What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Page #4

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It seems that, if our economy is poised for

meltdown, our agricultural system is doubly so.

I spoke with local sustainable designer

Harvey Harman and with writer Richard

Manning about what he calls "the oil we eat".

The average plece of food in your supermarket

has traveled 3,000 miles or more to get there.

So not only is it based on petroleum to grow it,

but then it's transported, and refrigerated.

And, you know, it's a system

that's very dependent on cheap energy,

and it's very energy-intensive.

If we take a look at about 1940, and an

American farmer, that farmer was using roughly

a calorie of fossil fuel to make a calorie of food.

Today that same farmer

uses something like 10 calories of

fossil fuel to make a calorie of food.

That means that petrochemicals, fossil fuel,

have become embedded in our food supply.

if we run out of fossil fuel that strategy

will collapse in a heartbeat.

Sadly, with so much at stake, oll

grows increasingly worth fighting for.

My friend Ray said it best.

Prices will naturally begin to rise

and people will probably fight over it more.

And the US will, almost certainly, with

whatever means are necessary, make

sure that we get everything we need.

And so that will probably make

for an unhappy rest of the planet.

It's a permanent state of affairs. You know?

The fuel crisis will be over in a

couple of hundred million years.

When everything has settled down and there's a

lot more having been made from all of us

having, you know, been squished back under.

(laughs)

It takes a long time.

Peak oil got my attention.

The ramifications are enormous.

And if the oil situation is bleak, some say

that the natural gas situation is even worse.

As writer and professor Otis Graham said.:

We've had three or four hundred years of

fossil fuel - it's coming to an end.

is that an historic turning point?

it's breathtaking!

Even more breathtaking is what

happens when we burn the stuff.

Scientists used to talk about climate

change in terms of centuries. Now

they're talking about decades.

Now they're talking about next year.

Now they're talking about now.

My friends and neighbors

are talking about it too.

We've increased the levels of carbon

dioxide in the atmosphere.

Which traps heat in the earth's atmosphere.

Which raises the temperature.

The glaciers are melting. The sea ice is melting.

The polar ice caps are basically melting.

And I hate it. I hate feeling like

we've done this to nature.

Not to mention all of the animals,

all of the wildlife, that are going to die.

it'll begin to happen.

it's already beginning to happen.

it's happening everywhere.

You know. it's happening!

it's terrifying.

it's a drag.

That's putting it mildly.

The only good thing I can think to say

about climate change is that when I

understood the climate situation, I

spent less time worrying about oil.

some people have said, and I

think they're right about this,

we're gonna run out of air to burn

before we run out of fossil fuels to burn.

in other words, the fossil fuels are

creating the global warming problem,

the CO2, and the pollution problems.

And, if we keep using those, it's not really a

matter of when we run out of fossil fuels.

It's when we befoul the atmosphere so much,

and create so much global warming, it's

irrelevant how much gas we've got left.

There. See what I mean? You feel

better already, don't you?

So, whom else could I speak with about the

climate? Tums out I didn't have to go very far.

William Schlesinger, Dean of the Nicholas

School of the Environment and Earth Sciences

at Duke University had this to say.

We have raised, globally in our atmosphere,

the concentration of carbon dioxide

from about 280 parts-per-million in the late

1800's to close to 380 parts-per-million today.

That's roughly a 30% increase.

And the projection is that it will

be 550, 560, in the year 2050.

Schlesinger's colleague at Duke, Professor of

Conservation Ecology Stuart Pimm, added this.:

There is now a strong scientific consensus that

that has caused warming over the last

several decades, maybe centuries, and there's a

strong expectation that it will continue to do so.

So. . .greenhouse gases on the rise.

Temperature on the rise. More floods.

More droughts. Rising sea level.

It's been in the news for some time now.

How does this impact the community of life?

Birds are arriving earlier in the springtime.

Plants are flowering earlier. Species'

ranges are moving northward.

We are seeing an extraordinary,

strong signal, biological signal,

of what global warming is doing for us.

Crops and trees will grow in

places they don't grow today.

We have a lot of suspicion that

they may not grow as well.

And we're beginning to see extinctions of

species that have literally no place

else to go as the climate gets warmer.

There's one impact I found particularly sobering.

The carbon in the atmosphere. The carbon in

the atmosphere goes into the ocean,

it gets absorbed in the ocean as,

I want to say, carbonic acid. . .

Changes in the atmosphere, for example,

of carbon dioxide can be buffered by absorption

of the carbon dioxide into the oceans.

That as you do that, you do change the acidity of

the oceans. And we are finding that there's a

measurable change in the acidity of the oceans.

And that is making it harder for the plankton to

form their shells. And if there's a plankton die-

off. . . that's the bottom of the food chain.

Plankton, as well as corals, are threatened not

only by rising acidity, but by rising temperatures.

Phytoplankton levels have declined by as much

as a third in some northern oceans.

And this has resulted in significant

impacts to fish and krill and bird populations.

But the reported dangers go far beyond a

breaking of food chains, which is bad enough.

Phytoplanktons produce half of

the oxygen we breathe. Half.

And they are a major carbon sink.

When plankton dies, more carbon remains

in the air. Which means more warming.

On top of this, new evidence shows

that climate can shift very rapidly.

Slow changes can build. . . to a

tipping point. . .and the system can

then shift abruptly to a new state.

this is happening in the oceans, where a global

current known as the grand conveyor belt is now

being impacted, with possibly disastrous results.

As Douglas Crawford-Brown, Director

of the Carolina Environmental

Program at the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill told me.:

The amount of carbon dioxide that we're putting

out into the atmosphere is rising to a point now

where most scientists would agree

that we may be at a sort of tipping point.

We may be at a point where we're going to

start to get so much carbon dioxide into the

atmosphere that feedback mechanisms

that control the temperature of the earth will

start to be stretched a little bit too far.

The classic one is you get too much

melting of ice, it flows into the ocean,

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