So, Gabon’s president has decided to diversify the economy . . . from oil to palm oil. You . . . have . . . got . . . to . . . be . . . joking. First, you are trading one primary commodity for another – in other words, the economic problems of price instability and complete dependence on the consumption of others are not in any way addressed by this shift. This is not diversification, this is retrenchment to a commodity that the British colonial government more or less stopped promoting in relatively nearby Ghana by 1920! And don’t tell me about biofuels – palm oil suffers from the same problems as nearly every other form of biofuel, in that it is at best carbon-neutral in and of itself, but requires energy to be converted to usable fuel . . . thus making it carbon positive (i.e. a net carbon emitter). The market for biofuels of this type is not really there yet, so this is not going to fly all that well.
Second, Gabon is home to a significant amount of high quality, old growth rainforest – home to all kinds of species not seen elsewhere, and part of the equatorial belt of rainforests that suck up 18% of annual global carbon emissions. The last thing we need is to see Gabon trading this forested area for palm plantations. One need only look to the situation in Indonesia, where this exact conversion is taking place, to see the kinds of fraud and environmental damage that this shift to a “benign” crop is creating.
Gabon desperately needs a new path to the future, but palm oil is not that path. Oh, and BBC: some level of analysis that points out any of these issues would have been nice . . .
Author: Ed
Why food security analyses fail . . .
Case 1: when you fail to define your basic terms correctly.
Laurie A. Garrett, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tried to write an interesting piece about climate change and food security recently. Her case is compelling, though she draws far too heavily on a few high profile examples of possible climate impacts on food supply without providing appropriate caveats about the difference between climate change (a trend over time) and climate variability (which can be one-off events, or the byproduct of a larger trend). This is somewhat standard fare in the popular media, as such caveats really don’t make for good reading.
What got my attention was Garrett’s complete failure to properly define food security. She argues “The overwrought phrase “food security” connotes literally obtaining sufficient calories and nutrients to stay alive.” Well, maybe in 1980. Since then, a tremendous amount of work (to which I have made a very small contribution) has expanded this definition dramatically – food security is about access and entitlement to food and other livelihoods resources – in other words, food security is more than enough calories on hand – you also have to have rights of access to those calories, or you are out of luck.
Why is this a problem in her article? Well, Garrett is trying to draw a link between climate change a food prices . . . which are presumed to hit the global poor the hardest. However, rising prices are only a part of the food security story. If we don’t know people’s rights of entitlement to the calories they need, then it becomes hard to say if we have enough or not enough food available.
For example, let’s assume that a Ghanaian husband and wife have three children – one girl and two boys. The household needs, at a basal level around 6000 calories a day to meet basic needs. We can go to their farm, and measure the food they eat, and get a caloric figure. Perhaps that figure comes back at 6500 calories per day. This is not enough to say that this household, and all its members are food secure. Does the wife and her girl child, have the same rights to food as the husband and boys, or must the females wait for the men to eat their fill, before eating whatever remains? If the females do not have the same rights of access, it may be that the husband and boys are more than food secure, while the wife and her girls are not.
Certainly, it is useful to know where there simply isn’t any food around – but even this is tricky. Most people forget that Ethiopia was actually increasing its agricultural exports across its famous mid-1980s famines. It’s just that the food was sold overseas for foreign currency, which was then used to pay off their national debt . . . as the Ethiopian population starved.
This article addresses but one part of the global food security equation – not enough to make sweeping claims of what is to come.
Oh, for the love of God . . .
I’m from New Hampshire, and most of the time I’m proud of it. And then there are the other times, such as when I find out that every Republican candidate for Judd Gregg’s senate seat says that human-induced global warming has not been proven. Really?
What offends me here is not that some people might want to debate the human component of climate change – there has been quite a bit of that in the comments section of this blog. I think that intelligent, reasoned debate on this subject that is grounded in evidence is completely fair game for discussion, etc. Further, this sort of debate serves to push research forward, and refine what we know and do not know about climate change and its human impacts.
What bothers me here is that none of these candidates is grounding this stance in evidence in any way – this is pure politics, pandering to a lowest-common-denominator fear of change crowd. And New Hampshire has a hell of a lot to lose from this – climate change is increasing climate variability (hence the 100 year floods referenced in the link above) which presents challenges not only to people’s property and safety, but also to the economy of the state. New Hampshire is heavily driven by tourist dollars, and tourism is heavily driven by skiing. Skiing relies on sub-freezing weather and adequate precipitation (even I know that snowmakers do not make desirable snow), both of which are becoming less predictable. By failing to have a reasoned discussion about this issue, based on facts about what we do and do not know – and the likely outcomes for New Hampshire, all of these candidates have staked out an irresponsible position that calls into question their fitness to represent the state at the national level.
Sorry for the lack of posts. I’m mid-move to DC, without home Internet. I’m hanging on by my iPhone. I’ll be back at it, once I have a place to sit down.
Carbon-neutral consumption? Nah . . .
Well, the markets seem to have faith in biofuels – two companies working on this idea have filed for IPOs in the past week. Both are interesting, though for different reasons. Gevo is interesting not for its choice of source material (still using corn, wheat and sugarcane), but for the fact that it is turning these sources into isobutanol, which as Martin LaMonica notes
“can be used as a solvent, blended to make jet fuel or other liquid fuels, or used as a raw material for plastics or rubber.”
Diversifying the products that might come from cellulosic sources is very interesting, and hints at directions we might take toward a post-petroleum world. The big drawback: they are still stuck using food crops as their source material for fuel. Elsewhere on this blog I have noted that this sort of sourcing of our fuel has significant ramifications for the global food supply, taking out perhaps too much slack in a time of environmental uncertainty (let alone new economic tools in the commodities markets).
All this makes the other IPO filing, PetroAlgae, much more interesting. They are working with algae as a source material for their fuel. Algae doesn’t take up arable land, isn’t one of our current food crops, and can be grown in a wide range of environments. If they can make this work, we might have something interesting there.
Let’s all remember, though, that biofuels don’t really fix the greenhouse problems our current development pathways are generating. At best, biofuels are carbon neutral – carbon goes into the plant, is released when plant is converted to energy, rinse, repeat). However, to get the plant to a state that works as a fuel requires energy – that energy has to come from somewhere, and therefore has a carbon footprint. So biofuels may not be as bad as coal, but completely clean they are not. The days of the guilt-free consumption of carbon-neutral goods derived from algae are not yet here . . .
Advanced biofuels maker Gevo files to go public via CNET
Algae fuel maker PetroAlgae files to go public via CNET
The new job looms . . .
and I know it, because news stories like this one about the flooding in Niger hit me a completely different way now – previously, I would have thought about how this could be teachable, and even how it might relate to some research ideas . . . now, I recall interviews from April with people in my new Bureau at USAID where we discussed the looming food crisis in Niger. In mid-September, this won’t be a teachable moment – this will be a fire drill for which I have some degree of responsibility. Sobering.
Incidentally, this is another example of the challenges that face those of us working at the intersection of environment and development. The long-term (last four-five decades) signal for precipitation is in steady decline. It is hard to say if this is a visible outcome of climate change, mostly because we have a lot of trouble understanding the mechanics of the West African climate (for those so inclined, there are some issues with the teleconnections from ENSO and the influence of the NAO).
This figure (from my upcoming book) illustrates the real problem, though – the long-term decline is clear at this weather station (the closest one to my research area that is not parked right on the beach), but more striking is the variability around the centerline. While this station is not showing any real trend toward greater variability, many other places in West Africa are – hence the massive, surprising flooding we are seeing in Niger, despite a long-term trend toward less precipitation in the region. People forget that there are two key variables that shape precipitation outcomes – amount and timing.
This is probably the hardest part of the job – thinking about how to plan for increasing unpredictability and variability. Trends are easy, assuming their mechanics are understood and therefore somewhat predictable. If I know there will be 10% less rainfall in a particular place by a particular year, I can go about figuring out what the biophysical, economic and social impacts of that change might be. However, it is a hell of a lot harder to plan for 10% more variability by a given year (assuming we could even quantify rising variability in such a manner). Well, if it was easy, it wouldn’t be interesting . . . and someone else would have solved it already.
A personal note on overconsumption . . .
My family and I are in the midst of a move from Columbia, SC to Washington, DC. There is nothing like moving to make you realize how much completely unnecessary crap you own. I’m almost to the point of calling in napalm rounds on my own position to solve the problem.
I constantly remind my students that I am not any better than them – I too consume things that degrade the environment, and when I am participating in a global environmental assessment my travel often generates more carbon then two or three of them generate in their everyday lives. Nobody’s perfect . . . and this damn move is reminding me that I am far from it.
Hoo, boy – fun with "background pharmaceuticals"
A remarkably underreported story here in the US, and indeed in most advanced economies, is the increasing presence of pharmaceuticals in our water supplies. No, this is not some grand conspiracy to dumb us down or make us passive (please remove the tinfoil helmet’s, y’all) . . . it’s what happens when we overprescribe drugs in dosages larger than can be completely taken up by our bodies. These drugs are expelled in our waste, and enter the surrounding ecosystem. This scares the hell out of me, and is almost enough to make me buy bottled water . . . and then I remember that bottled water is likely coming from a similarly contaminated source and has all sorts of horrific impacts on the environment.
NPR is running another story that references this issue today – a story about shrimp on measurable amounts of Prozac (which they are taking up from their surrounding environments). The story focuses on the impact of the Prozac on the shrimp, which head for light and therefore become more vulnerable to predators. What I find boggling is that the story stops there.
There is a huge implication here – WE EAT THOSE SHRIMP. And chemicals like fluoxetine concentrate as they move up the food chain – which means that when we eat shrimp on miniscule amounts of Prozac, we are dosing ourselves with Prozac. Eat enough shrimp, and you can get a dose that actually affects you. And this is not the only edible animal or plant taking up pharmaceutical chemicals from the environment – lots of them do. Just as mercury becomes a problem as it moves up the food chain, so too these chemicals become a problem – we are approaching a situation where it will be difficult to eat without getting an unprescribed dose of pharmaceutical. This cannot be good for us.
And people wonder why puberty is coming earlier and earlier for girls in our society. There is a reason my daughter drinks organic milk . . .
The point here is that the environment is not a bottomless sink into which we can dump things like chemicals and expect that we will never see them again. Yes, most people know this – yet we, as a society, seem surprised every time a new type of chemical surfaces in our food or water. We spend a lot of time and energy hollering about things like deforestation in the developing world, while we chew up our own environment in much more subtle ways that might be much more difficult to reverse . . . perhaps we need to get our own house in order before commenting on the behavior of others.
Development and Not-Quite-Zero-Sum Growth . . .
It seems to me that one of the more interesting debates to be had around global environmental change and development is that of the nature of growth in the modern world. There are those that argue (or at least implicitly argue) that growth is effectively unlimited by the biophysical world – the real barriers to growth around the world are capacity, governance, etc. Operating from this assumption (or something near to it), the logical decision is to foster growth everywhere in the world, and to assume that the absence of growth is a symptom of problems with human capacity, attitudes and institutions that can and should be rectified. At another pole are those that argue that our growth is fundamentally pinned to the biophysical world – this is the implicit assumption behind ecological footprint calculators, that we draw upon natural resource for growth in a manner that is fixed and measurable -and the measurements suggest, rather strongly, that growth is highly constrained by the biophysical world.
Like most people, I exist somewhere in the middle of this continuum. Ecological footprint calculators, imperfect though they may be (for example, converting our resource use into acres of land is a problematic and weak process/proxy), demonstrate rather clearly that if we are to get everyone in the world up to the average standard of living in the United States, we would need the natural resources from around three Earths. Many of the arguments about future policy built on these footprint calculations end up discussing rather steep resource and wealth redistribution curves if we want to see a more equal world. However, there is a significant flaw in this reasoning – these measures (let’s just assume that they are reasonably accurate for the purposes of this argument) and the resultant policy prescriptions assume the per capita intensity of use to be a constant going forward into the future. This discounts future technological developments that will, no doubt, lower the per capita resource use of those in the advanced economies, such as the US.
On the other hand, the news here isn’t all good – while the intensity of use might decrease over time, such decreases typically translate into the market in the form of reduced prices, which tend to spur increased production. Put another way, 5 years in the future we may only use 75% of the resources we do today to make a shirt, thus lowering the footprint of that shirt and the person who buys that shirt. However, the price of that shirt will likely decrease to remain competitive in the market, encouraging consumers to buy more shirts than they used to. If the price drop of the shirt is such that the consumer who typically buys four shirts a year decides to buy five, we’ve already lost the decreased footprint created by increased efficiency to a larger footprint created by greater consumption. In other words, improved resource efficiency related to growth won’t do us much good if it spurs the growth of consumption such that the per capita resource uptake remains constant or rises.
There is another bit of bad news here – even if those of us living in the advanced economies decided to freeze our amount of consumption, locking in our current standard of living while allowing increased resource use efficiency to translate into greater availability of goods and services in the Global South, I don’t see a point any time in the near future where these benefits will be of a scope that will allow for a real closing of the gap in the material standard of living between the developing and the developed. We’re looking at differences of orders of magnitude right now, accrued over several centuries of differential political economic activity when the Earth’s population and total resource uptake was much, much smaller. So if we want a truly equal world, those of us in the advanced economies are going to have to give something up.
While I am an indefatigable optimist (hey, I am writing this post but I still work in development), this doesn’t absolve me from a serious consideration of reality – so maybe I am a constrained optimist. The size of the global population today, coupled with our current regimes of resource use, have taken most, if not all of the slack out of the global resource/growth equation. No, we are not yet at a zero-sum world where growth in China means loss somewhere else, like the US – it is still possible to see growth in multiple sites, as technological advances create a bit more space for growth via increased efficiency. But there will come a day where we will cross this curve – where our inability to make things more efficient as quickly as our increased demand on resources rises will finally come to a point where the resources themselves become the restrictor plate on growth – the world will effectively become a zero-sum economy.
In my work on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, I saw trends that make the math above a lot more pressing. The rates of resource degradation around the world are astonishing. Not everything is getting worse, of course – temperate forests, for example, are doing pretty well – but an astonishing percentage of the resources we rely upon for our standard of living are under threat right now, not in some distant future. So our current use of the environment (much of this use in the name of growth, incidentally), with its various impacts, is hastening the day when we cross the curve into a zero-sum economy. Some might argue (or hope?) that we will generate enough wealth and capacity between now and then as to come up with some sort of a solution for this – or to put back the damage that we have done to our environment, thus uncrossing the curve for a while longer. This strikes me as a hell of a gamble*, where the stakes on a bad bet are getting larger and larger. Meanwhile, the nature of this bet has been shifting from betting one’s house on red to betting one’s house on red 16 . . .
No, we are not there yet. But, barring a remarkable revolution in our ability to generate energy and food (I won’t rule these out, but the sort of revolution we need is on the order of fusion, which isn’t all that close right now), zero-sum is coming. But what should we call this not-quite-zero-sum world we are living in? Surely someone has a name for this already . . .
*in the case of extinctions, this is a pointless gamble – there is no putting back extinct, and anything that goes extinct will have effects (some obvious, others difficult to discern) throughout ecosystems . . . and often there will be one or more impact parts of that ecosystem that humans see as useful. or necessary.
Wired #Fail on clean coal
I’m a fan of Wired magazine – its a pretty amusing read, and every once in a while I see something that really makes me think or go do a bit more reading. However, I was a little chapped when reading the feature article in their most recent issue – a review of technologies we thought we would have by now, but don’t. On that list was clean coal (link here, scroll down to find the clean coal piece). While I appreciated the fact that Wired was willing to run a story that called clean coal an oxymoron, they got the barriers to its implementation wrong:
The good news is that we already have the technology to use [coal] without melting the polar ice caps. It’s called carbon capture and storage — sucking up the CO2 that results from burning fossil fuels, compressing it into liquid form, and pumping it into the ground.
Here’s my problem – we haven’t actually worked out how to keep it in the ground, which is an immense technical challenge. Liquefying CO2 isn’t all that hard – pressure or very low temperatures will get you CO2 in liquid form. But once we inject it deep underground, it gets a lot warmer and the pressure levels are likely to drop . . . meaning it returns to a gaseous state. It’s hard to trap gases underground (geology is tricky – lots of faults and cracks to worry about, not to mention earthquakes!) and even when we do, the CO2 might interact with water, creating carbonic acid which can dissolve (very slowly and inexorably) the stone that makes up the storage reservoir, potentially creating holes through which the CO2 might return to the atmosphere. We don’t have great fixes for these issues right now, though there are some technologies that might be promising down the road. So, to summarize, right now we can extract (scrub) a lot of the CO2 from the process of burning coal, liquefy that CO2 and pump it underground. But if we can’t keep it there, we have just created a very long, expensive and indirect route for those emissions to reach the atmosphere.
This is not to say that carbon capture will never happen. A lot of money is being poured into this idea (see a recent posting at the NYTimes). And this is certainly not to say that I don’t want to see it happen – finding a way to produce cheap electricity with minimal environmental impact is a dream that will work in everyone’s favor, both now and into the future. But the clean coal crowd needs to be honest, as do the wind and solar people – there are still barriers to the successful implementation of all of these technologies.