Chapter 62
Jeff Rubin, "How High Oil Prices Will Permanently Cap Economic Growth," Bloomberg View, September 23, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-23/how-high-oil-prices-will-permanently-cap-economic-growth.html; Bryan Walsh, "There Will Be Oil-and That's the Problem," Time, March 29, 2012.
39 methane for 90 percent of their fertilizer costs
Maria Blanco, Agronomos Etsia Upm, "Supply of and Access to Key Nutrients NPK for Fertilizers for Feeding the World in 2050," November 28, 2011, http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects/NPK/Doc.u.ments/Madrid_NPK_supply_report_FINAL_Blanco.pdf, p. 26.
40 "more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food"
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 46.
41 spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food
Lester Brown, Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity (New York: Norton, 2012), ch. 1, http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-09-17/full-planet-empty-plates-new-geopolitics-food-scarcity-new-book-chapter.
42 diminishes grain yields by 6 percent
Jims Vincent Capuno, "Soil Erosion: The Country's Unseen Enemy," Edge Davao, July 11, 2011, http://www.edgedavao.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4801:soil-erosion-the-countrys-unseen-enemy&catid=51:on-the-cover&Itemid=83; Lester Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth (New York: Norton, 2001), ch. 3, http://www.earth-policy.org/books/eco/eech3_ss5.
43 50 percent reduces many crop yields by 25 percent
Vidal, "Soil Erosion Threatens to Leave Earth Hungry."
44
Judith Schwartz, "Saving US Gra.s.slands: A Bid to Turn Back the Clock on Desertification," Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 2011.
45 45 percent more water
"No Easy Fix: Simply Using More of Everything to Produce More Food Will Not Work," Economist, February 24, 2011.
46 from 3.5 percent annually three decades ago to a little over one percent
Grantham, "Time to Wake Up."
47 three quarters of all plant genetic diversity may have already been lost
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, "Building on Gender, Agro-biodiversity and Local Knowledge," 2004, ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/007/y5609e/y5609e00.pdf.
48 "some form of export ban in an effort to increase domestic food security"
Toni Johnson, Council on Foreign Relations, "Food Price Volatility and Insecurity," August 9, 2011, http://www.cfr.org/food-security/food-price-volatility-insecurity/p16662.
49 less frequent but larger downpours
Kevin Trenberth, "Changes in Precipitation with Climate Change," Climate Research 47 (2010): 12338.
50 produce a 10 percent decline in crop yields
Wolfram Schlenker and Michael Roberts, "Nonlinear Temperature Effects Indicate Severe Damages to U.S. Crop Yields under Climate Change," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 37 (October 2008): 1559498.
51 increasing global preference for resource-intensive meat consumption
Johnson, "Food Price Volatility and Insecurity."
52 food crops to crops suitable for biofuel
Ibid.
53 Conversion of cropland to urban and suburban sprawl
Lester Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: Norton, 2009), http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/pb4book.pdf.
54 with 67 percent of its people under the age of twenty-four
John Is.h.i.+yama et al., "Environmental Degradation and Genocide, 19582007," Ethnopolitics 11 (2012): 14158.