Food supply expert paints grim global picture 05.23.2022 By Arvin Donley NEW YORK, NEW YORK, US — Global wheat inventories currently stand at about 10 weeks of global consumption, a food supply expert said during a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council on May 19. Sara Menker, chief executive officer of Gro Intelligence, an organization that gathers and analyzes global food and agricultural data, said she disputes official government agency estimates that put global wheat inventories at 33% of annual consumption, countering inventories are closer to 20%. “It is important to note that the lowest grain inventory levels the world has ever seen are now occurring while access to fertilizers is highly constrained, and drought in wheat growing regions around the world is the most extreme it’s been in over 20 years,” Menker said. “Similar inventory concerns also apply to corn and other grains. Government estimates are not adding up.” Menker told the security council that while much of the blame for the burgeoning food security crisis has focused on the Russia-Ukraine war that has severely limited agricultural exports from that region, it has merely “added fuel to a fire that was long burning.” “I share this because we believe it’s important for you all to understand that even if the war were to end tomorrow, our food security problem isn’t going away anytime soon without concerted action,” she said. Menker cited five major factors occurring simultaneously that are “each individually extraordinary.” They are: Lack of fertilizer Climate disruptions Record-low inventories in cooking oils Record-low inventories of grains Logistical bottlenecks that already have started to unravel decades of global economic progress. Global fertilizer prices have nearly tripled year-on-year and quadrupled over the past two years because of supply shocks driven by logistical bottlenecks, restrictions on natural gas that impact the ability to produce fertilizer, and sanctions and export restrictions amidst the Russia Ukraine war, Menker said. “This risks significant crop yield reductions in key producing regions, such as Brazil, the United States, and Western Europe later this year and next year, severely impacting global food security and inflation for the next three to five years at a minimum,” she said. Global drought conditions for wheat are the worst in over 20 years around the world. The United States and Brazil, the world’s two largest exporters of agricultural products, also are experiencing extreme droughts. She noted that Brazil’s cropland soil moisture is at a 20-year low. The price of traditionally cheap palm oil has nearly tripled in the last two years, driven by increased biofuels demand, drought in regions that produce alternative cooking oils such as Brazil and Canada, record import demand from China and the loss of nearly 75% of global sunflower oil exports due to the Russia-Ukraine war. The recent export ban in Indonesia, the world’s largest palm oil producer, which is responsible for 60% of global production, has added significant upward price pressure to vegetable oils, Menker said. As for grains, Menker said verifiable data from public and private sources that Gro Intelligence organizes and then builds statistical models to connect the dots between its platform shows that global wheat inventories are at a level not seen since the financial and commodity crisis of 2007 and 2008. “Conditions today are worse than those experienced in 2007 and 2008,” she added. Logistical challenges, which began at the onset of the pandemic more than two years ago, have been exacerbated by other factors such as the Russia-Ukraine war, Menker said. “Russia and Ukraine used to provide nearly a third of the world’s wheat exports and are in the top five exporters of corn globally,” she said. “Combined, they used to export 75% of global sunflower oil supplies. All Ukrainian ports remain closed, making it impossible to move any of Ukraine’s harvested grain across its borders. Shifting to rail will move less than 10% of the prewar flow. It’s not enough. Russian exports, which also include fertilizer, are limited because of Black Sea maritime hazards.” Gro Intelligence estimates show that price increases in major food crops year to date has made an additional 400 million people food insecure. “There are a few food security statistics shared so I want to define this as the number of people at $3.59 a day,” Menker said. “To put this into perspective, that is equivalent to the number of people that China has taken out of poverty in the last 20 years. In five months, we have undone 20 years of progress.” She added that the organization’s economic shock models show that year-to-date changes in prices of agricultural products already have affected some economies by 3% to 5% of their GDP. Countries disproportionately affected are in regions such as North Africa, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and West and Central Asia. “Without substantial immediate and aggressive coordinated global actions, we stand the risk of an extraordinary amount of both human suffering and economic damage,” Menker said. “This isn’t cyclical; this is seismic. It’s a once in a generation occurrence that can dramatically reshape the geopolitical era.” https://www.world-grain.com/articles/16941-food-supply-expert-paints-grim-global-picture
Climate change, energy, and an unstable grid: The mainstream belatedly gets the connections By Kurt Cobb, originally published by Resource Insights May 29, 2022 Memorial Day marks the unofficial beginning of summer in the United States as the temperate breezes of spring give way to an enveloping heat that has become more and more intense each year due to climate change. This summer forecasters are expecting two big things: deadly heat and electricity outages. Mainstream news coverage is now explaining why these are inextricably intertwined, a relatively new development in such coverage. And, it turns out that the recent blistering record heatwave in India and Pakistan is but a foretaste of our future. Those of us who have covered climate change in the last two decades believed that by the time such connections became obvious and noted by mainstream outlets, the world would be so far along in the process of global warming that stability-challenging events such as grid failures would become normal. That’s because of the lag time between when we introduce greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and when we experience the warming caused by them is between 25 and 50 years. This is due to what’s called the thermal inertia of the oceans which means more or less that the oceans take time to warm (usually decades). Even if we were to take drastic action now that stopped all further emissions of greenhouse gases, the world would be in for several more decades of rising temperatures. But, of course, we as a global society are instead pursuing business as usual. I can remember as a child living largely without air-conditioning. We would experience nights so cool at the cottage we rented along the shores of Lake Michigan that we would close all the shutters and cover ourselves with wool blankets. Nowadays in my home in Washington, D.C., I am told I’m insane not to use air-conditioning. I share an old home with others and choose not to have an air-conditioner in my room. While I have a lizard-like tolerance for heat, in the summer of 2020 that tolerance was challenged. A heat dome park itself over the East Coast giving Washington daytime high temperatures of 90 degrees F or higher for 20 straight days. When those high temperatures were combined with Washington’s generally high summer humidity, the temperatures felt even hotter. A few days in a row of such heat does not bother me. But this many days meant that after a while I could not adequately cool down at night in order to recover before the next day’s heat. As the heat wave dragged on and the night temperatures hovered in the mid-80s, I took to spending a couple of hours in air-conditioning in the downstairs just to get cool enough to sleep before retiring to bed. But there are second order effects of heat. People tend to use more electricity during heat waves to power fans, residential and commercial air-conditioning, and industrial cooling. That, in turn, puts pressure on electrical generating plants and on the grid that delivers the electricity they produce. The irony, of course, is that 63 percent of the world’s electricity is generated using fossil fuels. For the remainder it takes considerable amounts of fossil fuels (particularly liquid fuels) to build and maintain the infrastructure for nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, solar and other sources. That reliance is simply embedded into the way we do things. So, the more cooling we demand, the more greenhouse gases we produce which, of course, only fuels the heat we are trying to escape from. During India’s recent heat wave the government ordered generating plants using coal to burn more as necessary in order to generate at capacity. But, of course, that’s not all. Prices for natural gas and coal, the primary fuels for electric generating plants, have skyrocketed in response to a better-than-expected rebound in energy demand from pandemic lows. That has put electricity prices on an upward trajectory as well. Disruptions due to the Russia-Ukraine war are partly to blame. But years of low investment by the energy industry is also a large factor. Finally, the state of the electrical grid is dismal. The 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. energy infrastructure a C- with a focus on the electrical infrastructure. The grid problem is actually a global one. And, it is a fact that as our energy infrastructure expands and is asked to deliver more energy, it becomes more and more costly and difficult to maintain. (One of the key observations of Limits to Growth, the groundbreaking resource and environmental analysis first published in 1972, is that one of the main reasons economic growth is likely to come to a halt is that all investment capital will one day have to go into maintaining our current infrastructure and mitigating the pollution and other ill effects of our way of life. As a result there will be no capital left over to invest in growth.) It’s not surprising that private utility companies run by humans with limited lifespans would choose current profit over making investments that are important for the next 50 years. Even government-owned utilities are sometimes rife with corruption that diverts public investment funds to personal gain or are simply poorly managed. And so I enter summer with a sense of foreboding, not only about a simmering war in Ukraine, but also the stability of basic energy infrastructure and our ability to function if the lights, computers, and the water, sewer and gasoline pumps go out for an extended period. https://www.resilience.org/stories/...he-mainstream-belatedly-gets-the-connections/
I think we're already seeing this, what's been called 'catabolic collapse' by others (explanatory article is in this thread earlier), for our general stock of capital assets, hard and soft: "(One of the key observations of Limits to Growth, the groundbreaking resource and environmental analysis first published in 1972, is that one of the main reasons economic growth is likely to come to a halt is that all investment capital will one day have to go into maintaining our current infrastructure and mitigating the pollution and other ill effects of our way of life. As a result there will be no capital left over to invest in growth.) I'm reminded of the story of the first designs for the International Space Station: it was so complex that engineers realized, based on hours of service and expected failure rates, that the astronauts would be busy full-time maintaining, repairing, or replacing systems on the ISS itself, leaving no time for experiments! A bit more extravagant and the station would have been in an immediate state of catabolic collapse--without relevant external inputs, something Planet Earth does not have.
The world may be careening toward a 1970s-style energy crisis -- or worse By Matt Egan, CNN Business Updated 10:12 AM ET, Thu June 2, 2022 New York (CNN Business) The world is grappling with gravity-defying energy price spikes on everything from gasoline and natural gas to coal. Some fear this may just be the beginning. Current and former energy officials tell CNN they worry that Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the wake of years of underinvestment in the energy sector have sent the world careening into a crisis that will rival or even exceed the oil crises of the 1970s and early 1980s. Unlike those infamous episodes, this one is not contained to oil. "Now we have an oil crisis, a gas crisis and an electricity crisis at the same time," Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency watchdog group, told Der Spiegel in an interview published this week. "This energy crisis is much bigger than the oil crises of the 1970s and 1980s. And it will probably last longer." The global economy has largely been able to withstand surging energy prices so far. But prices could continue to rise to unsustainable levels as Europe attempts to wean itself off Russian oil and, potentially, gas. Supply shortages could lead to some difficult choices in Europe, including rationing. Joe McMonigle, secretary general of the International Energy Forum, said he agrees with this depressing forecast from the IEA. "We have a serious problem around the world that I think policymakers are just waking up to. It's kind of a perfect storm," McMonigle, whose group serves as a go-between for energy producing and consuming nations, told CNN in a phone interview. 'I wouldn't trust them.' Energy Secretary blasts Russia for 'weaponizing' energy The extent of that perfect storm -- underinvestment, strong demand and supply disruptions from the war -- will have wide-reaching consequences, potentially threatening the economic recovery from Covid-19, exacerbating inflation, fueling social unrest and undermining efforts to save the planet from global warming. Birol warned of supply bottlenecks of gasoline and diesel, especially in Europe, as well as rationing of natural gas next winter in Europe. "It is a crisis for which the world is woefully unprepared," said Robert McNally, who served as a top energy adviser to former US President George W. Bush. Not only are energy prices very high, but the reliability of the power grid is being challenged by extreme temperatures and severe drought. A US power grid regulator warned last month that parts of the country could face electricity shortages and even blackouts this summer. 'Our fears have borne out' Former Obama energy adviser Jason Bordoff and Harvard University professor Meghan O'Sullivan wrote a piece in the Economist in late March warning that the world was on the cusp of "what may become the worst energy crisis since the 1970s." "Since we wrote that, our fears have borne out," Bordoff, co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School, told CNN. Of course, there are key differences between today and the 1970s. Prices have not spiked nearly as much as they did then and policymakers have not resorted to extreme steps like price controls. "Were we to resort to price controls and price caps, then we could have shortages," McNally said. When the war started, the West sought to avoid targeting Russia's energy supplies directly because it was simply too critical to global markets. Russia is not just the world's largest oil exporter, but it is the biggest natural gas exporter and a major supplier of coal. But as the brutality of the war became clear to the world, that hands-off approach did not last, with the United States and other countries banning Russian energy imports. Russia retaliated against Western sanctions by restricting or even halting its shipment of natural gas to multiple European countries. The European Union announced plans this week to phase out 90% of Russian oil imports by the end of the year. That move has raised the specter of further retaliation from Russia. Energy experts sound alarm about US electric grid: 'Not designed to withstand the impacts of climate change' This tit-for-tat situation has only worsened the supply shortfall in energy markets that were already tight. "We have not yet seen how bad this energy crisis is going to get," Bordoff said. Already, US gasoline prices have surged by 52% over the past year to record highs, angering the public and contributing to the nation's inflation crisis. Prices for natural gas, a vital fuel for heating homes and powering the electric grid, have nearly tripled over the past year in the United States. Natural gas prices have skyrocketed even further in Europe, though they are well off their worst levels. 'Putin just brought us there faster' Today's energy turmoil is not simply the result of the war in Ukraine. It is also the byproduct of cratering investment in oil and natural gas, which are depleting resources that require massive sums of money just to maintain their production, let alone increase it. Upstream investment in the oil and gas sector stood at just $341 billion in 2021, 23% below the pre-Covid level of $525 billion and well below the recent peak in 2014 of $700 billion, according to the IEF. This investment shortfall has been brought on by a series of factors, including a push among investors and governments to bet on clean energy, the uncertain future of fossil fuels and years of weak and volatile oil prices. California drought could cut state's hydropower in half this summer "Because of the desire to bring down carbon emissions, we have a lot less appetite to invest in hydrocarbons. And that exacerbates the price volatility and makes it more difficult to resolve the supply side," said Francisco Blanch, head of global commodities at Bank of America. Europe was already grappling with an energy crisis last year and prices for natural gas, coal and oil were high long before the first Russian tanks began rolling into Ukraine. "We were heading towards a crisis anyway. Putin just brought us there faster and sharper," said McNally, who is now the president of consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group. Shortages and gas lines? The 1973 oil crisis was marked by hours-long lines at gas stations, fuel shortages and panic. Experts said they worry about fuel shortages again today, although they view that as a greater risk in Europe than in the United States. "Fuel shortages are a global problem. You're going to see that very soon, though maybe not in the US," said Bank of America's Blanch. Blanch said he thinks this risk is lower in the United States because the country remains one of the biggest oil producers on the planet and is a major exporter of energy. Europe, on the other hand, is more reliant on foreign oil and natural gas -- especially from Russia. The IEA chief warned of natural gas rationing in Europe, which is heavily dependent on Russia for gas. Blanch noted that sky-high natural gas prices have already shut down factories in Europe. "Europe is already in natural gas rationing mode," he said. 'We have to be careful here' Energy experts told CNN they worry global policymakers are mismanaging the climate crisis, focusing too much on reducing supply and not enough on cutting the world's appetite for fossil fuels. "We're not doing nearly enough to reduce hydrocarbon demand consistent with our climate goals," said Bordoff. Focusing on just one side of the equation risks not only price spikes but social unrest and turning the public off to climate action. "We have to be careful here because if we allow the public to equate high energy prices with the energy transition, we're doomed," said McMonigle. "You will essentially lose public support, probably permanently." McMonigle urged governments to send signals to investors that not only is it okay to still invest in fossil fuels, but it's "necessary" for the world economy and progress in the energy transition. But even if policymakers convince investors to ramp up investment, that would take considerable time to result in more supply. What could end the energy crisis Of course, no one can say with certainty exactly how all of this will play out. And there could be surprises that ease the supply crunch. For instance, a diplomatic breakthrough that ends the war in Ukraine and allows sanctions to get lifted from Russia would be a gamechanger. Birol said other surprises that would ease the energy crisis include an Iranian nuclear deal, a deeper economic slowdown in China or an agreement by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC producers to ramp up oil production. Inflation worries are real but this isn't the 1970s He also reiterated that governments stand ready to release further emergency stockpiles of oil. However, even the record-setting release of US emergency stockpiles had just a modest and fleeting impact on gasoline prices. In March, the IEA also urged governments around the world to consider drastic steps to slash oil demand, including reducing speed limits on highways, working from home up to three days a week where possible and car-free Sundays in cities. And there's at least one other development that has been front-and-center lately and would ease the energy crisis: An economic recession, or at least one that's deep enough to cause demand to collapse. " Not a word about depletion in this article, but depletion is strongly related to "underinvestment" in fossil fuels, primarily through fear of stranded assets, and fear of newly enforced legal responsibility for cleanup. We are sucking oil and gas from more wells which produce less. That's more junk on the ground. The fossil fuel economy is unsustainable, and "that which is unsustainable will eventually not be sustained".
Outstanding article. They're certainly setting up Russia to be the excuse for when it happens, too. Despite the fact that this isn't just a Russia thing.
Yes, I've become very tired of hearing that excuse. But as someone recently wrote, "as the years and chaos unfold, everyone and everything will at some point be blamed, except for... ecological overshoot."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/04/opinion/environment/climate-change-trees-carbon-removal.html Let’s Not Pretend Planting Trees Is a Permanent Climate Solution June 4, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ET Credit...Boniface Muthoni/SOPA Images -- LightRocket, via Getty Images By Zeke Hausfather Trees are our original carbon removal technology: Through photosynthesis, they pull carbon dioxide out of the air and store it. They have lately been touted as a climate savior, a way to rapidly reduce the carbon dioxide that has accumulated in the atmosphere as we cut our emissions. A “trillion trees” initiative was launched with much fanfare at the World Economic Forum in Davos back in 2020, and it was one of the few climate solutions embraced by the Trump administration. Planting trees and protecting forests are a major part of many corporate efforts to offset emissions. But there’s a catch. Carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere is only temporarily stored in trees, vegetation and soil, while a sizable part of our emissions today, will remain in the atmosphere, much of it for centuries and some of it for millenniums to come. Trees can quickly and cost-effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere today. But when companies rely on them to offset their emissions, they risk merely hitting the climate “snooze” button, kicking the can to future generations who will have to deal with those emissions. We have a saying in the climate science world: “Carbon is forever.” Around 20 percent of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere today will still be in the atmosphere many thousands of years from now. This means that to effectively undo emissions, the carbon we take out of the atmosphere needs to stay out. There is a real risk that, in a warming world with more wildfires, with pests preying on trees and with drying soil, carbon in tree plantations could end up back in the atmosphere sooner rather than later. For carbon to be permanently removed by planting trees, forests would have to remain in place for thousands of years. On top of that, the trees would have to be planted on land that would have been forest-free for those same thousands of years had the trees not been planted. Companies using trees to offset their emissions often sign a 40-year contract. But the companies selling and buying carbon credits may not be around in 40 years. There is a real risk that no one will be left holding the bag if tree plantations are clear-cut for development, go up in flames or are devoured by mountain pine beetles a few decades hence. In short, the timelines over which carbon removal needs to occur are fundamentally inconsistent with the planning horizons of private companies today. There is another option for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Our current emissions come primarily from burning fossil fuels that spent millions of years underground before being dug up. If we put carbon back into the ground, put it into deep oceans or turn it into rocks, we can keep it out of the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years, effectively counteracting the long-term impact of our current emissions. There are only a handful of facilities in Europe and North America that are currently doing permanent carbon removal; the technologies have been deployed outside the lab for less than a decade, and they are still quite expensive, with prices typically in the hundreds of dollars per ton of carbon removed. But a growing number of scientists are working toward scaling them up and reducing costs. (I recently joined the team at Stripe Climate to help support early-stage technologies and build a market for permanent carbon removal.) In the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, my co-authors and I found that society needs to rapidly reduce emissions over the coming decades to avoid potentially catastrophic changes to our climate. We also showed that removing carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere would be an “essential element,” alongside rapid emissions reductions, to meet our climate goals. How much carbon removal will ultimately depend on how quickly and fully we can cut emissions. Most of our models show that to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, we’ll need to remove around 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year by 2050 — a bit more than annual U.S. emissions today. Over the next 80 years, we may need to remove more than 600 billion tons, an amount greater than 15 years of current global emissions. Why will we need so much carbon removal? The science is clear that to stop the world from continuing to warm, we need to get emissions to “net zero.” But there will always be some remaining emissions and some greenhouse gasses will be extremely difficult and costly to fully eliminate. Our models suggest we will need at least a few billion tons of carbon removal each year to counterbalance the remaining hard-to-eliminate emissions. Emerging technologies have the potential to meet this need. It is also increasingly likely that the world will pass 1.5 degrees Celsius — our most ambitious climate target — in the next decade or so. In the recent IPCC report, more than 96 percent of scenarios that limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the century overshoot it on the way there. Once we overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius, even getting emissions all the way down to zero will not cool the world back down. This is the brutal math of climate change, and it means that the only way to bring global temperatures back down in the future is through the large-scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. To date, carbon removal efforts by companies and governments have largely relied on trees and soil. But even under a best-case scenario, these can only provide around half of the removal needed. We only have so much available arable land in which to plant the number of trees we need to store enough carbon. While carbon removal is often conflated with carbon offsets, the vast majority of offsets currently sold pay someone else to avoid emissions rather than removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Offset markets are plagued by hot air, with many actors gaming the system by claiming carbon credits for actions they were already planning to take, such as building a clean energy project or not cutting down a forest they own. In one case, an environmental group even provided offsets that were sold to oil companies, making the dubious claim that they would otherwise allow the forests they own to be logged. Permanent removals, on the other hand, are harder to game. There is little market value to permanently removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so it is much easier to prove that money spent actually results in removal. And the risk of accidental rerelease is orders of magnitude smaller. That’s why the well-respected Science Based Targets initiative only allows measures that permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere to offset remaining emissions — and only alongside deep emissions reductions. The private sector can help jump-start permanent removals by purchasing them today. For example, Frontier — a recently announced initiative — will purchase nearly $1 billion of permanent carbon removal over the next nine years to help support early-stage technologies and figure out what approaches work and can scale in decades to come. But voluntary investments by the private sector can only take us so far; ultimately, removing carbon from the atmosphere will have to be incentivized by government policy, either through a price on carbon or subsidies for carbon removal. The scale of permanent carbon removal that will be needed to meet our most ambitious climate goals is staggering compared to the small amount of removal that has taken place to date. We are playing catch-up here, as we are on many climate fronts. We need to use this decade to figure out what works and what can scale in the decades to come: experimenting with a wide variety of approaches like direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, ocean alkalinity enhancement, biomass carbon removal and storage, and ocean biomass sinking among others. To tackle climate change, we need to reduce emissions as quickly as possible. But we also need to invest in bringing down the cost of technologies to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the future. Trees and soil are not a panacea for removing carbon. While governments should be encouraged to enhance the amount of carbon stored in trees, plants, and soil, we should be skeptical of claims that rely on temporary removals to justify additional “forever” emissions. Zeke Hausfather was a contributing author to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. He is the climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist with Berkeley Earth.
It is becoming clear that corporate initiatives to address climate change are all for show -- and effectively provide no results in reducing emissions. Many corporate initiatives are nothing more than shuffling carbon credit trades around on paper to obtain tax benefits without reducing a single ounce of carbon emissions associated with the large corporation. Report casts doubt on net-zero emissions pledges by big global companies https://www.reuters.com/business/su...s-pledges-by-big-global-companies-2022-06-12/