natureoftheclimate

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Do the Math

On Monday (Dec 3, 2012), Beverly and I attended a stop of the "Do the Math" tour from 350.org. This is Bill McKibben's movement.
http://math.350.org/

Salt Lake City was the final stop in the tour, so I was glad we could attend. He had some guests, including Terry Tempest Williams, and did a good job presenting his material. However, he was misleading his audience in several respects.
One incongruity I'll mention here was that he blamed the drought in the Midwest for the rise in food prices, but didn't mention the corn-based ethanol mandates that have consumed 40% of more of the corn produced in the U.S. That was a bizarre omission that led me to wonder if his audience was ignorant of the impact of this disastrous program. Then he demonstrated the problem of burning fossil fuels by using beer as an analogy. He showed how many beers it takes to become too drunk to drive, then showed several cases of beer to represent the excess CO2 we're putting into the atmosphere (i.e., above the 350 ppm level).

Field of Barley

The irony may have been lost of McKibben himself, but beer alone consumes huge volumes of both fresh water and grain. Worldwide, over 35 billion gallons of beer are sold each year. Considering it takes about a pound of grain to produce a gallon of beer (depending on the grains used), that's a lot of grain--and a lot of gallons of fresh water. For example, a productive acre produces about enough barley for 84 barrels of beer.

So I was sitting there wondering if McKibben had "done the math" about the impact of beer on world food prices. It far exceeds the impact of drought from year to year. (Not to mention the amount of CO2 emissions attributable to beer production, which is around 10 million tons annually.)

This isn't to say that we should ignore the impact of climate change, but it is important to recognize that the Earth produces far more calories than humans can safely consume already. Would it make any difference to these college kids to think about the people starving in Africa every time they open a can or bottle of beer? Probably not. But that's a consideration far more relevant than complaining about big corporations producing fossil fuels.

So I suggest that to the extent McKibben focuses on the impact of climate change on agriculture, he should do the math on aspects of human activity beyond just burning fossil fuels.
:)