Tag Archives: SCIENCE & TECH./SUSTAINABILITY

World food stocks dwindling rapidly, UN warns

Posted on by
Reply



The
world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to
historic levels, the top food and agriculture official of the United
Nations warned Monday. (Mohammed Ameen/Reuters)


World food stocks dwindling rapidly, UN warns


Published: December 17, 2007


P

ROME:
In an “unforeseen and unprecedented” shift, the world food supply is
dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to historic levels, the
top food and agriculture official of the United Nations warned Monday.

The changes created “a very serious risk that fewer people will be
able to get food,” particularly in the developing world, said Jacques
Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The agency's food price index rose by more than 40 percent this
year, compared with 9 percent the year before – a rate that was already
unacceptable, he said. New figures show that the total cost of
foodstuffs imported by the neediest countries rose 25 percent, to $107
million, in the last year.

At the same time, reserves of cereals are severely depleted, FAO
records show. World wheat stores declined 11 percent this year, to the
lowest level since 1980. That corresponds to 12 weeks of the world's
total consumption – much less than the average of 18 weeks consumption
in storage during the period 2000-2005. There are only 8 weeks of corn
left, down from 11 weeks in the earlier period.

Prices of wheat and oilseeds are at record highs, Diouf said Monday.
Wheat prices have risen by $130 per ton, or 52 percent, since a year
ago. U.S. wheat futures broke $10 a bushel for the first time Monday,
the agricultural equivalent of $100 a barrel oil.

Diouf blamed a confluence of recent supply and demand factors for
the crisis, and he predicted that those factors were here to stay. On
the supply side, these include the early effects of global warming,
which has decreased crop yields in some crucial places, and a shift
away from farming for human consumption toward crops for biofuels and
cattle feed. Demand for grain is increasing with the world population,
and more is diverted to feed cattle as the population of upwardly
mobile meat-eaters grows.

“We're concerned that we are facing the perfect storm for the
world's hungry,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World
Food Program, in a telephone interview. She said that her agency's food
procurement costs had gone up 50 percent in the past 5 years and that
some poor people are being “priced out of the food market.”

To make matters worse, high oil prices have doubled shipping costs
in the past year, putting enormous stress on poor nations that need to
import food as well as the humanitarian agencies that provide it.

“You can debate why this is all happening, but what's most important
to us is that it's a long-term trend, reversing decades of decreasing
food prices,” Sheeran said.

Climate specialists say that the vulnerability will only increase as
further effects of climate change are felt. “If there's a significant
change in climate in one of our high production areas, if there is a
disease that effects a major crop, we are in a very risky situation,”
said Mark Howden of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organization in Canberra.

Already “unusual weather events,” linked to climate change – such as
droughts, floods and storms – have decreased production in important
exporting countries like Australia and Ukraine, Diouf said.

In Southern Australia, a significant reduction in rainfall in the
past few years led some farmers to sell their land and move to
Tasmania, where water is more reliable, said Howden, one of the authors
of a recent series of papers in the Procedings of the National Academy
of Sciences on climate change and the world food supply.

“In the U.S., Australia, and Europe, there's a very substantial
capacity to adapt to the effects on food – with money, technology,
research and development,” Howden said. “In the developing world, there
isn't.”

Sheeran said, that on a recent trip to Mali, she was told that food
stocks were at an all time low. The World Food Program feeds millions
of children in schools and people with HIV/AIDS. Poor nutrition in
these groups increased the risk serious disease and death.

Diouf suggested that all countries and international agencies would
have to “revisit” agricultural and aid policies they had adopted “in a
different economic environment.” For example, with food and oil prices
approaching record, it may not make sense to send food aid to poorer
countries, but instead to focus on helping farmers grow food locally.

FAO plans to start a new initiative that will offer farmers in poor
countries vouchers that can be redeemed for seeds and fertilizer, and
will try to help them adapt to climate change.

Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million

Posted on by
Reply

Friday, December 28, 2007;
Page A21

This month may have been the most important yet in the two-decade
history of the fight against global warming. Al Gore got his Nobel in
Stockholm; international negotiators made real progress on a treaty in
Bali; and in Washington, Congress actually worked up the nerve to raise
gas mileage standards for cars.

But what may turn out to be the most crucial development went
largely unnoticed. It happened at an academic conclave in San
Francisco. A NASA scientist named James Hansen offered a simple,
straightforward and mind-blowing bottom line for the planet: 350, as in
parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a number that
may make what happened in Washington and Bali seem quaint and nearly
irrelevant. It's the number that may define our future.

To understand what it means, you need a little background.

Twenty years ago, Hansen kicked off this issue by testifying before
Congress that the planet was warming and that people were the cause. At
the time, we could only guess how much warming it would take to put us
in real danger. Since the pre-Industrial Revolution concentration of
carbon in the atmosphere was roughly 275 parts per million, scientists
and policymakers focused on what would happen if that number doubled –
550 was a crude and mythical red line, but politicians and economists
set about trying to see if we could stop short of that point. The
answer was: not easily, but it could be done.

In the past five years, though, scientists began to worry that the
planet was reacting more quickly than they had expected to the
relatively small temperature increases we've already seen. The rapid
melt of most glacial systems, for instance, convinced many that 450
parts per million was a more prudent target. That's what the European
Union and many of the big environmental groups have been proposing in
recent years, and the economic modeling makes clear that achieving it
is still possible, though the chances diminish with every new
coal-fired power plant.

But the data just keep getting worse. The news this fall that Arctic
sea ice was melting at an off-the-charts pace and data from Greenland
suggesting that its giant ice sheet was starting to slide into the
ocean make even 450 look too high. Consider: We're already at 383 parts
per million, and it's knocking the planet off kilter in substantial
ways. So, what does that mean?

It means, Hansen says, that we've gone too far. “The evidence
indicates we've aimed too high — that the safe upper limit for
atmospheric CO2is no more than 350 ppm,” he said after his
presentation. Hansen has reams of paleo-climatic data to support his
statements (as do other scientists who presented papers at the American
Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this month). The last
time the Earth warmed two or three degrees Celsius — which is what 450
parts per million implies — sea levels rose by tens of meters,
something that would shake the foundations of the human enterprise
should it happen again.

And we're already past 350. Does that mean we're doomed? Not quite.
Not any more than your doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way
too high means the game is over. Much like the way your body will thin
its blood if you give up cheese fries, so the Earth naturally gets rid
of some of its CO2each year. We just need to stop putting more in and,
over time, the number will fall, perhaps fast enough to avert the worst
damage.

That “just,” of course, hides the biggest political and economic
task we've ever faced: weaning ourselves from coal, gas and oil. The
difference between 550 and 350 is that the weaning has to happen now,
and everywhere. No more passing the buck. The gentle measures bandied
about at Bali, themselves way too much for the Bush administration,
don't come close. Hansen called for an immediate ban on new coal-fired
power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of old coal-fired
generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make sure that we leave
tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the medical analogy,
we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we're talking huge
changes in every aspect of your daily life.

Maybe too huge. The problems of global equity alone may be too much
– the Chinese aren't going to stop burning coal unless we give them
some other way to pull people out of poverty. And we simply may have
waited too long.

But at least we're homing in on the right number. Three hundred and fifty is the number every person needs to know.

Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence in environmental studies at
Middlebury College and the author of the forthcoming “Bill McKibben
Reader.”

"Fight Global Warming Now," a DIY handbook by Bill McKibben

Posted on by
Reply


Fight Global Warming Now: A Do It Yourself Handbook

Introduction

It’s easy to join the global warming movement. We know it’s easy
because we all just joined ourselves. None of us has spent long years
as organizers. One of us has spent long years mostly as a writer with a
little activism on the side; the rest of us haven’t spent long years
doing anything except school, because we just got out of college.

But in 2007 we came together to see if we could kick up a fuss about
climate change. That January 10, we launched a Web site,
StepItUp2007.org. We asked people across the country to start
organizing rallies for April 14, to demand that Congress cut carbon
emissions 80 percent by 2050. We had no money, and we had no
organization, so we had no expectations. Our secret hope, which seemed
a little grandiose, was that we might organize a hundred demonstrations
for that Saturday, only three months away.

Instead, our idea took off. The e-mails we sent ended up spreading
virally, in the way that certain ideas sometimes do on the Internet.
People we’d never heard of started signing up on the Web site to host
rallies in places we’d never heard of. The electronic pins stuck on our
online map got thicker by the week—200, 500, 900. By the time the big
day rolled around, there were 1,400 demonstrations in all fifty states,
ranging from tiny to enormous. It was one of the biggest days of
grassroots environmental protest since the first Earth Day in 1970,
covered extensively in the national media and in thousands of local
stories across the country.

Along the way we learned a few lessons and we want to share them in
this book, which is designed to help you plan and carry out your own
ongoing local rallies and campaigns, the way the thousands of
organizers we worked with did on April 14, 2007. We agreed to write it
because, one, we haven’t quite managed to solve global warming yet and,
two, we gained a few hard-earned ideas for how to make the most of two
things: local communities and the Internet.

There is no shortage of fine books on activism, from Saul Alinsky’s
classic Rules for Radicals through much more recent accounts. Many of
them have centered on the very difficult, long-term, and noble task of
community organizing—convincing people with too little power to stand
up for their rights. We’re mostly talking about something a little
simpler here: getting Americans who already care about an issue such as
global warming to actually take effective political action. And we
think certain things about contemporary America offer both
opportunities and pitfalls for organizers. This isn’t the 1960s
anymore; an awful lot has changed, even in the last few years.

We had an excellent database to draw on: all the people who
organized events for Step It Up and then sent us pictures and reports.
We interviewed and surveyed a great many of these organizers to learn
what worked and what didn’t, and this book is as much their work as
ours. (That’s one reason why any proceeds we receive from sales of the
book will go back into the climate change movement.) We also drew on
our work organizing the biggest climate change protest march to date,
in the summer of 2006, as well as various campus campaigns we’ve been
involved in. We wrote this book as if you were getting ready to
organize a rally in your community and want practical help thinking it
through and pulling it off. For “rally,” you can substitute a lot of
other ideas—teach-ins, petition drives, phone-banking,
voter-registration drives. Any kind of action or campaign, we think,
can benefit from at least some of these tips.

We also think that our experiences offer insights for those working
in other social change movements beyond the environment. We’ll be
illustrating our points with examples from our experience, but you’ll
be able to see pretty easily how they might fit other causes. We’ll
provide detailed, nuts-and-bolts advice, but we’re grouping most of our
thoughts more thematically, because we’ve found these organizing
principles to be powerful.

• Make it credible. You need to know enough about your subject to
argue convincingly, but you certainly don’t need to know everything,
and you shouldn’t be intimidated by the fact that you’re not an expert.

• Make it snappy. Today, it’s easier to organize ad hoc actions on
short notice (thanks mostly to the Internet) and harder to get people
to join organizations, come to endless meetings, and so forth (thanks
to longer work days, commutes, and the like). So we describe the
benefits of short-term campaigning for making your point.

• Make it collaborative. In an age when our leaders are often
hopelessly split along partisan lines, it’s actually quite possible,
and quite necessary, to reach out to diverse kinds of people to make a
stand against something as all-encompassing as global warming. We think
sharing an action instead of owning it is key.

• Make it meaningful. People are eager for the chance to do
something that shows their real commitment—say, walk for a day (or even
a week). In a religious nation, many are eager for the chance to put
faith to public use and to take a stand in the places that matter most
to them. Moral seriousness makes an important impression.

• Make it creative (and fun!). Along with earnestness, we have found
that the best actions are fun to do and fun for others to consider. The
environmental movement hasn’t been much of a singing movement for
years; art has played too small a role. We describe some ways to
involve everyone, from actors to athletes.

• Make it wired. Activism can’t live solely on the Web—virtual
petitions and the like aren’t that powerful. We do think, however, that
the Internet has become the crucial tool for building momentum behind
the kind of actions that can fight global warming, and we think there
are some things to understand as you put it to use.

• Make it seductive (to the media). A successful action doesn’t
require any coverage at all. But it’s easy to amplify the effect of
your hard work if you can get reporters and editors to pay attention.
And that’s relatively easy to do if you understand how they think.

• Make it last. Ad hoc organizing can lead to future actions, and
the nature of working together in the short term often builds long-term
bonds.

We draw largely on our experience with Step It Up 2007 in this book,
but we’ve worked on other actions, some of them successful and some
not, that have taught us lessons, too. Organizing is extremely
interesting work. (Well, most of the time. Sometimes it’s just filing
for permits and waiting in line at Kinko’s.) It’s as much about human
nature as it is about political strategy, as much about the small
issues of how we relate to one another as it is about the big issues of
the day.

In his book Blessed Unrest, our friend Paul Hawken said that the
movement that is rising to stop global warming and many other planetary
inequities will be the largest our planet has ever seen. We want to
give you the tools to ensure he’s right. Only three years ago, global
warming was off the radar screen for many Americans. Today, it is in
the national spotlight and a diverse network of groups is rising to the
challenge of stopping it. Hundreds of colleges and universities are
working to become carbon neutral, reducing emissions from campuses to
zero. Community organizers in Oakland, New Orleans, Detroit, and
elsewhere are taking on polluters and fighting for environmental
justice. In Appalachia, rural communities are banding together to fight
mountaintop removal, a heartbreaking new method for mining coal from
that region. People of faith are organizing their churches, synagogues,
and mosques, declaring global warming as the moral crisis of our time.
Traditional businesses are greening up, while entrepreneurs are
building a clean-energy alternative economy that has the potential to
create thousands of new jobs. And this is just the beginning.

Despite the array of groups and organizations working on global
warming, we are still missing a key element: the movement. Along with
the hard work of not-for-profit lobbyists, environmental lawyers, green
economists, sustainability-minded engineers, and forward-thinking
entrepreneurs, it’s going to take the inspired political involvement of
millions of Americans to get our country on track to solving this
problem. Linked up by the Internet and a common vision, we can start to
make change from the local level to the national and global. We hope
this book will give you the skills and inspiration you need to jump
into this growing movement. It’s hard work, but—take it from us—it can
be a lot of fun, too.

In 1968, observing the state of civil rights in America, Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. said, “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that
tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”
Today, we are feeling that fierce urgency again for two reasons. The
first is that scientists are telling us that we are running out of time
even faster than we thought. If we don’t act within the next few years,
we won’t be able to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The
second reason is a more hopeful one. Recent political changes in
Washington DC and around the country have finally created an
opportunity for genuine political action on global warming. There is no
guarantee that this situation will last. If you’ve been a little
paralyzed by the sheer size and horror of global warming, now is the
time to start moving forward, fast.

Return to main book page for Fight Global Warming Now

Many Biofuels Have More Climate Impact Than Oil

Posted on by
Reply

Many Biofuels Have More Climate Impact Than Oil


CHINA: September 28, 2007


BEIJING – Most crops grown in the United States and Europe to make
“green” transport fuels actually speed up global warming because of
industrial farming methods, says a report by Nobel prize winning
chemist Paul J. Crutzen.

The findings could spell particular concern for alternative fuels
derived from rapeseed, used in Europe, which the study concluded could
produce up to 70 percent more planet-warming greenhouse gases than
conventional diesel.


The study suggested scientists and farmers focus on crops which
required less intensive farming methods to produce better benefits for
the environment.


Biofuels are derived from plants which absorb the planet-warming
greenhouse gas carbon dioxide as they grow, and so are meant as a
climate-friendly alternative to fossil fuels.


But the new study shows that some biofuels actually release more
greenhouse gases than they save, because of the fertiliser used in
modern farming practices.


The problem greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, is more famous as the
dentists' anaesthetic “laughing gas,” and is about 300 times more
insulating than the commonest man-made greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.


“The nitrous oxide emission on its own can cancel out the overall
benefit,” co-author Professor Keith Smith told Reuters in a phone
interview.


The results, published in “Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
Discussions,” were based on the finding that fertiliser use on farms
was responsible for three to five times more such greenhouse gas
emissions than previously thought.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/11191/2007/acpd-7-11191-2007.pdf


They cast further doubts on the credibility of biofuels as a climate
cure, following the revelation of other unintended side effects such as
rainforest clearance and raised food prices, from competition with
forests and food for land. Brazil and the United States produce most of
the world's bioethanol, as a substitute for gasoline, while the
European Union is the main supplier of biodiesel.


“FUTILE EXERCISE”


Using biodiesel derived from rapeseed would produce between 1 and 1.7
times more greenhouse gas than using conventional diesel, the study
estimated.


Biofuels derived from sugar cane, as in Brazil, fared better, producing
between 0.5 and 0.9 times as much greenhouse gases as gasoline, it
found.


Maize is the main biofuels feedstock used in the United States, and
produced between 0.9 and 1.5 times the global warming effect of
conventional gasoline, it said.

“As it's used at the moment, bioethanol from maize seems to be a pretty futile exercise,” Smith said.


The study did not account for the extra global warming effect of
burning fossil fuels in biofuel manufacture, or for the planet-cooling
effect of using biofuel by-products as a substitute for coal in
electricity generation.


“Even if somebody decides that our numbers are too big … if you add
together the undoubted amount of nitrous oxide that is formed, plus the
fossil fuel usage, with most of the biofuels of today you are not going
to get any benefit,” Smith said.


However, the study did not condemn all biofuels, suggesting that
scientists and farmers should focus on crops needing little fertiliser,
and harvesting methods that were not energy intensive.

“In future if you use low nitrogen demanding crops, and low impact agriculture, then we could get a benefit,” Smith said.


The study singled out grasses and woody coppice species — like willows
and poplars — as crops with potentially more favourable impacts on the
climate. (Additional reporting by Nigel Hunt in London)


Story by Emma Graham-Harrison


REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/44555/story.htm

Climate Change, Courage & Celebration, by Frances Moore Lappe

Posted on by
Reply


Winter 2008: Liberate Your Space
Commentary: Climate Change, Courage & Celebration
by Frances Moore Lappé 		Print this articleEmail this article to a friend

AddThis Social Bookmark Button
Frances Moore Lappe

I’d
been preparing for a speech by devouring literature about the global
environmental catastrophe—50 species disappearing daily and ice caps
melting way faster than experts had predicted.

The
messages were tough: Hey, you Americans, the party’s over. Be more
responsible and less greedy. Give up your toys and wake up to the
disaster happening around us. “Power down” and stop trying to get your
status from acquisition. Remember, you’ve had it easy compared to the
rest of the world.

Inside I’d felt tight, frightened, and guilty.

Then
I got a call from Helen Whybrow, host of the Mad River Valley, Vermont,
event at which I’d been preparing to speak. All she really wanted was
reassurance that I understood the nature of the event. “Each fall our Center for Whole Communities puts on a Harvest and Courage Celebration,” she explained.

That
was it. All it took were these few words, and my body eased and heart
lifted. In my mind’s eye, I could already see hundreds of Vermonters
(among whom I will always count myself, having been one during the
’90s) filling a huge barn to share steaming bowls of soup, homemade
bread, and pies. Together, we’d dig deep for answers to our global
crises and take strength in our common search.

I’ve
spent much of my life focused on learning that, in regard to world
hunger, fear and guilt don’t truly motivate systemic change. Sometimes
they have the exact opposite effect. Telling people “no” can intensify
our craving, our grasping for even more before it’s all gone.

Yet
many impassioned, well-intentioned environmentalists believe that now
we must sound the shrillest possible alarm, for Americans are
asleep—unaware of the now near certainty that unless we cut carbon
emissions by 80 percent by 2050 or earlier, the consequences of
climatic disruption will be catastrophic.

But
what if many of our messages are themselves trapped in mechanistic and
moralistic thinking that helped get us into this mess in the first
place? And what if, to make this historic turn seem possible—even
compelling—we changed the way we talk and think about it?

Instead
of scolding people for being wasteful, we encourage ourselves and
others to shed a belief system that denies us power and happiness, and
keeps us on a treadmill wasting the Earth’s plenty. In that inefficient
system, only 6 percent of the material extracted and processed actually
ends up in products we use. Rather than “power down” we can offer ways
to “align with the Earth’s answers.” After all, the sun provides daily
doses of energy 15,000 times what we currently use from fossil sources.
The message might also shift from “simplify” to enrich and diversify as
we make new connections in our heads and in our communities, as we
learn new skills and ways of being. The challenge becomes less about
restriction and more about trusting our common sense and curiosity.

For
its event, the Center for Whole Communities links “harvest” with
“courage” with “celebration.” For me, the three words capture it all:
We can harvest the abundance that is our home if we have the courage to
break away from the dominant culture of waste and destruction and to
walk with our fear of the unknown and of being different. These natural
fears are the dark side of our beautifully social nature; but we can
tame our fear of separation as we make new connections in communities
of common purpose—instead of common purchases. Then we can celebrate.
For—who knows—we may just be able to make this historic turn.

Frances Moore Lappé is a YES! contributing editor and author of many books, most recently Getting a Grip.