Yeah, I can see it now. Jason and I, sitting behind our computers typing frantically, warning of $100 oil and millions approaching the starvation level, especially due to ethanol. Our long conversations about the limits of human wisdom projecting anything into the future.

Such sweet memories from so long ago. (Sighs sentimentally).

Then I was watching the news the other day, and the IMF said that 100 million people were close to starvation because of the high price of food.

A light went off in my head. “Bing”, just like that.

The light said: “It’s happening now — right before our eyes — maybe Christians are now finally free to DO something about food being turned into fuel. It’s gone beyond being an alarming theory to (ahem) actually being alarming. We were warned that this might happen but of course couldn’t take any action at the time because.... of some theological reason or other, I never did quite understand at the time… but the main thing is we didn’t actually do anything to prevent this! That’s what is important. We wouldn’t want to commit the crime of presuming to know the future. Never! It’s just not cricket, what what? But now that we know 100 million people are actually close to starvation, maybe it is permissible to raise ethanol as — you know — a bit of a thing?”

Gordon Cheng - 17 April 2008 10:23 PM

Dave Lankshear - 17 April 2008 08:16 PM

By ignoring peak oil, our governments are making economically immoral decisions right now.

Gaa! I take a break and I come back to discover another peak oil thread has sprouted.

I ask you.

Yes Gordon its on again, peak oil and climate change and scared to death and the whole dead horse thing.

Any more posts and I will slip into full gear and no more answering atheists because peak oil and climate change and scared to death are ALL THE RAGE. Hooray!!!

Let’s GO!!

GO Bulldogs GO - 4 up and we’ll clean up Richmond and Dave Lankshear and peak oil over the weekend - leave ‘em all “Scared to Death”!

I don’t know about ‘scared to death’ but there’s certainly a lot of them pesky annoying starving people out there. Maybe we should cross the road and join the Priest and the Levite? Might catch something if we stop to analyse this… I mean, it’s not one guy bleeding on the side of the road, but 100 million.

Well Dave(s), this is a dead horse, no question about it. But a hobby horse that hasn’t yet been killed is DDT. How about it Dave L? You could be the man to ride it in to forum history!

By which I mean, malaria is a big killer and reintroducing large scale spraying of DDT would be good for a lot of people. So, I think this one is worth a bit of energy, peak or otherwise.

Gordon, stop posting.

Gordon noted:

But a hobby horse that hasn’t yet been killed is DDT.

At first I thought you were referring to a thread - but I had trouble recalling the Dead Dromedary Thread, not to mention its contents.

David P realigns his priorities

Any more posts and I will slip into full gear and no more answering atheists...

So he just toys with us for a while then spits us out - but then, what else would one expect from a Bulldogs supporter!

Rob

(’84, ‘85, ‘93, 00)

Dannii Willis - 17 April 2008 11:55 PM

Gordon, stop posting.

You first!

But this is a dead horse, isn’t it?

100 million human beings are starting to go hungry.

Their food costs too much.

This is a whole new thing.

Hiding behind a “dead horse” because the thread happens to contain the words “peak oil” or “ethanol” is avoiding the great snorting and stinking elephant in the living room – 100 million people going hungry.

“Scared to death” just walked in the front door.

I don’t like the dead horse board either, it’s pretty silly. It seems to be the sort of thing you’d stick Luther’s theses or Wilberforce’s acts in.

Dannii Willis - 18 April 2008 02:25 AM

Wilberforce

You just said the magic word.

I try to keep out of these discussions these days, for all sorts of reasons, but I’ve been itching to get involved in this one for a few days now. The last few posts have prompted me to start typing.

I’m sort of with Dave on this one. The issue of rising numbers of people at risk of starvation is a high priority policy issue for the governments of the world and a matter that Christians serious about impacting the world for good will want to contribute towards overcoming.

If you’re interested, the following link from the IMF web site is brief and worth a read, and from there you can navigate to lots of other IMF research and commentary:

]IMF Spring Meetings

They haven’t said that there are 100 million on the brink of starvation and they haven’t isolated ethanol as the reason. They’ve said that 100 million are facing worsening poverty and that hundredds of thousands could starve - still enormously significant, but not quite what this topic’s title says. And in regards to ethanol, they’ve mentioned it as one factor among many, including strong demand growth for food from the rapidly growing economies such as China and the on-going effects of drought in many parts of the world which has reduced food supplies.

So the title of this thread is misleading and misquotes the IMF. But that doesn’t mean it should be labelled a “dead horse”, because the IMF HAVE said that the world faces a very stark problem. These forums should discuss it.

Let me toss a thought or two into the ring.

Perhaps for some readers the significance of rising food prices is a bit lost because food doesn’t make up nearly as much of what we in Australia spend our money on as it does in many other parts of the world. For the 100 million that the IMF has in mind, food is almost ALL of what they spend their meagre incomes on. Therefore, the price of corn being almost 50% higher than it’s average of the last 5 years is a huge impost.

- soy beans are 75% higher than their average price
- wheat is about 45% higher, but it’s been more than double in very recent times before pulling back over the last couple of weeks.

Some poorer countries are actually doing quite well economically out of this, because they are commodity exporters. But for many people - hundreds of thousands as the IMF says - these price moves mean that their incomes can no longer purchase food. It’s too expensive for them. They will starve unless they can get either an income boost or a donation of food.

In the longer term, the solution to global poverty is for governments in the world’s poorest countries to foster sound economic policies, encourage growth, higher education rates, etc. The most effective poverty reduction campaign in world history was set off by Deng Xiaoping when he opened China’s economy and embraced a more capitalist approach. 

But in the shorter term, and in countries with hopeless and/or corrupt governments, aid is required. So, I urge many of you to go and give an extra donation to Compassion or TEAR Fund or Christian Blind Mission or whichever Christian organisation you know is involved in the battle with world poverty. There is a real problem out there right now, but you can do something towards helping alleviate it.

Hi Warren,
you make some good points.

Note that the thread title is 100 million <i>close</i> to starving — not 100 million starving. It’s just based on current oil price and ethanol trends.

1. Cause of price rise depends on who you read.

The New York Times article Grains Gone wild states that the causes are China’s meat eating, then peak oil affecting farming, then “bad weather in Australia”, however, that’s a bit of a problem because Australia only supplies 1% of world calories so can’t really be that big an impact.

That article finishes:

But it’s not clear how much can be done. Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past.

Then we look at how the land is coping. (Wiki)
Of the earth’s 148,000,000 km² (57 million square miles) of land, approximately 31,000,000 km² (12 million square miles) are arable; however, arable land is currently being lost at the rate of over 100,000 km² (38,610 square miles) per year.

Or as Lester Brown puts it:

The eight warmest years on record have all occurred in the last decade.

For seven of the last eight years, the world has consumed more grain than it produced; grain stocks are now at a historic low.

One fifth of the U.S. grain harvest is now being turned into fuel ethanol.

Grain yields increased half as fast in the 1990s as they did in the 1960s.

Or the BBC:

Globally, we have taken over about 26% of the planet’s land area (roughly 3.3 billion hectares) for cropland and pasture, replacing a third of temperate and tropical forests and a quarter of natural grasslands.

Another 0.5 billion ha has gone for urban and built-up areas. Habitat loss from the conversion of natural ecosystems is the main reason why other species are being pushed closer to the brink of extinction.

Food security comes at a high price. In any case, it is a security many can only envy.

It appears peak oil, peak water, peak land, and “peak human” have placed us in the situation where, as Professor Richard Heinberg said on the movie “The 11th Hour”,

“There are simply too many people using too many resources too fast”.

2. What to do about it

Raising “economic growth” worldwide will just increase pressure on the dying earth. We need to somehow share out sustainable agriculture and low-energy city planning to everyone on earth to create the demographic transition which stabilises population growth, not copy them into our way of life. If we pave over and plough up every last scrap of earth with ever larger suburban sprawl and industrial agriculture to feed it, we’ll not only place the entire world infrastructure at the mercy of oil prices, but lose economically valuable “ecosystem services”. Without them we’re in big trouble!

I think Christians should be against ethanol production using up 1/5th of the grain in the US. They supply 20% of the world’s grain, so that policy alone accounts for 4% of the world grain harvest!

I think Christians should be calling on our governments to adopt “more European than Europe” city plans that wean us off the oil.

And I think Christians should be calling on the Australian government to adopt the following population policies from SPA.

And I think Christians should stop trusting in promises God hasn’t necessarily granted to Australian or Western Civilisation, let alone “trusting in” the market to provide.

When it comes down to it, economies depend on what can be produced, and reaching maximum production in farming due land, water, and oil limits to growth means we are going to be forced to reconsider our economic, social and population policies.

Genesis 1:28
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Sounds like Mission Accomplished!

James Flavin

Dave Lankshear - 18 April 2008 04:41 PM

And I think Christians should stop trusting in promises God hasn’t necessarily granted to Australian or Western Civilisation, let alone “trusting in” the market to provide.

.

Dave, I do not ‘trust’ the market, I trust the time proven resourcefulness and ingenuity of Greed.The Market is simply the way greed is manifest in the world.

Someone will find better ways of producing food and transport systems that are fossil-fuel-free once there is a dollar to be made out of it. Rising prices of food and oil helps this process.

It always does.

If I had to chose between the good intentions of nice people and the selfish intentions of greedy people to be most effective my money is on the latter. They have shown a tenacity and focus on achievement that government aid programs and pop-singer spearheaded campaigns simply do not have.

James Flavin

I agree James.

If human beings keep growing at today’s rate, there will be one person for every square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in just 780 years, and the total mass of humanity will equal the total mass of the earth in just 2000 years. Something has got to give.

Just think about Sydney: 1% population growth over 1 lifetime of 70 years is 2 Sydney’s,
2% is 4 Sydney’s
3% is 8
4% is 16
5% per annum growth for 70 years means we’ll have 32 times the population of Sydney!

The mathematicians tell me you can can flip the “rule of 70” around to ask, “how quickly will something double”? Just divide your annual % rate into 70. 70/1% = 70 years… at the end of 70 years whatever’s growing by 1% will have doubled.
70 / 2% = doubled at 35 years
70 / 3% = doubled at 23.333 years
70 /4% = doubled at 17.5 years etc.
It gives an idea of how fast something will grow.

The sheer speed of growth of just 2% per annum is why many people cannot visualise that babies born today could see the end of iron ore mining! People will immediately say “rubbish” but just 2% extra consumption and economic growth in iron ore mining each year will see iron ore reserves worldwide depleted in about 76 years.

Also, if an overall economy grows by 2% per annum, eventually part of that economic growth will just have to “balance” in the ecology or resources somewhere. Unless it’s completely service sector or “virtual” growth, economic growth means moving and consuming more “stuff” around. Most of that “stuff” is finite mined “stuff”. As Worldchanging says:

Where does your stuff come from? Before the store, before the factory, where did it really begin? If it isn’t made of wood, cloth, or other living matter, it was dug out of the ground.

So in a world rapidly hitting “peak everything”, recommending economic growth to solve high grain prices sounds kind of scary? I think we need to revisit the whole notion of “economic growth” and starting thinking about some system that encourages “economic stability”.

Lastly: greed seems to work on the upswing of the energy curve. Don’t know how it’s going to go on the inevitable downslope we’ll have for a while… a few decades… until we can really ramp up renewables and base transport on electricity. Until then, things could get kind of funky.

Remember: the Export Land Model says the world market for oil could evaporate in about 9 years leaving Australia and many “greedy corporate business people” stranded without oil. Our meagre domestic production will be rationed to essentials only.