Shirin Wertime has a must-read article at Culture Change that poses the question: what will happen to our food system as fossil fuels become increasingly scarce and expensive? The following is my summary of some of the highlights.

Today’s agri-food systems are almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel energy for everything from food production to transportation to food preparation and storage. The structure of agriculture production, aided and abetted by government policies, has spurred the expansion of farm specialization and consolidation, monocultures, the delocalization of agricultural production, and the adoption of industrial farming practices. The increase in globalized food production, which has come at the expense of local production, is sustainable only as long as cheap energy supplies can subsidize the transportation of goods across long distances. It will take deep-rooted structural and institutional changes as well as lifestyle changes on the part of individuals, their governments, and societies to transition to a more sustainable, non-petroleum based food system which oil depletion and rising costs will inexorably force on us.

Farming itself has become the least profitable and least energy intensive segment of the entire economy of agriculture. Only one-fifth of the energy that goes into our mouths is actually used for growing food. The rest goes to transport, processing, packaging, marketing, and food preparation and storage. Farmers end up with only 10% of the total food dollar, while 25% pays for farm inputs and 65% goes for transportation, processing and marketing. A century ago, farmers ended up with closer to 40% of the food dollar and most farm inputs were produced by the farmers themselves by using draft animal power, storing seeds, and using animal manure for fertilizer.

As oil declines, industrial agriculture in its current form will become impossible. It will prove increasingly difficult to feed the world with diminishing fertile land and water resources. The current structure of power relations and resource control in the United States prevents the widespread move away from fossil fuel based agriculture and transition to localized, sustainable agriculture. Without a change in the status quo, small local and sustainable producers cannot compete against fossil fuel subsidized agribusiness. But the reality is that the present agricultural system cannot be maintained for much longer. Decreasing oil production and rising oil prices will effectively bankrupt the American agri-food system. Without petroleum and all of its benefits, there will be little choice but to revert to a system of local, organic production and consumption.

Peak oil will turn our entire world upside down. There will be a return to localized, small-scale photosynthesis-based, appropriate-tech agricultural production and an end to the domination of economic and power structures that place profit above all else.

Now, I can buy all of this except the last part of the last sentence. I’ll believe in the end of avarice only when I see it.

A new study by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program finds that the water melting from Greenland’s ice sheet has increased by 30% over the last decade.

The study estimates that, as a result of the melting, sea levels will rise by 0.5 to 1.5 meters by 2100, threatening coastal cities and flooding island nations. That amount of sea level rise is double that estimated by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. The IPCC estimate did not incorporate sea level rise due to the melting of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets.

Lead author Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen said in a press release:

Greenland’s Ice Sheet is the single largest body of freshwater ice in the northern hemisphere. It contains around 3 million km of ice and, if it were to melt completely, this would cause global sea level to rise by roughly 7 meters . . . . Already now we are seeing how the areas experiencing surface melt are expanding northwards and that the periods of melt in southern Greenland are getting longer. The development in the last decade has taken scientists by surprise and it is still uncertain how the ice will react to future climate change.

The Summary – The Greenland Ice Sheet in a Changing Climate: Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic (SWIPA) 2009 is available at the AMAP website, as is the full Science Report.

Another new study published in the journal Nature adds further support to the AMAP results. The research team reconstructed the sea levels in the last interglacial period, around 125,000 years ago, at which time polar temperatures were around 3-5C warmer and equatorial sea-surface temperatures were around 2.5-3.5C warmer than today. The results showed that sea levels around the world during the last interglacial were between 6.6m and 9m higher than today, which implies significant melting of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets.

Even as the AMAP study is being released in Copenhagen, the climate talks, with less than two days to go, are blowing up. Even though the targets on the table are so weak and full of loopholes as to make the proposals meaningless, negotiators have given up on a replacement for Kyoto. The only remaining hope is that they will be able to come to a “politically binding” agreement to serve as a foundation for a legally binding agreement to be negotiated later.

The world’s poorer countries are blaming the world’s rich countries – and capitalism itself – for destroying the world, while rich countries are refusing to change targets that clearly fall short of what’s needed.

George Monbiot at The Guardian writes that the talks at Copenhagen are bigger than climate change – it’s a battle to redefine humanity.

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.

And, as the words and stance of the world’s poorer nations show, it’s about fairness. Global warming cannot be addressed without addressing the issue of fairness. Sharon Astyk writes that people will even act against their best interests – even if it means their own destruction – if they perceive they are being treated unfairly:

I think it enormously unlikely that we will respond to climate change as we must. But if we do, it will only happen if people see themselves as part of a story in which the distribution of discomfort and trouble is done fairly, and they are ensured a fair share. Fairness may not be logical, but it is essential.

The “cult of economics” that dominates our political ideology assumes that people always always rational, always act for their own gains, that markets are always efficient, that economics doesn’t have anything to say about equity or fairness – and that nothing is wrong with any of this, ever.

The situation we find ourselves in demands unselfish behavior and acts, toward a common good; which in turn require redefining prosperity and a wholesale reworking of the globe’s economic system, including its its goals and its metrics.

It should be obvious to everybody that an economic system that results in wrecking Earth’s climate and destroying Earth’s ecosystems – squandering humankind’s “natural capital” in pursuit of growth – has failed to produce prosperity. We desperately need another model.

David Korten, speaking at the recent Economics of Peace Conference in Sonoma, California, says our economic system has not only failed – it’s evil, and deserves to die:

So what is real wealth? We might say it is anything that has a real intrinsic value: land, labor, knowledge, food, education.

Most valuable of all are those forms of wealth that are beyond price: Love, a healthy, happy child, a job that provides a sense of self-worth and contribution, membership in a strong caring community, a healthy vibrant natural environment, peace—none of which find any place on Wall Street balance sheets or in our calculations of GDP.

Pull back the curtain, as the financial crash has done, and the truth is revealed that Wall Street acquires its power by destroying real living wealth to create phantom financial wealth. Wall Street is more than immoral, it is an institutional manifestation of evil.

The full text of Korten’s speech was published in Yes Magazine. A one-page version is not available, so you have to click through five pages (most annoying!). The excerpt quoted about is found on the second page.

Korten argues that our economic and political systems no longer work for or protect the public interest:

From the late 70s onward, Wall Street market fundamentalists mobilized to roll back the rules to unleash a consolidation of corporate power and de-link it from public accountability. Their right-wing social-engineering experiment allowed Wall Street to colonize the Main Street economy, decimated the middle class, undermined democracy and sense of community, reduced our national happiness index, and brought financial, social, and environmental devastation wherever it has reached.

Korten pleads for an economic system based on three foundational principles: ecological balance, shared prosperity, and living democracy; and for a shift from a “production-oriented” measurement system to one focused on the well-being of current and future generations.

Bring down Wall Street? Fat chance. But then again, who could have imagined that the Soviet Union would collapse and disappear, virtually overnight?

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression.

A recently updated paper by U. C. Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez covers data through 2007 and shows a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes.

In a brief column titled “Even more gilded” Paul Krugman calls the latest inequality numbers “truly amazing.”

Saez’s paper is available on the web: Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States.  This is the concluding passage:

The labor market has been creating much more inequality over the last thirty years, with the very top earners capturing a large fraction of macroeconomic productivity gains. A number of factors may help explain this increase in inequality, not only underlying technological changes but also the retreat of institutions developed during the New Deal and World War II – such as progressive tax policies, powerful unions, corporate provision of health and retirement benefits, and changing social norms regarding pay inequality. We need to decide as a society whether this increase in income inequality is efficient and acceptable and, if not, what mix of institutional reforms should be developed to counter it.

A stunning portion of growth has been captured by the very rich over the past 15 years, regardless of which party occupied the presidency or held sway in Congress. Between half and two thirds has gone to the top 1% .

The New York Times reports that in Franklin County in arid eastern Washington, Easterday Ranches Inc. is proposing to build a feedlot for 30,000 head of cattle that would withdraw about 1 million gallons a day from the ancient Grande Ronde Aquifer. The region is among the driest in the country, averaging only about 7 inches of rainfall a year. The proposal has touched off a wave of concern among local farmers, who worry that their wells could dry up.

The groundwater problems in eastern Washington are among the most serious in the country. In Franklin County, the aquifer is receding about a foot a year, while groundwater levels in neighboring Whitman County are declining at an even faster rate of 1.5 feet per year. A state-funded study released in January found that the deep aquifer in eastern Washington – especially in Franklin, Adams, Grant and Lincoln counties – is in serious trouble because a significant percentage of the area’s wells are tapping into the deepest part of the aquifer, where the water is 10,000 years old and is not recharged by surface water. The study found that some deep wells could recede so much that landowners would not be able to access groundwater.

A 1945 state law exempts withdrawals to 5,000 gallons a day from permit requirements. A 2005 interpretation of the law by the state’s attorney general concluded that groundwater withdrawals for “stock watering purposes” were not subject to any restrictions. Among those entitled to virtually unlimited water supplies, according to the interpretation, were large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, like the proposed Easterday Ranches feedlot. Several bills in the Washington Legislature this year would have capped livestock water-use to 5,000 gallons a day, but all died under intense lobbying from dairy and agricultural interests.

Reporter Scott Streater says local and state leaders appear ready to approve the Easterday feedlot. The Franklin County Water Conservancy Board has approved a water-rights transfer between Easterday and a nearby farmer – a critical component of the project. The Department of Ecology has final decision making authority over the project, and officials have indicated they plan to approve the feedlot water withdrawals. Many local leaders also support the Easterday development, touting the 40 jobs it will provide, the projected $60 million a year in tax revenue, and the $20 million a year in corn alfalfa and other feed that will be purchased from local farmers.

It’s a sad story, one that we’ve seen before in many permutations. The greedy rush in and are encouraged and enabled to exploit a common resource for their own and their enablers’ short-term benefit – leaving those who are content with enough, the innocent but unlucky, future generations, and Earth herself to bear the costs.

In effect, underdeveloped countries such as Bolivia are paying dearly for the massive energy consumption of the United States and the industrialized world. The so-called “carbon footprint” of the average Bolivian peasant is negligible, yet Bolivia’s poor are not only among the first to feel the harsh effects of climate change, but also are sorely lacking the resources to adapt to it.

That’s the indictment Carolyn Kormann lays out in her article at Environment 360, Retreat of Andean Glaciers Foretells Global Water Woes.

The great Andean ice caps are swiftly vanishing. Global warming will cause many of the Andes’ tropical glaciers to disappear within 20 years, not only threatening the water supplies of 77 million people in the region, but also reducing hydropower production, which accounts for roughly half of the electricity generated in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.

Agriculture in the region relies on irrigation during the annual five-month dry season. Water is stored in the Andean glaciers, which melt throughout the year and so provide water throughout the year. No glaciers, no storage, no water for farmers or city dwellers.

On the opposite side of the world, two billion people rely on meltwater from the Himalayas. Himalayan glaciers are the main source of water for five major river systems – the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, and the Yellow – whose flow irrigates and supplies drinking water to China, India, and Pakistan. Himalayan glaciers have lost 21% of their glacial mass since 1962. The Himalayas’ smaller glaciers will be gone by 2035 and many large ones will disappear by century’s end.

Stormy at Angry Bear points out that bonuses are a distraction.  The real issues are how wealth is distributed in this society and what is and is not valuable.

The post includes a chart showing the history of the tax rates on the wealthiest Americans.

I recently wrote a post arguing that we should stop obsessing about obscene compensation (the outrageous AIG bonuses, for example) and instead do something about the outrageous disparity in wealth in the U.S. - by returning to the tax scheme we had during the “socialist,” Republican, Eisenhower administration. That article included a table showing top marginal tax rates. Stormy’s chart shows it much better

The city of Belo, Brazil eliminated hunger while at the same time reinvigorating the local farm economy.

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, writes at Yes! Magazine that Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11% of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20% of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship and created a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives, to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system.

The city offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell their produce. Local farmers’ profits grew, while at the same time farm income in the country as a whole was dropping by almost half – and poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city offers people the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets (from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices”). 34 ABC markets now offer customers the opportunity to buy about twenty core, healthy items at a price set by the city, about two-thirds of the market price. Everything else the market owners can sell at the market price.

Another innovation involves three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

Hello, local progressive city mayors and city council people? How about something similar here?

This piece by Gristmill’s Tom Philpott, reporting on a presentation by Vandana Shiva at an international “slow food” conference in Terra Madre, Italy, shouldn’t be missed.

Shiva’s message was that the “solutions” to global warming put forth so far are nothing but desperate attempts to rejigger industrial economies, to make them “carbon-free.”

Philpott reports:

“She said climate treaties and discussions take place in the stratosphere – in congressional committees, exclusive global confabs peopled by CEOs of vast business empires, etc. She said these people operate under an industrial paradigm, and the solutions they concoct to climate change – cap-and-trade mechanisms, GMO seeds, etc. – mimic and don’t challenge that paradigm. But in the end, these attempts get nowhere. Real reform, Shiva insisted, will happen when discussions move from the stratosphere to the soil, and when we find new, non-industrial ways of thinking.”

Philpott contrasts Shiva’s position with that of our most “progressive” thinkers:

“Where Gore dreams of a “low-carbon” or even “carbon-free” world, Shiva pines for a “carbon-rich” future — one in which agriculture systematically builds organic matter into the soil, capturing it from the atmosphere.”

Shiva pointed out that small-scale agriculture is actually more productive than industrial agriculture.

“Shiva forcefully made the point that mixed-crop agriculture that relies on compost is actually many times more productive on a per-acre basis than industrial monoculture. She also noted that locally adapted agriculture is not a fixed, static thing – it evolves and responds to changes in the land and climate.”

Philpott adds that only by blithely ignoring agriculture’s role in climate change can people present abominable ideas like government-mandated ethanol and biodiesel as “solutions” to the climate crisis.

The industrial paradigm is the cause of both our energy and climate problems. More of the same cannot be the solution.

Cars are not a form of wealth – they’re depreciating assets we use to fulfill a function: transportation.  They’re an expense that detracts from wealth that could otherwise be used for things of lasting value and for the pleasures of life. And money spent on transportation is not a measure of how wealthy we are. Rather, transportation expenses are a budget item.  The bigger that item, the less left over for other things. All else being equal, the more we spend on cars and transportation the poorer we are.

And we spend a lot of money on cars.  For example, households in Portland-Salem spend more on transportation than on any other category except shelter – and almost all of that is on cars.

And almost all of the money we spend on transportation goes to supporting our cars.

According to these figures, fuel accounts for only about 15% of our total expenditures on our cars – yet people scream and complain about high gas prices. But it appears that these numbers were compiled in 2006 – and gas prices have increased since then.  In 2006, U.S. gas prices averaged about $2.65 a gallon. With gas at $4.00 a gallon, fuel costs would be about 50% higher. Still, with gas at $4.00 a gallon fuel costs would account for only about 21% of total cost of owning and operating a motor vehicle. Then again, Bloomberg reports that in May and June Americans spent more on gasoline than vehicles and parts for the first time in 26 years as auto sales collapsed and fuel prices soared.

Question: why don’t the other costs of cars – high prices, high insurance costs, and high repair & maintenance charges – raise the same kind of outrage and demand for government intervention as do fuel costs? Are we somehow entitled to cheap gas, while other expenses are just the inevitable and unavoidable results of market forces at work?

Just think how rich we would feel if we didn’t have to devote such a large chunk of our income to supporting our cars.

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