Writing on the Wall

The IPCC has come out with some fairly mixed messages about food security. The headline finding is that up to 3 degrees of warming, global food production will increase. Policy makers have so much else to worry about even as we approach 1.5 or 2 degrees, meaning that food security slips down the agenda.

But as I read the fourth assessment several things made me stop and think. For instance, the IPPC admits that its predictions do not take into account extreme weather events. This is very worrying: ask any farmer and they will tell you that it is not the 364 days of normal weather that scares them, but the one day of flash flooding.

Take the 2003 summer heat-wave in Europe, it reduced agricultural yields in affected countries by between 10 to 40% of the harvests for that year. This is exactly the kind of thing which is set to become much more frequent.
Read the rest of this entry »

The leaders of big oil companies should get behind the scheme of contraction and convergence, as it might be their only chance of avoiding nationalisation.
It should have been a wake up cry for big oil when UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon announced (1) that the tragedy of Darfur was caused by global warming. You would think that the horror of a country collapsing into civil war under environmental pressures would be enough. But I suspect that the really frightening thing for oil bosses is the techtonic shift in opinion that means a Secretary General will say this despite American disapproval. The world is changing,and so are the political dynamics that go with it. Indeed, on closer examination, the situation in Darfur reveals how profound these changes are.
Read the rest of this entry »

Food is something we can no longer take for granted. The recent forth IPPC report on climate change, as well as pressure on land use from Bio-fuels, increased meat consumption and a growing freshwater crisis all point towards ongoing problems with food supply to the poor. Add to this the rising cost of oil, and the pressure on the price of oil-based inputs to agriculture, like most pesticides and fertilizers, and you can see that we need to think carefully about how to stabilize food supply, as well as protect farmers from price shocks.

One of the key issues impacting on the poor is that their right to food is being compromised by market mechanisms. The enormous purchasing power of the rich, for meat, bio-fuels as well as luxuries like sugar is being pitted against the pitiful purchasing power of the poor, who are being priced out of food markets, and thus out of existence. Thus there is a need to try and provide the poor with affordable food. One way to do this is for countries to subsidize food on a national level. But this does nothing for global justice…
Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a reponse to a comment piece in the Guardian, from UN official, about the upcoming IPCC report on the impacts of climate change, particularly in the tropics:
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Tide of suffering

What needs to be borne in mind in this is the high proportion of earnings that the cost of food represents for the poor.

When we talk about climate change, we seem to forget that all these effects, rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, an overall drying trend globally, will all tend to impact on food production, and thus the price of food.

This is already happening: The world has been in net food deficit for the last couple of years: Not just because of climate change, but because of various forms of environmental degradation, that climate change is likely to make worse.

Read the rest of this entry »

The biofuels issue is part of a wider issue of Global food supply, which in turn has some frightening implications in terms of the politics that may accompany insecurity.

Even the most hardened climate sceptics acknowledge the climate is changing. All forecasts seem to agree on one thing at least: That these changes are likely to damage food production in the tropics, and also, on balance, reduce food production globally.

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | George Monbiot: If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels
Even without biofuels it is hard to see the price of food remaining stable.
There have been prodictions of global drying from the Met Office, as well as a range of predictions about impacts on tropical agriculture:

see: http://sedac.ciesin.org/giss_crop_study/CCMresources.html

What is clear is that the price of food is likely to rise, as food production falls. This is likely to lead to both civil unrest and environmental refugees, as well as disruption of the cheap labour sources that currently underpin the global interdepenencies of production. India, China and Pakistan are likely to be hit hard, all of whom are nuclear powers.

Read the rest of this entry »

The two people who mind the garden in our house, between them they earn 2000 rupees a month. That’s about £25-30. Funny thing is that the housekeeper, who makes 1000 rupees a month (for half-time work, that’s a relatively good deal for the market she is operating in) questioned why they struggled to get by on that money.

The answer came back that so many people come and eat at their house. In other words, on that kind of money, they are acting as a form of local social welfare, and it would be seen as strange if they didn’t do so. Upshot of it is that the wife of our care-taking couple has arthritis and needs 30 rupees (50 pence) to get on a bus to the local state hospital. I suspect that this is true, but actually don’t care if it is not. It is almost harder to deal with their honesty than with being ripped off.

Funnily enough I just read a piece by John Gray in the New Statesman about human agency, and the wierd take poltical philosophers tend to take on it. It was incidentally about Nazi Germany.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120045

Gray, as ever, was taking a pop at our weird image of enlightenment man being able to transform the world at will. OK John got the message. He also had a plug to his latest book , something characteristically morose and pessimistic. His point being that people often don’t have control over their lives.

Read the rest of this entry »

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The point of no return

The sense of resignation is more than troubling, it speaks of a collective cynicism. It seems that government is publically saying it will try and stop climate change, but privately admitting to itself that it cannot summon the political will to challenge vested interests.

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that Cheap Flights are Proliferating around the world:

Branson has plans to open up routes to Asia

Whilst low fare airlines enjoy huge growth in across Asia

In the UK Sian Berry Bemoans the way ministers are incoherant over flying

Blair effectively says keep on flying to everyone

Whilst Plane Stupid point out that all this is, well, ridiculous, and not really helping things very much.

It seems that everyone is pointing at each other. Blair says that the Chinese will make up for any British cuts in emmissions in a couple of years, whilst India and China point out that their per-capita emmissions are much lower than for OECD countries, and that their people surely want a taste of the pie.

There is a big debate about environmental justice underlying this (how much of the world’s resources does each person get to use?)
So when are we going to see a global convention that limits aviation? Aviation is not a part of Kyoto. The EU emmissions trading scheme does not seem to limit flying very strongly (the Plane Stupid people make that pretty clear.)

So the question is, where is the binding global agreement to limit aviation going to come from?

If this heating picture is anywhere near right, then Africa and India are in for a very, very rough ride.

See also:

BBC NEWS | Special Reports | 2004 | In Depth

Constitutions and revolutions are born out of discussion. A blog seems like a good salon for discussing a global constitution. But where should we start?

There has been quite some debate on such issues recently, much of it can be seen on the website Open Democracy. For instance, George Monbiot

http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/George_Monbiot.jsp

and David Held
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/David_Held.jsp

have both put forward their ideas there.

What do we mean by ‘humanity’?
However both of their approaches seem to me to need a stronger initial focus, or philosophical starting point. They both seem to hinge around an emerging ‘human’ identity, born of a globalising moment, some sense of cosmopolitanism.

Read the rest of this entry »