A Letter of Warning to Harper's Drones

 The following is a Facebook post by Paul Beckwith , a Canadian expert on climate change, in which he warns the government of the serious effects it will have on food and politics and asks them what they are planning to do about it. Even more than the economy this is a subject that affects us all. Humans can live without money, just like the rest of the animal kingdom, but we can't live without food or a suitable environment for our species. Without oil our machines don't work. Without food, we don't.
 

I emailed this to all Canadian MPs...you can do something similar...

Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold.

The world food situation is deteriorating. Grain stocks have dropped to a dangerously low level. The World Food Price Index has doubled in a decade. The ranks of the hungry are expanding. Political unrest is spreading.

On the demand side of the food equation, there will be 219,000 peo

ple at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night. And some 3 billion increasingly affluent people are moving up the food chain, consuming grain-intensive livestock and poultry products.

At the same time, water shortages and heat waves are making it more difficult for farmers to keep pace with demand. As grain-exporting countries ban exports to keep their food prices down, importing countries are panicking. In response, they are buying large tracts of land in other countries to grow food for themselves. The land rush is on.

Could food become the weak link for us as it was for so many earlier civilizations? This slideshow presentation, based on Lester Brown's latest book, Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, explains why world food supplies are tightening and tells what we need to do about it.

http://www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep/fpep_presentation

My video clip filmed about 3 weeks ago on Parliament Hill explains the clear connections between crop failures/droughts/floods/extreme weather/sea ice/greenhouse gases/climate change...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zw1GEp8UBj4

This is my presentation on Parliament Hill (Center blog) a few months ago at the All-Party Climate Change Caucus meeting.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByLujhsHsxP7NG42RjVQLXBrV1k/edit

This is a longer version of the linkages between food shortages and declining sea ice.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByLujhsHsxP7NThkM05iN1BXZ2s/edit

Please let me know what your plan is to deal with this coming turmoil.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Paul Beckwith (B.Eng. Engineering Physics, M.Sc. Physics, presently working on Ph.D. in climatology)