Tag Archives: food

The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2040

Every four years, or early in each U.S. presidential administration, the National Intelligence Council publishes a scenario report. I had to look up what the council actually is, and basically it is an organization reporting to the Director of National Intelligence, who reports to the President and is sort of but not really in charge of the U.S. “intelligence community”, which sprawls across various military and civilian agencies with their own organizational structures.

Since this is a U.S. government report and not copyrighted, I can copy and paste as much of it as I want. Here are the five scenarios they came up with:

RENAISSANCE OF DEMOCRACIES: The world is in the midst of a resurgence of open democracies led by the United States and its allies. Rapid technological advancements fostered by public-private partnerships in the United States and other democratic societies are transforming the global economy, raising incomes, and improving the quality of life for millions around the globe. In contrast, years of increasing societal controls and monitoring in China and Russia have stifled innovation.

A WORLD ADRIFT: The international system is directionless, chaotic, and volatile as international rules and institutions are largely ignored. OECD countries are plagued by slower economic growth, widening societal divisions, and political paralysis. China is taking advantage of the West’s troubles to expand its international influence. Many global challenges are unaddressed.

COMPETITIVE COEXISTENCE: The United States and China have prioritized economic growth and restored a robust trading relationship, but this economic interdependence exists alongside competition over political influence, governance models, technological dominance, and strategic advantage. The risk of major war is low, and international cooperation and technological innovation make global problems manageable.

SEPARATE SILOS: The world is fragmented into several economic and security blocs of varying size and strength, centered on the United States, China, the EU, Russia, and a few regional powers, and focused on self-sufficiency, resiliency, and defense. Information flows within separate cyber-sovereign enclaves, supply chains are reoriented, and international trade is disrupted. Vulnerable developing countries are caught in the middle.

TRAGEDY AND MOBILIZATION: A global coalition, led by the EU and China working with NGOs and revitalized multilateral institutions, is implementing far-reaching changes designed to address climate change, resource depletion, and poverty following a global food catastrophe caused by climate events and environmental degradation. Richer countries shift to help poorer ones manage the crisis and then transition to low carbon economies through broad aid programs and transfers of advanced energy technologies.

Everything above is a quote by the way. I couldn’t get horrible, terrible, no good very bad WordPress editor to make them look like quotes, even using the HTML editor.

Anyway, there is a lot of doom and gloom here. I am oftentimes all about doom and gloom, especially when others are feeling optimistic, but the contrarian in me wants to think that now that almost everyone is feeling doomy gloomy, maybe the reality will not be so bad. Certainly the major food crisis above gets my attention. A major war, terrorist attack, major natural or industrial disaster, or combination of these could obviously be devastating. Smaller-scale disasters and conflicts are pretty much guaranteed, and refugee flows from poorer to richer nations are going to become an issue more and more. It is hard to see our natural environment coming under less pressure in the coming 20 years, and hard to imagine much progress toward a peaceful world government and equality on a global scale.

On the other hand, much of Europe and Asia have the managed economy thing reasonably figured out, where the capitalist economy is able to grow while the government collects taxes and provides services people need, like health care, education, and retirement. Cynical politicians in Europe and North America may figure out that the refugee pressure they are going to face will be catastrophic and that helping potential refugees in their home countries is a win-win for everyone. The world really has done pretty well with the food situation so far, and let’s assume this will continue to be a priority and that competent visionary people will remain in charge of that. Medical breakthroughs seem very likely over the next 20 years – for example, widespread cures for cancer, diabetes, HIV, and other dread diseases seem like they might be on the horizon. The population explosion will start to slow down. And let’s just say we avoid major war, plagues, or famines through a combination of competence and luck. Things really could be okay, and a generation of children could grow up in a relatively stable, sheltered, prosperous situation much as the majority of today’s middle-aged adults in developed countries did. Some of those children will be the problem solvers of tomorrow who come up with additional breakthroughs and incremental progress.

There, I just talked myself into not being quite so doomy gloomy.

yes, you can eat Cicadas

The bulk of the Brood X cicadas are likely to come out in May (if 2004 is a good guide to what to expect) and be centered around D.C. and Baltimore. The edge of the blob just touches Philadelphia, and there are scatterings in southern and Central Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and Georgia. I wonder how they get scattered the way they do – do they start out everywhere and then local populations gradually go extinct over time? Besides a clear map and an empirical probability density function (but they don’t call it that, not wanting to scare readers!), this Washington Post article reminded me that the Cicada swarm is actually made up of three similar but different species. That also is weird and interesting.

Also, here is a cicada cookbook from the University of Maryland. I have tried fried crickets in Asia but I don’t think I can bring myself to try Cicadas. As the into to the cookbook points out though, shrimp and crayfish are basically bugs that we westerners eat, so your ick factor is mostly just a matter of cultural conditioning. The cookbook also has this interesting comparison of protein in insects vs. other animals we humans like to eat:

Many people all over the world eat insects and other arthropods both as a delicacy and staple. This is sensible because insects are nutritious. Insects provide as much protein pound per pound as lean beef. For example, every 100 gram serving of each, termites provide 617 calories of energy while lean ground beef gives 219 and cod gives 170 (3). Although their amino acid content is not as well-balanced for human nutrition, this can be easily corrected by including fiber and other plant proteins into your diet. Insects are also a good source of minerals and some vitamins, especially for people who have limited access to other animal proteins.

University of Maryland

So termites sound like a pretty good survival food. Even if you live in some wasteland where nothing else will grow, there is likely some wood around that you could feed to them. You can then feed them to chickens or rats if you want, but it may be most efficient to just eat them if you can handle it. I don’t think I handle it – termites are in the cockroach family, I while I can handle the crickets for sale in Asian street markets, I cannot handle the “water bugs” which are basically cockroaches. But maybe if someone can grind them into a flour or paste I can use to thicken my soup, it could be a nutritious supplement and I might not have to think about it so much.

February 2021 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: For people who just don’t care that much about plants and animals, the elevator pitch on climate change is it is coming for our houses and it is coming for our food and water.

Most hopeful story: It is possible that mRNA technology could cure or prevent herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer HIV, Zika and Ebola (and obviously coronavirus). With flu and coronavirus, it may become possible to design a single shot that would protect against thousands of strains. It could also be used for nefarious purposes, and to protect against that are ideas about what a biological threat surveillance system could look like.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: At least one serious scientist is arguing that Oumuamua was only the tip of an iceberg of extraterrestrial objects we should expect to see going forward.

Dietary Guidelines for Americans

The USDA has a new version of Dietary Guidelines for Americans out. Sorry, TLDR, but the Harvard School of Public Health has a handy summary (along with some criticism). Basically, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains will never go out of style. Sugar will never be in style again.

I think people of my generation and older are still confused about fat. The guidelines say plant-based oils are pretty much A-OK as long as you stay within your calorie limits, but still recommend “lean meats and poultry”, “low fat dairy”, and limiting saturated fat. First, I am confused whether saturated fat is bad for everyone, even those of us with low cholesterol, or whether the USDA assumes we are too stupid to understand nuances and a blanket statement like this will save lives overall (if so, they’re probably right.) Harvard also criticizes USDA for not discouraging processed meat like bacon and ham (but bacon is so good…well, better to think of it as an occasional treat like a candy bar).

Men should limit alcoholic drinks to “no more than two” and women to one (sorry, ladies). By the way, a(n imperial, 16 ounce) pint of 7% alcohol craft beer is not a drink, it is actually almost two. Whereas 1.5 ounces of 40% alcohol liquor is one drink and actually easier to control. I love those craft beers though. Oh, and don’t touch soda – it’s death in a glass.

But you can have 2-3 cups of (black) coffee a day, with no known negative effects.

You can have more salt than I thought (2300 mg/day) if you don’t have any particular risk factors.

Harvard also points out that the science behind the nutritional benefits of all that meat and dairy is not all that strong, while the science behind the environmental risks is strong, and clear, and not mentioned in these guidelines.

Well, this is the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Not the department of get your ass off the couch, go for a jog, and then eat some vegetables. We have an Environmental Protection Agency, but first of all it is not cabinet level, and second of all they don’t regulate agriculture. Nobody regulates the environmental impacts of agriculture! And the meat, sugar, corn (etc.) and food processing industries are massive, have enormously deep pockets, and use them to buy politicians who will keep it this way indefinitely.

vertical farming

Forbes has an article on vertical farming under lights, claiming that a 2-acre vertical farm can replace a 750 acre outdoor farm and use 95% less water. It doesn’t talk about pollution, but in theory it should be relatively easy to collect and recycle/compost/digest/burn solid waste, and collect and treat wastewater, from a farm like this. I know LED lights are efficient, but you do have to produce enough energy to replace the sunlight that would have fallen on 750 acres of the Earth, plus some extra because the system is not perfectly efficient, and you have to produce fertilizer of some sort. These things will have an ecological footprint. On the other hand, if this is in an urban population center, you potentially have a lot of waste streams you might be able to recover energy and nutrients from. Then you also have 748 acres of land somewhere that you can theoretically reforest or re-wetland. Then you might have a healthy fishery somewhere downstream that is no longer choked by sediment and nutrients from farm waste.

October 2020 in Review

In current events, this was just the month that the fall resurgence of Covid-19 exploded in the U.S. and around the world. Just a month when a new, controversial Supreme Court justice was sworn in. Just the last month leading up to the Biden-Trump election, amid a swirl of questions about a peaceful and orderly transfer of power if the voting goes the way the polls clearly say it is going to. Just a month when my home city erupted in “unrest” for the second time this year and the National Guard rolled in. (Incidentally, Joe Biden is also here as I write this on November 1, and I wonder if the National Guard rolling in is entirely a coincidence.)

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Global ecological collapse is most likely upon us, and our attention is elsewhere. The good news is we still have enough to eat (on average – of course we don’t get it to everyone who needs it), for now.

Most hopeful story: We have almost survived another four years without a nuclear war. Awful as Covid-19 has been, we will get through it despite the current administration’s complete failure to plan, prevent, prepare, respond or manage it. There would be no such muddling through a nuclear war.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are at least some bright ideas on how to innovate faster and better.

what’s really going on with the food supply?

The USDA, the UN, and Bloomberg say there is a “food inequality crisis…sweeping the globe”. It sounds like supplies of soybeans and wheat are down somewhat due to drought in some places (South America and Europe) and storms in others (Iowa specifically is mentioned in the article.) In this environment, prices are up, and because incomes are down due to the pandemic, poor countries and poor people are outbid and going hungry.

Of course, no specific flood, drought, or pandemic can be attributed to climate change…blah blah yada yada. Looking at the FAO Food Price Index, the current mini-spike is well below the major spikes of 2008 and 2011. Well, climate change is a long term signal embedded in a lot of short term noise, but dealing with food supply and food price issues in the short term could be a trial run for how we deal with the creeping long term problem before it is too late. The long term problem will gradually keep creeping up on us, embedded in lots of noise, and then some big event or series of events will be the straw that breaks the global food supply camel’s back. Let’s do something about it now.

What should we do? Well, I’m not an expert, but it starts with water. We need to stop overexploiting groundwater, and we probably need to think about shifting food production away from areas that rely primarily on glaciers and snowmelt, coastal areas that may experience saltwater intrusion or outright inundation, and areas expected to experience increasingly severe droughts. We need to pay attention to soil conservation. We need to pay attention to biodiversity, both to protect ecosystem services such as pollination and to make crops themselves more resilient (crops are subject to their own pandemics). We need sustainable fisheries. Maybe we need to move more production indoors under lights powered by renewable energy (or, I hate to say it, nuclear reactors). That might also help us control the nutrient pollution that is choking our coastal ecosystems. Recovering more nutrients from wastewater and farm waste might play a role. We may need to encourage people to eat more plants and less meat. Maybe we need more urban gardens and rooftop gardens and food forests. Finally, biotechnology probably has a role to play, but in my opinion we shouldn’t rely on this but should think of it as icing on the cake made of a mix of all the low-tech ingredients I mention above.

Living Planet Report

This year’s Living Planet Report paints a bleak picture of ongoing ecological collapse. I think this is an organization that has some incentive to be on the bleak side of average, but still I tend to buy into the message. The alarm is sounding, but not reaching the general public or our political leaders. People just don’t understand this like they do the simplistic concept of carbon emissions, and of course even that we are failing to address in an adequate way. What’s the elevator pitch for why it matters, even for people who don’t value or have much emotional connection with nature? In a word, it’s the food, stupids.

July 2020 in Review

Coronavirus certainly continues to be the main thing going on in current events globally. I just don’t have a lot of new or insightful things to say about it. Here’s some other stuff I read and thought about in July. WITH THE STUPID WORDPRESS BLOCK EDITOR, I CAN’T SEEM TO PUT A SPACE BETWEEN THESE PARAGRAPHS NO MATTER WHAT I DO. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • Here’s the elevator pitch for why even the most hardened skeptic should care about climate change. We are on a path to (1) lose both polar ice caps, (2) lose the Amazon rain forest, (3) lose our productive farmland, and (4) lose our coastal population centers. If all this comes to pass it will lead to mass starvation, mass refugee flows, and possibly warfare. Unlike even major crises like wars and pandemics, by the time it is obvious to everyone that something needs to be done, there will be very little that can be done.
Most hopeful story:
  • In the U.S. every week since schools and businesses shut down in March, about 85 children lived who would otherwise have died. Most of these would have died in and around motor vehicles.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • The world seems to be experiencing a major drop in the fertility rate. This will lead to a decrease in the rate of population growth, changes to the size of the work force relative to the population, and eventually a decrease in the population itself.

Jeff Masters: We’re all going to die!

Jeff Masters, who used to write a neat blog for Weather Underground before weather.com/IBM destroyed everything that was ever good about that site, has a dark take on climate change. He now writes on Yale Climate Connections, which is okay, but I notice that one by one my beloved RSS feeds are falling prey to neglect (there’s an RSS feed for Yale Climate Connections, which is okay, but not one for Jeff Masters’s blog specifically.)

When the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melt, the forests of the Amazon transition to scrubland, and vast swaths of once-fertile land become inhospitable desert, there will be no climate change vaccine that will suddenly bring an end to these essentially irreversible catastrophes. Tens of millions will starve. Wars will break out over scarce resources. Hundreds of millions of climate change refugees will flee rising seas, coasts will be ravaged by stronger storms, and desert-like lands will be without the food and water needed to sustain civilization.

Jeff Masters, Yale Climate Connections

I think that’s a pretty good elevator pitch for the “why should I care?” crowd: (1) massive melting of ice sheets on both poles leading to catastrophic sea level rise, (2) loss of the Amazon rain forest, which along with the oceans maintains the mix of gases in the atmosphere that we have become accustomed to throughout human history, (3) loss of huge amounts of what used to be productive farm land, due to high temperatures and lack of water. These processes will play out slowly, maybe over decades. We are the frogs in the slowly heating up cook pot. We may see slowly rising prices for food, and we will have to clean up after increasingly frequent storms, floods, and fires. Eventually we may see absolute food shortages. These acute crises will start to affect poorer nations, and poorer people in richer nations, before others, of course. Mass migrations, civil conflicts within nation-states, and geopolitical conflicts between nation-states may break out. Throw in a few random events like earthquakes and pandemics at already vulnerable moments, and things may get dicey.

This sounds awful, and there is certainly no worldwide effort to effectively deal with it. At the same time, science, technological know-how, and financial wealth continue to increase, although they obviously are not spread equally or fairly among the world’s people. We have seen examples of effective leadership and cooperation in the past at times of crisis, and maybe these will emerge again. As Jeff Masters rightly points out though, unlike wars and pandemics, a big difference with climate change is that when it becomes obvious to absolutely everyone that something has to be done, there may be no good options left.