As far as I know, the only famines among white settlers in the United States occurred back in the 1600's. The availability of land (just steal it from natives, or buy a parcel from someone who did) and the agricultural techniques available even in the 18th century meant that food was usually abundant and limited only by one's wallet. There were crop failures on a local scale, and lean times, and disruptions from the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, and even the Dust Bowl, but they did not amount to national famines.
That could change, and sooner than you think, if you crunch the numbers. The current drought, spreading over much of the nation, makes it worth thinking about.
The United States is no longer an agricultural nation. The human population is currently around 315 million. Over the last decade the dollar value of U.S. food imports and exports, while fluctuating year to year, has drifted from a surplus of exports to a surplus of imports. While our nation ships a lot of grain to China and other countries, we import a lot of food too, mainly from Mexico and Canada.
This year's drought has hit the corn crop particularly hard. Still, the current estimate is that corn production will be around 10.8 billion bushels. That sounds like a lot, but it is less than 4 bushels per person (a bushel is 8 gallons, or 56 pounds of shelled corn). Usually 40% goes to producing ethanol. Much of the rest goes to feed for meat animals, including exports to China. But a lot goes straight to feed humans in the United States everything from corn chips to corn syrup.
The key figure to watch is ending inventories. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's report on August 10, the ending inventory this year will be about 650 million bushels. That is down over 500 million bushels in a single year.
Now suppose the same thing happens to corn next year. Subtract another 500 million bushels from this years' inventory of 650 million bushels. That would leave an inventory of 150 million bushels. A third year straight of crop failure would mean famine.
Corn is not the only major crop, but drought is not the only problem. Higher temperatures can also lead to higher losses from superweeds (the ones that Monsanto helped create be killing their weaker ancestors), insects, and an assortment of plant diseases.
2012 will, hopefully, go down in history as a particularly bad year, not to be repeated anytime soon. We can't count on that.
Given how fat many Americans are, and that our diet is quite varied, you might still want to discount the risk of famine. After all, under the scenario above, even during the third year of disaster we could get 10 to 11 billion bushels of corn. We might produce less ethanol, and feed corn directly to hungry people, instead of to pigs, chickens, and cows. Maybe Canada, Russia, or Brazil will have a bumper year, and we'll just import corn for our tortillas. Maybe the President will proclaim that gluten-free diets are nonsense and people should eat more wheat products again.
Maybe the relatively affluent, the top 30% or 20% or so, will keep eating meat. Maybe the ethanol producers will put their profit first and not give up their share of corn.
Maybe production of corn will be even lower next year, and wheat will decline too. Why? Because the soil will be dry going into the new year, and irrigation sources will be depleted. And maybe the fat people will take no pity on those who are already lean: maybe they will be strong enough to shove the starving aside when the delivery trucks pull up to the supermarkets.
As the population of the U.S.and the globe increases, and as weather gets more erratic and generally warmer, it might seem like a good idea to have a plan to cope with ugly scenarios. The Free Market won't magically make food appear out of parched fields.
Barack Obama, as usual, is sucking his thumb, moistening it in case he needs to measure the political wind. Instead of turning off the ethanol machine and creating a rational plan to prevent famine in the long run (like: more birth control), he is worrying about getting re-elected. Ditto for Congress. If I had not studied American history I would say this lot is the worst bunch of idiots ever. In fact they are typical mediocrities.
Our only hope is that rains will return, and it will keep on raining until at least 2016, when we might get some better nominees for Congress and the Presidency.
Showing posts with label weather. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weather. Show all posts
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Sunday, August 28, 2011
A Republican Hurricane
Imagine what Hurricane Irene how would affect people if the Tea Party - Republican program for dissolving American government were in full effect.
First of all, most people would have had no warning that the hurricane was coming because the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would have been shut down. The Tea Party declared it a waste of taxpayer dollars. Sure, private weather companies could exist and tell their private clients that weather was about to go wild, and the Pentagon would continue to be well-funded and would have its own weather monitoring capabilities. But having a government service that efficiently serves everyone without charging ... that would be socialism.
For most people the first signs of Irene would be their cardboard boxes blowing away. The Republicans want to eliminate taxpayer-subsidized housing, Social Security payments, unemployment compensation, and Medicare. They do want to charge enough local taxes to pay police to keep the resulting 60 million homeless Americans out of abandoned structures, so boxes would be the new McMansions. You might think a family of four or even one would provide enough weight to hold down a box home against the wind, but you are forgetting that food stamps, a socialist evil, would have been eliminated. People would be too skinny to weigh down a box against hurricane force winds.
But why worry about the lazy socialist rabble? Republicans would be fine. The rich would have even more money because taxes would be even lower, and no government regulations would prevent them from industriously creating jobs for the unemployed people of India and Africa. Warned by their private weather services, the rich would simply fly their private jets to Texas to enjoy the Perry drought. If they lose a few servants trying to protect their mansions and yachts from the weather, they could be easily replaced.
Their are rich Republicans and their are religious Republicans; that is the alliance that has crushed (in our imaginary scenario) the socialist Anti-Christ. The Religious, non-rich Republicans who could still afford ammunition would be getting out their Vietnamese-made Kalashnikovs and perhaps a few still-functioning American made relics of when guns were still manufactured in the United States, before deregulation. You might think they would be protecting their homes against the 30 million homeless people in the path of the Hurricane.
No, they would be in a sectarian war. With church-state separation gone, inter-Christian tensions would have risen to unforeseen (except by me) heights. The hurricane would be the last straw. It would be clearly caused by a lack of appropriate prayer. The Baptists would accuse the Methodists and Catholics of praying wrong. As soon as the winds slowed the majority religion in each locality would go out armed and demanding conversion or death. Surviving Republicans would flee to their respective religious enclaves.
The economy would spiral into Depression that made the 1930's Depression seem like Happy Days. Even the U.S. military would eventually collapse, unable to pay its troops. States would secede from the union, and localities would secede from states.
It would be God's anarchy. Meanwhile, the socialist, religiously tolerant states of the world would get along just fine (as the Soviet economy did in the 1930s) and historians would write first drafts of The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.
First of all, most people would have had no warning that the hurricane was coming because the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would have been shut down. The Tea Party declared it a waste of taxpayer dollars. Sure, private weather companies could exist and tell their private clients that weather was about to go wild, and the Pentagon would continue to be well-funded and would have its own weather monitoring capabilities. But having a government service that efficiently serves everyone without charging ... that would be socialism.
For most people the first signs of Irene would be their cardboard boxes blowing away. The Republicans want to eliminate taxpayer-subsidized housing, Social Security payments, unemployment compensation, and Medicare. They do want to charge enough local taxes to pay police to keep the resulting 60 million homeless Americans out of abandoned structures, so boxes would be the new McMansions. You might think a family of four or even one would provide enough weight to hold down a box home against the wind, but you are forgetting that food stamps, a socialist evil, would have been eliminated. People would be too skinny to weigh down a box against hurricane force winds.
But why worry about the lazy socialist rabble? Republicans would be fine. The rich would have even more money because taxes would be even lower, and no government regulations would prevent them from industriously creating jobs for the unemployed people of India and Africa. Warned by their private weather services, the rich would simply fly their private jets to Texas to enjoy the Perry drought. If they lose a few servants trying to protect their mansions and yachts from the weather, they could be easily replaced.
Their are rich Republicans and their are religious Republicans; that is the alliance that has crushed (in our imaginary scenario) the socialist Anti-Christ. The Religious, non-rich Republicans who could still afford ammunition would be getting out their Vietnamese-made Kalashnikovs and perhaps a few still-functioning American made relics of when guns were still manufactured in the United States, before deregulation. You might think they would be protecting their homes against the 30 million homeless people in the path of the Hurricane.
No, they would be in a sectarian war. With church-state separation gone, inter-Christian tensions would have risen to unforeseen (except by me) heights. The hurricane would be the last straw. It would be clearly caused by a lack of appropriate prayer. The Baptists would accuse the Methodists and Catholics of praying wrong. As soon as the winds slowed the majority religion in each locality would go out armed and demanding conversion or death. Surviving Republicans would flee to their respective religious enclaves.
The economy would spiral into Depression that made the 1930's Depression seem like Happy Days. Even the U.S. military would eventually collapse, unable to pay its troops. States would secede from the union, and localities would secede from states.
It would be God's anarchy. Meanwhile, the socialist, religiously tolerant states of the world would get along just fine (as the Soviet economy did in the 1930s) and historians would write first drafts of The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Groundhog Day Forecasting
Groundhog Day is rapidly becoming the most important day for reflection and celebration of the year. Will Spring come? It isn't just a question of whether there will be a few more weeks of winter. There will be more than that in Alaska, less than that in Florida. What will the weather bring? What strange tidings of global warming and human folly can be seen?
Most Americans have been enduring a fiercely cold winter. In Mendocino County, California, the opposite is true. It usually rains here most days in winter. This year we are in a drought, or have perfect winter weather, depending on how you look at it. There has not even been the usual ocean fog to obscure the sun. Highs in the 60's. Just plain weird. One of my apple trees began blooming in December. Jan and I have been taking Hugo to Schooner Gulch Beach to run in the sun and sand. Schooner Gulch, normally a strong stream in winter, is a trickle. Neighbors report that other seasonal streams are dry.
America is in trouble, friends, and I can't say we don't deserve it. We built our economy on false premises. "Free trade" and unregulated greed were supposed to bring us prosperity, instead they have brought us to grief. Too many Americans drove SUVs they could not really afford to places they did not need to go to buy crap they did not need to buy. Americans who were incapable of working within a budget rewarded themselves with McMansions. Now we have McMansion ghost towns to add to the collapsed city centers of the old mill towns. We won't let immigrants in to fill up the empty housing. If we did let them in, it would add to a population that is already environmentally unsustainable. The United States of America can no longer feed its own population, after centuries of being one of the world's great food exporters (we still export food, but we import more than we export).
Our government is set up to be conservative. It is very time consuming to make any fundamental change in the government's structure or even policy (See Is America a Democracy?). The government was not designed to change as fast as technology its consequences. Our "sacred" U. S. Constitution was designed to protect the property of the then nascent economic aristocracy, including their property in slaves. It has been improved by some of its amendments, but it was not designed for our modern society.
The Obama administration, while potentially an improvement on the Bush and Clinton administrations, is off to a pretty bad start. The good things President Obama has done [closing the extra-legal foreign prisons and allowing California and other states to set better miles-per-gallon car requirements] are just observing the basic laws of the land that W. had been breaking. Having the tax-and-spend Democrats trying to appoint tax-cheating jackasses to Cabinet posts sends a very bad signal to the citizens.
No President is preparing the United States or the world for what is coming down the line. The weather is going to get heavier. Ecosystems really are changing or collapsing fast enough to see within a few years. The economy needs a total reorientation. We need to think about what we want to produce and consume given the environmental impacts of that consumption. We need to design and implement a new economy that can do this. We need a plan to lower the size of the human population to a long-term sustainable level in a fair and humane manner.
Let me just predict we are not going to get those things from the federal government. The much heralded economic stimulus package only hints at solutions. It does not look to me like it will do much unless you are in one of the special interest groups, like construction firms and workers, that it targets.
At least maybe the frothing-mouthed Republican Party of the past 30 years is going into hibernation. Moderates are taking over the Republican Party in former ultra-right strongholds like Texas. Take away the evolution-denying, wife-cheating, IRS-cheating Christian hypocrites and there are some basic, ancient lessons in the culture of the Republican Party that should not be thrown out with the bath water. The most important one is personal responsibility. If you are not willing to take responsibility for your life and for your community, no amount of government bossing around is ever going to make things right. At the leftist end of the spectrum, Personal Responsibility is one of the Ten Key Values of the Green Party.
Things may change quickly, or they may change slowly. But the weather is changing. Most likely scenario: America looks like the Sahara in 50 years. On the other hand, higher temperatures mean more water vapor from the oceans, and it has to come down somewhere, so parts of America could be in for a Deluge. Maybe Obama can start building the giant irrigation canals that people once thought they could see on Mars.
Most Americans have been enduring a fiercely cold winter. In Mendocino County, California, the opposite is true. It usually rains here most days in winter. This year we are in a drought, or have perfect winter weather, depending on how you look at it. There has not even been the usual ocean fog to obscure the sun. Highs in the 60's. Just plain weird. One of my apple trees began blooming in December. Jan and I have been taking Hugo to Schooner Gulch Beach to run in the sun and sand. Schooner Gulch, normally a strong stream in winter, is a trickle. Neighbors report that other seasonal streams are dry.
America is in trouble, friends, and I can't say we don't deserve it. We built our economy on false premises. "Free trade" and unregulated greed were supposed to bring us prosperity, instead they have brought us to grief. Too many Americans drove SUVs they could not really afford to places they did not need to go to buy crap they did not need to buy. Americans who were incapable of working within a budget rewarded themselves with McMansions. Now we have McMansion ghost towns to add to the collapsed city centers of the old mill towns. We won't let immigrants in to fill up the empty housing. If we did let them in, it would add to a population that is already environmentally unsustainable. The United States of America can no longer feed its own population, after centuries of being one of the world's great food exporters (we still export food, but we import more than we export).
Our government is set up to be conservative. It is very time consuming to make any fundamental change in the government's structure or even policy (See Is America a Democracy?). The government was not designed to change as fast as technology its consequences. Our "sacred" U. S. Constitution was designed to protect the property of the then nascent economic aristocracy, including their property in slaves. It has been improved by some of its amendments, but it was not designed for our modern society.
The Obama administration, while potentially an improvement on the Bush and Clinton administrations, is off to a pretty bad start. The good things President Obama has done [closing the extra-legal foreign prisons and allowing California and other states to set better miles-per-gallon car requirements] are just observing the basic laws of the land that W. had been breaking. Having the tax-and-spend Democrats trying to appoint tax-cheating jackasses to Cabinet posts sends a very bad signal to the citizens.
No President is preparing the United States or the world for what is coming down the line. The weather is going to get heavier. Ecosystems really are changing or collapsing fast enough to see within a few years. The economy needs a total reorientation. We need to think about what we want to produce and consume given the environmental impacts of that consumption. We need to design and implement a new economy that can do this. We need a plan to lower the size of the human population to a long-term sustainable level in a fair and humane manner.
Let me just predict we are not going to get those things from the federal government. The much heralded economic stimulus package only hints at solutions. It does not look to me like it will do much unless you are in one of the special interest groups, like construction firms and workers, that it targets.
At least maybe the frothing-mouthed Republican Party of the past 30 years is going into hibernation. Moderates are taking over the Republican Party in former ultra-right strongholds like Texas. Take away the evolution-denying, wife-cheating, IRS-cheating Christian hypocrites and there are some basic, ancient lessons in the culture of the Republican Party that should not be thrown out with the bath water. The most important one is personal responsibility. If you are not willing to take responsibility for your life and for your community, no amount of government bossing around is ever going to make things right. At the leftist end of the spectrum, Personal Responsibility is one of the Ten Key Values of the Green Party.
Things may change quickly, or they may change slowly. But the weather is changing. Most likely scenario: America looks like the Sahara in 50 years. On the other hand, higher temperatures mean more water vapor from the oceans, and it has to come down somewhere, so parts of America could be in for a Deluge. Maybe Obama can start building the giant irrigation canals that people once thought they could see on Mars.
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