One- to two-thirds of Earth’s permafrost will disappear by 2200, unleashing vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere.

That’s the frightening conclusion of a new study by NOAA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) published in the journal Tellus, titled Amount and timing of permafrost carbon release in response to climate warming.

NSIDC scientist Kevin Schaefer comments in the NSIDC press release:

The amount of carbon released is equivalent to half the amount of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age. That is a lot of carbon.

If we want to hit a target carbon concentration, then we have to reduce fossil fuel emissions that much lower than previously calculated to account for this additional carbon from the permafrost. Otherwise we will end up with a warmer Earth than we want.

The study’s authors estimate an extra 190 plus or minus 64 gigatons of carbon will enter the atmosphere by 2200—about one-fifth the total amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere. But, they warn, their estimates are certainly too conservative, in part because the study doesn’t incorporate the feedback from permafrost carbon release into its model.

The study itself is behind a paywall – but here’s the abstract:

The thaw and release of carbon currently frozen in permafrost will increase atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and amplify surface warming to initiate a positive permafrost carbon feedback (PCF) on climate. We use surface weather from three global climate models based on the moderate warming, A1B Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenario and the SiBCASA land surface model to estimate the strength and timing of the PCF and associated uncertainty. By 2200, we predict a 29–59% decrease in permafrost area and a 53–97 cm increase in active layer thickness. By 2200, the PCF strength in terms of cumulative permafrost carbon flux to the atmosphere is 190 ± 64 Gt C. This estimate may be low because it does not account for amplified surface warming due to the PCF itself and excludes some discontinuous permafrost regions where SiBCASA did not simulate permafrost. We predict that the PCF will change the arctic from a carbon sink to a source after the mid-2020s and is strong enough to cancel 42–88% of the total global land sink. The thaw and decay of permafrost carbon is irreversible and accounting for the PCF will require larger reductions in fossil fuel emissions to reach a target atmospheric CO₂ concentration.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress explains one reason why the study’s estimate is too conservative:

The permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere, much of which would be released as methane.  Methane is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!  One of the most conservative assumptions the study made, the lead author Dr. Kevin Schaefer confirmed in an email, is that all of the carbon would be released as CO2 and none as methane.

Despite the immanent danger to human life and global systems posed by global warming, humans continue their frantic quest for ever more fossil fuels to burn: in South America and West Africa, in the Arctic which is becoming newly accessible as it thaws, from tar sands in Canada, from shales in the U.S. and the Middle East. The search for fossil fuels goes on, despite the immediate environmental devastation wrought by mountaintop removal, by the strip mining of tar sands, by the fracking which despoils aquifers – and despite the ultimate and irreparable ecological devastation that will result from destabilizing Earth’s climate.

We think heroin is addictive? The war on drugs begs to be replaced by a war on fossil fuels.

A post by Ugo Bardi at The Oil Drum: Europe looks at the water consumption of energy technologies.

Notice how enormously water intensive biofuels are – as Bardi says, “another drawback for a technology which has also a low EROEI, needs large areas, and competes for land with food production.”

The world’s water resources are already stretched thin – and climate change will make things worse. Rivers from China’s Yellow to America’s Colorado no longer can be relied on to even reach the sea. Glaciers are already melting, from the Himalayas to the Andes.  No glaciers, no storage, no water. Climate change threatens desertification around the globe, from the American West to Australia, northern China and Tibet, the Mediterranean basin including southern Europe. From Saudi Arabia to the American West, we’re drawing from and exhausting “fossil water” from ancient aquifers.

Bardi rightly points out that the world’s water predicament is yet another indication that we’re bumping up against ecological limits to growth:

Water is, of course, a renewable resource but a lot of the water used today is “fossil” water. It comes from deep aquifers which can be drained empty as it has happened, for instance in Saudi Arabia. In addition, climate change may further reduce the water supply in many areas of the world. How much these factors will affect energy generation worldwide in the near future is difficult to say at present, but surely the problem shouldn’t be underestimated. The EROWI problem, in the end, is just an indication that we are hitting yet another limit of our finite environment.

Our political and economic systems require that resource issues such as peak oil or water shortages be approached as problems to be solved by finding new supplies or sources – by yet more growth. But growth is itself the underlying problem. As Daniel Allen says in a post at The Energy Bulletin, limits to growth cannot be overcome by yet more growth.

Resource depletion is a predicament requiring adaptation to an entirely new low-consumption paradigm, rather than a problem to be solved with technological or social solutions.

Allen urges Americans to “start the conversation about what a lower-consumption, resource-poor society would look like, and begin the appropriate preparations.”

The world needs to begin that conversation, like right now. In ancient Greek thought, transgressions of limits inevitably in punishment by the gods. When it comes to transgressing limits, climate change would be Gaia’s ultimate penalty. ]]> http://www.goal1.org/archives/2009/11/05/water-energy-and-limits-to-growth/feed/ 0 http://www.goal1.org/archives/2009/10/26/no-solution-to-our-agricultural-predicament/ http://www.goal1.org/archives/2009/10/26/no-solution-to-our-agricultural-predicament/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:48:54 +0000 Jim Just http://www.goal1.org/?p=3658

Compared to any other human activity, land use and agriculture are the greatest emitters of greenhouse gasses.

You heard that right. More than the emissions from all the world’s passenger cars, trucks, trains and planes, or the emissions from all electricity generation or manufacturing. Of the three most important man-made greenhouse gasses — carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation, methane emissions from animals and rice fields, and nitrous oxide emissions from heavily fertilized fields  — account for 30% of the total.

Jonathan Foley points out at Yale Environment 360 that since the last ice age, nothing has been more disruptive to the planet’s ecosystems than agriculture. Continued population growth is pushing global agricultural systems to their very limits. He asks:

Already, we have cleared or converted more than 35 percent of the earth’s ice-free land surface for agriculture, whether for croplands, pastures or rangelands. . . What will happen to our remaining ecosystems, including tropical rainforests, if we need to double or triple world agricultural production, while simultaneously coping with climate change?

We’re already exploiting Earth’s water resources in an unsustainable manner, drawing on fossil aquifers and draining rivers before they reach the sea. The use of industrial fertilizers and other chemicals has more than doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus compounds in the environment and fundamentally upset the chemistry of the entire planet. How can Earth cope with future demands from increasing population and agricultural consumption?

Unfortunately, Foley’s answer is pretty feeble. First, acknowledge we have a problem. Then, “find ways to simultaneously increase production of our agricultural systems while greatly reducing their environmental impacts” – what he calls a “greener agricultural revolution.”

What Foley can’t admit is, we don’t have a “problem” that can be solved with yet another technofix. We’re in a predicament, from which there’s no solution, no easy way out. The best we can hope for is to face our predicament squarely, with as much courage and grace as we can muster.

An article in the UK Timesonline reports that cod are doomed to disappear from the North Sea:

Cod are doomed to disappear from the North Sea because of climate change and not just as a result of over-fishing, researchers have discovered.

In the past 40 years the average temperature of the North Sea has increased by 1C with catastrophic effects on its delicate eco-systems.

Species of plankton, on which cod larvae feed, have moved away in search of cooler waters. The decline in cod stocks has led to an explosion in the populations of crabs and jellyfish, on which the adult fish feed. The shortage of predators at the top of the food chain has had a knock-on effect on flat fish, such as plaice and sole, whose offspring are eaten by crabs.

I just finished reading Song for the Blue Ocean. Back in 1997, Carl Safina chronicled the horrifying demise of the world’s fisheries. How much worse have things gotten since then? How much worse will they get?

John Michael Greer urges us to face the truth – the future won’t be better than the present:

We are not going to have a future better than the present: not in our lifetimes, and not in those of our grandchildren’s grandchildren. We collectively closed the door on that possibility decades ago, and none of the rapidly narrowing range of choices still open to us now offers any way of changing that.

Greer advises embracing ambivalence and accepting “both the wonder and the immense tragedy of our time.” But life is yin yang, both wonder and tragedy. Always has been, always will be.  It’s not just now.

Guy McPherson takes issue with the notion that our way of life is as great as we think.  He writes at The Energy Bulletin about his trip to a family wedding. He observes that the “living arrangements” we’ve made are far from ideal:

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.

Yes, we’ve done that – and far worse, thoughtlessly exploiting Earth’s resources and despoiling Earth’s ecosystems to the brink of collapse and beyond.

And now we’re reaping what we have sown, in the collapse of fisheries and a looming collapse in agriculture. We eat oil – but Hubbert’s peak is now in our rear-view mirror. Shed no tears for the demise of industrial agriculture. McPherson describes what he saw throughout the Midwest:

The entire region, formerly abundant with a multitude of edible crops, currently is brimming with a single commodity: #2 corn. It’s Roundup-ready, at that, just to throw a bucket of insulting acid into the face of reason. Roundup-resistant weeds are popping up throughout the region as we bring Farmageddon to the heartland and eventually to the world. Most of the corn, which is essentially inedible until it is processed (i.e., pummeled with inordinate quantities of fossil fuels), is watered with the last remaining drops of the Ogallala aquifer, brought to the surface with the same finite fluid used to power our trucks and cars. Verdant fields of ethanol dreams are interrupted occasionally by a field of soybeans; without rotations of legumes, the soil would be so depleted of nitrogen by king corn, it wouldn’t support even the great corn desert. The corn fills our bellies with death-inducing faux sugar. But we willingly trade some of that “food” for fuel because the associated dependence on automobiles allows us to burn off the final inches of life-giving topsoil to promote our culture of death in rapid-transit, individualized death-traps. Who could pass up a deal like that?

Contra Greer, McPherson thinks better days lie ahead.

How could they not? In the near future, we’ll return to a durable set of living arrangements.

Greer points out that McPherson’s dreams of “better days” imply a human population as low as 500 million. That’s quite a crash from today’s population of almost 7 billion.  We can’t control how that crash work itself out. Suffering will not be denied. Still, life is durable.

McPherson’s “better days” are seen in some imagined “future.” Better days are here already, all around us, no matter what the political, economic, or ecological crisis of the moment. They’re here in the chipping of a squirrel, in the deep dark of a new moon, in the mist of a September morning. They’re here in a meal of local free-run turkey, fresh garden tomatoes, and copious quantities of home-grown Pinot Noir shared with dear friends. As long as there are creatures on Earth, life will be wondrous – and tragic.

Our farmer neighbors don’t seem to be interested in the debates about whether we expect the future to be better or worse, whether industrial imperialism can be saved or is worth saving. They simply get about the work of raising the best food they can while struggling to make ends meet and doing as little harm as possible. That’s true revolution.

And everybody can participate. As Wendell Berry says, eating is an agricultural act.

Agricultural acts can be revolutionary.

Want to see why economists live in Fantasyland? Take a look:

This is the latest January 8, 2009 CBO projection of output under current law – that is, without any new stimulus package. Once we get past this little rough patch, we’ll soon be back on the economic growth path within a couple of years and will have made up lost ground by 2014 or so. Business as usual, on into the future.

Obama is offering a $775 billion plan to get the economy back on the growth track sooner rather than later. Noble prize winning economist Paul Krugman argues that that’s not enough – it won’t get us back on the growth track soon enough:

The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job.

In the economists’ world, there are no resource constraints such as the peaking of oil and other fossil fuels, uranium, and some metals and minerals (including copper, platinum, silver, gold, and zinc); the peaking of agricultural production due to peak phosphorus, depleting and eroding soils, desertification, and the exhaustion of aquifers; and the collapse of the world’s fisheries. There are no “sink” restraints such as the ability of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans to absorb carbon dioxide and other wastes.

Dmitry Orlov says economists are no better than astrologers:

To build support for his plans, Mr. Obama must rely on the consensus advice of mainstream American economists. These astrologers to the wealthy, with their fancy astrolabes they call “models,” may be popular during flush times, in spite of the feeble predictive abilities of their “science,” but they start to seem downright foolish and feckless once the economy starts to implode. Still, these pseudo-scientists, with their pseudo-Nobel prizes and their tenured faculty positions, are quite entrenched, and will be difficult to dismiss, because the fiction they spin is so much more cheerful than the physical reality it is designed to obscure.

Orlov is right when he points out what we call the “economy” is no longer connected to anything real; that what is needed is a concerted effort to build a new, vastly different economy, not to squander remaining resources on attempts to resuscitate the current, moribund one.  And as he says,  politicians are beholden to the system that got them into power.

Orlov’s advice seems apt: grow potatoes.

That’s the objective of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project, which aims at the transformation of agriculture in Lane, Linn, Benton, and Lincoln counties at the south end of Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

This bioregion contains roughly 700,000 acres of farmland, approximately 400,000 acres of which is used for cropland. It once produced a wide array of grains, fruits, and vegetables. At times wheat represented almost a third of what was harvested. The region had the agricultural capacity and food system infrastructure to feed itself.

Now, the region is dominated by farms growing fescue and rye grass for the global grass seed market. Less than 20% of its cropland acreage is utilized for food.

The Bean and Grain Project seeks to convert grass seed acreage into plots for organic beans, grains, and edible seeds as a critical first step to reinvigorating the regional food system. Harry MacCormack, co-founder of Oregon Tilth and owner of Sunbow Farm in Corvallis, Oregon, provides the vision and inspiration.

The project aims to rebuild a complete regional food system, growing food first for local markets and then for global markets only if surpluses are available.

The project sees peak oil as a force driving the relocalization of agriculture:

“It is often overlooked, but nearly every aspect of our current food system is based on petroleum and other carbon-based inputs. Soil nitrogen levels are maintained by fertilizers made from hydrocarbon gases. Pests are fought with petroleum-based pesticides. Weeds are eliminated by petroleum-based herbicides. Fields are cultivated and harvested by machinery powered by petroleum-based fuels. Food products are transported by trucks or trains or airplanes powered by petroleum-based fuels. Foods are processed with machines run by electricity generated by fossil fuels. Foods are packages in plastics made from petrochemical products. We cook with fossil fuel derivatives. From field to distributor to store to kitchen cabinet to stove, our entire food system flows upon a stream of petroleum. This system has evolved and grown through a period when petroleum and natural gas were irrationally cheap. That era appears to be over. The cost of a barrel of petroleum has increased ten fold in the last ten years. Oil production has or will soon peak. Hydrocarbon-based agriculture and its global food system is a literal and figurative dinosaur. Freight costs alone ensure that our food systems must change.

“Add the detrimental environmental impacts of industrial farming techniques–aquifer depletion, topsoil loss, petrochemical contamination of the watershed and other biota, toxic residues on or in crops themselves, and it is becoming increasingly clear that changing the way we farm is both sensible and necessary. Creating sustainable regional food systems based as much as possible on organic inputs and as independent as possible of petroleum fuels, should be one of humanity’s highest priorities. That is the exact purpose of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project, rebuilding a regional food system in the Willamette Valley.

Here’s an abridged version of the evidence she compiles. Note she hardly mentions the implosion of the global financial system – only the housing collapse, which is only a symptom of the systemic crisis.

“In early 2008, the world’s food and energy train came off the rails. . .

“It started with biofuels and growing meat consumption rates. They drove the price of staple grains up at astounding rates. . .

“Haiti was an early canary in the hunger coal mine. Desperately poor, by early 2008, tens of thousands of impoverished Haitians were priced entirely out of the market for rice and other staples, and were reduced to eating “cookies” made of nutrient rich mud, vegetable shortening and salt . . .

“After riots over long bread lines threatened to destabilize Egypt, the Egyptian government set the army to baking bread for the hungry. Forty nations either stopped exporting grains or raised tariffs . . . The UN warned that 33 nations were in danger of destabilizing, and the list included major powers including Pakistan, Mexico, North Korea India, Egypt and South Africa. Many of these hold nuclear weapons.

Shortages were a chronic problem in the poor world, but by early spring of 2008, they began to arrive in the rich world – despite Japan’s deep pockets, a shortage of butter and wheat reminded the rich world of its dependence on food import. Many of the supply problems were due to climate change and energy issues . . .

The energy train and the food train were inextricably linked, and indeed directly (as the costs of diesel rose rapidly) and indirectly (rising energy costs created the biofuels boom) drove the food crisis. They were linked in other, complex ways as well – the housing collapse that threatened to plunge Europe and the US into a major depression was in part due to the high costs of commuting from suburban infrastructure. Exurban housing collapsed hardest, while housing closer to cities remained desirable – for a while.

While the food crisis in the poor world made headlines, the energy crisis there went almost unnoticed. More and more poorer nations simply could not afford to import oil and other fossil fuels, and began to slowly but steadily lose the benefits of fossil fuels. Nations suffered shortages of gas, electricity and coal. . .

“Industrial agriculture, described as “the process of turning oil into food” began to struggle to keep yields up to match growing demand. . . Climate change threatened to further reduce yields in already stressed poor nations . . .

“[C]limate change is expected to reduce rice yields by up to 30%, and food production in the already starving Sahel is expected to be reduced by half. GMOs, touted as a solution, have yet to produce even slightly higher yields. Arable land is disappearing under growth, while aquifers are heavily depleted – 30% of the world’s grain production comes from irrigated land that is expected to lose its water supply in the next decades.

Meanwhile the costs of fossil fueled agricultural skyrocketed, with Potash rising by 300% in less than a year . . .

“Meanwhile, the ability of nations to transport food supplies began to be called into question. Early trucker protests were intermittent and largely ineffective, but real predictions of diesel shortages and a shortage of refining capacity made it a real possibility that food might not reach store shelves.

Astyk asks, how does the story end? There is no end, just a continuing unfolding.

Legislators were warned that the increases in average temperature and disruptions to our climate that are already built into our future will have profound and adverse consequences in Oregon. Changing precipitation patterns and timing could reduce water supplies in summer 30-40%. Increased temperature and drought stress threaten our rangelands and forests, leading to the increased probability of wildfires. Changed patterns of seasonal winds along our coast could further disrupt the occurrence and timing of the nutrient upwelling that is essential for the productivity of our fisheries. Higher sea levels and increased wave action will result in increased coastal erosion and flooding.

I noticed the first minor note of disconnect from reality when Stella Coakey, Associate Dean of the OSU College of Agricultural Scientists, reassured legislators that Oregon agriculture could probably adapt to the expected changes in climate – although she joked that we might be growing cabernet sauvignon rather than pinot noir. She did add a caveat – Oregon “production” agriculture could adapt, providing we have the water. Was she in the room when Anne Nolan warned legislators to expect a 30-40% decrease in the availability of surface water for summer irrigation?

I found the most troublesome testimony came not from a scientist, but from Gail Achterman, one on the state’s most experienced and respected public figures. Achterman has a sterling resume. She is Director of the Institute of Natural Resources, is chair of the Oregon Transportation Commission, and is a member of Governor Kulongoski’s Climate Change Integration Group.

Achterman talked about ODOT’s role in Oregon’s climate change mitigation plan. And this is where the hearing began to get disconnected from reality. Achterman summarized Oregon’s four-part climate change strategy for the transportation and land use sector (this strategy is laid out and discussed beginning at p. 43 of the CCIG’s Final Report to the Governor: Framework for Addressing Rapid Climate Change:

• Use of low-carbon fuels
• Use of cleaner and more efficient vehicles
• Reduction in vehicle miles traveled (VMT)
• System management and optimization

So what’s the problem? We’ll examine these “strategies” more closely, one at a time. But keep in mind that Oregon has set a goal of 10% reduction below 1990 levels by 2020, and 75% reduction by 2050. 75% by 2050 isn’t good enough to keep atmospheric CO2 below 450 ppm – to hit that target, we’ll have to achieve 80% reductions globally, which means even greater reductions in the countries most responsible for emissions (including the U.S., which is responsible for about 25% of annual global emissions and 28% of cumulative emissions since 1850 and the beginning of the industrial age.) The report concedes that the strategies don’t get us to the 2020 goal – and contains no clue of how we plan to get to 75% reductions.

And as Jack Barth said to the legislators at Friday’s hearing, James Hansen has recently said that keeping atmospheric CO2 at 450 ppm won’t be good enough to avoid melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, raising sea levels 27 meters and triggering catastrophic climate change. We’ve got to lower atmospheric CO2 levels from today’s 383 ppm to 350 ppm.

So hitting a target of 75% reductions by 2050 isn’t nearly enough.

With that preface, let’s take a close look at Oregon’s “strategies” and end with some comments about our seeming willingness to write off Oregon outside of Metro.

1. Biofuels. Low-carbon fuels in essence means biofuels. The report actually says that “cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel, and compressed biogas are among the lowest WTW [wheel-to-wheel] emissions fuels.” The report notes a couple of objections to biofuels – like increased food prices and adverse public health consequences – but brushes these aside and recommends mandating and subsidizing their use.

The report radically understates the consequences of diverting agriculture from food production to fuel production. We’re already starting to see skyrocketing grain prices and increasing food scarcity around the globe, resulting in spreading political unrest and raising the risk of widespread famine.

We’re also seeing land use changes such as deforestation as land is cleared for biofuels production. In the U.S., more marginal grasslands that have been in conservation programs are being plowed for biofuels production. Such land use changes release enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, carbon that had been tied up in soils and biomass.

Agribusiness-produced biofuels are heavily dependent upon inputs including fossil-fuel based nitrogen fertilizers, increasingly scarce and expensive phosphorus, and, in places such as the western Great Plains, India, and northern China, on depleting aquifers. Agribusiness biofuels production destroys our soils and ruins our fisheries.

The bottom line is this: biofuels worsen global warming while causing starvation and depleting our soils, waters, and fisheries. Yet biofuels are the first pillar of Oregon’s climate mitigation strategy.

2. Cleaner, more efficient vehicles. This strategy is described in the report as a “variety of technologies that reduce emissions by making cars more fuel-efficient or by trapping and sequestering greenhouse gases before they enter the air.”

This strategy is a version of Amery Lovins fantasy of a “hyper-car.” Jim Kunstler describes the fantasy thusly:

“a car that gets such supernaturally great mileage that it will save the human race’s threatened Happy Motoring program from extinction. The hyper-car program, which RMI still trumpets to this day, has, of course, the unintended consequence of promoting future car dependency.”

This strategy is for Oregon to piggyback on California’s low-carbon fuel standard. But EPA has blocked implementation, saying that federal regulation preempts state efforts. At least until a new administration is installed, this strategy is off the table.

3. Reduction in VMT. The report asserts that, although it’s a long-term rather than a short-term strategy, “reducing VMT is simply the single most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” This is, in a sense, stating the obvious: if we were to eliminate all motor vehicles, including trucks and buses, reducing VMT to zero, emissions from the transportation sector would pretty much be reduced to zero. But the report quickly limits the inquiry to non-freight VMT. We’re talking only cars and light trucks.

So how does the report suggest we reduce VMT?

First, pricing policies: congestion pricing on major highways; increased parking charges; eliminating minimum parking requirements and imposing maximum parking standards; cordon prices (like Stockholm and London); , carbon, emissions, and VMT taxes.

Second, transportation options: carpooling, bicycling, walking, transit and rail. But there’s not much juice here, as transportation options are pretty much determined by development patterns.

Third, land use planning. Sprawling suburban development patterns – large-lot, single-use residential developments located far away from destinations – require residents to drive in order to access jobs, schools, and stores. Higher-density, mixed-use developments are much easier to serve with transit and reduce the distances between residences and destinations, making bicycle and pedestrian trips much more feasible. The problem here is that we’ve already set our development patterns, literally in concrete. Achieving much here would require that we stop any expansion immediately and rely entirely on infill and redevelopment. Bringing growth to a halt is not on the table.

4. Optimize the existing system. The theory here is that fuel is wasted when people are sitting in traffic jams, and that reducing congestion will therefore reduce emissions. The report concedes that effects are tiny. The report also doesn’t consider “Jevons’ Paradox” – reducing congestion will encourage more people to drive, largely if not completely offsetting any gains made.

An exchange at the very end of the hearing made it apparent that there’s still a disconnect in the political world between global warming and peak oil. The report that we’ve been discussing does not address any VMT reduction strategies for rural areas at all. This attitude was confirmed at the committee hearing. It looks like we’re prepared to do something about VMT in the Metro area, but the rest of the state is different – distances to be traveled are immutable and nothing can be done.

Our rural land use patterns, like our cities and suburbs, have resulted from cheap and abundant oil, the automobile, and the mobility that they have made possible. People have lived in rural areas for millennia, clustered together in villages and towns for mutual support and companionship. Rarely have they lived solitary lives – and the more isolated and solitary they were, the poorer and more miserable they were for it. Peak oil means that people living in rural areas far from neighbors and amenities will be increasingly isolated by distance and by the expense of travelling. Rethinking our rural land use patterns is just as important as rethinking urban land use patterns, as our cities are dependent on their rural hinterlands to supply them with the basics of life. The fates of our cities and our rural areas are inextricably intertwined.

Here’s the abstract:

“Observations have shown that the hydrological cycle of the western United States changed significantly over the last half of the 20th century. We present a regional, multivariable climate change detection and attribution study, using a high-resolution hydrologic model forced by global climate models, focusing on the changes that have already affected this primarily arid region with a large and growing population. The results show that up to 60% of the climate-related trends of river flow, winter air temperature, and snow pack between 1950 and 1999 are human-induced. These results are robust to perturbation of study variates and methods. They portend, in conjunction with previous work, a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States.”

The ethanol boom isn’t helping. A new article in Newsweek warns that overdrawing fossil aquifers to grow corn isn’t sustainable:

“We’re going to make the area a desert. It’s going to be uninhabitable.”

“Saudi Arabia is abandoning a 30-year program to grow wheat that achieved self-sufficiency but depleted the desert kingdom’s scarce water supplies. . . The kingdom aims to rely entirely on imports by 2016.”

The article quoted an unnamed official:

“The reason is water resources.”

Saudi farmers used 1,300-1,500 cubic meters of water for every ton of wheat produced. As Ugo Bardi puts it at The Oil Drum: Europe, “the desert is going to win back the land it had ceded to agriculture.”

Bardi puts his finger on the problem:

“Saudi Arabian food production has been based on “fossil water.” It is water from ancient aquifers that can’t be replaced by natural processes in times of interest for human beings. Fossil water is non renewable, just as oil is, and it is unavoidable that it has to run out one day or another.”

Water production in Saudi Arabia reached a peak in the early 1990s, at more than 30 billion cubic meters per year. Today it is at around 15 billion cubic meters, less than half than the peak value.  At peak, 90% of the Saudi water came from non-renewable aquifers.

Saudi Arabia is not an isolated case in Middle East and North Africa. Several countries in the region, notably Libya, depend heavily on fossil water.

The Ogallala aquifer is an 800-mile-long underground pool of fossil water that stretches from Texas to South Dakota. The Ogallala feeds one-fifth of all the irrigated land in the United States, and is critical to farmers growing corn, cotton, wheat, soybeans and other crops.

Between three and six gallons of water are needed to produce one gallon of ethanol, potentially increasing demand on the already declining Ogallala by as much as 2.6 billion gallons a year just to process the corn and produce the fuel. Another 120 billion gallons a year could be needed for irrigation to grow more corn in the region.