Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-China’s ‘carbon intensity’ commitment means nothing
-Let’s Try Cap-and-Trade on Babies
-Illusions on the edge of a precipice
-How to stop doubting and love the climate models
-Baffin Island reveals dramatic scale of Arctic climate change
-The Economic Case for Slashing Carbon Emissions
-The Cold we Caused
-Green Fields: Economist’s advice to Big Food: Change or face fate of GM
-Global leaders gather in Iowa for World Food Prize, talks on food, agriculture security
-Bill Gates reveals support for GMO ag
-Gates gives $120 million to help poor nations farm
Yesterday was World Food Day, and the media dutifully paid a tiny bit of attention to the 1 billion plus people who suffer from chronic hunger. All the usual problems were trotted out, including multiple quotations in many media from the Australian National Science Director Megan Clark’s observation that to feed a growing population, we will have to produce more food in the next 50 years than we have in all of human history.
Evolution demands short-term thinking focused on individual survival. Most attempts to overcome our evolutionarily hardwired absorption with self are selected against. The Overman is dead, killed by a high-fat diet and unwillingness to exercise. Reflexively, we follow him into the grave.
As the fossil fuel age winds down, will the public be so amenable to setting aside additional landscapes, keeping them out-of-bounds to extractive industries? Will it even be willing to defend the national parks we already have?
-Population Growth Steady in Recent Years
-Stop blaming the poor. It’s the wally yachters who are burning the planet
-The coming Population Wars: a 12-bomb equation
-Factoring People Into Climate Change
-When It Comes to Pollution, Less (Kids) May Be More
-Copenhagen and population growth: the topic politicians won’t discuss
One of the reasons discussions of whether “organic” and “local” can “feed the world” often founder so badly is the whole set of presumptions that preceed such a discussion. So let’s talk about those – James McWilliams’ book _Just Food_ and others have stirred up a good bit of controversy on this subject, and lots of people seem to know the answers. But the real problem is that most people don’t really seem to understand what the questions are.
-The Problem With ‘Eat Local’
-James McWilliams’ over-hyped and undercooked anti-locavore polemic
-Just Food
Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels.
India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests has released a quick set of five studies to support the Indian government’s claim that it can quickly grow its economy without destabilising emissions negotiations. The intention is clearly to take a ‘scientific’ stand at the Copenhagen meeting in December to project the central government objective of steady GDP growth. Although India’s climate arguments versus the west are allied with China’s, the People’s Republic has publicly been more diplomatic.
One “emerging consensus view”, even among politicians who continue rooting for economic growth if only to claw tax receipts for paying off swollen national debt, is that world oil demand will ceiling if not crater. Peak Oil has won converts, some of them even able to openly admit it is real, but mostly selling oil saving and oil substitution to consumers as part and parcel of the hunting down of the Evil Molecule called CO2.
