Three trends underlie falling U.S. gasoline use: a shrinking car fleet, an overall reduction in driving, and improved fuel efficiency. Credit: Scott63us/cc by 2.0

By Janet Larsen
WASHINGTON, Mar 29 2013 (IPS)

Freeing America from its dependence on oil from unstable parts of the world is an admirable goal, but many of the proposed solutions – including the push for more home-grown biofuels and for the construction of the new Keystone XL pipeline to transport Canadian tar sands oil to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast – are harmful and simply unnecessary.

Gasoline use in the United States is falling, and the trends already driving it down are likely to continue into the future, making both the mirage of beneficial biofuels and the construction of a new pipeline to import incredibly dirty oil seem ever more out of touch with reality.

U.S. motor gasoline consumption peaked at 142 billion gallons in 2007. In each year since, American drivers have used less gasoline. In 2012, gas use came in at 134 billion gallons, down six percent off the high mark.

Three trends underlie falling U.S. gasoline use: a shrinking car fleet, an overall reduction in driving, and improved fuel efficiency. The number of registered vehicles in the United States rose rather steadily from 1945 to 2008, when it topped out at close to 250 million and then abruptly changed course.

As the economic recession hit, new car sales in the United States fell from more than 16 million in 2007 to below 11 million in 2009. For two years, scrappage exceeded new purchases, causing a contraction in the overall size of the fleet. Even with a rebound in sales to nearly 15 million vehicles in 2012, the days of annual sales exceeding 17 million – as seen through the early 2000s – are likely over.

The car promised mobility, but in urbanising communities it instead brought traffic congestion and air pollution. With four out of five Americans now living in urban areas, private vehicle ownership is starting to lose its allure. This is particularly true among younger people, who are readily embracing mass transit and the car-sharing and bike-sharing programmes that are popping up in cities around the country.

Fewer than half of American teenagers ages 15 to 19 have a driver’s license, a share that has been falling over recent decades as states have tightened restrictions and as socialisation patterns have shifted from cruising the streets to cruising the Internet. Retirees also tend to drive less; as the baby boomers retire, more people will be putting away their car keys.

As gasoline prices have risen, private vehicles have traveled fewer miles and public transit ridership has increased. Not only are there fewer vehicles traveling fewer miles on U.S. roads than there were just five years ago, but new cars today can drive farther on a gallon of gasoline.

This will soon accelerate: after more than two decades of near-total stagnation, in 2011 the Obama administration increased fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks from an average of 27.5 miles per gallon in 2008 to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. In addition to the technological changes that can improve the fuel economy of conventional vehicles, new plug-in hybrid electric cars and fully electric vehicles use far less gasoline or even do away with it entirely.

Somewhat counterintuitively, falling gasoline use is at odds with the federal mandate to use more renewable fuel. Under the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) requires blending increasing volumes of ethanol into the U.S. gasoline supply, regardless of how much gasoline is needed.

In 2012, U.S. distilleries produced 13 billion gallons of fuel ethanol, almost entirely from corn. Ethanol accounted for nearly 10 percent of the U.S. gasoline supply. The 2013 requirement for 13.8 billion gallons is likely to go beyond the 10-percent threshold of what can be blended into gasoline and still be used in older vehicles without risking engine damage and voiding warranties.

Furthermore, the RFS requires a growing share of the renewable fuel to come from cellulosic non-food biofuels, yet these have not become economical to produce on a meaningful scale. The increasing production of corn-based ethanol has pitted food use against fuel use, with the unfortunate result of higher food prices.

As drought in the U.S. Corn Belt shrank harvests in 2012, corn prices spiked to an all-time high. U.S. corn carryover stocks fell to six percent of use in 2012, a historic low. Still, more than 40 percent of the 2012 corn harvest will likely go to fuel cars.

While corn exports from the United States were down in 2012, gasoline exports were up. Higher domestic production and reduced demand allowed the United States to export more oil products than it imported for the second year in a row – after more than six decades of being a net importer.

The United States is still a net importer of crude oil, though. Instead of necessarily allowing more gasoline to reach U.S. markets, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would bring the carbon-intensive Canadian tar sands oil closer to Gulf Coast export terminals for easier access to international markets.

A March 2013 report by the National Research Council describes policies and technologies that would allow the United States to cut its gasoline use 80 percent by 2050. Yet the data they used on the distances being driven only went through 2005, missing the recent drop, and many of the social trends that are starting to drive down car use were not incorporated.

These trends are important to consider when envisioning energy and transportation policies for the future. This means rethinking mobility beyond private automobiles. And putting a price on carbon to encourage powering the cars still on the roads with carbon-free wind-sourced electricity can help move the United States beyond ecologically disruptive false solutions that raise food prices and further destabilise the climate.

*Janet Larsen is Director of Research at the Earth Policy Institute. Data and additional resources available at www.earth-policy.org.

The global average temperature in 2011 was 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.14 degrees Fahrenheit). According to NASA scientists, this was the ninth warmest year in 132 years of recordkeeping, despite the cooling influence of the La Niña atmospheric and oceanic circulation pattern and relatively low solar irradiance.

On a drought-hit farm in Syria. Credit: Caterina Donattini/IPS

Since the 1970s, each subsequent decade has gotten hotter – and nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the 21st century.

Each year’s average temperature is determined by a number of factors, including solar activity and the status of the El Niño/La Niña phenomenon. But heat-trapping gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, have become a dominant force, pushing the Earth’s climate out of its normal range.

The planet is now close to 0.8 degrees Celsius warmer than it was a century ago. Hidden within annual averages and expected variability are startling instances of new temperature and rainfall records in many parts of the world – weather extremes that would once be considered anomalies but that now risk becoming the new norm as the Earth heats up.

Worldwide, 2011 was the second wettest year on record over land. (The record was set in 2010, which also tied 2005 as the warmest overall.) Heavier deluges are expected on a warmer planet; each temperature rise of one degree Celsius increases the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold by about seven percent. Higher temperatures also can fuel stronger storms.

Brazil started the year with the deadliest natural disaster in its history: in January, a month’s worth of rain fell in a single day in Rio de Janeiro state, leading to floods and landslides that killed at least 900 people. That same month, flooding in eastern Australia covered an area nearly the size of France and Germany combined. Overall, it was the third wettest year in Australia since recordkeeping began in 1900.

The most expensive weather disaster of 2011 was the flooding in Thailand in the second half of the year, which ultimately submerged one third of the country’s provinces. At 45 billion dollars worth of damage – equal to 14 percent of Thailand’s gross domestic product – it was also the costliest natural catastrophe the country ever experienced.

In October, more than 100 people died as two storms – one from the Pacific and the other from the Caribbean – pounded Central America with rain. In western El Salvador, nearly 1.5 metres of rain fell over 10 days. And in December, Tropical Storm Washi hit the Philippines, creating flash floods that killed more than 1,200 people.

The 2011 Atlantic hurricane season had 19 named storms. Hurricane Irene brought extreme flooding to the northeastern United States in August, with total damages topping 7.3 billion dollars. The year was the wettest on the books for seven states in the country, while it was among the driest for several others.

Although the extremes appear to balance out, making for a near-average year, in fact a record 58 percent of the contiguous United States was either extremely wet or extremely dry in 2011.

Indeed, as is expected on a hotter planet, while some parts of the globe were overwhelmed by rain in 2011, others were distinguished by dryness. A severe drought in the Horn of Africa that began in 2010 devolved into a crisis situation in 2011, characterised by crop failure, exorbitant food prices, and widespread malnutrition. Exacerbated by chronic political instability and a belated humanitarian response, the death toll may have exceeded 50,000 people.

Back in North America, a drought that began in late 2010 and worsened over 2011 led hundreds of farmers from northern Mexico to march to that nation’s capital in January 2012 to draw the government’s attention to their suffering. Nearly 900,000 hectares of farmland and 1.7 million head of livestock were lost due to the dryness – the worst in Mexico’s 70+ years of data collecting.

Scorching heat, drought, and wildfires across the U.S. Southern Plains and Southwest caused farm, ranch, and forestry damages that exceeded 10 billion dollars in 2011.

Wichita Falls, Texas, experienced 100 days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit – far more than the previous record of 79 days set in 1980. Oklahoma and Texas had the hottest summers of any states in history, breaking by a wide margin the record set in 1934 during the Dust Bowl.

James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, writes that the likelihood of such extreme heat waves “was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming”. Texas also had its lowest rainfall on record. Invigorated by the heat and drought, wildfires burned across an estimated 1.5 million hectares in the state.

For the continental United States, summer 2011 was the second warmest in history. Nearly three times more weather stations hit record highs than lows in 2011, in line with a trend of increasing heat extremes. Whereas in the middle of the 20th century there were close to the same number of record highs and lows – as would be expected absent a strong warming trend – in the 1990s highs began outpacing lows. In the first decade of this century, there were twice as many record highs as record lows.

Worldwide, seven countries set all-time temperature highs in 2011: Armenia, China, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Republic of the Congo, and Zambia.

Interestingly, Zambia also was the only country to experience an all- time low temperature when it dropped to minus nine degrees Celsius in June. Kuwait experienced the year’s highest temperature, with thermometers measuring a searing 53.3 degrees Celsius, the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth during the month of August.

Even more threatening to health than daytime highs are extra hot nighttime minimum temperatures, which do not allow any respite from the heat. The world’s hottest 24-hour minimum ever – 41.7 degrees Celsius – was recorded in Oman in June 2011.

Even the Arctic had a notably warm year, with the 2011 temperature a record 2.2 degrees Celsius above the mean for 1951-80. Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost U.S. city, spent a record-breaking 86 consecutive days at or above freezing, far more than the previous record of 68 days set in 2009.

In fact, over the last 50 years temperatures in the Arctic have risen more than twice as fast as the global average, melting ice and thawing permafrost. Arctic sea ice has been shrinking more rapidly, falling to its lowest volume and second lowest area on record during the 2011 summer melt season.

With the summertime ice loss outpacing wintertime recovery, Arctic sea ice has thinned, making it increasingly vulnerable to further melting. Scientists expect a completely ice-free summertime Arctic by 2030 or even earlier.

As the reflective ice disappears, it exposes the dark ocean, which more readily absorbs solar energy, further warming the region. This sets forth a climate cascade, accelerating ice loss both in the ocean as well as on nearby Greenland, which contains enough ice to raise global sea level by 7 metres if it completely melted. The warming also thaws Arctic permafrost, releasing carbon dioxide and methane, further accelerating global warming.

Even without fully incorporating such climate feedback, models show that continued reliance on fossil fuels could raise the global temperature by up to seven degrees Celsius by the end of this century. Such an elevated temperature would amplify temperature and precipitation extremes enough to make the weather events of recent years look tame in comparison.

Only a rapid, dramatic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions can hold future temperatures in a range bearing any resemblance to what civilization has known.

*This article was originally published by the Earth Policy Institute. Data and additional resources at www.earth-policy.org.

Excerpt:

The world’s farmers produced more grain in 2011 than ever before. Estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show the global grain harvest coming in at 2,295 million tonnes, up 53 million tonnes from the previous record in 2009.

Consumption grew by 90 million tonnes over the same period to 2,280 million tonnes. Yet with global grain production actually falling short of consumption in seven of the past 12 years, stocks remain worryingly low, leaving the world vulnerable to food price shocks.

Nearly half the calories consumed around the world come directly from grain, with grain-fed animal products making up part of the remainder. Three grains dominate the world harvest: wheat and rice, which are primarily eaten directly as food, and corn, which is largely used as a feedgrain for livestock.

Wheat was the largest of the world’s grain harvests until the mid- 1990s. Then corn production surged ahead in response to growing demand for grain-fed animal products and, more recently, for fuel ethanol. Despite a drop in the important U.S. harvest due mostly to high summer temperatures, global corn production hit 868 million tonnes in 2011, an all-time high. The harvests of wheat (689 million tonnes) and rice (461 million tonnes) were also records.

Carryover grain stocks – the amount left in the world’s grain elevators when the new harvest begins -now stand at 469 million tonnes, enough to cover 75 days of consumption at current levels. Between 1984 and 2001 grain stocks hovered around the more comfortable level of 100 days.

In 2002, however, grain production fell 88 million tonnes short of demand, and since then annual carryover stocks have averaged 72 days of use, close to the bare minimum for basic food security. In 2006, stocks bottomed out at 62 days, setting the stage for the 2007–08 food price spike when international grain prices doubled or tripled in a short amount of time.

For poor families in developing countries who spend half or more of their incomes on food, often grain staples, this led to empty plates and frustration. Protests erupted in some 35 countries as the number of hungry people in the world climbed above one billion.

Following several strong harvests, global stocks were again pushed downward in 2010 when drought, wildfires, and a scorching heat wave decimated wheat crops in Russia and neighbouring countries. Exports were banned. Food prices again started to rise, prompting warnings of a second food price crisis in three years.

Ultimately the higher food prices between June 2010 and December 2010 pushed an additional 44 million people down the economic ladder into extreme poverty, according to the World Bank. The prospects for the world’s poorest remain grim, as even the record production in 2011 failed to outpace consumption enough to rebuild stocks sufficiently.

The tight stocks and food price volatility are occurring against a backdrop of a shrinking area available to feed each person and of slowing crop yield growth. Worldwide, grain is grown on close to 700 million hectares (1.7 billion acres). With the global population hitting the seven billion milestone in 2011, this leaves 0.1 hectare (a quarter of an acre) planted in grain per person, half as much as in the early 1960s.

While the total grain area is down from the peak of 732 million hectares in 1981, largely from the retiring of marginal and eroded land, production is more than 50 percent higher thanks to improved yields. In 1950, farmers could expect to harvest on average one tonne of grain per hectare. Now yields are three times as high.

The problem for world food prospects is that the proverbial “low- hanging fruit” have been picked, with much of the world (notably excepting sub-Saharan Africa) having already adopted higher yielding crop varieties and yield-boosting fertilizer and irrigation practices. Furthermore, yields may be leveling off or even shrinking in some countries. Global grain yields increased by an average 2.2 percent each year from 1970 to 1990. But between 1990 and 2010, the annual gains were just half as large.

Three countries produced nearly half the world’s grain in 2011: China at 456 million tonnes, the United States at 384 million tonnes, and India at 226 million tonnes. Together the 27 European Union countries harvested 286 million tonnes of grain.

A growing number of countries are relying on imported grain to meet their needs, pushing the share of the world grain harvest entering international trade to 12 percent. The United States is far and away the world’s top grain exporter, sending 73 million tonnes abroad in 2011. This is a quarter of all grain trade. It is followed by Argentina exporting 32 million tonnes of grain; Australia and the Ukraine, each at 24 million tonnes; and Russia and Canada, each topping 20 million tonnes.

For corn in particular, the United States dominates the world market, with U.S. corn accounting for over 40 percent of all international corn movement. For this reason, importing countries are concerned about the growing share of the U.S. crop – 40 percent in 2011 – being turned into fuel ethanol.

Japan continues to be the world’s largest grain importer, buying more than 25 million tonnes of grain from abroad in 2011, much of it to be used as animal feed. Egypt, Mexico, South Korea and Saudi Arabia round out the list of countries importing more than 10 million tonnes of grain. International grain market dependence is high across the arid Middle East; for instance, Saudi Arabia now relies on imports for 90 percent of its grain consumption. As the country has nearly pumped dry its underground water stores, it is abandoning its desert wheat farms.

China imported a net five million tonnes of grain in 2011, the most significant inflow since the country declared a national grain self- sufficiency policy in the mid-1990s. Though still a tiny fraction of the country’s 451-million-tonne consumption, the potential for China to import increasing amounts of grain is a concern to those who watch grain markets and prices.

China’s grain imports would be far higher had it not ratcheted up imports of another key field crop, the soybean. Climbing from almost nothing through the mid-1990s, China’s soybean imports hit 56 million tonnes in 2011, close to 80 percent of the country’s total soybean consumption and nearly 60 percent of all the soy traded internationally. Most of the high-protein soy is used in livestock and poultry feed.

As more people in China are moving up the food chain and eating more meat, milk, and eggs, the country’s feedgrain use has risen dramatically, surpassing that of the United States (where use is falling) for the first time in 2010. China now leads the world in the amount of grain fed to animals, standing at 149 million tonnes in 2011. Still, as the average meat intake in China is less than half that of the United States, the total grain consumption per person is far lower.

With little arable land around the world left unfarmed and with ever more mouths to feed, farmers face an uphill climb in their efforts to feed the world’s people. The animal protein and food-based biofuel production systems are two areas where fields could be re- appropriated to grow food directly for people instead of for livestock or cars.

But as water shortages spread and rising global temperatures bring more unpredictable weather – replete with heat waves, droughts, floods, and other crop-damaging extreme events – a higher level of grain reserves is needed to help cushion against harvest failures. Otherwise, preventing major food price shocks will require bumper harvests year after year, something that is far from guaranteed.

*This article was originally published by the Earth Policy Institute. Data and additional resources at www.earth- policy.org.

Future firefighters have their work cut out for them. Perhaps nowhere does this hit home harder than in Australia, where in early 2009 a persistent drought, high winds, and record high temperatures set the stage for the worst wildfire in the country’s history.

Global warming could usher in a new regime of larger, longer-burning fires, as well as fires in places that historically have been hard to ignite, like moist tropical forests. Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture

On Feb. 9, now known as “Black Saturday”, the mercury in Melbourne topped 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46.4 degrees Celsius) as fires burned over one million acres in the state of Victoria – destroying more than 2,000 homes and killing more than 170 people, tens of thousands of cattle and sheep, and one million native animals.

Even as more people move into fire-prone wildlands around the world, the intense droughts and higher temperatures that come with global warming are likely to make fires more frequent and severe in many areas. For southeastern Australia, home to much of the country’s population, climate change could triple the number of extreme fire risk days by 2050.

Although fires typically make the news only when they grow large and put lives or property at risk, on any given day thousands of wildfires burn worldwide. Fire is a natural and important process in many ecosystems, clearing the land and recycling organic matter into the soil.

Some 40 percent of the earth’s land is covered with fire-prone vegetation. A number of plants – such as giant Sequoia trees and certain prairie grasses – need fire to propagate or to create the right conditions for them to flourish.

Fire patterns have changed over time as human populations have grown and altered landscapes by clearing forests, allowing pasture animals to overgraze grasslands, and importing new plant species.

Across parts of the western United States, for example, cheatgrass, an invasive annual adapted to frequent burns, has supplanted native brush, desert shrub, and perennial grasses that typically experience longer intervals between fires. In other areas, mixed-age and mixed-species forests have been replaced by single-species plantations where flames can jump easily from tree to tree. The result, instead of a low-intensity restorative fire, is a fire so hot that it can cause lasting harm to soils.

Humans have also altered fire patterns through deliberate suppression. After 1910, when a severe wildfire charred more than three million acres of western U.S. forest in just two days, the strong desire to protect timber resources gave life to a policy of quickly extinguishing fires. For decades, firefighters proved remarkably successful in this endeavor, but the upshot was that forests became so loaded with fuel that a blaze that evaded control could quickly grow into a dangerous megafire.

Now policies are shifting in many places to let some fires proceed naturally or through preventative controlled burns; yet by warming the planet, we may be relinquishing even more control than we bargained for. Higher average global temperatures mean extremes are in store: even as climate change brings more flooding in some areas, other places will be plagued by droughts and extended heat waves.

As the temperature rose between the 1970s and early 2000s, for instance, the share of total global land area experiencing very dry conditions doubled from less than 15 percent to close to 30 percent. A hotter, drier world burns more readily. Global warming could be pushing us into a new regime of larger, longer-burning, more intense fires as well as fires in places that historically have been hard to ignite, like moist tropical forests.

Already there is evidence of the connection between higher temperatures and wildfire. Anthony Westerling of Scripps Institution and colleagues found a marked uptick in forest fires in the western United States since the mid-1980s, with the wildfire season lengthening by 78 days over the last 15 years compared with the preceding 15 years.

The fire season length and the duration of each fire rose in concert with regional spring and summer temperatures, which were an average 0.87 degrees Celsius higher in the later period. Higher temperatures are melting mountain snow cover earlier in the spring, leaving less moisture for the summer and giving fires a better chance to spread.

And while human land use certainly has had a direct effect on wildfire patterns throughout the West, the biggest increase in U.S. wildfire frequency has actually occurred in the largely untouched mid-elevation Northern Rockies forests, implicating climate change.

Farther north, Alaska’s and Canada’s boreal forests recently have experienced more-frequent fires, releasing enough carbon to transform them in some years from net absorbers to net emitters. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the total area burned more than doubled.

Higher temperatures have extended the range of the tree-damaging spruce budworm into new territory and allowed spruce beetles, no longer delayed by cold winters, to complete their typical two-year life cycle in just a single year. Drought has limited the efficacy of the trees’ defenses. Together the insects and the drought are leaving millions of acres of dead wood in their wake, providing fuel for wildfires.

Overall, a warmer climate is predicted to double the area burned in northern Canada by 2100; in Alaska, the area could double by as early as 2050.

In other parts of the world fire regimes are changing and are projected to change even more as the planet heats up. Over much of Europe fire frequency decreased during most of the twentieth century, and expanding forests soaked up carbon.

Now, however, some areas may be starting to see more fires. Between 2000 and 2006, some 50,000 fires burned each year in the Mediterranean region, compared with 30,000 a year in the 1980s, though the total area burned did not increase, in part because of more vigilant firefighting.

During Europe’s record 2003 heat wave, which killed over 50,000 people, an estimated 650,000 hectares of forest burned continent-wide. Although the number of fires during this warm and dry year was not particularly high, the area burned was a record.

More than five percent of Portugal’s forest area burned, four times the 1980–2004 annual average, resulting in economic damages exceeding one billion euros. If future warming is not kept in check, hot and dry summers like 2003 could happen as frequently as every other year, dramatically increasing wildfire risk.

For Southeast Asia, the extreme 1997–98 El Niño brought a major drought to the region, allowing some of the most severe fires in recent history to burn in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Laos. Fires set to clear land jumped from grasslands and shrublands to logged forests and peat swamps, where they burned underground.

For months Southeast Asian skies were hazy from smoke. Nearly 10 million hectares burned in Indonesia alone, affecting 23 of 27 provinces and costing more than nine billion dollars.

During that same El Niño, more than 20 million hectares burned in Latin America, wreaking damages of up to 15 billion dollars. In 2001 the following El Niño brought more drought and put a frightening one-third of Amazon forests at risk of burning. With a temperature rise of more than 3 degrees Celsius -well within the range projected for this century barring rapid and dramatic action to curb carbon emissions – much of South America is likely to see more frequent wildfires.

Just as a weakened immune system leaves a person vulnerable to otherwise innocuous germs, the combination of logging, road construction, and intentional burning to clear forests for cattle ranches, farms, and plantations has fragmented the world’s tropical forests, increasing their vulnerability to fire.

Piling higher temperatures on top of such stresses could completely undermine forests’ resilience. For the massive Amazon rainforest, we risk reaching a tipping point where recurrent droughts dry out the landscape enough so that small fires can turn into devastating conflagrations.

We all rely on trees to soak up greenhouse gases and store carbon. If large swaths of forest go up in flames, it could set into motion a vicious cycle, where more wildfires in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere. Stabilising climate, and doing so quickly, takes on a new urgency when it means averting an inferno on earth.

*Janet Larsen is the Director of Research for the Earth Policy Institute (http://www.earthpolicy.org), where this article was originally published.