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 Bioremediation In New Orleans There are many bioremdiation techniques that are fairly simple, natural, and applicable on a small scale and Common Ground has been working on a proposal to fund and train a worker’s cooperative to put them into practice.  Spirit or Empire? The 21st Century RevolutionI am introducing the discourse of “spirit” back into social activism because the problems we face, dear friends, cannot be solved by the same kind of mind and heart that created these problems in the first place.  Ten Year Forecast for America’s Reform and Restructuring With Saturn in Libra in the 10th house, the U.S. has the potential to eventually be a leader in a sustainable, just, and harmonious way of life.
 The Dark Night of the Planetary SoulThe world is in labor, about to birth a new planetary consciousness. Will this consciousness reflect our worst nightmares or our highest aspirations? The choice is ours.  Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food SupplyFarmers on the island of Bali in Indonesia once planted 200 varieties of rice, each adapted to a different microclimate; now only four varieties are grown. Ongoing, massive genetic consolidation is being driven by the centralization of the seed industry which is in turn consequent upon fuel-fed globalization.
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 The Dolphin Psalm
The Dolphin Psalm is a magic lantern drawing of the divine lovers at play with their marine allies. |
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Women is a drawing that depicts the dehumanizing systems of oppression that we all empower through our consent, and our apathy, worldwide. |
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home >> global news >> environment >> Rescuing a Planet Under Stress
Rescuing a Planet Under Stress
Page 2: Oil Addiction & World Hunger << Previous: Scoping Out our Global CrisisOil Addiction & World HungerEven as the economy’s environmental support systems are deteriorating, the world is pumping oil with reckless abandon.
Leading geologists now think oil production may soon peak and turn downward. This collision between the ever-growing demand for oil and the earth’s finite resources is but the latest in a long series of collisions. Although no one knows exactly when oil production will peak, supply is already lagging behind demand, driving prices upward.
 In this new world, the price of oil begins to set the price of food, not so much because of rising fuel costs for farmers and food processors but more because almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel for cars. In this new world of high oil prices, supermarkets and service stations will compete in commodity markets for basic food commodities such as wheat, corn, soybeans, and sugarcane. Wheat going into the market can be converted into bread for supermarkets or ethanol for service stations. Soybean oil can go onto supermarket shelves or it can go to service stations to be used as diesel fuel. In effect, owners of the world’s 800 million cars will be competing for food resources with the 1.2 billion people living on less than $1 a day.
Faced with a seemingly insatiable demand for automotive fuel, farmers will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to produce sugarcane, oil palms, and other highyielding fuel crops. Already, billions of dollars of private capital are moving into this effort. In effect, the rising price of oil is generating a massive new threat to the earth’s biological diversity. As the demand for farm commodities climbs, it is shifting the focus of international trade concerns from the traditional goal of assured access to markets to one of assured access to supplies.
Countries heavily dependent on imported grain for food are beginning to worry that buyers for fuel distilleries may outbid them for supplies. As oil security deteriorates, so, too, will food security. As the role of oil recedes, the process of globalization will be reversed in fundamental ways. As the world turned to oil during the last century, the energy economy became increasingly globalized, with the world depending heavily on a handful of countries in the Middle East for energy supplies. Now as the world turns to wind, solar cells, and geothermal energy in this century, we are witnessing the localization of the world energy economy.
 The globalization of the world food economy will also be reversed, as the higher price of oil raises the cost of transporting food internationally. In response, food production and consumption will become much more localized, leading to diets based more on locally produced food and seasonal availability.
The world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies. In the future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle Eastern oil but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain. Pressures on land and water resources, already excessive in most of the world, will intensify further as the demand for biofuels climbs. This geopolitics of scarcity is an early manifestation of civilization in an overshoot-and-collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization’s waning years.
You do not need to be an ecologist to see that if recent environmental trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down. It is not knowledge that we lack. At issue is whether national governments can stabilize population and restructure the economy before time runs out. Looking at what is happening in China helps us to see the urgency of acting quickly.
Learning from China
For many years environmentalists have pointed to the United States as the world’s leading consumer, noting that 5 percent of the world’s people were consuming nearly a third of the earth’s resources. Although that was true for some time, it no longer is. China has replaced the United States as the leading consumer of basic commodities.
Among the five basic food, energy, and industrial commodities— grain and meat, oil and coal, and steel—consumption in China has eclipsed that of the United States in all but oil. China has opened a wide lead with grain, consuming 380 million tons in 2005 versus 260 million tons in the United States. Among the big three grains, China leads in the consumption of both wheat and rice and trails the United States only in corn.
Although eating hamburgers is a defining element of the U.S. China’s 2005 meat consumption of 67 million tons is far above the 38 million tons eaten in the United States.
 While U.S. meat intake is rather evenly distributed between beef, pork, and poultry, in China pork totally dominates. Indeed, half the world’s pigs are now found in China.
With oil, the United States was still solidly in the lead in 2004, using more than three times as much as China—20.4 million barrels per day versus 6.5 million barrels. But U.S. oil use expanded by only 15 percent between 1994 and 2004, while use in China more than doubled. Having recently eclipsed Japan as an oil consumer, China now trails only the United States.
Energy use in China also obviously includes coal, which supplies nearly two thirds of the country’s energy. China’s annual burning of 960 million tons easily exceeds the 560 million tons used in the United States. With this level of coal use and with oil and natural gas use also climbing fast, it is only a matter of time before China’s carbon emissions match those of the United States. Then the world will have two major countries driving climate change.
China’s consumption of steel, a basic indicator of industrial development, is now nearly two and a half times that of the United States: 258 million tons to 104 million tons in 2003. As China has moved into the construction phase of development, building hundreds of thousands of factories and high-rise apartment and office buildings, steel consumption has climbed to levels never seen in any country.
With consumer goods, China leads in the number of cell phones, television sets, and refrigerators. The United States still leads in the number of personal computers, though likely not for much longer, and in automobiles.
That China has overtaken the United States in consumption of basic resources gives us license to ask the next question. What if China catches up with the United States in consumption per person? If the Chinese economy continues to grow at 8 percent a year, by 2031 income per person will equal that in the United States in 2004. If we further assume that consumption patterns of China’s affluent population in 2031, by then 1.45 billion, will be roughly similar to those of Americans in 2004,we have a startling answer to our question.
At the current annual U.S. grain consumption of 900 kilograms per person, including industrial use, China’s grain consumption in 2031 would equal roughly two thirds of the current world grain harvest. If paper use per person in China in 2031 reaches the current U.S. level, this translates into 305 million tons of paper—double existing world production of 161 million tons. There go the world’s forests. And if oil consumption per person reaches the U.S. level by 2031, China will use 99 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 84 million barrels a day and may never produce much more. This helps explain why China’s fast-expanding use of oil is already helping to create a politics of scarcity. Or consider cars. If China one day should have three cars for every four people, as the United States now does, its fleet would total 1.1 billion vehicles, well beyond the current world fleet of 800 million. Providing the roads, highways, and parking lots for such a fleet would require paving an area roughly equal to China’s land in rice, its principal food staple.
 The inevitable conclusion to be drawn from these projections is that there are not enough resources for China to reach U.S. consumption levels. The western economic model—the fossil fuel- based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy—will not work for China’s 1.45 billion in 2031. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India either, which by 2031 is projected to have even more people than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.” And in an increasingly integrated world economy, where countries everywhere are competing for the same resources—the same oil, grain, and iron ore—the existing economic model will not work for industrial countries either.
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Next: Lessons of History >>
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