Archive for December, 2007

World Food Prices Headed Up for 2008

Monday, December 17th, 2007

by Val Germann

There seems little doubt that 2008 will be a year of sharply higher food costs world wide. Today’s BBC website contains an article reporting that wheat futures have just cracked the $10.00 level and are certain to go even higher.

There are several reasons for this price increase but the bottom line is singularly clear, as the BBC explains.

Wheat prices have nearly doubled since the start of the year, fanning fears about food price inflation at a time when the global economy may be slowing.

We here in the United States do not worry about food but that situation does not obtain everywhere. Food shortages in other countries have hit hard and brought all kinds of troubles in their wake. Mexico has seen food riots over increasing corn prices, caused in part by the ethanol boom here. But wheat is even more of a primary food grain and shortages in that market could have serious reprecussions planet wide. Here is another BBC quote that should raise some eyebrows.

Rising wheat prices have been passed on to consumers worldwide and sparked protests in Asia. Protesters in Pakistan have blamed President Pervez Musharraf for failing to control prices.

When you consider how unstable Pakistan is, and that it possesses nuclear weapons, it’s easy to see a “perfect storm” of problems if wheat prices get too high. But the prospects for low prices are not good as a continuing drought in Australia cuts severely into that nation’s wheat exports, and problems in other countries continue to, shall we say, crop up.

Australian exports are expected to halve, while Argentina temporarily halted wheat exports this month to assess damage caused by cold weather. Russia is expected to ban wheat exports next month.

Not so good, is it? No, it’s not, especially when combined with the ongoing shift of acreage from wheat to corn here in the U.S., one result of our corn ethanol programs.

A review of the world’s press shows that in spite of the widely known facts above there seems to be little official concern about food prices. But that could change, in a hurry, as 2008 unfolds.

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Conflict and War, Global Security | Comments Off

Ethanol Praised as Food Stocks Fall, Prices Rise

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

By David L. Brown

The world is slipping into an era of shortages — shortages of clean water, shortages of energy, shortages of food in many areas. This is largely a result of human population growth and the resulting depletion of resources. Malthus predicted these limits more than two centuries ago, and with more than six and a half billion humans on the planet it appears that we are exceeding the numbers that the Earth can support.

As shortages become a general condition, it is not surprising that conflicts arise between those who have and those who want or need the various commodities that are becoming more scarce. One of the saddest developments, in my opinion, is the spill-over between energy and food supplies that has resulted in the ethanol boom in the U.S. This is something that Malthus could never have foreseen, and a subject that we have written much about.

And the mad rush to insanity continues. In its November-December issue, the magazine AgriMarketing, published by the National Agricultural Marketing Association, has named its “Product of the Year”. The winner was not a new combine, genetically modified plant, or feed supplement for cattle (although these were among the runners-up). No, the winner was … ethanol!

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The magazine devoted a number of pages to extolling this “product,” fuel alcohol made primarily from corn. According to an editorial by publisher Lynn Henderson, ethanol “has truly ushered in a new renaissance age for crop producers.”

Well, pish and bother. As the magazine itself points out (although buried in a pile of positive praise for ethanol that reminds me of something that might be encountered at the back end of a large feedlot), there are some problems. Prices for corn have risen to the point that most ethanol producers are barely breaking even, so that “construction of some ethanol plants have been halted and some that were on the drawing boards are not being built.”

Nay-sayers are portrayed like the Grinch that stole Christmas. “In addition, the product has been at the center of a food versus fuel debate, principally instigated and publicized by food and oil companies, industry insiders report,” the magazine says.

Well, the “bad press” about ethanol (as AgriMarketing calls it) is not just hype but based on real world facts, as anyone who has shopped for groceries recently will be aware. I note that T-bone steaks are going for ten bucks or more and milk is approaching five dollars a gallon. That is because the cost of corn, soybeans and other animal feeds has nearly doubled because of the demand for corn as feedstock for ethanol production.

The December 8 issue of The Economist takes on this problem with an article titled “Cheap no more.” The article bears the subhead “Rising incomes in Asia and ethanol subsidies in America have put an end to a long era of falling food prices.”

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Posted in Agriculture Issues, Essays and Opinion, Population Issues, Resource Depletion | 1 Comment »

Death, Taxes and Population

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

By David L. Brown

In that innermost part of our rational brains we all know that over-population is a root cause of most or perhaps all of the environmental trouble in the world, including climate change and global warming. But, like Oliver Hardy stridently declaring to Stan Laurel, “Now look at the mess you’ve gotten us into,” we aren’t sure what has happened or whose fault it is. People are genetically programmed to reproduce, and ovaries and testes generally win out over logically thinking brains.

Now, in order to protect the environment, an Australian doctor has come out four-square in favor of limiting the numbers of offspring that Aussie parents should be allowed to bring into the world, through the simple expedient of taxation. Writing in today’s Medical Journal of Australia, Dr. Barry Walters proposes that families be levied a $5000 “baby tax” at birth for each additional child over two, plus an annual carbon tax of $800 per child. He also calls for the elimination of government tax breaks or grants for parents of children.

According to a report on news.com.au (read it here):

[Walters] said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child’s lifetime.

[He] called for condoms and “greenhouse-friendly” services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits.

And he implied the Federal Government should ditch the $4133 baby bonus and consider population controls like those in China and India.

Professor Walters said the average annual carbon dioxide emission by an Australian individual was about 17 metric tons, including energy use.

“Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society,” he wrote.

Walters is clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth. Another “high-profile” Australian physician, Dr. Garry Egger, praised the proposal, writing in a response article in the MJA, “One must wonder why population control is spoken of today only in whispers.”

Not everyone agrees with the idea (including me, as you will read further down). The article quotes Angela Conway, a spokesperson for the Australian Family Association, who declared that it was ridiculous to blame babies for global warming. She added:

“I think self-important professors with silly ideas should have to pay carbon tax for all the hot air they create,” she said. “There’s masses of evidence to say that child-rich families have much lower resource consumption per head than other styles of households.”

Each side has a point, but the trouble with all of this is that population is not a problem just in Australia, or the United States, or even faraway places like India, China and Africa. It is a worldwide phenomenon. If a single nation such as Australia should seek to limit its population growth it will merely make more resources available for further expansion elsewhere until the world population limit is reached.

There you have the enormous Catch 22 of the population question — it cannot be acted upon locally because only a total multi-national program to limit growth in human numbers could possibly be effective. Otherwise, any nation or group that chose to voluntarily reduce their numbers would eventually be overrun by others who chose not to.

And, of course, the likelihood of any such unanimous multi-national effort coming to pass would be on the order of a snowball merrily making its way unharmed into the deepest and hottest circle of Hell. Accompanied by flying pigs.

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Posted in Population Issues | 1 Comment »

Does Bali Bust Mean Climate Catastrophe?

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

by Val Germann

It’s obvious now that no meaningful agreement on emissions reduction will come out of the current Bali climate talks. Oh, sure, there will be some kind of announcement, of some kind of “breakthrough,” but rest assured that it won’t amount to anything compared to the problem itself, which in this writer’s view is insurmountable. That is, it could well be that the human race has painted itself so thoroughly into a climate corner that there simply is no viable “solution” available. This is so because anything “effective” would promptly and completely crash our world’s current globalized economy. Let me tell you, no politician, anywhere, is going to sign on to that.

To see what I mean here let’s take a look at the “target” being proposed at Bali right now, taken from an article appearing today on the TERRADAILY website:

One of the rows is over a previous commitment made by Kyoto’s industrialised countries, which said they had an “ambition” to reduce their own carbon emissions by between 25 and 40 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels.

This goal has gained new traction because of recent scientific studies indicating that reductions on this order are necessary to prevent not just “global warming” but “catastrophic climate change.” However, the year 2020 is only 13 years away and to meet that goal would require an immediate reduction in fossil energy use, world wide, of several percent per year (!) because the world is emitting far more CO2, et. al., today than it was in 1990!

Such a draconian energy reduction program would rapidly bring on world wide recession, and then depression, followed by even more warfare than we’re seeing now. Such a program would reverse, at a stroke, the mantra of “growth” that has driven the world’s economies for the last several hundred years. It’s not going to happen.

What is going to happen is more of what we’re getting now, a rapid and continuing increase in total emissions. Take a look at this quote, from THE INDEPENDENT yesterday:

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move “Beyond Petroleum” by finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of abandoning its “green sheen” by investing nearly £1.5bn to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness using methods which environmentalists say are part of the “biggest global warming crime” in history.

Yes, indeed, here is the future for petroleum production world wide, tar sands, the actual crack of doom for any possible future reduction in overall emissions. How bad is this tar sands business? Read this quote from the same article as above:

“It takes about 29kg of CO2 to produce a barrel of oil conventionally. That figure can be as much 125kg for tar sands oil. It also has the potential to kill off or damage the vast forest wilderness, greater than the size of England and Wales, which forms part of the world’s biggest carbon sinks.

Oh, yes, that’s true, as is the fact that the world’s best fuel, natural gas, is being combined with billions of gallons of fresh water to create the third-rate “petroleum” that will be, because it must, the ever-increasing source of “new production” in the oil patch. For instance, Venezuela has immense quantities of similiar material and there is enough of the stuff around the world to continue some kind of really nasty “Age of Oil” almost indefinitely, all the way to the suffocation of mamalian life on Earth.

The bottom line is that all the hot air in the world, at Bali or any other “climate conference,” is not going to make one bit of difference in the real world of energy production and consumption. We humans are going to continue to do exactly what we’ve been doing and the word on that is coming from the top, the very top.

As for the rest of us, let us enjoy what we can, while we can. Our betters desire that we continue to drive giant SUVs back and forth to the grocery store for a quart of milk, and to consume apricots from Turkey, as this writer bought by mistake the other day. So be it, and the Devil take the hindmost! –

Posted in Age of Oil, Climate Change, Economics, Fossil Fuels | Comments Off

Midwest Takes Steps to Reduce Greenhouse Gas

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

By David L. Brown

A new move to reduce global warming has been announced, as six Midwestern states and a province of Canada have agreed to a regional plan to cap greenhouse gas emissions. The Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord was signed between the governors of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan, and Illinois, plus the premier of the Canadian province Manitoba. This pact represents the third such regional agreement in North America, according to a news report in New Scientist magazine.

The participants have agreed to establish a greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions trading system by 2010. Although details have not yet been set, a spokesman says they aim to eventually reduce carbon emissions in the area by 60 to 80 percent, a target suggested by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This will be accomplished through development of alternative energy sources such as wind power, improved energy efficiency, and the mandatory sequestration of CO2 by all coal-fired power plants in the region by 2020.

If the economies of the seven participants comprised an independent country, the news report states, it would be the world’s seventh largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Similar plans have been agreed in the New England region and in California, also large emitters of GHG.

Addressing the question of why the group has taken independent action, a spokesman for Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle was quoted: “We can’t afford to wait for the federal government. Our environment and security challenges are too great.”

One can take some comfort from these actions, while hoping that the organizers will follow through. It would be a shame to learn that smoke and mirrors are involved, for political rather than economic or ecological purposes—but my instinct is that even if they don’t presently have their hearts fully committed to the program, they soon will as the facts become more evident.

Catastrophic climate change is becoming more likely with each passing month. On November 22, the IPCC issued a “synthesis report” on three detailed studies released earlier this year. Intended as a summary, the new report actually goes further than the original papers, according to New Scientist’s Fred Pearce. He writes in the November 24 edition:

IPCC chiefs headed by chairman Rajendra Pachauri were stung by criticisms from scientists that their report on the physical science of climate change, agreed in February, had painted too rosy a picture. The charge was that their efforts to concentrate on findings with a 90 per cent certainty or better had resulted in them leaving out scarier but less certain scenarios. The synthesis report tries to make amends.

For instance, the February report predicted that sea levels will rise “between 18 and 59 centimeters” by 2100. Many glaciologists say that growing evidence of the instability of major ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, plus a recent doubling in the rate of sea-level rise, has made this an improbably low estimate, and the new report has responded to this. “This report does not assess the likelihood, nor provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise,” it says.

At the launch in Valencia, Spain, Pachauri explained what had changed since February. “It became apparent that, concerning the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, we really don’t know enough. Given the uncertainty it was prudent, and scientifically correct, to remove the upper boundary,” he said.

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Posted in Climate Change | 1 Comment »