Windfall

McKenzie Funk’s book, Windfall, explores the question, “What are we doing about climate change?”  Readers are introduced to ambitious speculators who are eager to make enormous profits on new opportunities resulting from a warming planet.  They are not investing in research for sharply reducing carbon emissions.  They are obsessed with keeping the economic growth monster on life support.  Climate change investment funds will soon become gold mines, creating a flood of new billionaires.  The future is rosy as hell.

Mining corporations are slobbering with anticipation as Greenland’s ice melts, providing access to billions of dollars worth of zinc, gold, diamonds, and uranium.  A defunct zinc mine, which operated from 1973 to 1990, provides a sneak preview of the nightmares to come.  The Black Angel mine dumped its tailings into a nearby fjord.  The zinc and lead in the runoff was absorbed by the blue mussels, which were eaten by fish, which were eaten by seals.  Investors won, the ecosystem lost.

Other entrepreneurs are anxious to turn the torrents of melt water into hydropower, providing cheap energy for new server farms and aluminum smelters.  Meanwhile, the tourism industry is raking in big money serving the growing swarms of disaster tourists.

As the Arctic ice melts, sea levels could rise as much as 20 feet (6 m).  A number of low-lying islands are already on death row — the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Seychelles, Bahamas, and the Carteret Islands.  Islanders are pissed that faraway rich folks are destroying their home.  Bath time is also predicted for large portions of Manila, Alexandria, Lagos, Karachi, Kolkata, Jakarta, Dakar, Rio, Miami, Ho Chi Minh City, and a fifth of Bangladesh.  There may be a billion climate refugees by 2050.

Five nations have shorelines on the icy Arctic Ocean: Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark (Greenland), and the United States (Alaska).  Beneath the rapidly melting ice are billions of dollars worth of oil, gas, and coal.  We would be wise to leave this energy in the ground but, of course, we won’t.  There will be abundant testosterone-powered discussion over borderlines in the region, and this might include blizzards of bombs and bullets.  Both Canada and Denmark claim ownership of Hans Island.  Russia has planted a flag on the North Pole.

A melted Arctic will also provide a new shipping lane, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific, providing a much shorter and much cheaper alternative to the Panama Canal.  Both sides of the Northwest Passage are owned by Canada, but other nations, like the U.S. and China, disagree that Canada owns the waterway.  They prefer it to be an international route of innocent passage, like Gibraltar.  Funk took a cruise on the Montreal, a frigate of the Royal Canadian Navy.  They were engaged in Arctic war games, which included an exercise that seized a naughty American ship.

The core driver of climate change is simple: “add carbon, get heat.”  As carbon emissions skyrocket, so does the temperature of the atmosphere.  We can’t undo what has already been done, damage that will persist for centuries, but it would be rather intelligent to quit throwing gasoline on the fire.  Unfortunately, the titans of capitalism have a different plan.  Renewable energy cannot power our nightmare, and environmental activism has failed.  Governments are careful to ignore the prickly issue, because voters delight in living as wastefully as possible.  Technology is our only hope.

Cutting emissions would blindside our way of life (and so will not cutting emissions).  But cleverly adapting to climate change will greatly enrich the titans, temporarily.  There’s growing interest in seawalls, storm surge barriers, and floating cities.  Israelis are making big money selling snowmaking and desalinization equipment.  Biotech firms are working like crazy to produce expensive drought resistant seeds.  India is building a 2,100 mile (3,380 km) fence along its border with Bangladesh, to block the flood of refugees that are expected when rising seas submerge low-lying regions.

Others dream of making big money creating monopolies on the supply of freshwater, which is diminishing as the torrents of melting ice rush into the salty oceans.  There are two things that people will spend their remaining cash on, water and food.  Crop yields are sure to drop in a warming climate.  This will lead to rising prices, and create exciting opportunities for profiteering.  A number of wealthy nations are ruthlessly acquiring cropland in third world regions.

Funk visited Nathan Myhrvold, a Microsoft billionaire, who now runs Intellectual Ventures.  His plan is to keep economic growth on life support by creating a virtual volcano called StratoShield.  Volcanoes spew ash into the atmosphere, which reduces incoming solar heat, and cools off the climate.  StratoShield would spray 2 to 5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere every year.  This would make the sunlight one percent dimmer, and enable life as we know it to continue, with reduced guilt, for a bit longer (maybe) — hooray!

Funk also visited Alan Robock, who opposes the plan.  Volcanic ash is not harmless.  The goal of StratoShield is to block heat.  The catastrophic side effect is that it’s like to severely alter rain patterns in the southern hemisphere, spurring horrendous droughts, deluges, and storm systems.  On the bright side, life in Microsoft country, the Pacific Northwest, would remain fairly normal, and the sulfur dioxide sunsets would be wonderfully colorful.

Funk didn’t mention that the geoengineering, if it actually worked, would have to be done permanently.  Beneath the shield, ongoing emissions would continue to increase the atmosphere’s carbon load.  If the shield was discontinued, and full sunlight resumed, the consequences would not be pleasant.

Myhrvold’s former boss, Bill Gates, is running a foundation that’s spending billions of dollars to eradicate disease.  The mosquitoes of the world are nervous, fearing near term extinction.  The foundation is dedicated to promoting the wellbeing of humankind.  Oddly, it has spent nothing on research to cut carbon emissions.  Folks will be spared from disease so they can enjoy drought and deluge.  There is no brilliant win/win solution.  The path to balance will be long and painful.

Funk finished his book in 2012, a very hot year for climate juju all around the world.  He had spent six years hanging out with tycoons, “the smartest guys in the room.”  All were obsessed with conjuring highly complex ways of making even more money by keeping our insane civilization on life support, for as long as possible, by any means necessary.

Climate change is a manmade disaster, and those most responsible are the wealthy consumers of the north.  Funk imagines that the poor folks of the south will be hammered, while the primary perpetrators remain fairly comfortable.  It’s a wicked problem because “we are not our own victims.”  We feel no obligation to reduce our emissions or consumption.  We care little about misery in far away places. 

I am not convinced that the north will get off easy.  Anyone who spends time studying the Earth Crisis will eventually conclude that humans are remarkably clever, but pathologically irrational.  We’ve created a reality far too complex for our tropical primate brains.  We’ve created a culture that burns every bridge it crosses.  Funk reminds us that, “We should remember that there is also genius in simplicity.”  I agree.

Funk, McKenzie, Windfall — The Booming Business of Global Warming, Penguin Press, New York, 2014.

Who Will Feed China?

Lester Brown is an environmental analyst, and founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and the Earth Policy Institute.  His grand plan was to observe global trends, and produce objective information.  Brown’s many books and reports have provided rational advice for the world’s irrational policymakers.  He has not sold his soul to corporate interests.

In 1994, Brown wrote an essay, Who Will Feed China?  It triggered an explosive response.  Chinese leaders angrily denounced him.  But behind the scenes, they realized that their nation was vulnerable, because they had not perceived the big picture clearly.  Brown expanded his essay into a book with the same title, published in 1995.  It became a classic.  Reading it 20 years later is eerie, because many of his warnings now sound like the daily news.

Before they industrialized, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were already densely populated.  Then, the growth of industry gobbled up a lot of cropland, which reduced food production, and forced all three to become dependent on imported grain.  In 1994, Japan imported 72 percent of its grain, South Korea 66 percent, and Taiwan 76 percent.

Brown saw that China was on a similar trajectory.  Cropland was limited, and it was rapidly being lost to sprawl, industry, and highways.  They were likely to lose half of their cropland by 2030.  They were also likely to add another 500 million people by 2030.  As incomes rose, people were eager to enjoy a richer diet, including more meat and beer.  This required even more cropland per person.

Freshwater for agriculture was also limited, and much of it was being diverted to growing cities and factories.  About 300 cities were already short of water.  China’s capitol, Beijing, was among 100 cities with severe water shortages.  Demand for water was sure to rise.  Only a few Chinese had indoor plumbing, and everyone wanted it.

Many farmers were forced to drill wells and pump irrigation water from aquifers, often at rates in excess of natural recharge — water mining.  As enormous amounts of water were removed underground, subsidence occurs.  The ground surface sinks, filling the void below, making it impossible for the aquifer to recharge in the future.  In northern China, subsidence affects a region the size of Hungary.  Irrigated fields produce the most food, but water mining will eventually force a reduction in irrigation.  Some regions may be forced to stop growing rice, a water-guzzling crop, and replace it with less productive millet or sorghum.

Grain productivity (yield per hectare) annually grew an average of 7.1 percent between 1977 and 1984.  The annual increase was less than 2 percent between 1984 and 1990, and just 0.7 percent between 1990 and 1994.  There were great hopes for biotechnology, but 20 years of efforts led to no significant increase in grain yields.  Meanwhile, the Yellow River moved 1.6 billion tons of topsoil to the ocean every year.

Now, assemble the pieces.  Population was likely to grow from 1.2 billion in 1995 to 1.66 billion in 2045.  Per capita grain consumption was growing, likely to increase 33 percent by 2030.  Cropland area was likely to decrease 50 percent by 2030.  Water for irrigation was limited, and certain to diminish.  Annual grain harvests may have been close to, or beyond, their historic peak.  The effects of climate change cannot be predicted, but might be severe.  In 1995, the notion of Peak Oil had not yet spread beyond the lunatic fringe, and Brown didn’t mention it, but at some point, it will make modern agriculture impossible.

Demand for grain was rising at a rate that would sharply exceed China’s harvests.  If their economy remained strong, they would have the money to import food.  But, would the food they need be available on the world market?  Following a century of catastrophic population growth, many nations were dependent on imported food.

As world population continued to grow, the ability to further increase food production was wheezing.  World grain stocks fell from 465 million tons in 1987, to 298 million tons in 1994.  At some point, surging demand for grain would exceed the surpluses of the exporters.  This would drive up the price of food.

Brown selected ten large developing nations where population growth remained extreme, and projected how much food they would need to import by 2030.  “By 2030, these countries — assuming no improvement in diet — will need to import 190 million tons of grain.  This is six times the amount they import today and nearly equal to total world grain exports in 1994.”

We were moving into an era of food instability.  “For the first time, an environmental event — the collision of expanding human demand with some of the earth’s natural limits — will have an economic impact that affects the entire world.”  Annual economic growth for the world was falling.  The global economy grew 5.2 percent in the ’60s, 3.4 percent in the ’70s, 2.9 percent in the ’80s, and 1.4 percent in 1990-94.  Slower growth, plus rising food prices, plus falling incomes, sets the stage for trouble.  “It could lead to political unrest and a swelling flow of hungry migrants across national borders.”

Agriculture was running out of steam.  The wizards of industrial civilization insisted that perpetual growth was possible, because our miraculous technology could overcome all challenges.  They were wrong.  Brown concludes, “The bottom line is that achieving a humane balance between food and people is now more in the hands of family planners than farmers.”  When Brown wrote, there were 5.6 billion of us.  Irrational policymakers disregarded the urgent need for family planning.  And so, today, at 7.2 billion, the world is a far more unstable place, with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Twenty years before Brown’s book, China realized that population growth was a problem.  They were adding 13 million every year, and emigration was not a real option.  Their one-child policy was launched in 1979, and the transition was bumpy.  The birthrate fell from 2.7 percent in 1970 to 1.1 percent in 1994.  It succeeded in preventing much misery, but it didn’t stop growth.  Brown praised them for actually taking action, forcing the present generation to sacrifice for the benefit of future generations — a concept unimaginable to Americans.

Brown, Lester R., Who Will Feed China?, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1995.

Here are recent follow-up reports from the Earth Policy Institute:

Can the World Feed China?  Lester R. Brown, February 25, 2014

Peak Water: What Happens When the Wells Go Dry?  Lester R. Brown, July 09, 2013

Global Grain Stocks Drop Dangerously Low as 2012 Consumption Exceeded Production , Janet Larsen, January 17, 2013