The Curious Capitalist, Justin Fox, Economy, Markets, Business, TIME

May 7, 2008 11:53

Lester Brown eats oysters, worries about "peak water"

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In March 1980, Lester Brown wrote a paper for his Worldwatch Institute titled "Food or Fuel: New Competition for the World's Cropland." Let's just say it turned out to be a bit premature. "I was so far ahead of the curve no one even knows that exists," Brown says. (It is still on sale for $9.95, though.)

Now, of course, food vs. fuel is a certified Big Issue. But former tomato farmer Brown, who now runs the Earth Policy Institute, has other concerns. Mainly about the water supply. "It looks like we may hit peak water before we hit peak oil," he says.

There are two giant fossil aquifers--that is, ancient underground aquifers of water that can't be replenished by rainwater--on the planet: The Ogallala Aquifer under the High Plains of the U.S., and the deep aquifer under the North China Plain.

Both are being depleted, but the Ogallala, while certainly crucial to the states of Kansas and Nebraska in particular, isn't make or break for the U.S. food supply: Brown says only 20% of the U.S. grain harvest comes from irrigated land. In China that figure is 80%, and the bulk of it comes from the North China Plain.

So basically, China is in for a big grain supply shock. And if China is in for a big grain supply shock, we're all in for a grain supply shock. Especially since lots of other countries face similar issues. Saudi Arabia, for example, became concerned in the 1970s that its oil embargo might be countered with a grain embargo. So it began tapping a fossil aquifer to become self-sufficient in wheat production. Now the aquifer is just about tapped out, and the country announced in January that it will soon begin importing all its wheat.

Hmmm, Les, got any good news? You betcha, he said. Nobody's gonna be able to build any more coal-fired power plants in the U.S.

This discussion took place over lunch Tuesday at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. We shared a dozen oysters--six Hog Islands from California, six Malpeques from Prince Edward Island, all excellent. And Lester told me that oysters used to be so abundant in the Chesapeake Bay that farmers would feed them to their hogs.

The photo was taken with my Blackberry. I was wondering why it was so fuzzy; then I took a look at the lens. Coated with dust. Maybe I just need to start carrying a real camera around.

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Reader Comments (1)

Dad:

We may need coal fired power if this guy is right:

[A San Francisco-based scientist says that current solar activity strongly indicates that the earth is on the verge of a new ice age.

"Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh," warns Phil Chapman writing in The Australian. Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut.

"The scariest photo I have seen . . . is at www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory [SOHO], located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity," Chapman wrote, adding ominously that "what is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot."

"This is where SOHO comes in," he explained. "The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimu m was in March last year. The new cycle, No. 24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers."

That, he writes did not happen. "The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon."

Why? According to Chapman "there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790. Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots."

Although the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No. 24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection, Chapman warns that it is cause for concern.

"Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming," he explains, "the average temperature on earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.]

Posted by Dad | May 7, 2008 4:31 PM