JCC Disaster Porn Thursday

what a great read!

Lloyd's of London's 2015 Report:

Food System Shock
The insurance impacts of acute disruption to global food supply

For those of you following my end of the world threads, and I'm sure that's all of you, we've discussed the following points:

1. climate change models suggest an increase in the frequency and severity of droughts worldwide. We should not have to wait long to notice this.

2. water resources are more strained now than ever with glacial melting, decline of winter mountain snowpacks, depletion of underground water reserves, overuse of riverways, etc.

3. with population growth rates at current levels, the world will need to double food production by 2050 to feed everyone.

So this is Lloyd's nightmare scenario:

*A strong warm-phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) develops in the central equatorial
Pacific Ocean.
*Flooding develops in the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, reducing production of maize in the US by 27%, soybean by 19% and wheat by 7%.
*Severe drought reminiscent of 2002 hits India, while parts of Nepal, Bangladesh, northeastern India and Pakistan are hit by torrential rainfall, flooding and landslides.
*Severe drought affects eastern and southeastern Australia and Southeast Asia. In India, wheat production is reduced by 11% and rice by 18%.
*In Bangladesh and Indonesia, rice is reduced by 6%, and rice production falls in Vietnam by 20%, and by 10% in Thailand and the Philippines.
*In Pakistan, wheat production is reduced by 10% due to flooding. Australian wheat is reduced by 50% by drought.
*Asian soybean rust expands throughout Argentina and Brazil, causing an epidemic.
*In Argentina, soybean production is reduced by 15%, with a 5% drop in Brazil.
...

*Wheat, maize and soybean prices increase to quadruple the levels seen around 2000. Rice prices increase 500%
*Food riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America. The euro
weakens and the main European stock markets lose 10% of their value; US stock markets follow and lose 5% of their value.

governments in Africa and the Middle East fail. Dogs and cats living together, etc.

They consider this scenario plausible and probable enough to incorporate into their strategic planning.

 

Maize? Cultural appropriation! You must die now...

Also, unrelated -- pretty sure it's still true that if the US ramped up to full production capacity, regardless of cost, we could feed the world 1-2x over. We still pay a lot of money for people to not grow at full output, I believe.

 

we'd pay a rapid price in terms of soil depletion through the midwest and depletion of the southern two thirds of the Ogallala Aquifer in the west. The end of agriculture under the lower Ogallala is imminent as it is.

 

McDonald's McRib was invented because there was a shortage of chickens.

 

McDonald's to the rescue. Every. Single. Time.

 

Spent time this weekend with a friend who travels the globe for one of the world's biggest food companies.

He says one of the things his company is most worried about is peak protein. The world is only about 10 years away from unable to provide enough protein to the meet the needs of the population, given the current mix of agricultural production devoted to animal protein.

Starting in about a decade, he says, 90% of the human population will slowly be priced out of the market for meat. It will no longer be cost-effective to feed protein through the "middle man" of an animal. Increasingly, all available protein will have to be fed directly to humans.

The world's only remaining largely untapped source of protein is insects. Bug farming may become a way to get easy protein to the world's increasingly protein-starved poor.

Beef and chicken and seafood for the ultra-rich. Bugs for the middle class. Basic plant protein for the poor.

The good news: the end of fast food. Unless McDonald's can find a way to make people love a bowl of rice and beans as much as they love a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

 

McBugwich with soy cheese.

I says to my friend: this is b.s. He's like, no, it's not. It's as real as Peak Chocolate, and Hershey's, Nestle, and Mars are scared ****less of Peak Chocolate.

 

Oh, I don't know about that. McDonald's stopped serving food a long time ago.

I would be worried more about Peak Chocolate, since we have no alternatives and the climate is changing enough that there is soon going to be nowhere to grow it.

 

Ugh. Poor people are so gross.

They'll probably complain about their rice and beans.

Just. Ugh.

 

Your scenario was about one bad year of weather. That's a few growing seasons at worst.

 

frequency and severity of this scenario occurring as the global climate trends toward an inevitable 4 degree increase.

The Lloyd's scenario is about a one-time occurrence. But I'm thinking about it as one of a series of system shocks as the climate warms, the ocean gets more acidic and calcification for shell-bearing creatures more difficult, as fisheries are depleted, as aquifers run dry, etc., all the while as the global population ticks toward 10 billion.

peak chocolate (catastrophe!) in 5 years
peak protein in 10-15 years
peak food in 20-30 years.

 

I thought the issue with banana is that they're all about to go extinct.

 

Panama disease killing off the Cavendish banana which is 95% of the world's crop.

 

Or bugs for the rich first.

 

So, I think I have my parents talked into putting a vegetable garden in our backyard.

 

Crickets are so very much the future of protein.

 

I admittedly kind of want to try the blueberry vanilla flavor.

 

"Paleo-friendly. Soy, dairy, grain and gluten-free."

in fact, it's free of everything that's not a bug.

 

So... how are we going to get ultra-rich?

 

sell cricket flour protein bars to the less rich!

 

I love how far "Paleo" has strayed from its original idea (which was nonsense to begin with). Ah yes, cavemen loved their flavored and sweetened cricket-flour power bars, although the Peanut Butter & Jelly flavor didn't really take off until the neolithic age. I found a blog with a recipe for 'paleo-friendly' fried pickle chips last year and I had so many follow-up questions.

 

because I'm a truly uncreative person but do all the cooking for the family, I use a subscription service to plan meals for the week. All the recipes toggle between "normal" "paleo" and "vegetarian", and flipping back and forth between paleo and non paleo makes me wonder sometimes whether they have a very rigorous methodology for deciding what's what, and also whether they really take it seriously at all.