by Al Gore
The projected reserves in these dirty sources, as well as in the deep reserves underneath the ocean floor, yield much more expensive oil than the world has enjoyed in the past. Even if we do not reach global peak oil in the near future, the prices we pay for oil are likely to be permanently higher than those we became accustomed to during the century and a half over which we exploited the cheaper, more easily recoverable reserves.
These higher petroleum prices have already had a big impact on food prices because modern industrial agriculture consumes prodigious quantities of diesel fuel for locomotion, and poorly contained methane for 90 percent of their fertilizer costs. According to Berkeley professor and author Michael Pollan, “it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food.” No wonder the demand for both oil and food is continuing to skyrocket—particularly in fast growing emerging economies. The impact of higher food prices is significantly larger in developing countries, where low-income families frequently spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food.
In spite of the impressive increases in food production in the last half century, and in spite of premature warnings in centuries past that humanity was reaching hard limits in its ability to provide more food for more people, many experts are nearly unanimous in pointing to multiple threats confronting the ability of the world to expand food supplies:
• Erosion of fertile topsoil at unsustainable rates; each inch of topsoil lost diminishes grain yields by 6 percent;
• Loss of soil fertility; each reduction of organic matter in soil by 50 percent reduces many crop yields by 25 percent;
• Increasing desertification of grasslands;
• Increasing competition for agricultural water from cities and industry, even though agriculture is projected to require 45 percent more water by 2030;
• A slowing rate of agricultural productivity gains since the Green Revolution in the second half of the twentieth century—from 3.5 percent annually three decades ago to a little over one percent now;
• Increasing resistance of pests, weeds, and plant diseases to pesticides, herbicides, and other agricultural chemicals;
• The loss of a significant amount of the world’s remaining plant genetic diversity; as much as three quarters of all plant genetic diversity may have already been lost;
• An increased risk of export bans by large producers facing their own domestic price hikes; according to the Council on Foreign Relations, data from the U.N.’s World Food Programme show that “over forty countries in 2008 imposed some form of export ban in an effort to increase domestic food security”;
• Erratic and less predictable precipitation patterns associated with global warming—which leads to less frequent but larger downpours, interrupting longer periods of deeper drought;
• The looming impact of catastrophic heat stress on important food crops that cannot survive the predicted global temperature increase of 6 degrees C (11 degrees F); each one degree C increase in temperature is expected by experts to produce a 10 percent decline in crop yields;
• Growing consumption of food, driven both by population growth, the growth in per capita consumption, and the increasing global preference for resource-intensive meat consumption;
• Diversion of more cropland from food crops to crops suitable for biofuel; and
• Conversion of cropland to urban and suburban sprawl.
We already know that extreme shortages of food, fertile land, and freshwater in countries with growing populations can lead to a complete breakdown of social order and a sharp increase in violence. Studies have shown conclusively that this deadly combination was a major contributing factor in the years leading up to the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda in 1994, which at the time had one of the five highest population growth rates in the world, with 67 percent of its people under the age of twenty-four.
Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, wrote, “modern Rwanda illustrates a case where Malthus’s worst-case scenario does seem to have been right.… Severe problems of overpopulation, environmental impact, and climate change cannot persist indefinitely: sooner or later they are likely to resolve themselves, whether in the manner of Rwanda or in some other manner not of our devising, if we don’t succeed in solving them by our own actions.”
Several experts now worry that there is a danger that several large food-growing countries—China and India among them—will run into a wall. Were that to occur, the resulting global food shortages and price hikes could be catastrophic. In Gujarat, India, the head of the International Water Management Institute’s groundwater station, Tushaar Shah, said of the looming water crisis in his region, “when the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India.”
India would not be alone. For example, rapid population growth and gross overexploitation of soil, water, and other natural resources are contributing to the anarchy and increasing radicalism in Yemen. Tap water flows in the capital city of Sana’a only one day in four. Partly because of water shortages and soil erosion, the harvest of grain has declined more than 30 percent in the last four decades. Yemen is becoming, in the words of Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, “a hydrological basket case.”
THE GROWTH OF CITIES
The collective failure to clearly see the most likely future consequences of realities evolving along easily measurable trend lines also reflects a well-known human vulnerability when we try to think about the future. Neuroscientists and behavioral economists have established that we have a kind of brain glitch when it comes to making choices in the present that require an evaluation of the future. The geeky term for this glitch in our thinking is “social discounting”—which simply means that we are prone to dramatically overminimize the future effects of choices we make now.
This vulnerability is an even bigger problem for us when the particular changes we have to evaluate are part of a pattern of exponential change—the kind of change that is common in the age of Earth Inc. and the Global Mind—because we are more comfortable thinking about change as a slow, linear process. There is one exponential change in particular over the last several generations whose implications we have been slow to recognize: the change in global population.
DURING THE LAST century alone, we quadrupled the human population. By way of perspective, it took 200,000 years for our species to reach the one billion mark, yet we have added that many people in just the first thirteen years of this century. In the next thirteen years, we will add another billion, and yet another billion just fourteen years after that—for a total of nine billion souls by the middle of this century. In only thirty-seven years, our population will grow by a number equivalent to all the people in the world at the beginning of World War II. And more than 95 percent of the new additions will be in developing countries.
Moreover, 100 percent of this huge net increase in global population will take place in cities, with the largest increases in the largest cities. In all, there will be more city-dwellers in the world than the entire population of the world at the beginning of the 1990s. In fact, the population of megacities already has increased tenfold over the last forty years. In this period of hyper-urbanization, cities with less than one million people will see a reduction in their share of the world’s urban population. This is a new trend that has surprised population experts, who note that it is a reversal of past urbanization patterns.
This historic transformation of human civilization from a predominantly rural pattern to a predominantly urban pattern has significant implications for the organization of society and the economy. The trend is so powerful that even with the enormous increase in overall population now under way, rural populations have leveled off and are expected to decline significantly, starting in the next decade.
Again, some perspective: for almost all of the ten millennia since the first cities were built, no more than 10 to 12 percent of people ever lived in urban areas. In the nineteenth century, the Industri
al Revolution began to increase urban populations, but the percentage was still only 13 percent at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1950, roughly a third of the world’s people lived in cities, and as of 2011, for the first time, more than half of us lived in cities. Already, more than 78 percent of people in developed countries live in cities, and by 2050 that number is projected to increase to 86 percent, with 64 percent of the population in less developed countries living in cities.
Forty years ago, only two cities in the world—New York and Tokyo—had populations of 10 million people; in 2013, twenty-three cities will have more than that number. And by 2025, thirty-seven such megacities will sprawl across the Earth. The sheer geographic size of cities and their rapid expansion into surrounding rural areas that used to be primarily agricultural land is also a challenge in many nations. The sprawl is increasing even more rapidly than the population—with a projected increase of 175 percent between 2000 and 2030.
The fastest growing of the new megacities is Lagos, Nigeria—which will grow from 11 million today to just under 19 million in 2025. All five of the fastest growing cities are in developing countries. The others, in addition to Lagos, are Dhaka, Bangladesh; Shenzhen, China; Karachi, Pakistan; and Delhi, India—which is projected to have a population of almost 33 million people by 2025. The largest megacity today, Tokyo, has more than 37 million people and is expected to grow to 38.7 million people by 2025. By 2050, almost 70 percent of the world’s population will be city dwellers.
One of the challenges posed by this hyper-urbanization is to the ability of municipal governments to provide adequate housing, freshwater, sanitation, and other essential needs. More than a billion people in the world live in slums today, roughly one out of every three inhabitants of cities. Without significant changes in policy and governance, the number of slum dwellers is projected to double to two billion people within the next seventeen years. The urban poor population—defined as those living on $1.25 a day or less—is growing at a rate even faster than the overall urban growth rate.
The majority of those moving to cities—especially in developing countries—do so to earn higher incomes. Even though income inequalities have been increasing within most countries, on a global basis, there has simultaneously been a historic movement of people out of poverty and into the middle class—particularly in Asia. And the vast majority of the growing global middle class will live in cities.
Already, more than 80 percent of global production takes place in cities. The per capita carbon emissions of people who live in cities are lower than that of people who live in suburbs, but in spite of the improved efficiency with which resources are used in cities, the overall per capita consumption rates in cities are significantly higher than in rural areas—primarily because incomes are higher.
In just the last thirty years, per capita consumption of meat in developing countries has doubled, while egg consumption has quintupled. The impact of skyrocketing meat consumption on topsoil, deforestation, and freshwater resources—and its production of global warming pollution and cardiovascular disease—is magnified by another factor as well: nine kilograms of plant protein are consumed in the production of one kilogram of meat protein.
HUNGER AND OBESITY
The change in diets around the world is also creating a global obesity epidemic—and in its wake a global diabetes epidemic—even as more than 900 million people in the world still suffer from chronic hunger. In the United States, where many global trends begin, the weight of the average American has increased by approximately twenty pounds in the last forty years. A recent study projects that half the adult population of the United States will be obese by 2030, with one quarter of them “severely obese.”
At a time when hunger and malnutrition are continuing at still grossly unacceptable levels in poor countries around the world (and in some pockets within developed countries), few have missed the irony that simultaneously obesity is at record levels in developed countries and growing in many developing countries.
How could this be? Well, first of all, it is encouraging to note that the world community has been slowly but steadily decreasing the number of people suffering from chronic hunger.
Secondly, on a global basis, obesity has more than doubled in the last thirty years. According to the World Health Organization, almost 1.5 billion adults above the age of twenty are overweight, and more than a third of them are classified as obese. Two thirds of the world’s population now live in countries where more people die from conditions related to being obese and overweight than from conditions related to being underweight.
Obesity represents a major risk factor for the world’s leading cause of death—cardiovascular diseases, principally heart disease and stroke—and is the major risk factor for diabetes, which has now become the first global pandemic involving a noncommunicable disease.* Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to suffer heart disease or a stroke, and approximately two thirds of those suffering from diabetes die from either stroke or heart disease.†
The tragic increase in obesity among children is particularly troubling; almost 17 percent of U.S. children are obese today, as are almost 7 percent of all children in the world. One respected study indicates that 77 percent of obese children will suffer from obesity as adults. If there is any good news in the latest statistics, it is that the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. appears to be reaching a plateau, though the increases in childhood obesity ensure that the epidemic will continue to grow in the future, both in the U.S. and globally.
The causes of this surge in obesity are both simple—in that people are eating too much and exercising too little—and complex, because the manufacturing and marketing of food products has changed dramatically. Dr. David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has extensively documented how food manufacturers and restaurant and fast food chains carefully combine fats, sugar, and salt in precise ratios that reach the “bliss point”—which means they trigger brain systems that increase the desire to eat more, even after our stomachs are full. On a global basis, the World Health Organization has found a pattern of increased consumption of “energy-dense foods that are high in fat, salt and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.”
Hyper-urbanization has separated more people from reliable sources of fresh fruit and vegetables. Quality calories in fruits and vegetables now cost ten times as much as calories per gram in sweets and foods abundant in starch. In a report for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Arielle Traub documented the increase from 1985 to 2000 in the price of fresh fruits and vegetables by 40 percent, while prices of fats declined by 15 percent and sugared soft drinks by 25 percent. Relative price, limitation of access to healthy food, increased inactivity, and the cumulative effects of massive food advertising campaigns all contribute to the obesity epidemic.
Several studies indicate that low-income neighborhoods have less access to supermarkets with a selection of fresh fruits and vegetables and are more likely to have fast food chains and convenience stores selling Slim Jims and Big Gulps than middle- and higher-income neighborhoods. Relative income and the time and knowledge necessary for food preparation both also play a role. Once eating habits are established, they are harder to change. When the U.S. government introduced healthier foods into the school lunch program in 2012, students at many schools launched protests on social media and threw the healthier food away.
In many countries, there is an almost precise correlation between the introduction of American fast food outlets and climbing obesity rates. One of the factors that led to the surge in fast food, manufactured food, and increasing portion sizes was a historic change in U.S. agricultural policy in the 1970s, at exactly the time when obesity rates began their climb. Instead of compensating farmers to withdraw land from production, as had been the case since FDR’s New Deal, the government subsidized farmers to grow as much as they possibly could. This policy change coincided with new advances in
agriculture technology, including better hybrid seeds coming out of the Green Revolution. Consequently, food prices went down significantly. Dr. Carson Chow, a mathematician working at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, constructed a detailed mathematical model that strongly suggests that the changes in U.S. agricultural policy correlate precisely with the large average weight gains and increased obesity.
The advertising industry has played a major role. One fast food hamburger chain, to pick only one example, famously used in its television advertisements a skimpily clad sex symbol washing a car in a suggestive manner. The advertising budget for manufactured food items and fast food chains is already two thirds that for automobiles. And again, these interrelated trends may have started in the U.S., but have now spread around the world. The impact of obesity on the world’s resources is the equivalent of adding an extra one billion people to the planet.
THE ORIGINS OF MASS MARKETING
The rising rate of consumption in the world is a relatively new phenomenon, less than a century old, and is also a trend that started in the United States. Although mass advertising began to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most historians date the true beginning of consumer culture to the 1920s, when the first mass electronic medium, radio, was introduced in the United States, along with the first national circulation magazines and the first silent films shown in theaters. Significantly, consumer credit also became more widely available during the Roaring Twenties to help buyers finance the purchase of relatively expensive new products like automobiles and radios.
Electricity, which was available in less than one percent of American households at the beginning of the twentieth century, rose to almost 70 percent of U.S. homes by the end of the 1920s. The technology of mass production with interchangeable parts and early forms of automation (all forerunners of today’s Earth Inc.) began to decouple productivity from increased employment and produced a cornucopia of consumer goods that stimulated a keen interest among manufacturers and merchants in the emerging science of mass marketing. The advertising industry entered a new and distinctly different role in the marketplace.
