Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:00
the reason it's called World On The Edge is because it it begins to focus on the time that we have or don't have to make the the needed adjustments the the basic
00:00:12
point is that food I think is going to be the weak Link in our civilization as it was for so many earlier civilizations whose archaological sites we now study
00:00:25
like the samans and the Mayans or the Easter Islanders or what have for the betterment of maybe the Earth and not the people might might it be better that you know that we really do go through a
00:00:38
collapse of sorts and that we rebuild on a local level because it would have to rebuild on a local level well what usually happens when a when a civilization begins to break down under
00:00:50
stress is that after a point it reaches it it it can't can't recover and it just everything sort of feeds on everything else and this is why the the samans
00:01:03
collapsed and and why the Mayans collapsed but when that happens there's an enormous dieback um I mean 90 plus percent of populations die probably um the best
00:01:17
place to be in this situation would be on a subsistence Farm in in you know in a village in subsaharan Africa or someplace it's not much affected by what happens to the rest of the world
00:01:30
but the I think most people don't realize how vulnerable we are I mean for example the the food supply in the average city in the United States um if
00:01:43
it's not daily renewed would run out in about three days there's not much of a buffer there did did you say three days Lester I did three
00:01:55
yes um so if anything that disrupts that flow of food I mean I've seen scenarios someone assumed you know what if you have a really vir virulent strain of flu
00:02:10
and the truck drivers don't want to go out and risk bringing it home to their families so they stay home they're the ones that get the food into the cities and so if they're not
00:02:20
working um then the system can come apart pretty fast I just cite that as an example of how uh how vulnerable we are what what I
00:02:32
find interesting is that whereas most discussions of the current rise in food prices talk about events that have contributed to this you know the heat
00:02:46
wve in Russia flooding in Pakistan or Australia or uh what have you but and these clearly contribute but my sense is
00:02:58
that what we're looking at is is Trend driven rises in food prices and among those Trends are climate change falling water tables and thus spreading
00:03:10
shortages of irrigation water uh soil erosion and in the more agriculturally advanced countries that a shrinking backlog of
00:03:24
unused agricultural technology um and in in looking at climate for example agriculture as it exists today
00:03:37
evolved over an 11,000 year period of rather remarkable climate stability um and what we now have is a system that was designed to maximize production with
00:03:54
that climate system but that climate system is changing and what we discover now is that that there's really no Norm to go back to because everything is in
00:04:08
flux um the rule of thumb that crop ecologists use for um for assessing the effect of climate
00:04:22
change is that for each one degree Celsius rise in temperature during the growing season we can expect a 10% decline in Grain yields wheat rice corn and so forth so that's sort of the
00:04:35
climate uh issue the water issue is in some ways even more imminent um because we we have we have
00:04:51
identified with the Earth policy Institute has identified 18 countries that are over pumping their
00:05:03
aquifers and what this means in effect is that each of those countries has created a food bubble a water-based food bubble they have art artificially inflated food production by overpumping
00:05:17
which by definition is a short-term phenomenon so production keeps going up and up and up with over pumping and then the aquifer is depleted at that point the rate of pump puming is necessarily
00:05:30
reduced to the rate of recharge so that's the nature of the food bubble in some countries it's small in some countries it's big the most dramatic example of among the 18 countries of the
00:05:43
bubble bursting thus far is in Saudi Arabia the Saudis um decided after the oil export embargo they were vulnerable to a grain export embargo so using their
00:05:54
oil drilling technology they found an aquifer about a half mile down that they've been using to to produce wheat with irrigation that worked fine for more
00:06:07
than 20 years they were self-sufficient in wheat but in early 2008 they announced that aquafer was largely depleted that particular aquifer happens to be a fossil aquifer that is there's
00:06:20
no recharge and they said we're going to they're going to phase out wheat production in 8 years well in fact it's going much faster than that and after 3 years they've lost about 70% of their
00:06:31
wheat crop I mean wheat production is in collapse and it will disappear entirely probably in another uh year or two what's interesting about this one it's it's so dramatic um and it means
00:06:44
the Saudis will be importing all their wheat indeed all their grain within a year or two but they can compete in World Markets Syria has also experienced a peak in Grain production begun to
00:06:57
decline because of water shortages and and also Iraq Yemen is is a hydrological basket case and and it will shortly experience a a a a dramatic drop in its
00:07:09
in its grain production it's already importing 80% of its grain so but the big water bubbles are in India and China the World Bank estimates um in one of
00:07:21
its reports on the water situation in India that 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced by over pumping at some point as aquifers are
00:07:35
depleted that over pumping will will disappear and they'll have to find some other source of food for the 175 million people our estimate for China is that 130 million Chinese are being fed by
00:07:49
over pumping so we have these bubbles that are starting to burst and the interesting thing is that the economists who do agricultural supply and demand projections don't even are hardly even
00:08:02
aware of them when you look at the models they use they have a lot of economic variables but no falling water tables no Rising temperatures for example and then soil erosions becoming a major issue with two massive dust
00:08:14
bowls now forming one in northern and western China and Western Mongolia the other in central Africa and it stretches across much of Africa the whole salian region someone said soil erosion is like
00:08:27
the tires on your car uh after a point um if you keep driving they they wear thin and and you have a blowout then you know you've got a problem well soil erosion is like that you don't
00:08:39
notice don't notice it until suddenly you don't have much top soil left um and there're already countries now where grain production is declining because of solo erosion like Mongolia like loto and
00:08:53
and North Korea and Haiti are are not able to increase their grain Supply anymore because of soil erosion and then the fourth factor that I think is going to make food the the focal
00:09:04
point of our effort to save civilization um is that the more agriculturally advanced countries Japan for example with rice the Japanese were the Pioneers in
00:09:18
raising rice yields they started more than a century ago but for the last 16 years their rice Shield per acre has not increased at all it's been flat China and it's not because Farmers
00:09:30
don't want to increase production they do there are uh they have a support price it's probably three times the world market price or something something like that but there are no new technologies
00:09:44
they can use to go beyond where they are China Rice yields in China are now very close to those in Japan so China may also be about to Plateau unless it can go above Japan which I doubt if that's
00:09:57
the case then we're looking at two countries that that are that produce onethird of the world rice Harvest no longer able to increase their production
00:10:08
in Europe three very quickly three countries in Europe France West France Germany and the UK in all three wheat yields of plateau no longer increasing there so we have all these Trends making
00:10:21
it more difficult to expand food production that's why these price Rises now I think are are are disturbing because it was price Rises and a growing number of hungry people that signaled the decline
00:10:34
of the Samaran and the Mayan civilizations I find it so interesting Lester you reading your book and and learning more about you on the internet
00:10:45
has been it's been really sobering for me because when you talk about one of the lines that I really liked and and I'm sure I'm not going to have an exact quote here but it was that failure Fe
00:10:59
takes a long time but collapse comes quickly there there are many resources that are becoming scarce but none more so than time time I think is
00:11:12
the critical element in the situation we're in now and it means not only understanding where we are and what's happening but in reversing the trends if
00:11:26
we cannot um stabilize population if we cannot stabilize climate if we cannot stabilize aquifers um we're
00:11:38
toast um that's not a debatable point um and I don't think we've yet quite realized how um how serious the situation is partly because we're looking at and it we're looking at an
00:11:53
experience that we've not had before I mean if you were to think about uh failure um and and if you're thinking about the potential breakdown of a civilization you would look first at the weakest
00:12:05
parts of the civilization and those are the failing States we now have a very substantial list of failing States and the question becomes how many failing States before we have um a failing Global civilization and so what I
00:12:19
recommend in as part of Plan B which is in the new book World On The Edge is um we have to think about this in war time terms we need a wartime a
00:12:32
mobilization at wartime speed on wartime scale just fine-tuning this situation is not going to um to do it I noticed president sarosi this year the president
00:12:46
of the G20 is concerned about Rising food prices he wants to do something about it he wants to curb speculation well that's treating the symptom not the cause of the problem you
00:12:58
get specul ulation when you have very rapid increases potentially rapid increases in prices of Commodities but what we need to be looking at is how we can accelerate the shift to smaller
00:13:10
families and stabilize population um how to uh we need a worldwide effort to raise water productivity similar to the one we used to raise land that we launched to raise land productivity a
00:13:22
half century ago um but but no one is really focused on on these causal factors they focusing uh more and more on on on the symptoms and uh with the
00:13:35
global environment as with medicine treating the symptoms uh does not cure the the the problem it's not just the environmental system that's broken it's our political system that is unfortunately broken at the same time
00:13:48
when we need them the most and it's not always clear to me why we sudden have why climate denial has become such a a common thing in a in a presumably
00:14:05
educated society and I wonder if if it might not be part part denial that we don't want to face the complex demanding situations that we've put oursel in if
00:14:19
we can deny it then it's not a problem anymore and so I I I have a feeling that's one of the forces uh uh at work here here um it's I mean when I when I
00:14:33
think about social change I sort of have three different models that that I find useful one is the Pearl Harbor model where you have a catastrophic catastrophic event that changes everything literally
00:14:46
overnight the second model is what I call the Berlin Wall model where you have something building and building and building and building and finally it it just sort of explodes and the Berlin
00:14:59
Wall coming down was the visual manifestation of a political revolution in Eastern Europe it changed the form of government of every country in the region without Bloodshed with a minor
00:15:12
exception of Romania and we didn't see it coming I remember the White House called in the head of the agency you know and said how come you guys didn't warn us about this not only did our
00:15:25
intelligence agencies not warn the White House this was coming they didn't anticipate it and after it happened they had trouble explaining it but this is this is how change comes this is one of
00:15:38
the models of social change and my own sense is despite all the problems we have in government that we may be moving toward a Tipping Point on the climate issue and one of the manifestations I
00:15:50
see of this is the success of the anti-coal movement in in first Banning new Coal Fired power plants I mean Banning the um construction of new Coal Fired power plants and and secondly now moving into
00:16:04
phase two to close existing Coal Fired power plants and and meeting with with much more success than most people realize so that's an example of a story that has not gotten a lot of attention
00:16:16
but that is I think an important uh part of this Tipping Point phenomenon I mean my own sense is that coal was basically finished as a as a source of electricity generation in the United States it's
00:16:29
just a matter of time now until it's phased out um the third model of social change is what I call the the the sandwich model
00:16:40
where you have an support and support for that for Change and support at the top for that change and I think to some degree we have that in this country now though everyone's a while you have to
00:16:53
wonder so I think there are so many details that people if they haven't read about it or if they haven't been informed they're they're they're under an assumption that's not true and that is a little rise in temperature isn't
00:17:06
going to affect anything well the the interesting thing about the corn plant is that the the tassel on the top produces the pollen um
00:17:20
and that pollen floats down and the ear of corn itself in the early formative stages has this strands of silk coming out the end the the nuisance part of doing corn on the on the cob you know
00:17:33
you have to get rid of all that that Silk what most people don't know is that each of those strands of silk is connected to a potential kernel site on the ear and in order for the kernel to develop a grain of pollen Must Fall on
00:17:46
that strand of silk and it it it's like a fallopian tube and it carries the pollen to the kernel site you get fertilization and you get corn but if you happen to have very hot weather 95°
00:17:59
and above during that pollination period the silk dries out turns brown and does not does not work and so you can get if you have really high temperatures in that part of July roughly the F first
00:18:13
half of July in the Corn Belt you can do a lot of damage to a corn crop and one of the examples I use in in in World On The Edge to give a sense of how close to the edge we
00:18:24
are is I look at the Moscow Heat wve where the average temperature in July was 14° F above the norm this is for the month of
00:18:37
July if someone had told me at this time last year that there would be a heat wave in Russia and the average temperature in July would be 14 degrees above the norm I I would have said you know I'm not a climate denier but that's
00:18:50
that's beyond the pale we could we would we would never see anything as dramatic as that but in fact that's what happened now what happened with with the Russian grain Harvest was they've been hoping
00:19:03
for about 100 million tons because of that heat and the related drought it dropped to 60 million tons so the world the Russians and the world lost 40 million tons of grain okay if that heat
00:19:16
wve had been centered in Chicago in the heart of the Corn Bel in a country that produces 400 million tons of grain then we would have lost and we had lost 40% of that that would which could easily
00:19:29
happen then we would lose 160 million tons of grain we and the world if that had happened World grain stocks would have dropped to the lowest level on record far below two years ago when the
00:19:43
the the food price rise started in in late 07 into into '08 and we would have seen chaos utter chaos in World grain markets because prices
00:19:57
would have gone to levels we can cannot even now imagine and what that would have led to in in the first instance would be exporting countries restricting their exports to
00:20:10
try and keep their food prices down and that would limit the amount available then we would have seen the oil exporting countries nearly all of whom import grain starting to barter oil for
00:20:24
grain to make sure they got enough grain for their people then the rest of the world the all the other importing countries would have been left out there by themselves with very little grain to compete
00:20:38
for I mention that because that could have led to one a total loss of confidence in the market in the World Market um which countries historically have always been able to rely on I mean prices might go up a bit but you could
00:20:51
always get the grain you needed so that loss of face faith in the market could lead to a breakdown in the world economy because the whole world economy the whole monetary system is based on confidence if you lose confidence
00:21:05
everything begins to come apart and I use that example just to show how close to the edge we we may be and I don't think we we realize it yet and we don't
00:21:17
have indicators of sort of societal stress as you as um if if if you will that that reflect Rising food prices and
00:21:29
uh um spreading water shortages and and and increasing uh competition by more and more people for limited resources um or competition for oil for example I mean
00:21:43
one of the things that I I note in World On The Edge is that we may be hitting Peak water and peak oil at almost exactly the same time and we' you and I have never lived in a world where oil
00:21:56
production was declining it's always been rising and it's going to be a very different world same is true with with irrigation water through our throughout our lifetimes the irrigated area in the
00:22:08
world has been expanding now suddenly in some countries it's starting to shrink and and before long could be shrinking for the world as a whole so these these changes are not always easy for us to
00:22:22
anticipate and experiences we've not had before are not easy to imagine but this is sort of where we are now and this is the challenge to kind of go beyond our our sort of conventional behavior and
00:22:35
and begin to try to understand what's happening something else that I read that you wrote was that for every five cars we bring online we pave over an
00:22:48
acre of land Lester I don't think of course I knew that there were consequences but again I think as people are watching this series I think they don't like me I don't think that they realize the significance of those
00:23:02
consequences an acre for every five cars to me that's shocking you have to keep in mind I mean think of a football field as an acre which it is roughly and you could put five cars you know on there
00:23:15
and not really occupy that much of it but you have to have more than one place to park a car if you're going to use it you have to go at least have one other parking place and maybe a few of them or several of them with shopping center and
00:23:28
workplaces and and and so forth um and then you have to have a place to drive it and uh uh when you think about the amount of land you have to pave over if you can think of looking from the air
00:23:41
down at cars on roads and highways and so forth the cars actually cover only a fairly small part of that space even when when you're unless you're looking at at
00:23:53
traffic congestion from the air um so um one of the the most disturbing Trends in the world right now that I see is the extraordinary growth in automobile sales in
00:24:06
China um two years ago I think it was 14 million tons they passed us for the first time um uh I think it's now 17 million tons and may go up to 20 million tons next sorry 20 million cars next
00:24:20
year um and the amount of land they're going to have to pave is is just extraordinary I mean even if they accept more crowding and congestion than we do they still have to pave more land and
00:24:33
and that can become a real threat to their their food production and it is one of the re one of the reasons why uh I think China's going to be turning the World Market for massive quantities of
00:24:45
grain in the in the near future if not this year next year probably and when it does it will necessarily come to the United States because we are Far and Away the world's leading grain exporter
00:24:58
we export probably as much grain as Canada Australia and Argentina combined but what this does is it it it promises to open a new chapter in our
00:25:10
history because as Americans cheap food is part of our Birthright we are the world's Bread Basket we only spend 10% of our income on food but to have 1.4 billion
00:25:25
Chinese competing with us for our grain Harvest driving up our food prices would create an entirely new situation now historically we had something like that in the 70s with food price inflation um
00:25:40
after the Soviets cornered the world weak Market um because they had a crop failure and and and people didn't sort of know what was happening but um we banned soybean exports to Japan for
00:25:53
example totally because prices are going up so fast here it would be be tempting to do that with China the only problem is China is our Banker now every month here in Washington US Treasury
00:26:06
Department holds an auction selling treasury Securities and they do this to cover our fiscal deficit because our taxes aren't enough we're spending far more than we
00:26:19
uh than we take in in government retive so the Chinese have been doing this for years now they now hold almost a trillion dollar worth of US Treasury
00:26:32
Securities they're our banker and like it or not we're going to be sharing our grain Harvest with the Chinese regardless of what happens to our food prices I think there's a very real possibility that the share of our income
00:26:46
spent on food is going to be rising in the years ahead and one of the reasons will be because of the demands of the Chinese who are already incidentally importing 80% of their soybeans much of them from the United States partly
00:27:00
because of them we now have more land in soybeans than in wheat for example just to show how far that's that's gone but but when they come for grain that'll be big time compared with soybeans in your
00:27:11
book Lester that you said there countries like China are also you know going to other poor countries and renting up all their acreage so that they can feed their own people so it
00:27:25
appears on the back of other poor people in late 19 I'm sorry in late 2007 in early 2008 when grain and soybean prices
00:27:46
tripled um the grain importing countries were having great diff difficulty finding enough grain to
00:28:00
import there just wasn't enough to go around and so that was when grain exporting countries like Russia and Argentina for we restricted exports to
00:28:12
keep their domestic food prices down and that only made the problem worse of course for the rest of the world then Vietnam the world's number two rice exporter banned exports entirely for several months because their food prices
00:28:25
were getting out of control and the the net effect was that the importing countries lost confidence in the world grain market so then they tried negotiating long-term grain agreements
00:28:37
and that didn't go very far because it was a sell's market so exporting countries weren't interested in committing wheat exports for five years for example um so then what they began doing and
00:28:50
Saudi Arabia was one of the first but joined by China and South Korea and a dozen other countries including more recently India they began buying land in other countries on which to produce food
00:29:04
for themselves and that is um uh represents um a sort of every country for itself kind of extreme it begins with exporting
00:29:16
countries not willing to share scarcity and restricting their exports then it translates into these land grabs um and and some of them are huge I mean some of China
00:29:28
land Acquisitions in Africa I think one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is is larger than Belgium I mean these are not trivial um not few thousands of Acres but hundreds of thousands and
00:29:40
millions of Acres um and one of the more interesting developments in this field is that there are a number of countries including Saudi Arabia South Korea and China that are that are acquiring land
00:29:51
in Ethiopia and the Sudan which are the uh the upper uh Nile Watershed and all these land Acquisitions also involve water you
00:30:05
don't buy land in that part of the world without getting water to go with it and and so as they develop this these these land grabs this land to produce food for
00:30:17
themselves it will be with water that will no longer go to Egypt which is the the downstream country in the Nile and since almost all the water in the Nile's now used I mean the Nile is almost dry
00:30:30
when it reaches the Mediterranean any water taken out Upstream will not be available to Egypt so it will be losing irrigation water and its domestic food production that now accounts for about
00:30:42
45% of its total consumption will get smaller and smaller making it ever more dependent on the World Market and it already is the world's largest weed importer unless we act quickly I think
00:30:55
civilization itself is at risk and saving civilization is not a spectator sport it's not something where we can sit around and hope someone else is going to take care of it we all have to get involved and the question I'm
00:31:07
most I'm ask most frequently when I'm traveling around the world is people ask what can I do and I think they expect me to say change your light bulbs and recycle your newspapers and so those
00:31:19
things are important but we now have to change the system we've got to restructure the world economy and we have to do it quickly and that restructuring involves backing out fossil fuels and replacing them with
00:31:31
renewable sources of energy with wind and and and solar and geothermal and it's now possible and we have such an abundance of renewable energy we have three states North Dakota Kansas and
00:31:43
Texas it could supply all us from wind alone could supply all us electricity needs uh many times over uh China has enough harness wind energy to increase
00:31:55
its current consumption 16 fold if it needed to um that obviously won't happen there's no need for it but the point is we have a lot of and one can talk about solar in the same terms we have a lot of
00:32:08
renewable energy in the world and the challenge us to harness it so as individuals my challenge is you know to get involved pick an issue that's important to you please come back and watch complete
00:32:22
interviews with each of the experts and you can join me Tom Harman anytime on the web at tomart [Music]
00:32:38
and.com
End of transcript