preserved land, which would encourage many more farmers to think beyond conservation.

So not only does this “coalition” favor plowing up conservation acres, they even go so far as to recommend that the government ease restrictions to open up even more land to being pillaged in the name of Mammon, the false god of riches and avarice.

I don’t suppose there are very many left who remember the Dust Bowl Days of the 1930s when the practice of plowing up vast swaths of fragile land resulted in an ecological, economic and social disaster. The conservation programs of today are partly the result of that era, as well as the problems of over-production that stalked agriculture a few decades later.

I was born too late to witness the Dust Bowl Days, although I did see a minor resurgence in the early 1950s. It was quite a sight from our home in central Missouri one afternoon as an ominous red cloud loomed in the Southwestern sky. The cloud was composed of topsoil blown from fields in Oklahoma and southern Kansas. The next morning a thin layer of the red dust covered everything, the ground, trees, and even the floors and furniture inside our house.

Here is an interesting timeline showing some of the weather events of those years of heat and drought in my home state, as posted on the website of the Missouri Climate Center:

1930’s-40’s: Dust Bowl Years of the 1930’s and early 1940’s: Heat and Drought

In Particular: 1930, 1931, 1934 1936, 1940, 1941 for drought and 1934 and 1936 for summer heat and drought

1934: July. Hottest month on record for state: Avg. temp. 86.1°; Hottest Summer on record for state: Average temperature: 81.9°

1936 :D riest summer for the state: Average total precipitation for Jun, Jul, Aug.: 3.78”

1950’s: Drought Years of the 1950’s: Heat and Drought

In Particular: 1953-57 for drought and 1953 and 1954 for summer heat and drought. This was a drier period than the 1930’s and early 1940’s.

1951: Ice storms crippled the entire states’ transportation system on Christmas Eve.

Flood on Missouri River in June and July, on Mississippi River in April, May and July caused more than $0.25 Billion damage in Missouri alone.
1953: Driest year on record. State average precipitation: 25.35”

1954: July 14: Hottest temperature ever recorded for Missouri: 118° in Warsaw and Union.

Memory is short and history is long, so it is no surprise that the lessons of that period have already been forgotten by most. And would it matter even if those lessons were still in the public mind? Probably not, because the love of money trumps good intentions. Farmers are no different from anyone else when it comes to that. When there isn’t much at stake, doing the right thing yields warm and fuzzy feelings … but as soon as there is a buck to be made it’s Katy Bar the Door!

The present agricultural environment has much in common with historic “bubbles” such as the “Tulipmania” that swept over 17th Century Holland. Bubbles are times when the normal pursuit of money turns into a runaway cycle of economic madness. There are many other examples, including the stock market frenzy of the 1920s that led to the Great Depression, the tech stock bubble that burst a few years ago, and even the housing bubble and resulting credit crunch that is currently plaguing the world economy.

Just as none of those bubbles ever came to anything good, the rapidly inflating agricultural bubble is surely doomed to disaster as well. As long as money is to be made, those fragile acres will be put to the plow. Nevermind the pheasants and ducks; nevermind the soil washing and blowing away from the land to pollute the water and air; nevermind that precious topsoil is the most important link between human beings and the Earth that supports us; nevermind all of that because the clarion call of money is drawing us like pigs to the trough.

What is going to happen cannot be good. It could be merely disastrous, or actually calamitous. We are overdue for a period of “heat and drought” as recorded in the Missouri timeline shown above for the 1930s and 1950s. What then? Will we once again witness clouds of dust so thick they block out the Sun? Will crops wither and die in the field? Will farmers experience another boom-to-bust cycle that will drive tens of thousands of them into bankruptcy and despair? Probably. The question is not whether such things will take place, but just how serious they become.

In view of the fake fuels scandal, climate change, and looming famine, the outlook is grim indeed. Mammon beckons.

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Resource Depletion | 2 Comments »

Why Can’t the Chinese Be More Like Us?

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

By David L. Brown

The current issue of The Economist has a cover story about China’s insatiable and growing thirst for natural resources. The cover itself bears the title “The New Colonialists,” and features this picture (which I have cropped to show only the main subject without all the text and masthead:

20080315issuecovus400.jpg

The picture strikes me as particularly amusing and symbolic because of several facts. One, it shows the proud Chinese explorer hobnobbing with Arabs in a scene that could be out of the 18th Century. (Point: They’re not exactly up-to-date.) And, it shows the symbolic Chinaman heading out in a desert wasteland something like the one that China itself is in danger of becoming. But let’s get to the story.

In this week’s editorial, or “leader” as they call it, The Economist makes the following remarks about China’s emergence as the world’s biggest resource hog:

THERE is no exaggerating China’s hunger for commodities. The country accounts for about a fifth of the world’s population, yet it gobbles up more than half of the world’s pork, half of its cement, a third of its steel and over a quarter of its aluminium. It is spending 35 times as much on imports of soya beans and crude oil as it did in 1999, and 23 times as much importing copper—indeed, China has swallowed over four-fifths of the increase in the world’s copper supply since 2000.

Hmm, sounds like we have a real problem here. Just as the developed parts of the world are beginning to ease up on the remaining resources of our planet, the Chinese are trying to recreate the Industrial Revolution on a gargantuan scale. That can’t be good, can it? Well, no, but in fact the worst of the pain might be felt by China itself. As The Economist explains:

Still, China’s hunger for natural resources is creating plenty of problems. Most of them, though, are in China, not abroad.

China is hoovering up ever more commodities not just because its economy is growing so quickly, but also because that growth is concentrated in industries that use lots of resources. Over the past few years, there has been a marked shift from light manufacturing to heavy industry. So for each unit of output, China now consumes more raw materials.

That may sound like a minor change, but the implications are dramatic. For one thing, it has encouraged the sort of foreign entanglements that are now causing China such embarrassment. More worryingly, it is compounding China’s already grim pollution. Heavy industry requires huge amounts of power. Steelmaking, for example, uses 16% of China’s power, compared with 10% for all the country’s households combined. By far the most common fuel for power generation is coal. So more steel mills and chemical plants mean more acid rain and smog, not to mention global warming.

These are not just inconveniences, but also an enormous drag on society. Each year, they make millions sick, cause hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, sap agricultural yields and so on. Pan Yue, a deputy minister at the government’s environmental watchdog, believes that the costs inflicted by pollution each year amount to some 10% of GDP.

The Economist editorial also states that the Chinese government is facing massive complaints from its own citizens, with pollution as “the cause of ever more protests and demonstrations. There were some 60,000 in 2006 alone, by the authorities’ own count,” according to the leader. Imagine that, 60,000 admitted protests and demonstrations against pollution!

(more…)

Posted in Economics, Resource Depletion | 1 Comment »

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