BURNED OUT: Crops and Climate Change

Food and climate change with two speakers: Dr. Geoffrey Heal, an eco-economist from the Columbia School of Business, NY, speaking at the London School of Economics; and author/food activist Wayne Roberts at McMaster University, Canada. Wayne Roberts courtesty of Maggie Hughes "News from the Other Side" at CFMU FM McMaster U Radio.

No copyright music.

IMPORTANT NOTES FOR RADIO STATIONS AND PODCAST SUBSCRIBERS:

This is the last show of our 2009 Spring season. Rebroadcasting stations, podcast listeners and regular downloaders: please note - I've laid out 8 key re-runs of Radio Ecoshock for the Summer. The download list will show up on Wednesday July 8th, as well as on our archive page. Radio stations can find a list of any music used, or other production notes, in the expanded listing at http://www.ecoshock.net That's starting July 8th.

These are the most important, and most downloaded programs we've ever done - as chosen by the listeners downloading from our site. The e-votes are in.

I'll be out of email contact from July 11th to August 11th. I'll check out all email then, please don't expect a reply. There is no electricity or phones where I'm going.

I'll be back with a whole new season, 48 news Radio Ecoshock Shows, starting in Late August. Don't change anything on your podcast - the new shows will show up as soon as they are ready in August.

Here are the links to full speeches by our feature speakers:

Geoffrey Heal to London School of Economics (about 57 min)
CD quality 52 MB
speech Lo-Fi 12 MB
Geoffrey Heal Q and A (about 30 min) Lo-Fi only 7 MB

Wayne Roberts "Food and Climate Change" about 1 hour. Maggie Hughes "The Other Side of the News"


Here is the basic script for this week's show:

Welcome to Radio Ecoshock - home of the awful truth.

We could talk about a half million more people kicked out of their jobs. The record number of regular mortgages 2 or 3 months behind. Collapsing states, budget slashing towns, bankrupt banks.

But hey, why bother with all that bad news, when the biggest story ever told is unfolding before our eyes. I know disappearing coral, birds and plants nobody has heard of doesn't sell. How about this: the food we all eat is under pressure even in these early days of the climate shift.

[Geoffrey Heal Quick Clip: No One is Working on Hotter Crops]

That is economist Dr. Geoffrey Heal speaking to the London School of Economics. He's going to tell us about agricultural loss already underway, and projected in the coming decades. Why fertile California will take a hit. Dr. Heal wonders why America is so slow to react. Could it be the fossil fuel lobby? Did the oil and coal boys twist the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill?

Then food activist and author Wayne Roberts works through the challenge of feeding a world where nature is disrupted. Food and global warming, in a speech recorded by Maggie Hughes.

Personally, I'm heading out tomorrow to buy a couple more sacks of hard red wheat for our emergency supply cupboard. Each bag is 44 kilograms, or about 50 pounds, of the best organic. I'll pour the wheat into Mylar bags, toss in two or three oxygen depleters, and seal it all in a 5 gallon bucket. That should keep at least 10 years, maybe 20.

The wheat news is good and bad. In the Summer of 2009, wheat prices are going down, because so many new acres have been planted. That doesn't mean it will all survive until harvest. Canada is a big wheat producer, and the Canadian Wheat Board predicts a 20 percent cross loss due to a drought in Western Canada. So dry, the seeds never sprouted, or tiny blades of wheat died. It's the Northern tip of a new Dust Bowl expected to fill the North American West as carbon levels rise in the atmosphere.

Two other big wheat producers, China and Australia, are also in big trouble as the rains stop reaching the fields. Increasing heat waves are also a threat to wheat.

Did I mention the new unstoppable wheat disease called ug99. It was first found in Uganda, but has now spread to the Middle East, including Iran. The only response is to burn the crop. So far, we have no resistant varieties, and experts in both Europe and North America say they expect ug99 to arrive sooner of later. That could devastate wheat production.

I like bread. I like some every day. Maybe this year, maybe three years from now, wheat and bread products could rocket up in price, or disappear for a while. That's when I'll crack open my buckets and make my own.

On to the show. First of all - American climate politics. The U.S. Supreme court recently gave the Environmental Protection Agency control over carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Why didn't the Obama Administration use their green appointees to get busy on greenhouse gases, through the EPA? Suddenly, a new piece of legislation appears in the House, where political contributions reign. Suddenly, a bunch of Republicans vote for the Waxman-Markey Bill, which is really a license for the coal and oil companies to carry on.

Let's get a different perspective from Dr. Geoffrey Heal, an economist from the Columbia Business School in New York. His speech on May 6th 2009 second guessed the Obama energy deal - and went on to explain why America has been hustled backward on climate change. Then Heal, who has been working the connections between economy and the environment since 1979, paints a dire picture of agricultural losses - as high as 40 percent world wide, as the climate shifts to it's new hot state.

Heal3 Waxman Markey end of speech.wav 5:31

Why is the American government the last to know we need action to save the climate? Geoffrey Heal gives us three bad reasons, in this speech as first visiting professor at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, the LSE.

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Heal4 Corporate AntiScience.wav 2:04
Heal5 US is a Petro State.wav 5:27

Is it true that the United States is the third largest oil producer, and second biggest natural gas producer, in the world? No wonder American climate policy seems to Saudi Arabian.

There you have it: fossil fuel corporations fought to cloud our minds, aided by a history of Conservatism and anti-scientific religious interests. I think he should have added all of us. We love our big cars and leaving all the lights on. We love to fly around on holidays while eating far too much. We're all in this climate tragedy together. Never forget the power of the people to empower a wrong-headed civilization - on our charge cards, no less.

This is Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith. I'm hungry to get on to our main topic this program: how climate change will affect our dinner plates. Here is more from Dr. Geoffrey Heal, from his speech "Controversies in the Economics of Climate Change"

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Heal 7 World Hydrology Calif Farms.wav 4:15

Finally, Dr. Heal wrestles with the economic cost of mass extinction. Sad but true, we need to enter this fact into the company books: up to 40 percent of all species on Earth could go extinct by 2100. How will that affect sales, you ask?

Geoffrey Heal is not your standard corporate accountant. He knows extinctions impact the environment in many strange ways. Take the Pacific Sea Otter for example. It was almost wiped out in California - and what happened? The fisheries also died out off that coast. It turns out the Sea Otter is a "corner-stone species". The otters were eating other creatures that kept things in balance for fish. When Sea Otters from Oregon were brought back to California, the local fishing improved.

Other connections between the species are harder to see. Let's hear Dr. Heal explain how the extinction of the Passenger Pigeons may have boosted Lyme disease in the United States.

Heal 8 Cost of Extinction.wav 11:14

That was Dr. Geoffrey Heal, from the Columbia School of Business, speaking on "Controversies in the Economics of Climate Change". This presentation was at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics in Britain, May 6th, 2009. Audio enhancement by Carl Hartung and Alex Smith of Radio Ecoshock. Find the full 55 minute speech plus Q and A on our climate pages, at www.ecoshock.org. And in the links at the top of this blog entry.

[Radio Ecoshock Station ID]

I'm Alex - and we're talking climate disruption of the food supply.

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That's author and food activist Wayne Roberts, currently employed as a sustainable food advisor for the city of Toronto, Canada. He spoke at McMaster University in Hamilton on May 5th, 2009 - on “Food and Climate Change”.

Here is the first part of that speech by Wayne Roberts.

OSofNews_090519_WayneRoberts_For Radio 18 min.wav 18 min

You have been listening to Wayne Roberts, a long time food activist, making the connections with the polluted environment and climate change. This talk at McMaster University in Canada was part of a college radio program called "The Other Side of the News" on CFMU FM. Producer Maggie Hughes just announced she had to give up her weekly radio program for health reasons. But she'll continue to get the facts others miss, in specials posted on the audio exchange web site radio4all.net That's radio the number 4 all dot net for Indy producer Maggie Hughes past work, and coming shows. Thanks Maggie.

Or check out her web site at www.oside.ca

That's it for Radio Ecoshock this week. Find the full speeches by Dr. Geoffrey Heal and Wayne Roberts as free mp3 downloads on our web site. Choose "climate" from our Audio on Demand menu, lower down on the main page, ecoshock.org. Or get Wayne Roberts full speech as broadcast on "The Other Side of the News" here.


Load up your IPOD, mp3 player or computer with hot programs and speeches from Ecoshock. It takes a lot to really grasp this developing storm, in your heart.

I'm Alex Smith. Thanks for being on the journey with me.

Have a great Summer. Enjoy yourself - and put away the harvest as it comes.

EARLY DEPRESSION DAZE

Forget Madoff. Wall St. is the giant Ponzi scheme.

The former NASDAQ Chairman and investing icon Bernard Madoff admits he ran a giant investment scam that lost $50 billion. Everyone, the wealthiest and wise, were taken in. Even the Rothschilds were hit, not to mention Swiss banks, British Banks (Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC), hedge funds (for a cool ten billion), Jewish charities, university endowments, pensions funds, municipalities. Lots of pain - but it's also illustrative of the much bigger landscape. Wall Street and all the big banks were just Ponzi operations, paying out old investors from new suckers. Can you say "sub-prime"?

Hear, in his own words, audio of Bernie explaining why fraud just isn't possible these days, due to stiff regulation. Yeah right.

It gets worse. The CDS/CDO asteroid is set to strike Earth in 2009. Bets totaling at least $50 trillion dollars come home for settlement. But that is more than the net worth of Earth. As Max Keiser points out - even if every American home and business were sold off to the Chinese and Saudis - the debt still wouldn't be paid.

That is the black hole the American Treasury and the FED (read: the same bank nuts who got us into this mess) are trying to fill up with your childrens' tax money. There isn't enough money in the world to settle these gambling debts. The idea any of it is going to be paid back is ridiculous. It just goes into the hole, and is never seen again. That is called "deflation".

Why doesn't the government give the money to the people instead? Or at least start up some productive industry, like building alternative energy plants, and more trains. Sadly, the gangsters/bankers are in charge of our government now, scaring the politicians worse than Osama bin Laden. And paying them off too.

Alex explains.

Then we interview Michael Byron on surviving the Crunch. He's the author of the Infinity's Rainbow series, and a professor in the San Diego area. His last book is:
""The Path Through Infinity’s Rainbow: Your Guide for Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad."

Finally, at the request by a couple of listeners, Alex comes clean about his food storage project. How much things cost, how long will wheat last in buckets, why is bulk food so hard to find all of a sudden? Getting in ahead of the curve, as the world food situation - even in plentious America - gets scary.

You will also hear a song I love, capturing the times "Clearcut" by Ethan Miller and Kate Boverman. And, of course, "Food Storage Blues" by Mormon Brother Thompson and the bean sisters.


Alex's food storage audio blog. Bit of music and fun. Radio Ecoshock 081219 1 hour CD Quality 56 MB or Lo-Fi 14 MB

FOOD THREATS & SURVIVAL - PLUS HYBRID HUMAN POWER

We open up this program with a classic 1946 quote from U.S. President Harry Truman. Old Harry begs Americans to save scraps of bread to help feed the starving overseas. We haven't heard much of that recently, although an estimated 860 million something people are hungry to dying.

You get a 24 minute interview with Kathy Jo Wetter of ETC Group. They've just released a report ""Who Owns Nature? Corporate Power and the Final Frontier in the Commodification of Life." That's the title of the 100th newsletter coming from the ETC Group, published in November 2008.

It's an ambitious report naming exactly which corporations are trying to take over the world's food and drug industry, from seeds to processing and chemicals, all the way to your grocery store, and your body. Plus a lot of top ten charts that name names: the companies who control most of your food chain. They'd like to own it all.

Then I look at threats to our wheat supply, which is rapidly dwindling. We've used up more than we grew in 6 of the last 7 years. At their low point, just before the harvest, humans only have 55 days worth of wheat in reserve (as Lester Brown tells us in a quick clip).

Then there is the UG99 black stem wheat rust - a scary fungi that can destroy wheat crops. It was discovered in Uganda back in 1999, and spread up the East Coast of Africa. Then the only force five hurrican ever recorded in the Indian Ocean spread UG99 to the Middle East. It is now in Iran, and threatens to cross over into the Punjab bread basket of India. Maybe the Ukraine too.

Eventually this crop threat will reach North America. We have some fungicides, but not nearly enough, as outlined in this show. The resistant variety might take 5 years to get into the marketplace. A rust in 1954 killed forty percent - that's 40%!! - of the North American wheat harvest, so this is serious stuff.

Also, we don't have the big food warehouses anymore, in your city. The corporations are using a just in time system to deliver food directly from the source to your local food market. They use the trucks themselves as a rolling warehouse. So... if there is an emergency, whether climate, earthquakes, the bird flu, or just crop shortages and stopped trucks - you cannot depend on any outside source of food. Maybe it's time to consider your own food storage at home.

I interview Kari from Survival Foods Canada Business is really picking up there, as Canadians worry about their food supply, in the coming Depression. The same thing is happening in the United States, for companies like readyreservefood.com

FINALLY - WE CHANGE IT UP AND GO FOR HUMAN POWER STATIONS...

How about hybrid humans that produce their own electric power - just by walking around. Not only does this device exist - it makes walking easier, not harder. The invention is in it's earlier stages, led by Max Donelan of the Simon Fraser University Locomotion Lab.

The prototypes are being taken commercial, to provide power for those needing heart stimulation, or other internal body pumps that require a sure and rechargeable source of electricity. But the future possibilities are astounding. You would power your ipod/phone/computer just by walking down to the corner store. Perhaps in the future, all of us will become independent power stations, removing the need for bit climate killing fossil fuel plants.

I caught up with Max Donelan at a Cafe for Scientists in the Vancouver Public Library, on November 19th, 2008. In this 16 minute clip, introduced by CBC radio personality Hal Wake, Max explains his invention, plus the basics of human power use.

All in all, it's a full hour of information tinged with paranoia (or is that reality?)

Alex Smith
host
Radio Ecoshock

NOT SO COOL FARMING

The report is called "Cool Farming: Climate impacts of agriculture and mitigation potential" It's from Greenpeace International.

We have with us one of the authors, Dr. Pete Smith from the School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen. Dr. Smith was also a lead author, reporting for last year's climate series, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The total amounts of greenhouse gases coming from human agriculture are surprising to me. Your report finds that farming contributes at least 20 percent, and perhaps even up to a third, of all human-made greenhouse gases.

Dr Smith and I looked at a lesser-known greenhouse gas - nitrogen dioxide, usually shown on charts as N2O. It has a global warming potential 296 times higher than that of carbon dioxide. So it only takes a tiny amount of nitrogen dioxide to kick up a great deal of global warming.

According to Greenpeace:

"The overuse of fertilizers and the resulting nitrous oxide emissions have the highest share of agriculture’s contribution to climate change:
the equivalent of 2.1 billion tonnes of CO2 every year. And, the energy-intensive production of fertilizer adds another 410 million tonnes of CO2-equivalents. Of all chemical products,
fertilizers are among the greatest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions."

We know fertilizers were poisoning various river systems, and adding dead zones to coastal ocean areas - but I did not know they were such a potent force to change the climate.

That's why we spent some time, in this Ecoshock interview, going over how fertilizer really works. It is made from natural gas - another fossil fuel in short supply. As James Howard Kunstler told us in previous Ecoshock programs, the big fertilizer plants formerly located in Alabama and Louisiana - close to the Gulf of Mexico gas fields - have now moved to the Middle East. The American gas fields are in decline, so fertilizer manufacturing goes where the gas is.

That means our fertilizer is shipped thousands of miles by (oil-burning) ships. It also means that a Middle East conflict could not only cut off oil to the United States - but the very fertilizer required to feed America, used by the industrialized farm systems. Another vulnerability.

It might not even take a war to start this shift. Competition, and higher prices from China and India, could divert fertilizer away from both America and Europe.

You would think the big global warming gases would be in production of the fertilizer. Nope. Although those plants do spew out plenty of greenhouse gases, remember, the fertilizer itself contains fossil fuel derived greenhouse gases, especially nitrogen dioxide. Most of that goes into the water supply (our rivers and lakes, causing eutrophication) - but a significant amount just evaporates directly from the field, or from cow manure.

One solution would be to use other farming methods to build up the natural soil, so we don't need these fossil fuel fertilizers. At the very least, farmers need to find ways to use the minimum amounts of chemical fertilizers. They need to contain the greenhouse gas emissions from their fields and feed-lots.

BIO-FUELS

Then we looked at all the former forest land that is being bull-dozed to make "green" biofuels. I want to refer our listeners to a study done by Paul Crutzen at the Max Planck Institute, along with a whole group of international scientists, titled "Nitrogen dioxide release, from agro-biofuel production, negates global warming reduction by replacing fossil fuels." That was published August 1st, 2007.

That study finds that the process of growing biofuels creates so much nitrogen dioxide, as a powerful greenhouse gas, that we actually ADD to global heating, when we try and use biofuels.

MITIGATION

Dr. Smith, and the Greenpeace report, has some very positive suggestions for mitigation. Many of these are simple steps that could at least slow down the heating of the planet. I know farm talk isn't very sexy these days - but since we all eat - we all have to take responsibility for our impact on the planet's ecosystem derived from farming.

Following my chat with Dr. Pete Smith, I went for a Greenpeace agriculture campaigner based in Vancouver, Canada - Josh Brandon. Josh has real credentials in the field. He's been working on GM (Genetically Modified) food, trying to get labeling, at the very least, in Canada. Really, Greenpeace wants the experimentation on our food chain stopped until we know more about the impacts and risks.

Now Greenpeace has realized that farming itself is at least 20% of our climate change problem, maybe more. So, Josh Brandon has to morph into a climate change campaigner as well.

We focused on the situation in North America, and the changes Greenpeace want, to help preserve out climate.

Surely, it isn't necessary to burn out the planet, with droughts, storms, and floods, just to eat? Brandon doesn't think so, and again, there are some obvious improvements we can make to our farming process.

Here is where to find the 20 page summary of the report (558 KB) as a .pdf file.

www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/cool-farming

The full version (995 KB pdf file) is here:

www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/cool-farming-full-report

Or just Google "Greenpeace International Cool Farming"

Check out the interview. Food activism is becoming strong - not just for our own health, but for the continuing health of the whole ecosystem.

Alex Smith
host
Radio Ecoshock
www.ecoshock.org

End of the Age of Oil - 1

James Howard Kunstler lecture as 1st visiting scholar to Simon Fraser Urban Studies 080124

From the Long Emergency to new measures after Peak Oil. The best speech of the year so far.

Why the housing boom will not return, and what that means to the American economy. The disaster of investing in suburbia, as oil becomes more and more expensive, and dangerous to get.

How Nationalization of most of the oil of the world (the major companies like Shell and Exxon only deliver about 5% now, Kunstler says) - means not only will oil run out - but the countries who control it (like the Emirates, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia) will (a) keep more for their own economies and (b) send it to their friends (which may not be America....)

A whole range of social issues, tackled head on, with verve, from one of America's most articulate writers and speakers. Kunstler is the author of "The Geography of Nowhere" and "The Long Emergency" plus many other fiction and non-fiction books. His newest, a fiction novel set in the near future, after oil has run out, is titled "World Made by Hand." That comes out in March of 2008.

Meanwhile, he has been appointed the first visiting scholar to the progressive school of urban design at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, Canada. This speech was one of two given for that program - and the conclusion plus the lively question and answer period will follow in the Radio Ecoshock program next week. Kunstler unsettled the audience, who responded with both admiration and antagonism. A sign of a good speaker.

Part 1 of 2.

Ecoshock show 080201 1 hour CD Quality 56 MB or Lo-Fi 14 MB