The Future: six drivers of global change Part 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 Increasing desertification of gra.s.slands

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 Ishiyama et al., "Environmental Degradation and Genocide, 19582007," Ethnopolitics 11 (2012): 14158.