A Drop of Rain

Well, after 1 year or so of heavy biofuel frenzy, the results are coming in pretty fast. Note that all of these shortages and problems have multiple causes, but the fact is, like a freeway travelling at capacity, any event, no matter how apparently trivial, pushes the freeway into a traffic jam state.

First we have some fairly predictable events. Coupled with the inevitable corruption, the recent wheat price increases, indirectly triggered by intensive corn cultivation in the USA to make the highly energy intensive corn based ethanol (intensive = expensive crop ‘inputs’), and directly by increasing global, especially Chinese, demand for wheat, and a serious drop in wheat production in Australia due to a drought, we now see the first cracks appear:

The subsidized price of a 110-pound sack of flour has been less than $3 for years; the market price reached $45 early this year and has fallen to $36 since the government intervened.
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Even more serious, rice, the staple of much of the world’s poor, the ones, that is, who don’t rely on corn or wheat, is skyrocketing in price as well.

A global rice shortage that has seen prices of one of the world’s most important staple foods increase by 50 per cent in the past two weeks alone is triggering an international crisis, with countries banning export and threatening serious punishment for hoarders.

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This story is worth notice because this patterns is going to start repeating more and more often. Barcelona’s water supplies are dangerously low, forcing the town to begin to literally ship in water. Water is something that we just don’t think that much about, but supplies are getting stretched further and further as we heat up the planet and increase the population.

Boats will from next month bring fresh water from other parts of Spain and neighbouring France to Barcelona to help the city deal with the region’s worst drought in decades
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Water reserves across Spain have dropped to 46.6 percent of capacity, a 20 percentage point drop over the level recorded a decade ago.

The situation is especially critical in the northeastern region of Catalonia, whose capital is Barcelona, where water reserves at just 19 percent of capacity.

If they drop below 15 percent, the water from the dams cannot be used as it is too close to the bottom and will have too much sediment.

What’s most interesting about this story is what the article does not refer to. Which is, besides the drought, the massive rise in population and, probably even more critical, water consumption in general, over the last 10 years.

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