I started a new job today. So far, I have:
Basically, when you think about it, I cannot be:
Yee haw! I hope this keeps up.
I’ve been following lots of articles on the food crisis that is happening around the world. Prices of staples like rice, corn, and wheat are doubling and tripling, leading to food shortages and riots in importing countries. The New York Times has been doing some amazing analysis on this here and here.
It feels personal at times, since during my short 6 months in West Africa, I learned that in Sierra Leone they are dependent on rice and other grain imports. Even though they grow an beautiful local variety of rice, it is hard to find in the markets since it is exported, and another grade of rice is imported from world markets. People there buy rice by the giant bag for families, and in a place where one meal a day really is the norm, rice really is a main staple. There is also a lot of bread, which I ate for breakfast most days. When I was there, the price of rice was relatively stable, but the price of bread (wheat) rose, and at one point there was a shortage and there was no bread to be found: price rises affect the ability to import it into the country altogether, it’s not just about being able to find it on the street but have to pay the vendor more. So, the reality hits close to home for me, although I don’t *feel* it as much as my friends there do.
in Paul Krugman’s article, he says that these rising prices are a result of rising population demanding more grains or grain intensity (i.e. meat) , effects of climate change, and what he calls “bad policy” such as promoting ethanol as an alternative to fossil fuels for cars, putting food crops in competition with energy (which is seeing rising prices that will continue to rise).
In an Ecological Economics way, this is an interesting issue. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, whose work I like a lot, did a lot of work in the early 1970s looking at the entropy law (second law of thermodynamics) and the economic process. He pointed out that over extraction of natural capital, and over pollution, that is, going beyond the rate at which the earth can process pollution or regenerate natural capital, would set the earth and economy into co-evolutionary process resulting in scarcity and a more damaged environment for future generations. Herman Daly, took Georgescu-Roegen’s writings, and said that ecological economics policy should seek to achieve sustainable scale (throughput of material goods in the economy), just distribution, and efficient allocation (economic efficiency), in that order.
Sustainable scale plays into this in a couple of interesting ways. For one, population growth, and growth of wealth for certain parts of the population, is driving this increased demand on food. But another scale issue is that of fuel consumption for cars. While governments could be finding policies to get people out of their cars, or into much smaller cars (see the post below on SUVs) which use less fuel, I think that the production of these biofuels creates the hope that people can continue to drive without change, rather than reducing energy usage patterns. This hope that we can just go on without changing essential infrastructure for personal mobility is obviously adding to this issue of scale.
Georgescu-Roegen discussed the just distribution issue in the sense of future generations, but we are seeing right now that there isn’t just distribution right now, and these issues of scale are affecting current generations in a very immediate sense. His issue of future generations definitely holds though in that the issue of climate change took time to grow, and what happened in the past is affecting us now.
On the food part, it’s something that I don’t know as much about, but a good friend who works on the issue of food has pointed out to me that much of the analysis in the media does not question why so many countries rely on food imports, how the food system is set up, and why the food system reacts this way. My systems thinking friend would look at this and see the food system as an unstable system, and the perfect storm of climate change creating drought, population demands and biofuels will effect a transformational change on the food system which has to find a new equilibrium. The question is, what will the new equilibrium be, and how do we adapt so that we can minimize the damage?
How should we solve global climate change? No small task, it is true, and hence calls for innovative thinking. In addition to my world parachute for geo-engineering idea, here are a few ideas I thought of today:
Idea #1: Have Girl Guides sell emissions trading products, such as allowances (or credits) from the mandatory sector (of greenhouse gas reductions) and offsets from the voluntary sector.
Rationale: Climate change makes us all feel bad, and to mitigate it we have to pay more money or change our lifestyles immensely. But, could you really say “no” if one of these cute girls came to your house to sell emissions reductions? In addition, this could help them recover from their trans-fats image, and give a new revenue stream to fundraise for the organization. It would be even more cute if they got to run an auction for allowances, rather than just selling offsets, or trading allowances for companies.
Idea #2: Change zoning by-laws to make all garages, and garage doors too small to fit SUVs.
This could be a very uncontroversial way to pass an unconventional law which would significantly reduce the number of SUVs on the road, since owners will find it increasingly difficult to park them. While these zoning by-laws will only affect new garages (of which there will be plenty), how would you affect the already existing ones? I suggest putting standards and codes to limit the size of garage doors, so that if you had to replace your garage door, it would be too small to cover the hole, therefore, garage owners would have to cover those spots with more walls, thereby reducing the ability to fit an SUV through it.
Rationale: The biggest contributor to growth of greenhouse gas emissions in the personal transportation sector is from the rapid market takeover of SUV’s. SUV’s consume considerably more gasoline than a regular car (such as a sedan type), and their market share has gone from a very small percentage in the early 1990s, to a third or 50% of all personal vehicles.
Idea #3: The environmental icon air travel challenge. Who travels more, Al Gore or David Suzuki? Wouldn’t you like to know? If we knew how much they travel by air to educate us on the realities of climate change, do you think they would travel less?
Rationale: Traveling by air plane produces significantly more greenhouse gas emissions than most other forms of travel. One long air flight for one person (12 hours +) produces more greenhouse gas emissions than all other greenhouse gas emitting activities for that person combined (on an annual basis). Check zerofootprint.net’s carbon calculator for the proof.
A change of events means that I have 5 days left at work. codejill, one of my trusty career advisors, advised me that it might be a good idea to pick up a pineapple cup and sip from it during my last days at work. I didn’t have time to order one online, so I went to Balloon King and found a coconut cup. I also picked up the little paper umbrellas to put in it. I brought it in last Wednesday, and sipped from it all day at my desk. I managed to make a total of 3 colleagues laugh. When I went to fill it with water the next day, it was cracked the whole way through and water spilled everywhere! I am not happy with this small return-on-investment for my $3.95 plus tax purchase. boo. I didn’t even manage to make it to a single meeting with my coconut and umbrella!
