Published on 3 Dec 2007 by Global Public Media. Archived on 3 Dec 2007.

What will we eat as the oil runs out?

by Richard Heinberg

The Lady Eve Balfour Lecture, November 22, 2007

Our global food system faces a crisis of unprecedented scope. This crisis, which threatens to imperil the lives of hundreds of millions and possibly billions of human beings, consists of four simultaneously colliding dilemmas, all arising from our relatively recent pattern of dependence on depleting fossil fuels.

The first dilemma consists of the direct impacts on agriculture of higher oil prices: increased costs for tractor fuel, agricultural chemicals, and the transport of farm inputs and outputs.

The second is an indirect consequence of high oil prices - the increased demand for biofuels, which is resulting in farmland being turned from food production to fuel production, thus making food more costly.

The third dilemma consists of the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events caused by fuel-based greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is the greatest environmental crisis of our time; however, fossil fuel depletion complicates the situation enormously, and if we fail to address either problem properly the consequences will be dire.

Finally comes the degradation or loss of basic natural resources (principally, topsoil and fresh water supplies) as a result of high rates, and unsustainable methods, of production stimulated by decades of cheap energy.

Each of these problems is developing at a somewhat different pace regionally, and each is exacerbated by the continually expanding size of the human population. As these dilemmas collide, the resulting overall food crisis is likely to be profound and unprecedented in scope.

I propose to discuss each of these dilemmas briefly and to show how all are intertwined with our societal reliance on oil and other fossil fuels. I will then argue that the primary solution to the overall crisis of the world food system must be a planned rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels in the growing and delivery of food. As we will see, this strategy, though ultimately unavoidable, will bring enormous problems of its own unless it is applied with forethought and intelligence. But the organic movement is uniquely positioned to guide this inevitable transition of the world's food systems away from reliance on fossil fuels, if leaders and practitioners of the various strands of organic agriculture are willing to work together and with policy makers.

Structural Dependency

Until now, fossil fuels have been widely perceived as an enormous boon to humanity, and certainly to the human food system. After all, there was a time not so long ago when famine was an expected, if not accepted, part of life even in wealthy countries. Until the 19th century - whether in China, France, India or Britain - food came almost entirely from local sources and harvests were variable. In good years, there was plenty - enough for seasonal feasts and for storage in anticipation of winter and hard times to come; in bad years, starvation cut down the poor, the very young, the old, and the sickly. Sometimes bad years followed one upon another, reducing the size of the population by several percent. This was the normal condition of life in pre-industrial societies, and it persisted for thousands of years.¹

By the nineteenth century a profound shift in this ancient regime was under way. For Europeans, the export of surplus population to other continents, crop rotation, and the application of manures and composts were all gradually making famines less frequent and severe. European farmers, realizing the need for a new nitrogen source in order to continue feeding burgeoning and increasingly urbanized populations, began employing guano imported from islands off the coasts of Chile and Peru. The results were gratifying. However, after only a few decades, these guano deposits were being depleted. By this time, in the late 1890s, the world's population was nearly twice what it had been at the beginning of the century. A crisis was in view.

But crisis was narrowly averted through the use of fossil fuels. In 1909, two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in fossil fuels. The process initially used coal as a feedstock, though later it was adapted to use natural gas. After the end of the Great War, nation after nation began building Haber-Bosch plants; today the process yields 150 million tons of ammonia-based fertilizer per year, producing a total quantity of available nitrogen equal to the amount introduced annually by all natural sources combined.²

Fossil fuels went on to offer other ways of extending natural limits to the human carrying capacity of the planet.

In the 1890s, roughly one quarter of British and American cropland had been set aside to grow grain to feed horses, of which most worked on farms. The internal combustion engine provided a new kind of horsepower not dependent on horses at all, and thereby increased the amount of arable land available to feed humans. Early steam-driven tractors had come into limited use in 19th century; but, after World War I, the effectiveness of powered farm machinery expanded dramatically, and the scale of use exploded throughout the twentieth century, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia.

Chemists developed synthetic pesticides and herbicides in increasing varieties after World War II, using knowledge pioneered in laboratories that had worked to perfect explosives and other chemical warfare agents. Petrochemical-based pesticides not only increased crop yields in North America, Europe, and Australia, but also reduced the prevalence of insect-borne diseases like malaria. The world began to enjoy the benefits of "better living through chemistry," though the environmental costs, in terms of water and soil pollution and damage to vulnerable species, would only later become widely apparent.

In the 1960s, industrial-chemical agricultural practices began to be exported to what by that time was being called the Third World: this was glowingly dubbed the Green Revolution, and it enabled a tripling of food production during the ensuing half-century.

At the same time, the scale and speed of distribution of food increased. This also constituted a means of increasing human carrying capacity, though in a more subtle way. The trading of food goes back to Paleolithic times; but, with advances in transport, the quantities and distances involved gradually increased. Here again, fossil fuels were responsible for a dramatic discontinuity in the previously slow pace of growth. First by rail and steamship, then by truck and airplane, immense amounts of grain and ever-larger quantities of meat, vegetables, and specialty foods began to flow from countryside to city, from region to region, and from continent to continent.

The end result of chemical fertilizers, plus powered farm machinery, plus increased scope of transportation and trade, was not just an enormous leap in crop yields, but a similar explosion of human population, which has grown over six-fold since dawn of industrial revolution.

However, in the process, conventional industrial agriculture has become overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. According to one study, approximately ten calories of fossil fuel energy are needed to produce each calorie of food energy in modern industrial agriculture.³ With globalized trade in food, many regions host human populations larger than local resources alone could possibly support. Those systems of global distribution and trade also rely on oil.

Today, in the industrialized world, the frequency of famine that our ancestors knew and expected is hard to imagine. Food is so cheap and plentiful that obesity is a far more widespread concern than hunger. The average mega-supermarket stocks an impressive array of exotic foods from across the globe, and even staples are typically trucked or shipped from hundreds of miles away. All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable, but the fact that nearly all of this recent abundance depends on depleting, non-renewable fossil fuels whose burning emits climate-altering carbon dioxide gas means that the current situation is not sustainable. This means that it must and will come to an end.

The Worsening Oil Supply Picture

During the past decade a growing chorus of energy analysts has warned of the approach of "Peak Oil," the time when the global rate of extraction of petroleum will reach a maximum and begin its inevitable decline.

During this same decade, the price of oil has advanced from about US$12 per barrel to nearly $100 per barrel.

While there is some dispute among experts as to when the peak will occur, there is none as to whether. The global peak is merely the cumulative result of production peaks in individual oilfields and whole oil-producing nations, and these mini-peaks are occurring at an increasing rate.

The most famous and instructive national peak occurred in the US in 1970: at that time America produced 9.5 million barrels of oil per day; the current figure is less than 5.2 Mb/d. While at one time the US was the world's foremost oil exporting nation, it is today the world's foremost importer.

The history of US oil production also helps us evaluate the prospects for delaying the global peak. After 1970, exploration efforts succeeded in identifying two enormous new American oil provinces - the North Slope of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. During this period, other kinds of liquid fuels (such as ethanol and gas condensates) began to supplement crude. Also, improvements in oil recovery technology helped to increase the proportion of the oil in existing fields able to be extracted. These are precisely the strategies (exploration, substitution, and technological improvements) that the oil producers are relying on to delay the global production peak. In the US, each of these strategies made a difference - but not enough to reverse, for more than a year or two at a time, the overall 37-year trend of declining production. To assume that the results for the world as a whole will be much different is probably unwise.

The recent peak and decline in production of oil from the North Sea is of perhaps of more direct relevance to this audience. In just seven years, production from the British-controlled region has declined by almost half.

How near is the global peak? Today the majority of oil-producing nations are seeing reduced output: in 2006, BP's Statistical Review of World Energy reported declines in 27 of the 51 producing nations listed. In some instances, these declines will be temporary and are occurring because of lack of investment in production technology or domestic political problems. But in most instances the decline results from factors of geology: while older oil fields continue to yield crude, beyond a certain point it becomes impossible to maintain existing flow rates by any available means. As a result, over time there are fewer nations in the category of oil exporters and more nations in the category of oil importers.⁴

Meanwhile global rates of discovery of new oilfields have been declining since 1964.⁵

These two trends (a growing preponderance of past-peak producing nations, and a declining success rate for exploration) by themselves suggest that the world peak may be near.

Clearly the timing of the global peak is crucial. If it happens soon, or if in fact it already has occurred, the consequences will be devastating. Oil has become the world's foremost energy resource. There is no ready substitute, and decades will be required to wean societies from it. Peak Oil could therefore constitute the greatest economic challenge since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

An authoritative new study by the Energy Watch Group of Germany concludes that global crude production hit its maximum level in 2006 and has already begun its gradual decline.⁶ Indeed, the past two years have seen sustained high prices for oil, a situation that should provide a powerful incentive to increase production wherever possible. Yet actual aggregate global production of conventional petroleum has stagnated during this time; the record monthly total for crude was achieved in May 2005, 30 months ago.

The latest medium-term report of the IEA, issued July 9, projects that world oil demand will rise by about 2.2 percent per year until 2012 while production will lag, leading to what the report's authors call a "supply crunch."⁷

Many put their hopes in coal and other low-grade fossil fuels to substitute for depleting oil. However, global coal production will hit its own peak perhaps as soon as 2025 according to the most recent studies, while so-called "clean coal" technologies are three decades away from widespread commercial application.⁸ Thus to avert a climate catastrophe from coal-based carbon emissions, our best hope is simply to keep most of the remaining coal in the ground.

The Price of Sustenance

During these past two years, as oil prices have soared, food prices have done so as well. Farmers now face steeply increasing costs for tractor fuel, agricultural chemicals, and the transport of farm inputs and outputs. However, the linkage between fuel and food prices is more complicated than this, and there are other factors entirely separate from petroleum costs that have impacted food prices. I will attempt to sort these various linkages and influences out in a moment.

First, however, it is worth taking a moment to survey the food price situation.

An article by John Vidal published in the Guardian on November 3, titled "Global Food Crisis Looms As Climate Change and Fuel Shortages Bite," began this way:

Empty shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products.

Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18 percent food price inflation in China, 13 percent in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10 percent or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50 percent higher than a year ago and rice is 20 percent more expensive. . . .

Last week the Kremlin forced Russian companies to freeze the price of milk, bread and other foods until January 31. . . .

India, Yemen, Mexico, Burkina Faso and several other countries have had, or been close to, food riots in the last year. . . . Meanwhile, there are shortages of beef, chicken and milk in Venezuela and other countries as governments try to keep a lid on food price inflation.⁹

Jacques Diouf, head of the FAO, said in London early this month, "If you combine the increase of the oil prices and the increase of food prices then you have the elements of a very serious [social] crisis. . . ." FAO statistics show that grain stocks have been declining for more than a decade and now stand at a mere 57 days, the lowest level in a quarter century, threatening what it calls "a very serious crisis."¹⁰

According to Josette Sheeran, director of the UN's World Food Program (WFP), "There are 854 million hungry people in the world and 4 million more join their ranks every year. We are facing the tightest food supplies in recent history. For the world's most vulnerable, food is simply being priced out of their reach."¹¹

In its biannual Food Outlook report released November 7, the FAO predicted that higher food prices will force poor nations, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, to cut food consumption and risk an increase in malnutrition. The report noted, "Given the firmness of food prices in the international markets, the situation could deteriorate further in the coming months."¹²

Meanwhile, a story by Peter Apps in Reuters from October 16 noted that the cost of food aid is rising dramatically, just as the global need for aid is expanding. The amount of money that nations and international agencies set aside for food aid remains relatively constant, while the amount of food that money will buy is shrinking.¹³

To be sure, higher food prices are good for farmers - assuming that at least some of the increase in price actually translates to higher income for growers. This is indeed the case for the poorest farmers, who have never adopted industrial methods. But for many others, the higher prices paid for food simply reflect higher production costs. Meanwhile, it is the urban poor who are impacted the worst.

Impact of Biofuels

One factor influencing food prices arises from the increasing incentives for farmers worldwide to grow biofuel crops rather than food crops. Ethanol and biodiesel can be produced from a variety of crops including maize, soy, rapeseed, sunflower, cassava, sugar cane, palm, and jatropha. As the price of oil rises, many farmers are finding that they can produce more income from their efforts by growing these crops and selling them to a biofuels plant, than by growing food crops either for their local community or for export.

Already nearly 20 percent of the US maize crop is devoted to making ethanol, and that proportion is expected to rise to one quarter, based solely on existing projects-in-development and government mandates. Last year US farmers grew 14 million tons of maize for vehicles. This took millions of hectares of land out of food production and nearly doubled the price of corn. Both Congress and the White House favor expanding ethanol production even further - to replace 20 percent of gasoline demand by 2017 - in an effort to promote energy security by reducing reliance on oil imports. Other nations including Britain are mandating increased biofuel production or imports as a way of reducing carbon emissions, though most analyses show that the actual net reduction in CO2 will be minor or nonexistent.¹⁴

The US is responsible for 70 percent of world maize exports, and countries such as Mexico, Japan, and Egypt that depend on American corn farmers use maize both as food for people and feed for animals. The ballooning of the US ethanol industry is therefore impacting food availability in other nations both directly and indirectly, raising the price for tortillas in Mexico and disrupting the livestock and poultry industries in Europe and Africa.

Grain, a Barcelona-based food-resources NGO, reports that the Indian government is committed to planting 14 million hectares with Jatropha for biodiesel production. Meanwhile, Brazil plans to grow 120 million hectares of fuel crops, and Africa up to 400 million hectares. While currently unproductive land will be used for much of this new production, many millions of people will be forced off that land in the process.¹⁵

Lester Brown, founder of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, has said: "The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its two billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue."¹⁶ This is an opinion no longer being voiced just by environmentalists. In its twice-yearly report on the world economy, released October 17, the International Monetary Fund noted that, "The use of food as a source of fuel may have serious implications for the demand for food if the expansion of biofuels continues."¹⁷ And earlier this month, Oxfam warned the EU that its policy of substituting ten percent of all auto fuel with biofuels threatened to displace poor farmers. Jean Ziegler, a UN special rapporteur went so far as to call the biofuel trade "a crime against humanity," and echoed journalist George Monbiot's call for a five-year moratorium on government mandates and incentives for biofuel expansion.¹⁸

The British government has pledged that "only the most sustainable biofuels" will be used in the UK, but, as Monbiot has recently noted, there are no explicit standards to define "sustainable" biofuels, and there are no means to enforce those standards in any case.¹⁹

Impact of Climate Change and Environmental Degradation

Beyond the push for biofuels, the food crisis is also being driven by extreme weather events and environmental degradation.

The phrase "global warming" implies only the fact that the world's average temperature increase by a degree or more over the next few decades. The much greater problem for farmers is destabilization of weather patterns. We face not just a warmer climate, but climate chaos: droughts, floods, and stronger storms in general (hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, hail storms) - in short, unpredictable weather of all kinds. Farmers depend on relatively consistent seasonal patterns of rain and sun, cold and heat; a climate shift can spell the end of farmers' ability to grow a crop in a given region, and even a single freak storm can destroy an entire year's national production for some crops. Given the fact that modern agriculture has become highly centralized due to cheap transport and economies of scale, the damage from that freak storm is today potentially continental or even global in scale. We have embarked on a century in which, increasingly, freakish weather is normal.

According to the UN's World Food Program (WFP), 57 countries, including 29 in Africa, 19 in Asia and nine in Latin America, have been hit by catastrophic floods. Harvests have been affected by drought and heatwaves in south Asia, Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay.²⁰

Last week the Australian government said drought had slashed predictions of winter harvests by nearly 40 percent, or four million tons. "It is likely to be even smaller than the disastrous drought-ravaged 2006-07 harvest and the worst in more than a decade," said the Bureau of Agriculture and Resource.²¹

In addition to climate chaos, we must contend with the depletion or degradation of several resources essential to agriculture.

Phosphorus is set to become much more scarce and expensive, according to a study by Patrick Déry, a Canadian agriculture and environment analyst and consultant. Using data from the US Geological Survey, Déry performed a peaking analysis on phosphate rock, similar to the techniques used by petroleum geologists to forecast declines in production from oilfields. He found that "we have already passed the phosphate peak [of production] for United States (1988) and for the World (1989)." We will not completely run out of rock phosphate any time soon, but we will be relying on lower-grade ores as time goes on, with prices inexorably rising.²²

At the same time, soil erosion undermines food production and water availability, as well as producing 30 percent of climate-changing greenhouse gases. Each year, roughly 100,000 square kilometres of land loses its vegetation and becomes degraded or turns into desert, altering the temperature and energy balance of the planet.²³

Finally, yet another worrisome environmental trend is the increasing scarcity of fresh water. According to United Nations estimates, one third of the world's population lives in areas with water shortages and 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water. That situation is expected to worsen dramatically over the next few decades. Climate change has provoked more frequent and intense droughts in sub-tropical areas of Asia and Africa, exacerbating shortages in some of the world's poorest countries.

While human population tripled in the 20th century, the use of renewable water resources has grown six-fold. According to Bridget Scanlon and colleagues, writing in Water Resources Research this past March 27, in the last 100 years irrigated agriculture expanded globally by 480 percent, and it is projected to increase another 20 percent by 2030 in developing countries. Irrigation is expanding fastest in countries such as China and India. Global irrigated agriculture now accounts for almost 90 percent of global freshwater consumption, despite representing only 18 percent of global cropland. In addition to drawing down aquifers and surface water sources, it also degrades water quality, as salts in soils are mobilized, and as fertilizers and pesticides leach into aquifers and streams.²⁴

These problems all interact and compound one another. For example, soil degradation produces growing shortages of water, since soil and vegetation act as a sponge that holds and gradually releases water. Soil degradation also worsens climate change as increased evaporation triggers more extreme weather.

This month the UN Environment Program concluded that the planet's water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks are all in "inexorable decline." Much of this decline is due to agriculture, which constitutes the greatest single source of human impact on the biosphere.²⁵

In the face of all these daunting challenges, the world must produce more food every year to keep up with population growth. Zafar Adeel, director of the International Network on Water, Environment and Health (INWEH), has calculated that more food will have to be produced during the next 50 years than during the last 10,000 years combined.²⁶

What Is the Solution?

International food agency officials spin out various scenarios to describe how our currently precarious global food system might successfully adapt and expand. Perhaps markets will automatically readjust to shortages, higher prices making it more profitable once again to grow crops for people rather than cars. New designer-gene crop varieties could help crops adapt to capricious climactic conditions, to require less water, or to grow in more marginal soils. And if people were to simply eat less meat, more land could be freed up to grow food for humans rather than farm animals. A slowdown or reversal in population growth would naturally ease pressures on the food system, while the cultivation of currently unproductive land could help increase supplies.

However, given the scale of the crisis facing us, merely to assume that these things will happen, or that they will be sufficient to overcome the dilemmas we have been discussing, seems overly optimistic, perhaps even to the point of irresponsibility.

One hopeful sign is that governments and international agencies are beginning to take the situation seriously. This month the World Bank issued a major report, "Agriculture for Development," whose main author, economist Alain de Janvry, appears to reverse his institution's traditional stance. For a half-century, development agencies such as the World Bank have minimized the importance of agriculture, urging nations to industrialize and urbanize as rapidly as possible. Indeed, the Bank has not featured agriculture in an annual report since 1982. De Janvry says that, since half the world's population and three-quarters of the world's poor live in rural areas where food production is the mainstay of the economy, farming must be central to efforts to reduce hunger and poverty.²⁷

Many agencies, including the INWEH, are now calling for an end to the estimated 30 billion dollars in food subsidies in the North that contribute directly to land degradation in Africa and elsewhere, and that force poor farmers to intensify their production in order to compete.²⁸

In addition, there are calls for sweeping changes in how land use decisions are made at all levels of government. Because soil, water, energy, climate, biodiversity, and food production are interconnected, integrated policy-making is essential. Yet policies currently are set by various different governmental departments and agencies that often have little understanding of one another's sectors.

Delegates at a soils forum in Iceland this month took up a proposal for a formal agreement on protecting the world's soils. And the World Water Council is promoting a range of programs to ensure the availability of clean water especially to people in poorer countries.²⁹

All these efforts are laudable; however, they largely fail to address the common sources of the dilemmas we face - human population growth, and society's and agriculture's reliance on fossil fuels.

The solution most often promoted by the biggest companies within the agriculture industry - the bioengineering of crops and farm animals - does little or nothing to address these deeper causes. One can fantasize about modifying maize or rice to fix nitrogen in the way that legumes do, but so far efforts in that direction have failed. Meanwhile, and the bio-engineering industry itself consumes fossil fuels, and assumes the continued availability of oil for tractors, transportation, chemicals production, and so on.³⁰

To get to the heart of the crisis, we need a more fundamental reform of agriculture than anything we have seen in many decades. In essence, we need an agriculture that does not require fossil fuels.

The idea is not new. The aim of substantially or entirely removing fossil fuels from agriculture is implicit in organic farming in all its various forms and permutations - including ecological agriculture, Biodynamics, Permaculture, Biointensive farming, and Natural Farming. All also have in common a prescription for the reduction or elimination of tillage, and the reduction or elimination of reliance on mechanized farm equipment. Nearly all of these systems rely on increased amounts of human labor, and on greater application of place-specific knowledge of soils, microorganisms, weather, water, and interactions between plants, animals, and humans.

Critics of organic or biological agriculture have always contended that chemical-free and less-mechanized forms of food production are incapable of feeding the burgeoning human population. This view is increasingly being challenged.

A recent survey of studies, by Christos Vasilikiotis, Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley, titled "Can Organic Farming Feed the World?", concluded: "From the studies mentioned above and from an increasing body of case studies, it is becoming evident that organic farming does not result in either catastrophic crop losses due to pests nor in dramatically reduced yields. . . ."³¹

The most recent publication on the subject, by Perfecto et al., in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, found that "Organic farming can yield up to three times as much food on individual farms in developing countries, as [conventional] methods on the same land. . . ."³²

Moreover, is clear that ecological agriculture could help directly to address the dilemmas we have been discussing.

Regarding water, organic production can help by building soil structure, thus reducing the need for irrigation. And with no petrochemical runoff, water quality is not degraded.³³

Soil erosion and land degradation can be halted and even reversed: by careful composting, organic farmers have demonstrated the ability to build humus at many times the natural rate.³⁴

Climate change can be addressed, by keeping carbon molecules in the soil and in forests and grasslands. Indeed, as much as 20 percent of anticipated net fossil fuel emissions between now and 2050 could be stored in this way, according to Maryam Niamir-Fuller of the U.N. Development Program.³⁵

Natural gas depletion will mean higher prices and shortages for ammonia-based nitrogen fertilizers. But ecologically sound organic-biological agricultural practices use plant and manure-based fertilizers rather than fossil fuels. And when farmers concentrate on building healthy topsoil rich in beneficial microbes, plants have reduced needs for nitrogen.³⁶

The impending global shortage of phosphate will be more difficult to address, as there is no substitute for this substance. The only solution here will be to recycle nutrients by returning all animal and humans manures to cultivated soil, as Asian farmers did for many centuries, and as many ecological farmers have long advocated.³⁷

What Will Be Needed

How might we actually accomplish this comprehensive transformation or world agriculture? Some clues are offered by the example of a society that has already experienced and dealt with a fossil-fuel famine.

In the late 1980s, farmers in Cuba were highly reliant on cheap fuels and petrochemicals imported from the Soviet Union, using more agrochemicals per acre than their US counterparts. In 1990, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Cuba lost those imports and faced an agricultural crisis. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds of body weight and malnutrition was nearly universal. The Cuban GDP fell dramatically and inhabitants of the island nation experienced a substantial decline in their material standard of living.³⁸

Several agronomists at Cuban universities had for many years been advocating a transition to organic methods. Cuban authorities responded to the crisis by giving these ecological agronomists carte blanche to redesign the nation's food system. Officials broke up large state-owned farms, offered land to farming families, and encouraged the formation of small agricultural co-ops. Cuban farmers began employing oxen as a replacement for the tractors they could no longer afford to fuel. Cuban scientists began investigating biological methods of pest control and soil fertility enhancement. The government sponsored widespread education in organic food production, and the Cuban people adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity. Salaries for agricultural workers were raised, in many cases to above the levels of urban office workers. Urban gardens were encouraged in parking lots and on public lands, and thousands of rooftop gardens appeared. Small food animals such as chickens and rabbits began to be raised on rooftops as well.

As a result of these efforts, Cuba was able to avoid what might otherwise have been a severe famine.

If the rest of the world does not plan for a reduction in fossil fuel use in agriculture, its post-peak-oil agricultural transition may be far less successful than was Cuba's. Already in poor countries, farmers who are attempting to apply industrial methods but cannot afford tractor fuel and petrochemical inputs are watching their crops fail. Soon farmers in wealthier nations will be having a similar experience.

Where food is still being produced, there will be the challenge of getting it to the stores. Britain had a taste of this problem in 2000; David Strahan relates in his brilliant book The Last Oil Shock how close Britain came to political chaos then as truckers went on strike because of high fuel costs. He writes: "Supermarket shelves were being stripped of staple foods in scenes of panic buying. Sainsbury, Asda, and Safeway reported that some branches were having to ration bread and milk."³⁹ This was, of course, merely a brief interruption in the normal functioning of the British energy-food system. In the future we may be facing instead what my colleague James Howard Kunstler calls "the long emergency."⁴⁰

How will Britain and the rest of the world cope? What will be needed to ensure a successful transition away from an oil-based food system, as opposed to a haphazard and perhaps catastrophic one?

Because ecological organic farming methods are often dramatically more labor- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture, their adoption will require an economic transformation of societies. The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. Nearly every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a forced pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.

Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs, and make necessary transportation more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions capable of supporting only small populations from their regional resource base. In some cases, relocation of people on a large scale may be necessary.

We will need to grow more food in and around cities. Recently, Oakland California adopted a food policy that mandates by 2015 the growing within a fifty-mile radius of city center of 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the city.⁴¹

Localization of food systems means moving producers and consumers of food closer together, but it also means relying on the local manufacture and regeneration of all of the elements of the production process - from seeds to tools and machinery. This again would appear to rule out agricultural bioengineering, which favors the centralized production of patented seed varieties, and discourages the free saving of seeds from year to year by farmers.

Clearly, we must also minimize indirect chemical inputs to agriculture - such as those introduced in packaging and processing.

We will need to re-introduce draft animals in agricultural production. Oxen may be preferable to horses in many instances, because the former can eat straw and stubble, while the latter would compete with humans for grains. We can only bring back working animals to the extent that we can free up land with which to produce food for them. One way to do that would be to reduce the number of farm animals grown for meat.

Governments must also provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. It would be a mistake to think of this simply in terms of the need for a larger agricultural work force. Successful traditional agriculture requires social networks and intergenerational sharing of skills and knowledge. We need not just more agricultural workers, but a rural culture that makes farming a rewarding way of life capable of attracting young people.

Farming requires knowledge and experience, and so we will need education for a new generation of farmers; but only some of this education can be generic - much of it must of necessity be locally appropriate.

It will be necessary as well to break up the corporate mega-farms that produce so much of today's cheap food. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that will be utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land reform will be required in order to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots.

In order for all of this to happen, governments must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways this could be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping it in its tracks might be advantageous; but, given the fact that rapid adaptation is essential, offering subsidies for education, no-interest loans for land purchase, and technical support during the transition from chemical to organic production would be essential.

Finally, given carrying-capacity limits, food policy must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means of economic incentives and improve the economic and educational status of women in poorer countries.

All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying mere techno-fixes - will almost certainly lead to dire consequences. All of the worrisome trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of Earth would be degraded significantly, and perhaps to a large degree permanently.⁴²

So far we have addressed the responsibility of government in facilitating the needed transformation in agriculture. Consumers can help enormously by becoming more conscious of their food choices, seeking out locally produced organic foods and reducing meat consumption.

The organic movement, while it may view the crisis in industrial agriculture as an opportunity, also bears an enormous responsibility. In the example of Cuba just cited, the active lobbying of organic agronomists proved crucial. Without that guiding effort on the part of previously marginalized experts, the authorities would have had no way to respond. Now crisis is at hand for the world as a whole. The organic movement has most of the answers that will be needed; however, its message still isn't getting through. Three things will be necessary to change that.

1. The various strands of the organic movement must come together so that they can speak to national and international policy makers with a unified voice.
2. The leaders of this newly unified organic movement must produce a coherent plan for a global transition to a post-fossil-fuel food system. Organic farmers and their organizations have been promoting some of the needed policies for decades in a piecemeal fashion. Now, however, there is an acute need for a clearly formulated, comprehensive, alternative national and global food policy, and there is little time to communicate and implement it. It is up to the organic movement to proactively seek out policy makers and promote this coherent alternative, just as it is up to representatives of government at all levels to listen.
3. I have just called for unity in the organic movement, and to achieve this it will be necessary to address a recent split within the movement. What might be called traditional organic remains focused on small-scale, labor-intensive, local production for local consumption. In contrast to this, the more recently emerging corporate organic model merely removes petrochemicals from production, while maintaining nearly all the other characteristics of the modern industrial food system. This trend may be entirely understandable in terms of the economic pressures and incentives within the food industry as a whole. However, corporate organic has much less to offer in terms of solutions to the emerging crisis. Thus as the various strands of the organic movement come together, they should do so in light of the larger societal necessity. The discussion must move beyond merely gaining market share; it must focus on averting famine under crisis conditions.

To conclude, let me simply restate what is I hope clear by now: Given the fact that fossil fuels are limited in quantity and that we are already in view of the global oil production peak, we must turn to a food system that is less fuel-reliant, even if the process is problematic in many ways. Of course, the process will take time; it is a journey that will take place over decades. Nevertheless, it must begin soon, and it must begin with a comprehensive plan. The transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a distant utopian proposal. It is an unavoidable, immediate, and immense challenge that will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society. A hundred years from now, everyone will be eating what we today would define as organic food, whether or not we act. But what we do now will determine how many will be eating, what state of health will be enjoyed by those future generations, and whether they will live in a ruined cinder of a world, or one that is in the process of being renewed and replenished.

Notes

1. See Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1982)
2. See Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Boston: WIT Press, 2004)
3. David Pimentel, "Constraints on the Expansion of Global Food Supply," Kindell, Henry H. and Pimentel, David. Ambio Vol. 23 No. 3, May 1994. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. http://www.dieoff.com/page36htm
4. See also Roger D. Blanchard, The Future of Global Oil Production: Facts, Figures, Trend and Projections (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005)
5. Longwell, "The future of the oil and gas industry: past approaches, new challenges," World Energy Vol. 5 #3, 2002 http://www.worldenergysource.com/articles/pdf/longwell_WE_v5n3.pdf
6. Energy Watch Group, "Crude Oil - The Supply Outlook," http://www.energywatchgroup.de/fileadmin/global/pdf/EWG_Oilreport_10-2007.pdf
7. "Oil Supplies Face More Pressure," BBC online, July 9 2007 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6283992.stm
8. Energy Watch Group, "Coal: Resources and Future Production" (April, 2007). http://www.energywatchgroup.org/files/Coalreport.pdf
9. John Vidal, "Global Food Crisis Looms as Climate Change and Fuel Shortages Bite," The Guardian, Nov. 3, 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange
10. Jacques Diouf quoted in John Vidal, op. cit.
11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange
12. http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ah876e/ah876e00.htm
13. Peter Apps, "Cost of Food Aid Soars As Global Need Rises, Reuters, October 16 http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN648660.html
14. See Jack Santa Barbara, The False Promise of Biofuels (San Francisco: International Forum on Globalization, 2007)
15. Vidal, op. cit.
16. Lester Brown quoted in Vidal, op. cit.
17. "IMF Concerned by Impact of Biofuels of Food Prices," Industry Week online, October 18, 2007, http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=15197
18. Ziegler, quoted by George Monbiot http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/11/06/an-agricultural-crime-against-humanity/
19. Monbiot, op. cit.
20. Vidal, op. cit.
21. Vidal, op. cit.
22. Patrick Déry and Bart Anderson, "Peak Phosphorus," http://energybulletin.net/33164.html
23. http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39083
24. "Agriculture Consuming World's Water," Geotimes online, June 2007 http://www.geotimes.org/june07/article.html?id=nn_agriculture.html
25. "Unsustainable Development 'Puts Humanity at Risk'," New Scientist online, October 17 2007, http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12834
26. "Between Hungry People and Climate Change, Soils Need Help," Environmental New Service, August 31, 2007, http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2007/2007-08-31-03.asp
27. Celia W. Dugger, "World Bank Puts Agriculture at Center of Anti-Poverty Effort," New York Times, October 20, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com...
28. Stephen Leahy, "Dirt Isn't So Cheap After All," http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39083
29. Ibid.; http://www.worldwatercouncil.org
30. See, for example, William M. Muir, "Potential environmental risks and hazards of biotechnology," http://www.biotech-info.net/potential_risks.html
31. http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~christos/articles/cv_organic_farming.html
32. (vol 22, p 86) University of Michigan, July 10, 2007
33. "Organic Agriculture," FAO report, 1999, http://www.fao.org/unfao/bodies/COAG/COAG15/X0075E.htm
34. Ibid.
35. "Between Hungry People and Climate Change, Soils Need Help," Environmental New Service, August 31, 2007, http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2007/2007-08-31-03.asp
36. FAO, op. cit.
37. F.H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea and Japan, (New York: Dover Publications, 1911, ed. 2004)
38. The story of how Cuba responded to its oil famine is described in the film, "The Power of Community," http://www.powerofcommunity.org
39. David Strahan, The Last Oil Shock (London: John Murray, 2007), p. 15
40. James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (Nerw York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)
41. Matthew Green, "Oakland Looks toward Greener Pastures," Edible East Bay, Spring 2007, http://www.edibleeastbay.com/pages/articles/spring2007/pdfs/oakland.pdf
42. Peter Goodchild, "Agriculture In A Post-Oil Economy," 22 September, 2007
http://www.countercurrents.org/goodchild220907.htm

Published on 5 Jul 2007 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 5 Jul 2007.

Energy, climate and the future of health

by Dan Bednarz, Ph.D.

Author's Note: This working issue brief is being circulated to health  departments and hospital administrators across the country. Readers are enjoined to get it in front of local public health officials and other medical professionals and administrators and ask them to join the collaboration. Comments, editions, revisions, and suggestions welcome -DB

“We have only two modes—complacency and panic.”
—James R. Schlesinger, the nation’s first energy secretary.

Introduction

This issue brief summarizes:

1. the public policy relationships between peak oil and climate change (AKA global warming);
2. the population-level health threats generated or aggravated by peak oil and global warming;
3. how these two forces of social change endanger the viability of public health and healthcare systems;
4. and the policy implications of the above for the health of the nation that will be pursued through The Collaboration on Energy, Climate and the Future of Health, which formed at the Indianapolis/Marion County Health Department May 31, 2007.

I: Issue Overview

If our public health and health-delivering institutions are to adapt to major natural environmental changes in the 21^st century they must develop a cooperative, conceptually inventive¹ and integrated response to global warming and peak oil. This will require the involvement of the three levels of government and include offices of public health, hospitals and medical complexes, social services, environment, economic development, urban planning, transportation, sustainability, etc., as well as citizens, business, academia, foundations, and non-governmental healthcare providers --preventive and clinical/acute.

Despite numerous serious programmatic and fiscal challenges confronting the nation’s public health and healthcare institutions, climate change and energy scarcity are driving forces that will set the parameters for how they operate.

Although peak oil is a geological event with cultural ramifications its onset threatens the natural environment since it will lead to pressure on government to “cut red tape” and allow unrestricted mining of coal and tar sands, and perhaps “shale oil” and other hydrocarbon sources to meet energy demand. Already, “a powerful roster of Democrats and Republicans is pushing to subsidize coal as the king of alternative fuels².” Such efforts to prolong the fossil fuel era may be unsustainable for lack of fossil fuels to adequately replace oil. Accordingly, the consequences of peak oil, which are impossible to quantitatively estimate, appear certain to halt to economic growth, and in the worst case to introduce permanent socioeconomic stagnation, decline or collapse. Like peak oil, climate change carries massive cultural implications, but its primary outcome is a bundle of ecological perturbations, some of catastrophic sociological scale.

Indeed, each of these threats alone can trigger classic “vicious circles³” and a cautionary note is in order. Analyzing them in the standard Health Impact Assessment (HIA) framework, though necessary, chances mischaracterizing them as yet another benefit-cost policy decision between the economy and the environment. This dichotomy is false⁴. Peak oil and global warming appear to be, respectively, obdurate geological and ecological constraints on economic activity and social complexity⁵; they signal a need for a fundamental reconceptualization in the health sciences of humanity’s place in the biosphere⁶. Further, it is not far-fetched to say that they will –unfortunately later rather than sooner—awaken or force a majority of citizens to this needed rethinking and re-experiencing of our place in nature.

Thus, the question of which is more critical --peak oil or global warming-- is counterproductive and a reflection of political rivalries, ideology, vested interests or perhaps honest misunderstanding. Good cases can be made for either as preeminent. Nonetheless, and this is not well understood in society, it appears that peak oil is most urgent in terms of onset and immediate socioeconomic severity. It may occur in less than five years –it may be commencing—and will explode into public consciousness as it disrupts social and economic activities with stark proportions. Given high level uncertainty, climate change may play out over the course of this century; conversely, there is mounting concern⁷ that the earth may be approaching inflection or tipping points which will usher in sudden –within a decade—deleterious events that trigger various health catastrophes: disease and famines caused by droughts (there is a fresh water crisis in many parts of the world, and in a related matter American aquifers are faced with depletion⁸), floods, a tipping of the Gulf Stream Conveyor Belt⁹ (but see this¹⁰ revision), extreme regional temperature increases and declines, melting ice sheets/rising sea levels, species invasions and disease vector advances, “hot” species extinction, to cite a few salient phenomena.

Rather than assign ascendancy to either, for sound health policy a nuanced grasp of their reciprocal relationships is needed, especially since it appears, 1) both will produce profound change for much or all of the 21^st century, and 2) mitigating one while ignoring the other can be counterproductive. David Strahan¹¹ argues that climate change and peak oil partisans, who often operate in isolation from or opposition to one another:

…ought to be such natural allies. For every climate argument there’s a strong peak one to reinforce it. The climate change campaigner wants to reduce food miles and encourage local agriculture in order to cut carbon emissions; the peak oilier wants the same to secure the food supply when fuel runs short. The climate change campaigner wants higher vehicle fuel economy to cut carbon emissions; the peak oiler to help defer the date of peak production and its attendant economic crisis. Broadly speaking both agendas call for an early and rapid transition away from the oil economy....

Strahan also discusses¹² the Stern Report on global warming and notes that it accepts dubious information about the distant onset of peak oil which would make Stern’s¹³ calculations of economic costs invalid. In similar fashion, Uppsala University’s Kjell Aleklett¹⁴ and his colleagues claim that the more severe of the recent IPCC¹⁵ global warming family of scenarios “require more oil [to be available on the market for consumption] than what is realistically possible” because of the nearness of peak oil. They further report the same holds for natural gas and even¹⁶ coal¹⁷ (which many energy analysts think is super-abundant and will smoothly replace oil).

This does not imply that we need not worry about future global warming or that the amount of greenhouse gasses already –due to the time delay involved-- released by fossil fuel burning is insignificant; or that Aleklett and his colleagues know with certainty how much oil remains. It is to affirm that both issues need to be understood simultaneously to make sound public policy choices, given the tendency of proponents of one issue to discount or misconstrue the other issue. To this point in our nation’s history the abundance of natural resources has indulged, even institutionalized, a spendthrift attitude toward social policy. Simply put, we will have fewer degrees of freedom to misallocate (pork barrels, miscalculations, waste, fraud and abuse) natural and economic resources as we face the compounding challenge of peak oil and global warming.

The Silence about Energy

As noted, peak oil, and more generally the role of energy in society, is both the less appreciated and well-known of these two driving forces. Graham Strouts¹⁸ observes that the concept of “energy use” unites the various threads of environmentalism, including mitigation of global warming through less fossil fuel use,

Pollution (e.g. from plastic packaging), over-fishing, cutting down the rainforests, and of course climate change itself were now seen as aspects of the use and abuse of energy and these issues would themselves change and be significantly affected by oil peak.

Thomas Homer-Dixon¹⁹, in his recent book subtitled: “catastrophe, creativity, and the renewal of civilization” notes: “Energy is society’s critical master resource: when it’s scarce and costly, everything we try to do … becomes far harder.” Also important is the political-economy of energy --which applies mutatis mutandis to a lesser extent to climate change, given its recent ascendance into the media spotlight. Kevin Philips²⁰ notes:

The political establishment’s reluctance to acquaint the American electorate with this dilemma involves three particularly glaring problems: (1) unwillingness to speak of the present oil crisis in the full context of geological, economic, and military history; (2) failure to understand the past vulnerability of great but idiosyncratic national energy cultures [like England relying on coal] losing their familiar footing; and (3) refusal to discuss the evidence of oil-field depletions and insufficient new discoveries that shows petroleum production moving toward an inflammatory worldwide shortage.

An example of Phillps’ argument is a recent Defense Department study, Transforming the Way DoD Looks at Energy: An Approach to Establishing an Energy Strategy²¹, which has received virtually no news media attention, and reports that the Pentagon,

Recogniz[es] that DoD must change how it views, values, and uses energy—a transformation that will challenge some of the department’s most deeply held assumptions, interests, and processes…

The phrase “peak oil” is not in the document, yet it is the unstated raison d'être of the study, as exemplified by this bureaucratese: “Current planning presents a situation in which the aggregate operational capability of the force [the military] may be unsustainable in the long term.” This sotto voce acknowledgement of energy scarcity raises a rhetorical question: If the Pentagon is planning –even without fanfare and obliquely-- for a world of expensive and scarce energy²²; it also has done scenario forecasting²³ for climate change, and Congress is debating further²⁴ study²⁵, what then is inhibiting health policy-makers and kindred stakeholders from doing the same? (The Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control is investigating impacts of petroleum scarcity on pharmaceuticals and food.)

If readers concerned about the future of public health and medicine take nothing else away from this document, it should be this question.

What is Peak Oil?

Peak oil is not about “running out of oil.” It is Geology 101, the inevitable highpoint in the consumption cycle of a finite resource, typically the halfway point from which flow-extraction rates begin irreversible decline and become more difficult and expensive to locate and extract –simply: despite more effort, diminishing returns. The primary socioeconomic risks stem from no longer having a growing and cheap supply of this indispensable resource as demand for it increases. Petroleum supplies both energy and a vast array of products-- to facilitate expanding world economic activity, not just transportation. To reiterate, the principal climate change risk peak oil poses is that coal and other hydrocarbon sources will be turned to in “no-holds-barred” fashion as substitutes for oil and, not long afterwards, also for natural gas as it too peak worldwide in approximately a decade. This will form a health/environment versus the economy catch-22 unless both issues are addressed concurrently.

For more detailed analyses of energy (and its connections to climate) issues see the websites Energy Bulletin and The Oil Drum.

The Onset of Peak Oil

A comment regarding the onset of peak oil is in order. The City of Portland has issued a task force report²⁶ which assumes that we are entering the twilight of the fossil fuel era and should abandon the managerial inclination for “muddling through²⁷” in favor of “Act big, act now”. A recent GAO²⁸ (Government Accountability Office) report and The Hirsch Report²⁹ inform us we as a nation are ill-equipped to face peak oil. What is striking about the GAO report is that it presents no scenarios in which the United States avoids some harmful effects. Hirsch and his colleagues estimate that 20 years³⁰ is needed for a damage-free infrastructure and socioeconomic transition from oil to alternatives. This is not occurring on anywhere near the scale required³¹.

On the actual timing of peak oil, several³² geologists³³ claim³⁴ it has arrived or is fast approaching³⁵. Recently, a milestone was reached as BusinessWeek³⁶ allowed peak oil to be discussed in its pages, Jeremy Gilbert, former Chief Petroleum Engineer at British Petroleum, offers a subtle and cautious but informed and sobering view:

I expect to see a peak sometime before 2015, but I don’t think we’ll see a simple maximum followed by a decline. I foresee a series of maxima, each followed by a brief decline. The simplest analogue would be a sine wave. It may be some time after the true peak before we can recognize it as such.

To repeat, at present we have no ready scalable alternatives³⁷ to petroleum³⁸ (or, to make the situation more dire, natural gas). The present state of alternative energy sources such as solar, wind, nuclear, coal-to-liquids, among others cost more to produce than oil and will take years, if any become scalable; and to integrate into society, although solar and wind, once installed, are cost-effective over the long-term. Neither, however, is likely to power an airplane unless a miracle breakthrough in technology occurs.

Indeed, our national discussion of energy is stilted and typically focused on calls for reigning in “greedy oil companies” and “more drilling” to make the nation “independent of foreign oil,” which, as Phillips notes above is not possible –60% of our domestically consumed oil is imported and this figure rises each year because of falling domestic extraction of oil, which peaked in 1970. The notion that the fossil fuel era is at its zenith and is soon to enter its twilight is not yet part of the nation’s consciousness. For example, the media-recognized “expert” on oil is Daniel Yergin³⁹ of Cambridge Energy Research Associates who, in 2005, predicted “There will be a large, unprecedented buildup of oil supply in the next few years.” For an assessment of why Yergin and his associates consistently overestimate the future supply of petroleum, see this Econobrowser⁴⁰ post.

Significantly, peak oil is not merely about gasoline, but our way of life. Dave Pollard⁴¹ writes:

...The bottom line is that, while $3.50/gallon gasoline was a cakewalk (just a catch-up after decades of after-inflation price decreases), $7/gallon gasoline will be nightmarish. Not because we can't afford to pay $140 to fill our gas tank, but because we can't afford to pay twice as much for the oil we eat, the oil we wear, the oil that drives our entire economy…

This is the incredible bind we've gotten ourselves into: Coping with global warming and the End of Oil … demands a large increase in the price of energy to dampen our appetite for it. But that large increase could easily plunge the world into another Great Depression.

...So the real problem is not that gasoline prices are too high, or that they are too low, it's that we think the price of gasoline is the real problem, and that changing that price will solve it.

A caveat on the potential for antagonism and misunderstanding between peak oil and climate change stakeholders. Not all those who are concerned about peak oil are equally or at all aware of or concerned about climate change, and vice versa for some working to halt global warming. There is a role for the health sciences and other related actors –such as department of sustainability and environment-- to play in synthesizing these confounding forces and elucidating how neither can be mitigated in isolation from the other; the concept to combine them is sustainability, which is elaborated in the policy section of this brief.

Finally, illustrations of the need to make the peak oil-climate change connection was offered above regarding the IPCC and Stern Reports; two further ones from the peak oil side are pertinent. The first is the news that Canada has postponed its Kyoto targets⁴² for 13 years to accommodate production of the Alberta tar sands, which render a liquid fuel substitute for oil. Naomi Klein⁴³ reports:

The process of refining bitumen [tar sands] emits three to four times the greenhouse gases produced by extracting oil from traditional wells, making the tar sands the largest single contributor to Canada's growth in greenhouse gas emissions.

Second, a survey by KPMG LLP⁴⁴ of 553 oil and gas industry executives in April 2007 found 82 percent of them citing declining oil reserves as a concern, with 60 percent of them believing the trend is irreversible, that is, that we are heading into an era of energy scarcity of unknown duration that may become permanent. However –and this is alarming-- 11 percent deny global warming is occurring, and an added 65 percent think it is due to natural weather cycles, not the burning of fossil fuels. This astonishing 76% consensus among energy executives paves the way for unchecked exploitation of coal, tar sands and shale oil to replace petroleum. Such injurious tunnel vision can be overcome by the informed voice⁴⁵ of the health and related professions, again in the context of social and environmental sustainability.

II: Population-level Health Threats

To date the health sciences have devoted peripheral attention to the influence of global warming on the future of population-level health; but this is changing. "Health is moving more to the centre of the climate change debate," says Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum⁴⁶ at the World Health Organization (WHO). "[Global warming is] no longer an environmental issue but one that poses a threat to people's lives and livelihoods."

In the past year climate change has taken on an urgency previously absent in its three decade history in the public discourse. Nonetheless, much of the public –and our national government—appear reluctant to make any substantive public policy or behavioral changes; and a recent poll states: “Americans see climate⁴⁷ threat, but reluctant to conserve...” Of note, Al Gore’s influential “Inconvenient Truth” is vague and tepid on systemic social change, leaving the mutually exclusive Rashamonesque implications that marginal lifestyle concessions are all that is required or that the problems is so massive as to be unsolvable.

A list of how peak oil endangers population-level health is given by Bednarz and Crawford⁴⁸. Modifying this to include global warming as well we have:

• Disruptions and drastic reductions in food production, as well as prices⁴⁹. Climate change can trigger heat waves and droughts. Given the dependence of modern agriculture on natural gas, for fertilizers; and petroleum, for pesticides; for crop production; and for transportation, processing, and refrigeration, peak oil places commercial agriculture at risk.
• The stresses of peak-oil-induced unemployment will lead to varied adverse health statuses, behaviors and risk-taking activities, and to increased burdens on tax dollars to deal with mass unemployment.
• Global warming and peak oil create secondary health risks encountered by those unable to adequately heat their dwellings in the winter, or, conversely, to properly cool them in the summer.
• Breakdown or interruptions in transportation systems, affecting the manufacture and distribution of a multitude of products necessary to preserve hygienic conditions, to produce medicines, pharmaceuticals and ancillary products and, more generally to distribute goods across the nation, as well as to allow citizens travel access to various health-related institutions.
• Breakdown or disruptions in the drinking and wastewater treatment systems due to their energy dependence to operate.
• Breakdown of health system for want of resources and demand overload. This is known as “Surge,” the word implying that it is temporary; in this case healthcare institutions will face a Long Emergency⁵⁰ and perhaps a socially transforming one.
• A range of mental health issues involving “collective behaviors” or situational hysterias, ennui, depression and pathologies stemming from the above conditions. And these could also affect health professionals.

For health policy-makers and professionals, the unavoidable questions raised by peak oil and climate change are not confined to the “normal science⁵¹” of the public health paradigm –which supplies a background set of assumptions, beliefs and decision rules that in essence leaves public health to devise tradeoffs with the health risks generated by “Cornucopian⁵²” socioeconomic activities. New paradigm challenging/shattering questions deriving from an ecological perspective will emerge as we are compelled to consider how climate change and peak oil endanger the future of health infrastructure –its sustainability-- and the biosphere that supports human life. For example, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s latest book (see footnote 18 above) in addition to William Catton’s⁵³ classic “Overshoot” are important theoretical guides in this thinking; and François Cellier⁵⁴ offers a conceptualization of sustainability that can --and sooner or later will-- be integrated into public health:

The ecological footprint of a person is a measure of the amount of land that a person needs to produce everything that he or she consumes: food, clothing, energy, shelter, the tools that are needed to make the clothing, etc.  ... The average Swiss consumes roughly 5.5 hectares (13.6 acres), the average American occupies roughly 10 hectares (24.7 acres), whereas the average inhabitant of Madagascar gets by with 0.5 hectares (1.2 acres) only. The average inhabitant on this planet currently makes use of 2.2 hectares (5.4 acres).

The Portland task force report, Descending the Oil Peak: Navigating the Transition from Oil and Natural Gas, notes:

Public health services (immunizations and control of contagious diseases, sanitation, vector control, environmental health, etc.) are interrelated and problems in one area may exacerbate problems in others. Increasing costs will challenge the budgets of governments, businesses, and individuals (p25.)

The unparalleled scope of these leads to consideration of the survival of public health and healthcare systems.

III: Health Systems Threats

Public health (sometimes called preventive medicine) aims to promote health and prevent disease; treatment medicine (which deals with chronic and acute care) seeks to cure disease or place it in remission. Given the taken-for-granted nature of cheap and abundant energy (and the products from oil) many in the health professions need to be reminded of their dependence upon resources and energy to perform their mission. For example, the author has met medical professionals who believe that the retirement of the baby boomers is a growth opportunity, not a threat to the nation’s health systems. What this claim overlooks is that while providing health services increases the GDP it does so by consuming natural resources, some of them, like oil, finite or simply overdrawn from nature.

According to Gail Tverberg⁵⁵, an insurance industry actuary, peak oil and, by extension, global warming pose the following fundamental macroeconomic threats (author’s comments in plane text):

• [L]ower economic growth rates and possibly long-term negative economic growth rates. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Our economic system is premised upon perpetual expansion.
• Collapse of debt-based economies. This is likely if long-term economic decline occurs –who will be able to lend money if the economy is contracting with little or no hope of “recovering” into expansion? Further, Tverberg notes that long-term this would lead to the end of insurance companies. How do you deliver healthcare in America without them?
• Failure of economic assumptions to hold. A paradigmatic breakdown in economic theory because supply would not be able to meet demand. What paradigm will be used to plan economic activity and allocate social resources under these conditions?
• Increasing mortality and morbidity. Energy scarcity and global warming can create “Overshoot,” when the amount of resources available to sustain a population is insufficient and cannot be produced by the natural environment. This –which some refer to is ultimately grounded in overpopulation-- is the elephant in the room --and the point at which Nature turns “against” public health in the form of a population die-off.

In short, following the basic logic of systems theory⁵⁶, the sweeping disturbances (sources of chaos) created by climate change and peak oil imperil health systems in two basic ways. The first is that resources and energy will become expensive and then scarce (we are entering the expensive period now). The second danger lies in being overwhelmed by surges of demand, from temporary emergencies and then from long-term downturns in the economy that eventually weakens the health of the populace.

A comment is needed on the standard assumption in public health that disasters and emergencies are local, containable and of a relatively short duration. During a health emergency adaptation of the generic surge model, which is based on a command and control hierarchy, is employed. This response protocol presumes that communication networks are undisturbed and that slack resources are available elsewhere in the system –from the larger society-- and will be transported to the emergency area. Although there will be localized health emergencies, especially at the beginning stages of peak oil and due to droughts or other weather-induced calamities cause by global warming, the prospect of system-wide –all encompassing—system breakdowns is what looms and could become the “new normal.” That is, if the economic and ecological crises precipitated by these forces progressively worsen, the entire social system will enter into a Long Emergency⁵⁷ the outcome of which is far too complex to anticipate. This could result in the third scenario cited in the Portland peak oil report, social collapse, the scenario health professionals must work to avoid unfolding. This is discussed in the final section of this issue brief, to which we now turn.

IV: Policy Agenda

This “Wikiesque” issue brief is by definition a work in progress so as to allow new members a role in shaping the policy agenda of the collaboration. It is organized around:

• The rationale for the collaboration.
• Adumbrating the collaboration’s first, project: developing and disseminating the Gospel of Energy Conservation.
• Sketching four scenarios and their health impact implications.

Why a Collaboration on Energy and Climate?

The first rationale for founding the collaboration stems from the fact that the majority of health policy-makers and health professionals throughout the nation have not (yet) placed peak oil and, to a lesser extent, global warming within “their web of operations⁵⁸.” Colloquially, these threats are not on their radar⁵⁹. The second rationale is that no one organization –or profession-- can solve these issues and the synergistic dynamics of contributions from various disciplines in addition to health institutions –social services, department of environment, transportation, urban planning, etc.-- are critical.

With this in mind, the Indianapolis/Marion County Health Department held an organizational and brainstorming meeting to launch the national collaboration. Academics, public health professionals, urban planning, transportation, and citizen activist groups were present. The provisional mission statement of the collaboration is:

Ensuring healthy communities through sustainable agriculture and energy practices.

All activities (research, policy analysis, and related educational activities) will occur within the conceptual framework of Health Impact Assessment (HIA), which refers to “the estimation of the effects [and risk calculations where possible] of a specified action on the health of a defined population”⁶⁰.

According to the WHO⁶¹, HIA rests on four values, which will transcend platitude status to take on especial significance in a world of less, not more energy and resources:

• Democracy – allowing people to participate in the development and implementation of policies, programmes or projects that may impact on their lives.
• Equity – HIA assesses the distribution of impacts from a proposal on the whole population, with a particular reference to how the proposal will affect vulnerable people (in terms of age, gender, ethnic background and socio-economic status).
• Sustainable development – that both short and long term impacts [social and ecological] are considered, along with the obvious and less obvious impacts.
• Ethical use of evidence – the best available quantitative and qualitative evidence must be identified and used in the assessment. A wide variety of evidence should be collected using the best possible methods.

The collaboration acknowledges that energy underpins social organization and economic activity and that climate change is related to humans burning fossil fuels, which produce approximately 80% of the energy we use. Therefore, both issue point in the same policy direction: burning less fossil fuels --energy conservation-- and all this implies for healthy policy-making.

Energy Conservation, the Key to Mitigation

Without doubt a reduction in the use of fossil fuels is the key mitigation wedge for both peak oil and global warming. Therefore, the most significant initial health policy contribution the collaboration can make is to develop and then educate the public about the “Gospel of Energy Conservation” as the path to social sustainability and, also, to establishing a sustainable relationship with the natural ecology.

Our nation is as naive about the role of energy in supporting and maintaining all human activity –including health and health-related infrastructure-- as was the public about the microbe –germs—a century ago when modern public health was organized and institutionalized. At that time public health and medicine educated a public eager for knowledge on protecting against lethal diseases.

The credibility and status of public health as an unbiased protector of the public’s health rose with the dissemination of that knowledge. That credibility, and the power to deliver a message to the citizenry, is now latent but can be activated again by public health and allied partners. Moreover, these systems are in place and do not need to be invented, like the Department of Homeland Security.

Tentatively, the themes of the Gospel of Energy Conservation are:

• Energy enables all human activity, especially economic activity, and is the foundation upon which all health services are delivered. It is no longer cheap and abundant –it must be conserved and used with efficiency.
• Fossil fuels provide over 80% of our energy, but they also contribute to global warming and a host of health risks. Indeed, petroleum is linked to many health dangers, as Tamminen⁶² illustrates. We have the irony of being dependent on, “addicted to”, a documented –although not publicly well-known—health hazard.
• The dependence of our food supplies on fossil fuels –for fertilizers and pesticides-- is enormous. Food is shipped, processed and heated or cooled with fossil fuels. This will change, as in no strawberries in January.
• Tradeoffs to allow conservation are unavoidable. Many citizens will be surprised to learn of how fossil fuel has penetrated, especially oil, virtually all aspects of our lives far removed from transportation, such as the manufacture of aspirin, pharmaceuticals, and all items made from plastic. The good news here is that there is a great deal of wasted energy in the American economy that can be identified and conserved.
• Although lifestyle sacrifices are called for, a vision of social regeneration must be linked to these calls for sacrifice. There is a growing literature on how to face our dilemma –reliance on fossil fuels that are harmful to us and the biosphere we inhabit-- realistically and with hope. An example of this is a recent article by John Rynn⁶³ on how human ingenuity can help us become sustainable and truly in balance with the earth and its resources. Also, the previously cited new book by Homer-Dixon (footnote 18) is guardedly optimistic around the theme of renewal. Although no efforts can be made to endorse any metaphysical or religious perspective, these issues will deeply alter understandings and practices of sundry religious Weltanschauungen.

Ironically, there is a need for the health professions themselves to come to terms with energy, to understand the indispensable and multiple connections it has to social lifestyles, economic activity and, significantly, to enabling population-level health standards to be maintained. Eventually, the core curriculum of public health, medical and other health sciences will have to incorporate a full understanding of energy. This is to say that students with health sciences degrees can no longer avoid a thorough grounding in the relationships between energy and health. This is a long-term process that need not prevent continuing education (“Train-the Trainer”) courses on energy for local public health departments prior to educating the public.

The Treatment-Prevention Imbalance

In developing the theme of conservation to attain long-term sustainability, the imbalance between the funding of public health and acute/chronic care should be raised. Accordingly, in the Portland task force report, we read (p6):

To the extent that provision of public health services declines, associated public health risks will increase… Putting money into preventive care ultimately saves money for both society and individuals as later costs for medical services decrease.

Presently and depending upon how the calculation is done, 1-5% of all health expenditures go to prevention, the rest goes to treatment. This disparity in all likelihood cannot be perpetuated --sustained-- after the onset of peak oil.

It is pertinent to cite an effort by local health entities to address peak oil which spring from this awareness. The Indianapolis/Marion County Health Department, McKee, 2006⁶⁴, has prepared a four-phased model for local health departments to do initial planning for peak oil emergencies and over the long-term. The principal problem to developing and disseminating the plan cited by the author, Mary McKee, is that, “Most local health departments … are constantly scrambling for resources to meet the public needs in their communities.”

The Efficacy of Scenarios

The future is contingent and cannot be know precisely, but it can be better understood, even if only in broad outline, with scenario forecasting. The time for “muddling through” incrementally -a trusted and highly effective management strategy in relatively non-turbulent and stable times-- is passing. In the health professions, everyone in a position of leadership must become a futurist. At its elemental level, futurism is connected to strategic management and calls for scanning the environment for signals of change. While this sounds good “in theory” it rarely takes place “in practice” due to the scarcity of time, the limits on the human attention span and money. This is especially so in public health, which typically is overburdened, underfunded and understaffed.

A central function of this collaboration, therefore, is to focus on these issues and to work toward institutionalizing energy and climate in the form of staff positions and organizational awareness and thought. That will require resources, even in a time of economic downturn and austerity the maxim of an “ounce of prevention…” holds.

In closing, four scenarios adapted from Dan Bednarz⁶⁵ are presented and briefly discussed. The content and recommendations flowing from the Gospel of Energy Conservation and the definition of what is sustainable will of necessity vary with each scenario.

• No Crisis Many economists argue that peak oil is a temporary setback or literally of no consequence. We are, after all, an exceptional species capable of great ingenuity. Accordingly, global warming and peak oil will be solved in due time, when the market “signals” they should be solved. There will be no energy or climate crisis –they are impossible. This “business-as-usual” scenario is straining under the empirical reality of $3.30 per gallon gasoline and the multiple ecological “signals” from the natural environment about climate change. Nonetheless, this scenario is entrenched and highly resistant to disconfirmation. An energy crisis appears likely to break its paradigmatic dominance
• Short-Term Crisis If peak oil is within 15 years we are at the least in for a trying and disruptive period of transition to new energy source(s). Systems such as transportation, food production and distribution, government services, health and medical care, living arrangements, and so on, will have to adjust to a period – a decade or more -- of scarce and expensive energy. In this picture there will be a recession, the crisis will be corrected, followed by a recovery, probability with a new understanding of the human animal’s place in nature where conservation and sustainability will be widely shared –and perhaps legally encoded-- social values.
  
  If the crisis continues and no viable long-term solution is in sight, then the natural progression is to the next scenario.
• Long-Term Crisis At this stage there will be a society-wide realization that there are limits to growth. This means that standards of living in Western countries, especially the United States, will decline permanently as industrial society tries to reorganize and find a new balance –at a lower level of material comfort and consumption-- with the natural environment.
  
  The major questions then become, When --how long will it take?-- and at what economic levels and social sacrifices will society stabilize? Put differently, will industrial society be able to find alternative energy sources that will allow it to survive in any semblance of its pre-peak oil activity and organization?
  
  If the crisis at this stage cannot be resolved by humans, nature will enforce its solution, at which point human actions will be stochastic and irrelevant to the collective outcome.
• Unrecoverable Crisis Die-off is a wretched topic to discuss, but nonetheless it is natural conservation process actuated when rising demand for the earth’s resources intersects the declining availability of those resources. Even if this is the long-term consequence of peak oil and global warming, it will not arrive according to a Hollywood action script; most likely it will take decades to unfold as a series of rolling and interconnected crises, each one more difficult to cope with than the previous one because resources become scarcer and scarcer as more and more systems break and infrastructure decays as population rises as a demographic certainty for at least the next several decades. However, new forms of socio-cultural organization emerge as it becomes clear to the members of the collapsing society that the old ways no longer work and new ways begin to “make sense.” But let us be clear that under this scenario the human population of the earth will shrink to a sustainable number, and the health sciences will have little to no say in the process.

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Dan Bednarz, Ph.D., is a former Associate Director, Center for Public Health Practice, University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (until 2005) and is now President of Energy & Health Care Consultants.