Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

governance S 33
which may occur regularly. When climate change–driven emergencies
become normal, government must have the capacity to
quickly and effectively rebuild shattered communities and economies
on a more resilient basis.
A fourth implication follows. In the foreseeable future the
food system will become increasingly vulnerable to higher
prices for fertilizer, pesticides, and fuels for farm operations,
transport, processing, and distribution. Moreover, the stresses of
higher temperatures, prolonged drought, changing crop diseases,
and storms associated with climate destabilization could reduce
farm output. The study cited above (p. 20) by the Consultative
Group on International Agricultural Research indicates that by
2050 much of the American Midwest will be unsuitable to grow
wheat. 25 In other words, after the peak of oil extraction and in
a greenhouse world, the dependability of food supply cannot be
taken for granted. To till, harvest, process, transport, and market
food 1,500 miles from farm to kitchen, the present agricultural
system is said to require a dozen fossil fuel calories for each food
calorie. All of this is to say that in the long emergency ahead
we may plausibly expect that governments once again will have
to deal with the ancient scourge of famine, new technologies
notwithstanding.
A fi nal implication of the long emergency concerns the necessity
of mobilizing a coalition large enough and steady enough to
change our politics, economy, and manner of living to fi t biophysical
realities. The problem is that many people tend to deny
bad news, especially when it is complicated and solutions may be
costly and inconvenient. Improving the state of the environment
has long been that kind of problem. From Plato’s observations
about soil erosion in the hills of Greece in the 4th century b.c.
to George Perkins Marsh’s observation in 1864 that humans were
everywhere a disturbing environmental force, no government
and no society took the evidence seriously enough to do much
about it. The reasons are not hard to fi nd. The rate of environmental
change was often slow enough as to be virtually invisible