CVN member Tony de Castro submitted this book review, which he wrote and previously published elsewhere, with this comment: “Another book that is a few years old, but has aged well. The issues are, depressingly, the same.” He has added his recent thoughts about the book’s relevance to the Comox Valley. Tony invites your comments on this article.
The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources
Michael T. Klare
2012, Picador
320 pages, paperback
ISBN-10: 1250023971
ISBN-13: 978-1250023971
Politicians are always telling us that we need to vote for them because they will implement “growth” policies in the economy. We apparently need to support economic expansion at all costs and we need to consume more and more to keep things going. The implication is that an economy that is growing is a healthy economy in a healthy society.
In his book The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, Michael T. Klare throws a veritable tsunami of facts at us which indicate that, while our demand for resources to power the world economy is endless, the actual volume of minerals, drinking water and topsoil is limited and shrinking. On top of that, the easy-to-drill oil fields are reaching maturity.
We are using our inheritance too fast. There are no longer many essential resources to power our modern economies that are abundant, affordable and accessible. In the past one hundred years wars were often fought for ideological reasons. What we believe in will now take a back seat as countries will compete for secure access to the vital ingredients to power their economies: minerals, food, water, and energy. Nations with enough military muscle will push their weaker neighbours out of the way. Climate change will only make matters worse as large numbers of environmental refugees will try to move to areas where they can survive, and there will be people there waiting to prevent that.
Klare’s argument is that we have drilled for oil and mined for essential minerals in the easy to reach and cheap to exploit areas. We are now moving into more out of the way zones, where it is either more expensive, or more dangerous, to retrieve the essential ingredients that make up the recipe for our industrial civilization. This will result in more oil spills, chemical leaks, and loss of biodiversity. As there are more of us on this planet with each passing year, there will also be more people competing for a diminishing pool of goods. This is a prescription for large scale conflict.
From the 1950s to about 2010, the world’s Gross Domestic Product went up by over 500%. This trend is likely to continue with countries like India, China and Brazil trying to become economic superpowers. Oil is the master key that opens all these industrial doors. Without it, nothing works. The US Department of Energy is projecting a 30% increase in the world’s consumption of fuels up to 2035. The increase for natural gas is expected to be around 50%. Over 90% of our transportation of goods runs on oil. Without oil we have no modern capitalism as we know it. But we have already discovered, and are using up, most of the easily accessible light oil. We are left with either heavy oil that is harder to extract without large amounts of energy and water, or oil that is very deep, offshore, in ecologically sensitive areas or in unstable countries. This makes future extraction much more expensive and dangerous. And we haven’t found a good way to deal with the large amounts of polluted water and CO2 emissions that go with that.
Drilling for oil in the Arctic will mainly see the US, Russia, Denmark, Norway, and Canada drilling at great depths, often in bad weather, and in an area where significant leaks cannot really be controlled without first seeing massive environmental damage. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates total Arctic oil and gas reserves at more than 20 percent of Earth’s remaining stocks.
Further south, Canada’s tar sands, euphemistically marketed as “oil” sands, use large amounts of water and energy, must be moved via long pipelines which not many communities want, and are quite generous in their contribution to greenhouse gases.
Things don’t look good for coal either. Most of the easy to mine coal has been found and is being used up. The remaining black stuff is harder and more dangerous to mine because it is much deeper. Deeper coal is more expensive to extract and increases the chance of cave-ins from collapsing walls.
What about metals? A few years ago Thomas Graedel and his team at Yale University estimated that for the 10 billion people we are supposed to have on Earth by 2100, we will require 1.7 billion metric tons of copper. That is more than even the most optimistic estimate of available stock on our planet. A similar picture can be seen for many other common minerals. But the real problem lies with rare minerals. Many of these metals are essential, have no or few substitutes, and are available in only a few countries. Our world can’t run nowadays without a broad range of electronics. The manufacture of most of this equipment requires over 50 minerals. If some of these become very hard to find and there are no easy substitutes, high-tech products can’t be made, and without our microchip-driven technology we can’t function, at least not with the standard of living we are used to in the industrialized parts of the world.
The US Department of Energy estimates that China accounts for at least 95% of total worldwide rare earth metals production. Clean energy applications are now using about 20% of the rare earth elements, much of them in advanced electromagnets and lightweight batteries. New demand has recently strained supply, and this could result in shortages if new sources are not found. For example, the Toyota Prius is especially dependent on rare earths, with each electric motor requiring 2 pounds of neodymium, and each battery 22 to 33 pounds of lanthanum.
But humans don’t need minerals to eat. They need healthy topsoil and clean water to grow crops. There is, at the present time, a veritable land grab going on. Countries like China, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and India are buying huge areas of farmland in Africa to grow crops and send the food back home. What the local African farmers in those areas are supposed to do then to feed their families is unclear. Many countries are currently unable to feed themselves with the land assets they have. If they can’t import affordable essential crops, there will be mass starvation across large parts of the planet. In addition, topsoil is eroding faster than new soil can regenerate on about a third of the world’s cropland. And it takes about 500 years for soil to recover from over-cultivation. It does not take a genius to figure out the math. There will be hunger in our future unless we change direction.
To make matters more interesting, global warming will result in desertification in some parts of the planet. This will drive up the price of farmland even more. Two-thirds of the land being grabbed is in Africa. Other countries include Russia, Argentina and Brazil.
We don’t seem to anticipate the problem, as productive farmland in industrialized countries keeps either being paved over, over-cultivated or polluted.
So what do we do about all these projections? Klare tells us we should be racing to adapt to the new reality, not racing to plunder what’s left. In the long run, the nations that adapt will do better. How this should be done is not entirely clear. The present capitalist system is based on consuming more. Competition, we are told, is good for us. The race is driven by the need to preserve the present industrial production methodology.
Klare does not talk much about global warming. This is strange, as there is plenty of scientific data showing that if resource scarcity is a problem, the increase in global temperatures will be just as problematic. Given that our version of capitalism is all about maximizing profit over the short and medium term, it is hard to see how such a system would have the insight and motivation to curtail profits for long term viability. Corporations are not in the business of worrying about what will happen in two or three generations.
When it comes to raw materials, we find ourselves in the same situation as with global warming. We probably won’t do anything until we have no other choice. But by then it will be too late and we literally will not have many other options. We will eat what is on the menu, which is not very appetizing. An overcrowded planet with a shrinking supply of essential raw materials, farmland, and drinking water. And a global climate that will make some areas of the planet mostly uninhabitable.
At the end of his book Klare encourages us to adapt. He feels that we should drastically alter our consumption patterns. But how do we do that? Given current consumption trends we really should be radically reducing the human population on this planet. China tried the “one-child” policy for a while and there was very little cultural support for that. After a slowdown, China’s population started growing again when the one-child policy was relaxed. Ironically, the main places where fertility is declining are in some highly urbanized and densely populated countries like Japan, and in places where economic austerity has sent young people to live back with their parents or grand-parents, such as Italy. So a global population cut is not on the cards short of massive starvation, epidemics or wars.
We should also be encouraging young people to return to farming. In fact, the trends point the other way. People are moving to the city and old farmers in many countries can’t find anybody in the family to carry on the farming tradition. And growing food is not a respected profession in many places. Apparently in Canada the professions which will be in high demand are in information technology, healthcare and engineering. Plus all the trades that keep the machinery ticking. Quite by chance these are occupations that need those minerals, water and oil we have been talking about.
So then what? Most readers of this article will remember studying feudalism in history classes in school. Under this social arrangement, a “lord” would be the owner of the land. This land would have often been acquired by force. As he often had too much land, he (and there were very few females owning land) would grant the right to exploit a portion of this land to a “vassal”, who in return would provide military support, taxes and crops to the lord on a periodic basis. The vassal did not have to do much other than keep order, as the land often came already fully furnished with “peasants”, who worked the land in exchange for food and basic lodging, and who had few rights.
Lately there have been writers arguing that with resource scarcity we will be entering a new type of feudalism (often called Feudalism 2.0). This neo-feudalism is characterized by unequal rights between a small minority who own large amounts of capital, land and resources, and a majority who struggle to make ends meet. In the same way that we have gated communities where rich people live, here we will have gated economies, gated access to legislation, policing, tax law and so on. And with GMO companies trying to control agriculture with seeds that can’t be saved from year to year, we have a small minority (the famous 1%) controlling everybody else. If you want to read more about this concept, these are two good places to start:
Feudalism 2.0: http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/02/23/Entitled-Get-Brazen/
Neo-feudalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism
Additional thoughts
So, how does this apply to the Comox Valley? Well, we have some good farmland and we should really have long term plans to ensure the land is not paved over, poisoned with mine tailings or turned into massive holiday resorts for people who fly in for the weekend. It would also be nice to make it easier for young people to get into farming by developing co-op land ownership arrangements which are affordable. And it might not be a bad idea to avoid the GMO monocultures that are becoming so problematic in other parts of the world. Organic food will eventually cost a fortune, so here is a profitable niche for our community.
Energy self-sufficiency is also essential. We already have some local hydroelectric power, but we haven’t even started considering the tidal power options off our coastline. We have some narrows where water rushes at great speed every day and for free. So, we probably can’t avoid many of the resource shortages that are coming our way over the next few generations, but if we have a bit of foresight we can try to develop a community that will be self-sufficient in food, energy and essential tools.
Tony notes that this book has the following ratings at the indicated websites:
– 3.7 stars out of 5 at goodreads.com
– 4 stars out of 5 at amazon.com
