New report on agriculture, GHG emissions, climate change, and the farm income crisis

Cover of Tackling the Farm Crisis and the Climate Crisis by Darrin Qualman

How can we reduce agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by half by mid-century?  And how can steps to do so help strengthen and safeguard family farms?  These two questions are the focus of a new report written by Darrin Qualman in collaboration with the National Farmers Union (NFU).  The report is entitled Tackling the Farm Crisis and the Climate Crisis: A Transformative Strategy for Canadian Farms and Food Systems and it’s available from the NFU website.

The report looks at the climate crisis and the farm income crisis.  It concludes that our farms’ high emissions and low net incomes have the same cause: overdependence on purchased inputs: fertilizers, chemicals, fuels, etc.

The report shows clearly that the GHG emissions coming out of our farm and food systems are simply the downstream byproducts of the petro-industrial inputs we push in.  “Push in millions of gallons of fossil fuels and they will come out as millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide.  Push in megatonnes of fertilizers and they will come out as megatonnes of nitrous oxide.  As we have doubled and redoubled input use, we have doubled and redoubled the GHG emissions from agriculture,” states the report.  From this novel observation comes an inescapable conclusion: “Any low-emission food system will be a low-input food system.”

The report takes a long-term view and states that “10,000 years of human history makes one thing crystal clear: farming does not create GHG emissions; petro-industrial farm inputs create GHG emissions.”  It goes on to state that “Two things happen when farmers become overdependent on  purchased inputs: emissions go up, and net incomes go down.”

The report is optimistic, however, arguing that solutions to climate problems can also be solutions to farm income problems.  On average, farmers are now retaining just five cents out of every dollar they earn.  The other 95 cents go to pay for inputs—to pay fertilizer, chemical, seed, fuel, and machinery companies and other input and service providers.  But as input use is reduced as a way to reduce emissions, margins and net incomes can go up.  Steps to deal with the climate crisis can also be steps to solve the farm income crisis.

The report explores dozens of practical on-farm measures and government policies that can, taken together, reduce agricultural emissions by half by mid-century.  The report, however, does not underestimate the scale of the task ahead.  It acknowledges that “farmers, other citizens, all sectors, and all levels of government must mobilize, with near-wartime-levels of commitment and effectiveness, to slash emissions.  ”

The report is a hopeful blueprint for the transformation of our farms and food systems.  “We are looking at a future wherein agriculture must increasingly re-merge with nature and culture to create a much more integrated, life-sustaining, and community-sustaining agroecological model of human food provision, nutrition, and health.”

Darrin Qualman worked as Director of Research for the National Farmers Union from 1996 to 2010.  He is the author of the book, published in 2019, Civilization Critical: Energy, Food, Nature, and the Future.

Click HERE to read the report.

The nitrogen crisis: the other mega-threat to the biosphere

Nitrogen fertilizer use graph historic long-term 1850-2019
Global nitrogen fertilizer use, 1850-2019

If there was no climate crisis we’d all be talking about the nitrogen crisis.  Humans have super-saturated Earth’s biosphere with reactive nitrogen, setting off a cascade of impacts from species shifts, ecosystem changes, and extinctions to ocean dead zones and algae-clogged lakes.  When scientists surveyed the many threats to the biosphere to determine a “safe operating space” for planet Earth, the areas in which they concluded that we’d pushed furthest past “planetary boundaries” were climate change, species extinction, and nitrogen flows.  The graphic below, from the journal Nature, shows the extent to which we’ve transgressed safe planetary boundaries.  Note nitrogen—the red wedge, lower right.

Planetary Boundaries Rockstrom Steffen et al

Source: Reproduced from: Johan Rockström, Will Steffen, et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461, no. 24 (2009).

A nitrogen primer

Nitrogen is indispensable for life—a building block of proteins and DNA.  Nitrogen (N) is one of the most important plant nutrients and the most heavily applied agricultural fertilizer.  Nitrogen  is common in the atmosphere—making up 78 percent of the air we breath.  But this atmospheric N is inert; non-reactive—it can’t be used by plants.  In contrast, reactive, plant-usable N is just one-one-thousandth as abundant in the biosphere as nitrogen gas is in the atmosphere.  For hundreds-of-millions of years, plants have struggled to find sufficient quantities of usable N.

But humans have intervened massively in the planet’s nitrogen cycles—effectively tripling the quantity of N flowing through terrestrial ecosystems—through farmland, forests, wetlands, and grasslands.  In intensively cropped areas, nitrogen flows are now ten times higher than natural levels.

Here’s the most important part: nitrogen is a fossil-fuel product.  Natural gas is the main input for making N fertilizer.  That gas provides the tremendous energy, heat, and pressure needed to split atmospheric nitrogen molecules and combine N atoms with hydrogen to make reactive compounds.  The amount of energy needed to create, transport, and apply one tonne of N fertilizer is nearly equal to two tonnes of gasoline.  Nitrogen is one way that we push fossil-fuel energy into the food system in order to push more food out.  We turn fossil fuels into fertilizer into food into us.

Humans managed to increase global food production about eight-fold during the 20th and early 21st centuries.*  There’s more tonnage coming out of our food system.  But that system is linear, so if there’s more food coming out one end, there must be more inputs being pushed into the other end—more energy, chemicals, and fertilizers.  The graph above shows how humans have increased N fertilizer inputs three-hundred-fold since 1900 and thereby helped increase human food outputs eight-fold, and human populations four-and-a-half-fold.  By pushing in a hundred million tonnes of fossil-fuel-derived fertilizer we can push out enough food to feed an additional six billion people.  (for more information on nitrogen, see chapters 3 and 28 of my recent book, Civilization Critical.)

Greenhouse gas emission from nitrogen fertilizer

The nitrogen crisis is compounded by the fact that N production and use drive climate change.  The production and use of nitrogen fertilizer is unique among human activities in that it produces large quantities of all three of the main greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (from fertilizer-production facilities fueled by natural gas); nitrous oxide (from soils over-enriched by factory-made N); and methane (from the production and distribution of natural gas feedstocks and from the fertilizer-production process, i.e., from fracking, leaking gas pipelines, and from emissions from fertilizer plants).  A 2019 science journal article reported that actual methane emissions from fertilizer plants may be 100 times higher than previously assumed.  Emissions from N fertilizer production and use make up about half the total emissions from agriculture in many regions.  It’s fertilizer, not diesel fuel, that’s the largest emissions source on many farms.

Alternatives

We cannot continue to push massive quantities of petro-industrial N fertilizer into our farm fields and ecosystems.   Luckily there are alternatives and partial solutions.  these include:
– Getting nitrogen from natural sources: legumes and better crop rotations;
– Scaling back our demand for agricultural products: reducing food waste; rethinking biofuels; minimizing nutritionally disfigured food (sugar pops and tater tots); ceasing the attempt to globally proliferate North American levels of meat consumption;
– Funding agronomic research into low-input, organic, and agro-ecological production systems;  and
– Rationalizing and democratizing our food system—moving away from systems based on yield-, output-, trade-, and profit-maximization; corporate control; farmer elimination; and energy- and emission-maximization to new paradigms based on food sovereignty, health and nutrition-maximization, input-optimization, emissions-reduction, and long-term sustainability.

Any maximum-input, maximum-output agricultural system will  be a high-emission system.  Input reduction, however, can boost sustainability and net farm incomes while reducing energy use and emissions.  Cutting N use is key.

* The FAO records a four-fold increase in grain production between 1950 and 2018 and it is likely that production roughly doubled between 1900 and 1950, so an eight- to ten-fold increase in production is likely between 1900 and 2018.

Graph sources:
International Fertilizer Association (IFA);
– Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001);
– UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), FAOSTAT; and
– Clark Gellings & Kelly Parmenter, “Energy Efficiency in Fertilizer Production and Use.”

 

Through the mill: 150 years of wheat price data

Graph of wheat price, western Canada (Sask. or Man.), farmgate, dollars per bushel, 1867–2017
Wheat price, western Canada (Sask. or Man.), farmgate, dollars per bushel, 1867–2017

The price of wheat is declining, and it has been for many years.  The same is true for the prices of other grains and oilseeds.  The graph above shows wheat prices in Canada since Confederation—over the past 150 years.  The units are dollars per bushel.  A bushel is 60 pounds (27 kilograms).  The brown line suggests a trendline.

These prices are adjusted for inflation.  The downward trend reflects the fact that wheat prices fell relative to prices for nearly all other goods and services; as time went on it took more and more bushels of wheat or other grains to buy a pair of shoes, lunch, or a movie ticket.  For example, my father bought a new, top-of-the-line pickup truck in 1976 for $6,000, equivalent to about 1,200 bushels of wheat at the time.  Today, a comparable pickup (base model) might cost the equivalent of about 4,000 bushels of wheat.  As a second example, a house in 1980 might have cost the equivalent of 20,000 bushels of wheat; today, that very same house would cost the equivalent of 60,000 bushels.

The graph below adds shaded boxes to highlight three distinct periods in Canadian wheat prices.  The period from Confederation to the end of the First World War saw prices roughly in the range of $20 to $30 per bushel (adjusted to today’s dollars).  From 1920 to the mid-’80s, prices entered a new phase, and oscillated between about $8 and $18 per bushel.  And in 1985, wheat prices entered a third phase, oscillating between $5 and $10 per bushel, more often closer to $5 than $10.  In each phase, the top of the range in a given period is roughly equal to the bottom of the range in the previous period.

Graph of wheat price, western Canada (Sask. or Man.), farmgate, dollars per bushel, 1867–2017
Wheat price, western Canada, farmgate, dollars per bushel

1985 is often cited as the beginning of the farm crisis period.  The graph above shows why the crisis began in that year.  Grain prices since the mid-’80s have been especially damaging to Canadian agriculture.  The post-1985 collapse in grain prices has had several effects:

– The expulsion of one-third of Canadian farm families in just one generation;
– The expulsion of two-thirds of young farmers (under 35 years of age) over the same period;
– A tripling of farm debt, to a record $102 billion;
– A chronic need to transfer taxpayer dollars to farmers through farm-support programs (with transfers totaling $110 billion since 1985); and
– A push toward farm giantism, with the majority of land in western Canada now operated by farms larger than 3,000 acres, and with many farms covering tens-of-thousands of acres.

As per-bushel and per-acre margins fall, the solution is to cover more acres.  The inescapable result is fewer farms and farmers.

It is impossible to delve into all the causes of the grain price decline in one blog post.  Briefly, farmers are getting less and less because others are taking more and more.  A previous blog post highlighted the widening gap between what Canadians pay for bread in the grocery store and what farmers receive for wheat at the elevator.  This widening gap is created because grain companies, railways, milling companies, other processors, and retailers are taking more and more, chocking off the flow of dollars to farmers.  This is manifest in declining prices.  Agribusiness giants are profiting by charging consumers more per loaf and paying farmers less per bushel.

Of course, grain prices are a function of domestic and international markets.  The current free trade and globalization era began in the mid-1980s.  (The Canada-US Free Trade Agreement was concluded in 1987, the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, and the World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture in 1995.)  The effect of free trade and globalization has been to plunge all the world’s farmers into a single, borderless, hyper-competitive market.  At the same time, agribusiness corporations entered a period of accelerating mergers in order to reduce the competition they faced.  As competition levels increase for farmers and decrease for agribusiness corporations it is easy to predict shifts in relative profitability.  Increased competition for farmers meant lower prices while decreased competition for agribusiness transnationals translated into higher prices and profits.

Graph sources:
– 1867–1974: Historical Statistics of Canada, eds. Leacy, Urquhart, and Buckley, 2nd ed. (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1983);
– 1890–1909: Wholesale Prices in Canada, 189O–19O9, ed. R. H. Coats (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1910);
– 1908–1984: Statistics Canada, Table: 32-10-0359-01 Estimated areas, yield, production, average farm price and total farm value of principal field crops (formerly CANSIM 001-0017);
– 1969–2009: Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food: Statfact, Canadian Wheat Board Final Price for Wheat, basis in store Saskatoon;
– 2012–2018: Statistics Canada, Table: 32-10-0077-01 Farm product prices, crops and livestock (formerly CANSIM 002-0043).

Energy slaves, “hard work,” and the real sources of wealth

Stuart McMillen graphic novel Energy Slaves
An excerpt from the online long-form comic "Energy Slaves" by Stuart McMillen

Check out this brilliant ‘long-form comic’ by Stuart McMillen: Energy Slaves.  Click here or on the URL above.

Many Canadians and Americans struggle financially.  Millions are unemployed.  Many others live paycheque-to-paycheque.  A 2017 report by the US Federal Reserve Board found that 40 percent of US citizens couldn’t cover an unexpected expense of $400 without selling something or borrowing money.  There’s a lot of denial and misunderstanding regarding the financial challenges faced by a large portion of our fellow citizens.

Equally, though, there is misunderstanding, denial, and myth-making regarding those among us who are more financially secure, those who are well off—“the rich.”  Most glaring is the way we mischaracterize the sources of our wealth, luxury, and ease.  We lie to ourselves and each other regarding why we have it so good.  The rich often claim that their wealth is a result of “hard work.”  We hear people objecting to even the smallest tax increase, saying: “I worked hard for my money and no one is going to take it from me.”

The reality, however, is quite the opposite.  The rich don’t work very hard.  Every poor women or girl in Asia or Africa who gets up at dawn to walk many kilometres to carry home water or firewood for her family works harder than the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires.  Every farmer with a hoe or toiling behind an oxen works harder than any CEO.  My farmer grandparents worked far harder than I do, yet I live much better.  I would be self-delusional in the extreme to attribute my middle-class luxury to “hard work.”

No, those of us in North America, the European Union, and elsewhere in the world who enjoy privileged lives live well, not because we work hard, but because of the vast energy windfall of which we are the beneficiaries.  We live lives of comfort and ease because our work is done for us by “energy slaves.”

A human worker can toil at a constant rate of about one-tenth horsepower.  Working hard all year at that rate I can do about 200 horsepower-hours worth of work—hoeing or hauling or digging.  But if I add up the work accomplished by non-human energy—by fossil fuels and machines and by electricity from various sources and electric motors—I find that, on a per-capita average, that quantity is 100 times my annual work output.  For every unit of work I do, the motors and machines that surround me do 100 units.  Those of us who live comfortable, high-consumption lives are subsidized 100-to-1 by work we do not do.  And the richest among us enjoy the largest of those subsidies.

Let me state that another way: If I look around me, at the hurtling cars and trucks, the massive quantities of cloth and steel and concrete created each year, the rapidly expanding cities, the roads that get paved and the bridges built, I am seeing a quantity of building and digging and hauling and making that is 100 times greater than the humans around me could accomplish.  Human muscles and energies provide one percent of the work needed to create and maintain our towering, hyper-productive, petro-industrial civilization; but electricity, fossil fuels, other energy sources, engines, and machines provide the other 99 percent.  We and our human bodies put in 1 unit of work, but enjoy the benefits of 100.  That is the reason so many of us live better than the kings, sultans, and emperors of previous centuries.

As Stuart McMillen brilliantly illustrates in his long-form comic, Energy Slaves, it is as if each of us has a whole troupe of slaves toiling for our benefit.  It is the work of these virtual assistants that propel us along, create our homes and cities, raise our food, pump our water,  and make our goods.

We will face many hard questions as we progress through the twenty-first century: can we continue to consume energy at the rates we do now?  How can we generate that energy without fouling the atmosphere and destabilizing the climate?  How do we more equitably share access to energy among our soon-to-be 11-billion-person population?  How do we address energy poverty?  And all these questions and issues are tied to others, such as to issues of income inequality.  But a vital first step is to begin to talk honestly about the real sources of our wealth, to acknowledge that we enjoy undeserved subsidies, to admit that we are all (energy) lottery winners, and to approach the future with attitudes of humility and gratitude rather than entitlement.  We cannot navigate the future if we cling to the self-serving and self-aggrandizing myths of the past.

$100 billion and rising: Canadian farm debt

Graph of Canadian farm debt, 1971-2017
Canadian farm debt, 1971-2017

Canadian farm debt has risen past the $100 billion mark.  According to recently released Statistics Canada data, farm debt in 2017 was $102.3 billion—nearly double the level in 2000.  (All figures and comparisons adjusted for inflation.)

Some analysts and government officials characterize the period since 2007 as “better times” for farmers.  But during that period (2007-2017, inclusive) total farm debt increased by $37 billion—rising by more than $3 billion per year.

Here’s how Canadian agriculture has functioned during the first 18 years of the twenty-first century (2000 to 2017, inclusive):

1. Overall, farmers earned, on average, $47 billion per year in gross revenues from the markets (these are gross receipts from selling crops, livestock, vegetables, honey, maple syrup, and other products).

2. After paying expenses, on average, farmers were left with $1.6 billion per year in realized net farm income from the markets (excluding farm-support program payments).  If that amount was divided equally among Canada’s 193,492 farms, each would get about $8,300.

3. To help make ends meet, Canadian taxpayers transferred to farmers $3.1 billion per year via farm-support-program payments.

4. On top of this, farmers borrowed $2.7 billion per year in additional debt.

5. Farm family members worked at off-farm jobs to earn most of the household income needed to support their families (for data see here and here).

The numbers above give rise to several observations:

A. The amount of money that farmers pay each year in interest to banks and other lenders ($3 billion, on average) is approximately equal to the amount that Canadian citizens each year pay to farmers ($3.1 billion).  Thus, one could say that, in effect, taxpayers are paying farmers’ interest bills.  Governments are facilitating the transfer of tax dollars from Canadian families to farmers and on to banks and their shareholders.

B. Canadian farmers probably could not service their $100 billion dollar debt without government/taxpayer funding.

C. To take a different perspective: each year farmers take on additional debt ($2.7 billion, on average) approximately equal to the amount they are required to pay in interest to banks ($3 billion on average). One could say that for two decades banks have been loaning farmers the money needed to pay the interest on farmers’ tens-of-billions of dollars in farm debt.

Over and above the difficulty in paying the interest, is the difficulty in repaying the principle.  Farm debt now—$102 billion—is equal to approximately 64 years of farmers’ realized net farm income from the markets.  To repay the current debt, Canadian farm families would have to hand over to banks and other lenders every dime of net farm income from the markets from now until 2082.

The Canadian farm sector has many strengths.  By many measures, the sector is extremely successful and productive.  Over the past generation, farmers have managed to nearly double the value of their output and triple the value of agri-food exports.  Output per year, per farmer, and per acre are all up dramatically.  And Canadian farmers lead the world in adopting high-tech production systems.  The problem is not that our farms are backward, inefficient, or unproductive.  Rather, the problems detailed above are the result of voracious wealth extraction by the dominant agribusiness transnationals and banks. (To examine the extent of that wealth extraction, see my blog post here).

Although our farm sector has many strengths and is setting production records, the sector remains in a crisis that began in the mid-1980s.  And what began as a farm income crisis has metastasized into a farm debt crisis.  Further, the sector also faces a generational crisis (the number of farmers under the age of 35 has been cut by half since 2001) and a looming climate crisis.  Policy makers must work with farmers to rapidly restructure and transform Canadian agriculture.  A failure to do so will mean further costs to taxpayers, the destruction of the family farm, and irreparable damage to Canada’s food-production system.

The cattle crisis: 100 years of Canadian cattle prices

Graph of Canadian cattle prices, historic, 1918-2018
Canadian cattle prices at slaughter, Alberta and Ontario, 1918-2018

Earlier this month, Brazilian beef packer Marfrig Global Foods announced it is acquiring 51 percent ownership of US-based National Beef Packing for just under $1 billion (USD).  The merged entity will slaughter about 5.5 million cattle per year, making Marfrig/National the world’s fourth-largest beef packer.  (The top-three are JBS, 17.4 million per year; Tyson, 7.7 million; and Cargill, 7.6.)  To put these numbers into perspective, with the Marfrig/National merger, the largest four packing companies will together slaughter about 15 times more cattle worldwide than Canada produces in a given year.  In light of continuing consolidation in the beef sector it is worth taking a look at how cattle farmers and ranchers are fairing.

This week’s graph shows Canadian cattle prices from 1918 to 2018.  The heavy blue line shows Ontario slaughter steer prices, and is representative of Eastern Canadian cattle prices.  The narrower tan-coloured line shows Alberta slaughter steer prices, and is representative for Western Canada.  The prices are in dollars per pound and they are adjusted for inflation.

The two red lines at the centre of the graph delineate the price range from 1942 to 1989.  The red lines on the right-hand side of the graph delineate prices since 1989.  The difference between the two periods is stark.  In the 47 years before 1989, Canadian slaughter steer prices never fell below $1.50 per pound (adjusted for inflation).  In the 28 years since 1989, prices have rarely risen that high.  Price levels that used to mark the bottom of the market now mark the top.

What changed in 1989?  Several things:

1.       The arrival of US-based Cargill in Canada in that year marked the beginning of integration and consolidation of the North American continental market.  This was later followed by global integration as packers such as Brazil-based JBS set up plants in Canada and elsewhere.

2.       Packing companies became much larger but packing plants became much less numerous.  Gone were the days when two or three packing plants in a given city would compete to purchase cattle.

3.       Packer consolidation and giantism was faciliated by trade agreements and global economic integration.  It was in 1989 that Canada signed the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUSTA).  A few years later Canada would sign the NAFTA, the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture, and other bilateral and multilateral “free trade” deals.

4.       Packing companies created captive supplies—feedlots full of packer-owned cattle that the company could draw from if open-market prices rose, curtailing demand for farmers’ cattle and disciplining prices.

Prices and profits are only partly determined by supply and demand.  A larger factor is market power.  It is this power that determines the allocation of profits within a supply chain.  In the late ’80s and continuing today, the power balance between packers and farmers shifted as packers merged to become giant, global corporations.  The balance shifted as packing plants became less numerous, reducing competition for farmers’ cattle.  The balance shifted still further as packers began to utilize captive supplies.  And it shifted further still as trade agreements thrust farmers in every nation into a single, hyper-competitive global market.  Because market power determines profit allocation, these shifts increased the profit share for packers and decreased the share for farmers.   The effects on cattle farmers have been devastating.  Since the latter-1980s, Canada has lost half of its cattle farmers and ranchers.

For more background and analysis, please see the 2008 report by the National Farmers Union: The Farm Crisis and the Cattle Sector: Toward a New Analysis and New Solutions.

Graph sources: numerous, including Statistics Canada CANSIM Tables 002-0043, 003-0068, 003-0084; and  Statistics Canada “Livestock and Animal Products”, Cat. No. 23-203

 

 

Will Trump’s America crash Earth’s climate?

Graph of US energy consumption by fuel, 1990 to 2050
US energy consumption by fuel, 1990 to 2050

Last week, the US Department of Energy (DOE) released its annual report projecting future US energy production and consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  This year’s report, entitled Annual Energy Outlook 2018, with Projections to 2050 forecasts a nightmare scenario of increasing fossil fuel use, increasing emissions, lackluster adoption of renewable energy options, and a failure to shift to electric vehicles, even by mid-century.

The graph above is copied from that DOE report.  The graph shows past and projected US energy consumption by fuel type.  The top line shows “petroleum and other liquids.”  This is predominantly crude oil products, with a minor contribution from “natural gas liquids.”  For our purposes, we can think of it as representing liquid fuels used in cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships.  Note how the US DOE is projecting that in 2050 America’s consumption of these high-emission fuels will be approximately equal to levels today.

The next line down is natural gas.  This is used mostly for heating and for electricity generation.  Note how the DOE is projecting that consumption (i.e., combustion) of natural gas will be about one-third higher in 2050 than today.

Perhaps worst of all, coal combustion will be almost as high in 2050 as it is today.   No surprise, the DOE report (page 15) projects that US GHG emissions will be higher in 2050 than today.

Consumption of renewable energy will rise.  The DOE is projecting that in 2050 “other renewables”—essentially electricity from solar photovoltaic panels and wind turbines—will provide twice as much power as today.  But that will be only a fraction of the energy supplied by fossil fuels: oil, natural gas, and coal.

How can this be?  The world’s nations have committed, in Paris and elsewhere, to slash emissions by mid-century.  To keep global temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius, industrial nations will have to cut emissions by half by 2050.  So what’s going on in America?

The DOE projections reveal that America’s most senior energy analysts and policymakers believe that US policies currently in place will fail to curb fossil fuel use and reduce GHG emissions.  The DOE report predicts, for example, that in 2050 electric vehicles will make up just a small fraction of the US auto fleet.  See the graph below.  Look closely and you’ll see the small green wedge representing electrical energy use in the transportation sector.  The graph also shows that the the consumption of fossil fuels—motor gasoline, diesel fuel, fuel oil, and jet fuel—will be nearly as high in 2050 as it is now.  This is important: The latest data from the top experts in the US government predict that, given current policies, the transition to electric vehicles will not happen.

The next graph, below, shows that electricity production from solar arrays will increase significantly.  But the projection is that the US will not install significant numbers of wind turbines, so long as current policies remain in force and current market conditions prevail.

The report projects (page 84) that in 2050 electricity generation from the combustion of coal and natural gas will be twice as high as generation from wind turbines and solar panels.

Clearly, this is all just a set of projections.  The citizens and governments of the United States can change this future.  And they probably will.  They can implement policies that dramatically accelerate the transition to electric cars, electric trains, energy-efficient buildings, and low-emission renewable energy.

But the point of this DOE report (and the point of this blog post) is that such policies are not yet in place.  In effect, the US DOE report should serve as a warning: continue as now and the US misses its emissions reduction commitments by miles, the Earth probably warms by 3 degrees or more, and we risk setting off a number of global climate feedbacks that could render huge swaths of the planet uninhabitable and kill hundreds of millions of people this century.

The house is on fire.  We can put it out.  But the US Department of Energy is telling us that, as of now, there are no effective plans to do so.

Perhaps step one is to remove the arsonist-in-chief.

 

If you’re for pipelines, what are you against?

Graph of Canadian greenhouse gas emissions, by sector, 2005 to 2039
Canadian greenhouse gas emissions, by sector, 2005 to 2030

As Alberta Premier Notley and BC Premier Horgan square off over the Kinder Morgan / Trans Mountain pipeline, as Alberta and then Saskatchewan move toward elections in which energy and pipelines may be important issues, and as Ottawa pushes forward with its climate plan, it’s worth taking a look at the pipeline debate.  Here are some facts that clarify this issue:

1.  Canada has committed to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 30 percent (to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030).

2.  Oil production from the tar sands is projected to increase by almost 70 percent by 2030 (From 2.5 million barrels per day in 2015 to 4.2 million in 2030).

3.  Pipelines are needed in order to enable increased production, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and many others.

4.  Planned expansion in the tar sands will significantly increase emissions from oil and gas production.  (see graph above and this government report)

5.  Because there’s an absolute limit on our 2030 emissions (515 million tonnes), if the oil and gas sector is to emit more, other sectors must emit less.  To put that another way, since we’re committed to a 30 percent reduction, if the tar sands sector reduces emissions by less than 30 percent—indeed if that sector instead increases emissions—other sectors must make cuts deeper than 30 percent.

The graph below uses the same data as the graph above—data from a recent report from the government of Canada.  This graph shows how planned increases in emissions from the Alberta tar sands will force very large reductions elsewhere in the Canadian economy.

Graph of emissions from the Canadian oil & gas sector vs. the rest of the economy, 2015 & 2030
Emissions from the Canadian oil & gas sector vs. the rest of the economy, 2015 & 2030

Let’s look at the logic one more time: new pipelines are needed to facilitate tarsands expansion; tarsands expansion will increase emissions; and an increase in emissions from the tarsands (rather than a 30 percent decrease) will force other sectors to cut emissions by much more than 30 percent.

But what sector or region or province will pick up the slack?  Has Alberta, for instance, checked with Ontario?  If Alberta (and Saskatchewan) cut emissions by less than 30 percent, or if they increase emissions, is Ontario prepared to make cuts larger than 30 percent?  Is Manitoba or Quebec?  If the oil and gas sector cuts by less, is the manufacturing sector prepared to cut by more?

To escape this dilemma, many will want to point to the large emission reductions possible from the electricity sector.  Sure, with very aggressive polices to move to near-zero-emission electrical generation (policies we’ve yet to see) we can dramatically cut emissions from that sector.  But on the other hand, cutting emission from agriculture will be very difficult.  So potential deep cuts from the electricity sector will be partly offset by more modest cuts, or increases, from agriculture, for example.

The graph at the top shows that even as we make deep cuts to emissions from electricity—a projected 60 percent reduction—increases in emissions from the oil and gas sector (i.e. the tar sands) will negate 100 percent of the progress in the electricity sector.  The end result is, according to these projections from the government of Canada, that we miss our 2030 target.  To restate: according to the government’s most recent projections we will fail to meet our Paris commitment, and the primary reason will be rising emissions resulting from tarsands expansion.  This is the big-picture context for the pipeline debate.

We’re entering a new era, one of limits, one of hard choices, one that politicians and voters have not yet learned to navigate.   We are exiting the cornucopian era, the age of petro-industrial exuberance when we could have everything; do it all; have our cake, eat it, and plan on having two cakes in the near future.  In this new era of biophysical limits on fossil fuel combustion and emissions, on water use, on forest cutting, etc. if we want to do one thing, we may be forced to forego something else.  Thus, it is reasonable to ask: If pipeline proponents would have us expand the tar sands, what would they have us contract?

Graph sources: Canada’s 7th National Communication and 3rd Biennial Report, December 2017

Earth’s dominant bird: a look at 100 years of chicken production

Graph of Chicken production, 1950-2050
Chicken meat production, global, actual and projected, 1950 to 2050

There are approximately 23 billion chickens on the planet right now.   But because the life of a meat chicken is short—less than 50 days—annual production far exceeds the number of chickens alive at any one time.  In 2016, worldwide, chicken production topped 66 billion birds.  Humans are slaughtering, processing, and consuming about 2,100 chickens per second.

We’re producing a lot of chicken meat: about 110 million tonnes per year.  And we’re producing more and more.  In 1966, global production was 10 million tonnes.  In just twelve years, by 1978, we’d managed to double production.  Fourteen years after that, 1992, we managed to double it again, to 40 million tonnes.  We doubled it again to 80 million tonnes by 2008.  And we’re on track for another doubling—a projected 160 million tonnes per year before 2040.  By mid-century, production should exceed 200 million tonnes—20 times the levels in the mid-’60s.  This week’s graph shows the steady increase in production.  Data sources are listed below.

The capacity of our petro-industrial civilization to double and redouble output is astonishing.  And there appears to be no acknowledged limit.  Most would predict that as population and income levels rise in the second half of the century—as another one or two billion people join the “global middle class”—that consumption of chicken and other meats will double again between 2050 and 2100.  Before this century ends, consumption of meat (chicken, pork, beef, lamb, farmed fish, and other meats) may approach a trillion kilograms per year.

Currently in Canada the average chicken farm produces about 325,000 birds annually.  Because these are averages, we can assume that the output of the largest operations is several times this figure.  In the US, chicken production is dominated by contracting.  Large transnationals such as Tyson Foods contract with individual growers to feed birds.  It is not unusual for a contract grower to have 6 to 12 barns on his or her farm and raise more than a million broiler chickens per year.

We’re probably making too many McNuggets.  We’re probably catching too many fish.  We’re probably feeding too many pigs.  And it is probably not a good idea to double the number of domesticated livestock on the planet—double it to 60 billion animals.  It’s probably time to rethink our food system.  

Graph sources:
FAOSTAT database
OECD-FAO, Agricultural Outlook 2017-2026
Brian Revell: One Man’s Meat … 2050?
Lester Brown: Full Planet, Empty Plates
FAO: World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050, the 2012 revision

The 100th Anniversary of high-input agriculture

Graph of tractor and horse numbers, Canada, historic, 1910 to 1980
Tractors and horses on farms in Canada, 1910 to 1980

2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of input-dependent farming—the birth of what would become modern high-input agriculture.  It was in 1918 that farmers in Canada and the US began to purchase large numbers of farm tractors.  These tractors required petroleum fuels.  Those fuels became the first major farm inputs.  In the early decades of the 20th century, farmers became increasingly dependent on fossil fuels, in the middle decades most also became dependent on fertilizers, and in the latter decades they also became dependent on agricultural chemicals and high-tech, patented seeds.

This week’s graph shows tractor and horse numbers in Canada from 1910 to 1980.  On both lines, the year 1918 is highlighted in red.  Before 1918, there were few tractors in Canada.  The tractors that did exist—mostly large steam engines—were too big and expensive for most farms.  But in 1918 three developments spurred tractor proliferation: the introduction of smaller, gasoline-engine tractors (The Fordson, for example); a wartime farm-labour shortage; and a large increase in industrial production capacity.  In the final year of WWI and in the years after, tractor sales took off.  Shortly after, the number of horses on farms plateaued and began to fall.  Economists Olmstead and Rhode have produced a similar graph for the US.

It’s important to understand the long-term significance of what has unfolded since 1918.  Humans have practiced agriculture for about 10,000 years—about 100 centuries.  For 99 centuries, there were almost no farm inputs—no industrial products that farmers had to buy each spring in order to grow their crops.  Sure, before 1918, farmers bought farm implements—hoes, rakes, and sickles in the distant past, and plows and binders more recently.  And there were some fertilizer products available, such as those derived from seabird guano (manure) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  And farmers occasionally bought and sold seeds.  But for most farmers in most years before about 1918, the production of a crop did not require purchasing an array of farm inputs.  Farm chemicals did not exist, very little fertilizer was available anywhere in the world until after WWII, and farmers had little use for gasoline or diesel fuel.  Before 1918, farms were largely self-sufficient, deriving seeds from the previous years’ crop, fertility from manure and nitrogen-fixing crops, and pulling-power from horses energized by the hay and grain that grew on the farm itself.  For 99 of the 100 centuries that agriculture has existed, farms produced the animal- and crop-production inputs they needed.  Nearly everything that went into farming came out of farming.

For 99 percent of the time that agriculture has existed there were few farm inputs, no farm-input industries, and little talk of “high input costs.”  Agricultural production was low-input, low-cost, solar-powered, and low-emission.  In the most recent 100 years, however, we’ve created a new kind of agricultural system: one that is high-input, high-cost, fossil-fuelled, and high-emission.

Modern agriculture is also, admittedly, high-output.  But this last fact must be understood in context: the incredible food-output tonnage of modern agriculture is largely a reflection of the megatonnes of fertilizers, fuels, and chemicals we push into the system.  Nitrogen fertilizer illustrates this process.  To produce, transport, and apply one tonne of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer requires an amount of energy equal to almost two tonnes of gasoline.  Modern agriculture is increasingly a system for turning fossil fuel Calories into food Calories.  Food is increasingly a petroleum product.

The high-input era has not been kind to farmers.  Two-thirds of Canadian farmers have been ushered out of agriculture over the past two generations.  More troubling and more recent: the number of young farmers—those under 35—has been reduced by two-thirds since 1991.  Farm debt is at a record high: nearly $100 billion.  And about the same amount, $100 billion, has had to be transferred from taxpayers to farmers since the mid-1980s to keep the Canadian farm sector afloat.  Farmers are struggling with high costs and low margins.

This is not a simplistic indictment of “industrial agriculture.”  We’re not going back to horses.  But on the 100th anniversary of the creation of fossil-fuelled, high-input agriculture we need to think clearly and deeply about our food production future.  As our fossil-fuel supplies dwindle, as greenhouse gas levels rise, as we struggle to feed and employ billions more people, and as we struggle with many other environmental and economic problems, we will need to rethink and radically transform our food production systems.  Our current food system isn’t “normal”: it’s an anomaly—a break with the way that agriculture has operated for 99 percent of its history.  It’s time to ask hard questions and make big changes.  It’s time to question the input-maximizing production systems agribusiness corporations have created, and to explore new methods of low-input, low-energy-use, low-emission production.

Rather than maximizing input use, we need to maximize net farm incomes, maximize the number of farm families on the land, and maximize the resilience and sustainability of our food systems.