2084: Global Transitions and Dangers--Peak Oil, Part I

I’ve always had an affinity for the ancient Greek’s view of history. For the Greeks, history was an endless repeat of pre-determined events. This view is not entirely antiquated as many international relations theories also believe that nation-states follow regular repeated patterns in history. There is a certain fatalistic aspect to it, that some things are inevitable. Sometimes, that inevitable future seems grim and dangerous, however, this is only the case when the danger signs are ignored and precautionary steps are not taken early to ameliorate certain outcomes.

What cycles can be observed in history? Many have remarked on a similar pattern in the rise and fall of nations and civilizations. Many have seen regular patterns in international relations and the onset of war. You can also see a cyclical patterns in social movements and revolutions. Since the advent of modern nation-state and the free market system, one could argue that we have followed a cyclical pattern based on continued innovation.

What is this cycle? Given my background in international relations, I think it does have something to do with the rise and fall of great powers within the international system. However, technology, the innovation and maintenance of energy systems have played a key part in this cycle.

Since the creation of the modern nation-state system, nations have vied for dominance within that system. Some have been better placed or endowed with greater resources than others. A nation-states dominance has often depended on their access to resources and their strong research and development of leading edge technology (see the works of Paul Kennedy and Robert Gilpin).

Leadership in new leading edge technologies has kept the global market system going. Innovations have led to greater competition among nation-states and the rise and fall in the fortunes of the great powers.

The end of World War II marked the beginning of another cycle in global relations. However, this one was marked by a number of characteristics that distinguish it from the others. One being the bipolar competition between two ideologies, free-market capitalism and democracy of the West vs. the totalitarian communism offered by the Soviet Union had its allies. Second, the development of nuclear weapons, making war between these two camps almost unthinkable. Finally, the development of a truly global market and globalized world fostered the development of mass consumer societies in the most developed industrialized nations of the West.

To fuel these mass transportation, mass communication, and mass consumption societies has required more and more of the world’s resources. This has led to a host of potential global problems. There are many doom and gloom predictions regarding the future of the human race: global warming, population pressures, dwindling fresh water supplies, agricultural pressures from growing populations, and dwindling resources.

Many of these problems, and there are more of course, are the subject of great debate. Especially here in America, it is often surprising how politicized some of these problems are. Many simply deny that there is a problem. What is well-known and accepted in other Western countries, is seen (thankfully, by a minority for the most part) in this country as a myth or non-existent.

I would like to focus on one particular global problem (I may touch on others in other articles). That has to do with our system’s reliance on oil/petroleum. No one can deny oil’s benefits. It is what fuels our modern industrial way of life. I have been reading a number of articles to get my head around the potential future problem of oil, including some articles graciously sent to me by deezelboy.

Soon, we could potentially face a world where cheap and abundant oil/petroleum is a thing of the past. One could argue it is already past as many of us are starting to feel the pressure at the gasoline pump.

Peak Oil

This problem revolves around an old idea called peak oil. This is essentially, the point at which production reaches a terminal point; afterwards, production goes into decline. If production goes into decline, but global consumption remains constant, then we face a problem of rising oil costs.

There used to be some debate over whether this was actually happening, but now nearly all experts (from both sides of the political spectrum) who study this agree, that there is a problem. The question remains, when will global production reach its peak? Estimates vary widely, but even moderate estimates put peak oil somewhere between 2010 and 2020. Some have argued that we have already reached the peak. See this summary report prepared by Energy Watch Group (Thanks to deez for this link).

Oil certainly has one unavoidable fact; it is a finite resource, which does mean that it will eventually run out. If we are not prepared for this eventuality, this will have dire consequences for our society and way of life. What peak oil does is raise the question of how we are going to deal with this increasingly expensive and dwindling resource. Transportation, agriculture, and many other aspects of our consumer lifestyle depend on this resource…how should dwindling resources be allocated or how will we mitigate or solve this problem?

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) July report, the 2007 rate of oil production was approximately 88 million barrels per day. The global consumption of oil is somewhere in the vicinity of 85 million barrels per day. In 2004, the IEA predicted that by 2030, global oil demand will increase to 121 million barrels per day (drawn from an article written by Kjell Aleklett, President of the Association of the Study of Peak Oil and Gas in World Watch 2006).

Effectively, this means oil production will have to keep pace when many of the OPEC and Non-OPEC countries have had modest growth in production or even decline. Thirty-three out of 48 oil producing countries have seen declining oil production. To effectively meet the oil demands of 2030, Aleklett reports that we would need to discover “10 new Saudi Arabia’s” or “four petroleum systems the size of the North Sea.” It is worth noting the case of China. China currently has 21 percent of the global population and consumers 6 percent of the global oil supply. As China continues to become more affluent and as it continues to experience economic growth, the demand for oil in China alone will begin to tax global production.

It is interesting to compare the United States, which accounts for approximately 5 percent of the global population, but consumes 25 percent of the global oil supply. Here is a useful table for comparison:

All of this adds up to potentially serious problems with global consequences. Without oil/petroleum, many of the things our modern society depends on will grind to a halt. Our mass consumption society will collapse unless solutions and alternatives are explored. If even moderate predictions are true, we face in the very near future, sharp increases in the price of oil.

The rate of production and the rate of discovery of new oil fields have been experiencing a general downturn for sometime. If consumption is predicted to rise, prices will soar and average everyday human beings will suffer as a result. Currently the United States and the European Union consume the most oil/petroleum and enjoy the highest standards of living in the world. We have all the comforts of modern society and in our decadence we may bring about potential global disaster.

As I have mentioned, many cycles in history can be seen. In the modern state system, I have observed that often technology, Great Power politics, and social revolutions are often linked together. As mentioned above, Great Powers within the international system, maintain their dominance by maintaining their superiority in leading edge technologies. Without maintaining that technological edge, a Great Power goes into decline which historical as led to greater competition among nation-states and general warfare between them.

Social revolutions and new innovations in technologies cause transitions to new and different economies and societies. Sometimes, these transitions are slow, allowing for the socio-economic dislocations caused by them to be mitigated and easier to bear. Sometimes, they are rapid with great upheaval and suffering.

Without proper planning, and to be fair, not all future transitions have been or are foreseeable; the inevitability of certain events can be mitigated. We face another transition, transition in the production of energy. How this transition is handled will have a myriad of global, social, and economic consequences. We have the ability to see the transition in our midst, so it is important to take steps now to ensure that the transition is an easy one.

Part II will explore some of the potential solutions and how we can avoid the next global cycle turning into a disastrous transition. The intersection of global great power politics, socio-economic conditions, and revolutions will be explored and what the future may or may not hold for humanity.

Michael Pollan: The 2007 Farm Bill 'You are what you grow'

Here is an article sent to me by a friend who's field is environmental science...more specifically, sustainable agriculture. Being obese and corpulent is no longer the purview of the rich. I have found it strange to find that it is exceedingly more expensive to try and eat healthy and that there are so many cheap fatty alternatives.

• Michael Pollan: The 2007 Farm Bill 'You are what you grow', By Michael Pollan, Sustainable Food News, April 19, 2007. Straight to the Source

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer, is the Knight professor of journalism at the University of California , Berkeley . His most recent book is "The Omnivore's Dilemma," which was named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post and Amazon.com.

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person's wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods - dairy, meat, fish and produce - line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more "energy dense" than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them "junk." Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly - and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget.

So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots? For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system - indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world's food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root.

Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat - three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.)

For the last several decades - indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning - U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy. That's because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did.

The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce.

A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what its surgeon general has called "an epidemic" of obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup.

But such is the perversity of the farm bill: the nation's agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its public-health objectives. And the subsidies are only part of the problem. The farm bill helps determine what sort of food your children will have for lunch in school tomorrow.

The school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of America 's children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to serve enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow.

The farm bill essentially treats our children as a human disposal for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce.

To speak of the farm bill's influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact - on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration.

By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities - or to the United States.

The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s.

(More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico 's eaters as well as its farmers.) You can't fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico .

And though we don't ordinarily think of the farm bill in these terms, few pieces of legislation have as profound an impact on the American landscape and environment. Americans may tell themselves they don't have a national land-use policy, that the market by and large decides what happens on private property in America , but that's not exactly true.

The smorgasbord of incentives and disincentives built into the farm bill helps decide what happens on nearly half of the private land in America: whether it will be farmed or left wild, whether it will be managed to maximize productivity (and therefore doused with chemicals) or to promote environmental stewardship.

The health of the American soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look of its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs and formulae buried deep in the farm bill.

Given all this, you would think the farm-bill debate would engage the nation's political passions every five years, but that hasn't been the case. If the quintennial antidrama of the "farm bill debate" holds true to form this year, a handful of farm-state legislators will thrash out the mind-numbing details behind closed doors, with virtually nobody else, either in Congress or in the media, paying much attention.

Why? Because most of us assume that, true to its name, the farm bill is about "farming," an increasingly quaint activity that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake. This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of their Midwestern colleagues. Since we aren't paying attention, they pay no political price for trading, or even selling, their farm-bill votes.

The fact that the bill is deeply encrusted with incomprehensible jargon and prehensile programs dating back to the 1930s makes it almost impossible for the average legislator to understand the bill should he or she try to, much less the average citizen. It's doubtful this is an accident.

But there are signs this year will be different. The public-health community has come to recognize it can't hope to address obesity and diabetes without addressing the farm bill. The environmental community recognizes that as long as we have a farm bill that promotes chemical and feedlot agriculture, clean water will remain a pipe dream. The development community has woken up to the fact that global poverty can't be fought without confronting the ways the farm bill depresses world crop prices. They got a boost from a 2004 ruling by the World Trade Organization that U.S. cotton subsidies are illegal; most observers think that challenges to similar subsidies for corn, soy, wheat or rice would also prevail. And then there are the eaters, people like you and me, increasingly concerned, if not restive, about the quality of the food on offer in America .

A grass-roots social movement is gathering around food issues today, and while it is still somewhat inchoate, the manifestations are everywhere: in local efforts to get vending machines out of the schools and to improve school lunch; in local campaigns to fight feedlots and to force food companies to better the lives of animals in agriculture; in the spectacular growth of the market for organic food and the revival of local food systems. In great and growing numbers, people are voting with their forks for a different sort of food system. But as powerful as the food consumer is - it was that consumer, after all, who built a $15 billion organic-food industry and more than doubled the number of farmer's markets in the last few years - voting with our forks can advance reform only so far. It can't, for example, change the fact that the system is rigged to make the most unhealthful calories in the marketplace the only ones the poor can afford.

To change that, people will have to vote with their votes as well - which is to say, they will have to wade into the muddy political waters of agricultural policy. Doing so starts with the recognition that the "farm bill" is a misnomer; in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten with the interests of eaters placed first. Yes, there are eaters who think it in their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no matter how poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize the real cost of artificially cheap food - to their health, to the land, to the animals, to the public purse.

At a minimum, these eaters want a bill that aligns agricultural policy with our public-health and environmental values, one with incentives to produce food cleanly, sustainably and humanely. Eaters want a bill that makes the most healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least healthful ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local farms rather than processed surplus commodities from far away.

Enlightened eaters also recognize their dependence on farmers, which is why they would support a bill that guarantees the people who raise our food not subsidies but fair prices. Why? Because they prefer to live in a country that can still produce its own food and doesn't hurt the world's farmers by dumping its surplus crops on their markets.

The devil is in the details, no doubt. Simply eliminating support for farmers won't solve these problems; overproduction has afflicted agriculture since long before modern subsidies. It will take some imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the current farm bill hobbles. But the guiding principle behind an eater's farm bill could not be more straightforward: it's one that changes the rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity.

Such changes are radical only by the standards of past farm bills, which have faithfully reflected the priorities of the agribusiness interests that wrote them. One of these years, the eaters of America are going to demand a place at the table, and we will have the political debate over food policy we need and deserve. This could prove to be that year: the year when the farm bill became a food bill, and the eaters at last had their say