The Near & Distant Future of Food

Hello, everyone. Rather than spend this week breathlessly talking about the United States and Israel setting off World War III or Iran sneaking sleeper agents into the country or what have you, I want to talk about something that we can definitively track right here, right now. This isn't to minimize the threat of the US attacking Iran or of Iran striking back–and it is certainly not to minimize the danger posed by Israel, who have thus far killed over 60,000 Palestinians since their genocide began* and are conducting air strikes against several other countries in order to obfuscate their conquest of Gaza. So while I do want to talk about these things, I am not expressly a foreign policy person, nor do I find the alarmism coming out of mainstream media about Iran to be anything other than the same propaganda the country fell for when Bush Jr. wanted to invade Iraq. We will be discussing, briefly, some of this fallout today even so.

The focus of the newsletter this week, then, is food. I felt prompted to discuss this after seeing from several outlets the same recent study. The link, you'll see, notes that this study is counter to some of the preconceived notions of climate change–namely that as the world warms and (this particular nugget seems to get trotted out by climate change deniers all the time) as atmospheric CO2 rises, the planet will green. This is wishful thinking. Without further throat-clearing, let's take a look at our future as cartoon mice splitting peas.

*As is becoming clearer and clearer, the figure of 60,000 people is a heavy underestimation.

4.4%

The study analyzed potential climate change impacts on staple crops and our adaptation to the losses forecast. The estimate comes out to a 4.4% loss in growth per 1°C of temperature rise–which they conveniently put another way: 120 calories per person per day. This doesn't sound horrible for a person who is getting their full 2,000 calories easily, or for whom resources are not scarce. But when you start thinking about regions where food is harder to come by or requires more money to acquire, this is suddenly quite dire. We've reached 1.5°C lately (we actually dipped back down to 1.4°C! We did it, Joe!), which means 180 calories are already reduced from the world's production. We are certainly going to reach 2°C, which carves another 60 calories off and puts the total at 240 calories per person, per day.

The danger here doesn't necessarily come to us all as this globally represented omni-person who is short 120 calories per day. Instead, think about this in particulars. The study mentions that, contrary again to others, it finds that the greatest hit to crop production won't actually be in poorer regions–it will be in major global breadbaskets. The Midwest, California, Ukraine, for example, could bear some of the heaviest losses. This means that it's not just "everybody in the world goes on a little diet,**" it means food costs more as a matter of supply and demand. It's an economic problem as well as a gastronomic one. Some people will bear this burden more than others, and this is particularly true of people who already have a harder time feeding themselves. As we've discussed before on the newsletter, Ukraine feeds a lot of people in Africa and Asia; a cut to Ukrainian wheat could put vulnerable populations at risk. The same goes for US crops, which of course wind up all over the world.

Put fairly bleakly (but I don't think unrealistically), the article linked above quotes Solomon Hsiang as saying:

If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that's basically like everyone on Earth giving up breakfast.

With so many people on the planet already food insecure, the disruption of an entire meal's-worth of calories is a grave problem.

**Which is not so little. It has been estimated that some Gazans are subsisting off of as little as 240 calories a day. 1°C potentially halves that measly sum.

2°C is Dead

I set my climatic watch by James Hansen, who stated earlier in the year that the global target of 2°C is now out of the picture. Hansen was one of the first and loudest scientists to bring the fight to the US government about climate change, and he has regularly disrupted mainstream climate discourse with new models that show our situation as much more dire than previously forecasted. In February, he and his colleagues found that in part due to the decrease in shipping pollution (and increase in irony) and a more accurately-modeled sensitivity to CO2, we will not successfully keep the planet below 2°C of warming. This, of course, means we have no hope of keeping to 1.5°C, and 1.5°C is the temperature threshold at which we begin to lose tipping points.

Once those tipping points go, all the science and magical thinking in the world won't stop the planet from warming all on its own. It won't stop at 2°C or 3°C–we should hope it stops at a civilization-buckling 4°C. Just going off the math from the study above–which probably doesn't account for all the knock-on effects of a 4°C world–that's 480 calories. A quarter of the ideal caloric intake of every healthy adult on the planet.

Importantly, Hansen doesn't think all hope is lost–and the study on food production includes as a key component of their research the likelihood of human adaptation. But this is something we have got to be thinking about and preparing for. We can be the ones who create this adaptation and mitigate the loss of some of this food production. We won't all individually surmount this deficit, but we can put a dent in it.

Iran

As of this writing, Iran and Israel have brokered a tentative ceasefire. This avoids, so long as the ceasefire holds***, Iran blocking traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which would single-handedly cost the world a billion dollars in oil shipments every day the waterway is closed–good for the climate, bad for all of us who still rely on fossil fuels. Along with the war in Ukraine, this conflict underscores just how fragile our human ecosystems are. We can't keep permitting the warmongers and tech companies of the world to bet on our lives. Get organized, get hooked up within your community, get ready.

***Israel thus far has broken every ceasefire it has entered into, repeatedly, since the start of their genocide.