writeaboutwarming

March 24, 2014 – The Post Carbon Institute has put together a fine talking heads documentary called “Agriculture in a Changing World.”   I learned a bit from it, so I thought I might summarize it for you.   You can find the film at www.postcarbon.org/video/2111138-agriculture-in-a-changing-world . The half hour film consists of brief remarks made by leaders in the agriculture and climate change worlds.   I’ll start with Lester Brown, formerly of the World Watch Institute, now heading up the Earth Policy Institute.   He shocked me by stating that families in a number of countries around the world, among them Nigeria, Haiti, Ethiopia, India, and Peru, must go without food a certain number of days during the week.   While I was aware that Haitians have suffered this degree of deprivation for decades, I didn’t know that food supply was so precarious in other parts of the world.   He went on to say that water shortages are now a problem everywhe...

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005 ) was signed into law by George W. Bush that year – the year that ended with global peak oil having been realized, as luck would have it. What a coincidence. One of its primary stipulations was that greater quantities of biofuels be added to gasoline, thereby (so it was hoped) reducing American dependence upon foreign countries for oil. This line of reasoning was based largely upon Brazil’s success in utilizing ethanol derived from sugar cane ( http://www.v-brazil.com/science/ethanol/bush-brazil.html ). The Act incorporates policy determined by politicians, not scientists. Fast forward six years. Let’s see how things are going: “The Russian drought [of 2010] simply sparked this latest speculative bubble. Russia did lose 33 percent of its wheat harvest, but it had plenty of wheat stocks on hand to make up the difference. Instead of using those stocks, the Russian government was persuaded by multi...