ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

We’re now experiencing the extreme effects of economic bad “weather” in the wake of the near collapse of the global financial system. Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch asks, what if we wake up after a “lost decade” only to meet an environmental crisis involving extreme weather? What he doesn’t ask is just as important: what if we wake up to find a world desperately short of energy, especially oil?

Engelhardt points out that nobody seems to be noticing the extreme and even record-breaking droughts that are presently affecting large and disparate parts of world:

• Southeastern Australia has been burning up, its already dry climate growing ever hotter. Its wheat crops have been hurt in recent years by continued drought.
• Central China is experiencing the worst drought in half a century. Temperatures have been unseasonably high and rainfall, in some areas, 80% below normal; more than half the country’s provinces have been affected by drought, leaving millions of Chinese and their livestock without adequate access to water. In the region which raises 95% of the country’s winter wheat, crop production has already been impaired and is in further danger without imminent rain.
• Iraq is another country in severe drought. The lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the “fertile crescent,” are the homeland of agriculture, not to speak of human civilization.
• Serious drought conditions extend across the Middle East, threatening to exacerbate local conflicts from Cyprus and Lebanon to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel.
• In Latin America, Argentina is experiencing the most intense, prolonged and expensive drought in the past 50 years. Soybeans and corn crops are withering away, and cattle are dying.
• Much of the state of Texas is now gripped by drought, and parts of it by the worst drought in almost a century. Winter wheat crops have failed. Ponds have dried up. Cattle herds may be slaughtered come summer.
• The American southwest could fall into “a possibly permanent state of drought.” A December 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report warns: “In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.”
• Northern California – which produces 50% of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables and a majority of [U.S.] salad, strawberries and premium wine grapes, is in the third year of an already monumental drought.  Water deliveries to farms have been cut by up to 85%. New Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has warned that “California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century.”
• East Africa and the Horn of Africa are experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged drought, and crop failures.

The U.N. concurs that global warming is already contributing to rising food prices and food shortages. A new Rapid Response Assessment released by the U.N. Environment Program reports grain production has leveled off and fisheries are declining. It warns global food production could fall 25% short of demand by 2050 due to the combined impacts of climate change, land degradation, cropland losses, water scarcity, and species infestation.  The report is seeing through rose-colored glasses, as it projects food production will need to increase by 50% by 2050. It gives no clue how this feat is to be accomplished, only by unspecified “new ways to increase food production.”  Good luck with that.Scientists agree that climate change will accelerate throughout this century – and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. At best, we can slow down the rate of increase and eventually (hopefully) avoid passing an irreversible “tipping point.” Extreme weather of every sort – which has already arrived – will become ever more the planetary norm.

And we’re going to wake up in 2010, or maybe 2012, after a few years of inexorable depletion and cutbacks of investment in additional capacity, to find that we don’t have enough oil to maintain life as we know it, dependent on auto and truck transportation. Maybe we’ll find ourselves short of electricity generating capacity, as well.

The world as we have known it has already changed. Any economic recovery will find us in an unfamiliar and increasingly unfriendly new world.