By Daniel Tencer
MediaScout
An easily overlooked article, buried in today’s La Presse and the Star, suggests that the human race came within a whisker of extinction seventy thousand years ago, when the homo sapiens population may have dropped to as few as two thousand people. That should give us pause for thought as we look at today’s news cycle, which is, almost without exception, focused on the apparently sudden arrival of serious problems with our supply of two basic necessities: food and energy. CIBC economist Jeff Rubin is all over last night’s broadcasts and today’s papers, announcing that we can expect a serious shock at the pumps: By this summer, Rubin says, we’ll be paying $1.40 per litre of gas, and that will rise to $2.25 per litre over the next several years, bringing the cost of an average tank of gas to around $100. And, in a not unrelated story, Canadians can soon expect to pay considerably more for basic foodstuffs as well, as grain prices (and therefore, by extension, meat prices) soar over the next few years. The two issues come down to a basic problem that is at the heart of all economics, but one that we, in our age of affluence and seemingly endless economic growth, have mostly forgotten about: scarcity. As developing nations become wealthier, the demand for food and energy rises, while the supply remains stagnant. That is what is happening, and the result appears to be a return to an us-or-them, zero-sum mentality. As Rubin told The National last night: “For every new driver who gets on the road in India or China or Russia, someone’s got to get off the road in [our] part of the world.”
In all fairness, we could have seen this coming. Economists and academics have been warning us for years that oil supplies are peaking, and will begin to decline, and that increasing demand for food will put pressure on the planet’s ability to sustain the human race. The predictions of social unrest and war arising from the problem of scarcity continue to be ignored, even as food riots break out in poor countries and the US continues to fight a war in the middle of the world’s largest oil pool. What is conspicuously absent from the Big Seven’s coverage of this issue today is any discussion as to how to solve these problems. There are few questions posed on how to increase food production, no discussion of alternative energy sources. Yet it is becoming increasingly obvious that, if we want to maintain our standard of living, then finding alternatives to fossil fuels and reforming the creaky, at times senseless structure of global agricultural trade can no longer be treated as political footballs to be accepted or rejected-they have to be seen, quite literally, as matters of survival. If we fail to rise to the challenge, then nature itself will no doubt provide a draconian solution. As an example, take another lesson from pre-history in today’s news cycle, an item in The National (not available online) and the Star regarding the fate of the king of the dinosaurs, the tyrannosaurus rex. New genetic evidence suggests that, when conditions became unfavourable for the enormous creature, the t-rex evolved into something more manageable-the everyday barnyard chicken, and the ostrich, to be precise. If we fail to address the problems facing us now, nature could reduce us, too, to a species that is less demanding.
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