Mother Earth's Triple Whammy

Commentary: Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you're shelling out for gas and food, but it could get a whole lot worse. Just ask the North Koreans.

By John Feffer

June 18, 2008

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[Introduction by Tom Engelhardt]

It's been a curious experience, each evening recently, turning on the NBC or ABC nightly news, with historic levels of flooding in Iowa as the lead story. ("Uncharted territory," National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Pierce called these floods.) After all, there are those stunning images of Cedar Rapids, a small city now simply in the water. The National Weather Service has already termed what's happened to the city an "historic hydrologic event," with the Cedar River topping its banks at, or above, half-millennium highs. (That's an every 500 year "event"!)

But here's the special strangeness of this TV moment: Network news loves weather disasters, and yet, as with historic droughts in the Southeast or Southwest, as with the hordes of tornadoes coursing through the center of the country, as with so many other extreme weather phenomena of recent times, including flooding in Southern China and the Burmese cyclone, when it comes to the Midwestern floods, night after night no TV talking head seems ever to mention the possibility that climate change/global warming might somehow be involved. (Nor, by the way, are our major newspapers any better on the subject.) As an omission, it's kinda staggering, really, for an event already being labeled "a Midwestern Katrina."

All that soggy Iowa acreage and an estimated 20% of the corn and soya crops in the region already lost—forget ethanol, but think soaring food prices—and yet not a word. Of course, it's true that no single weather catastrophe like this one can be simply and definitively linked to climate change—and undoubtedly some may have nothing to do with it. But when the weather is this extreme, wouldn't you want, as a reporter or news editor, to make sure the subject was at least raised and considered? Or is it simply: been there, done that?

My theory of life is that, when you see a four-legged, black-and-white striped horse-like animal on a savannah, you should call it a zebra until evidence proves otherwise. You would certainly think that, this late in the game, this post-Al Gore, this post-all those melting icebergs, icecaps, iced-over seas, and glaciers, such levels of denial might have abated a bit, but no such luck, it seems.

And in this case, where the mainstream media leads, Americans seem inclined to go. So, can we be truly surprised that an April poll from the Pew Research Center actually found a modest decline since January 2007 in "the proportion of Americans who say that the earth is getting warmer"? Or that, while a majority of the world, in Pew's latest Global Attitude Study, blames the U.S., at least in part, for accelerating global warming, we are one of the countries "where majorities do not define global warming as a very serious problem."

Fair warning, then. Think of this as the Tomdispatch equivalent of the Surgeon General's caveat on a cigarette pack: If you value the health of your state of denial, you will read the following remarkable piece by John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus and Tomdispatch regular, slowly, carefully, and at your peril. Tomdispatch takes no responsibility for what may happen. Tom Engelhardt

Mother Earth's Triple Whammy
Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you're shelling out for gas and food, but it could get a whole lot worse. Just ask the North Koreans.
By John Feffer

Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you're shelling out at the pump and the grocery store; but, unless policymakers begin to address all three of these trends as one major crisis, it could get a whole lot worse.

Just ask the North Koreans.

In the 1990s, North Korea was the world's canary. The famine that killed as much as 10% of the North Korean population in those years was, it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe—though few saw it that way at the time.

That small Northeast Asian land, one of the last putatively communist countries on the planet, faced the same three converging factors as we do now—escalating energy prices, a reduction in food supplies, and impending environmental catastrophe. At the time, of course, all the knowing analysts and pundits dismissed what was happening in that country as the inevitable breakdown of an archaic economic system presided over by a crackpot dictator.

They were wrong. The collapse of North Korean agriculture in the 1990s was not the result of backwardness. In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. Despite claims of self-sufficiency, the North Koreans were actually heavily dependent on cheap fuel imports. (Does that already ring a bell?) In their case, the heavily subsidized energy came from Russia and China, and it helped keep North Korea's battalion of tractors operating. It also meant that North Korea was able to go through fertilizer, a petroleum product, at one of the world's highest rates. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped subsidizing those energy imports in the late 1980s and international energy rates became the norm for them, too, the North Koreans had a rude awakening.

Like the globe as a whole, North Korea does not have a great deal of arable land—it can grow food on only about 14% of its territory. (The comparable global figure for arable land is about 13%.) With heavy applications of fertilizer and pesticides, North Koreans coaxed a lot of food out of a little land. By the 1980s, however, the soil was exhausted, and agricultural production was declining. So spiking energy prices hit an economy already in crisis. Desperate to grow more food, the North Korean government instructed farmers to cut down trees, stripping hillsides to bring more land into cultivation.

Big mistake. When heavy rains hit in 1995, this dragooning of marginal lands into agricultural production only amplified the national disaster. The resulting flooding damaged more than 40% of the country's rice paddy fields. Torrential rains washed away topsoil, while rocks and sand, dislodged from hillsides, ruined low-lying fields. The rigid economic structures in North Korea were unable to cope with the triple assault of bad weather, soaring energy, and declining food production. Nor did dictator Kim Jong Il's political decisions make things any better.

But the peculiarities of North Korea's political economy did not cause the devastating famine that followed. Highly centralized planning and pretensions to self-reliance only made the country prematurely vulnerable to trends now affecting the rest of the planet.

As with the North Koreans, our dependency on relatively cheap energy to run our industrialized agriculture and our smokestack industries is now mixing lethally with food shortages and the beginnings of climate overload, pushing us all toward the precipice. In the short term, we face a food crisis and an energy crisis. Over the longer term, this is certain to expand into a much larger climate crisis. No magic wand, whether biofuels, genetically modified organisms (GMO), or geoengineering, can make the ogres disappear.

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