Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
drought in the Soviet Union also caused major food shortages, leading to
mutually embarrassing purchases of eighteen million tons of grain from
the United States, where domestic food prices began to rise. For a brief
period in late 1973— just before the Christmas Eve oil price shock of that
year— a bushel of wheat sold for twice the price of a barrel of oil.
31
Lester
Brown of the Overseas Development Council estimated that in 1972, cli-
matic variation reduced the world food supply by about 1 percent— the
first such reduction in more than a decade.
32
“No single factor has a greater
impact on food production in any country than weather,” Brown wrote.
“The vulnerability of the supply-demand balance to the weather suggests
that the climate itself might well replace pollution as the dominant global
environmental concern.”
33
The atmosphere may have received short shrift at the 1972 U.N. Con-
vention on the Human Environment; but because of climate's relationship
to food, climate change earned new significance as a geopolitical issue in
the lean years of the late 1970s. The United States supplied three-quarters
of the world's grain exports in that decade; and with U.S. grain stocks
dwindling and the Department of Agriculture pressing acreage previously
held out of production into service, foreign policy experts—including
CIA analysts— worried about the international political consequences
of another poor harvest.
34
“The stability of most nations is based upon a
dependable source of food,” read a CIA working paper, “but this stabil-
ity will not be possible under the new climatic era.”
35
The agency largely
subscribed to Bryson's work on aerosols and by 1974 “had obtained suf-
ficient evidence” of a global cooling trend to put climatic change on the
geopolitical radar. “Climate is now a critical factor,” the CIA confirmed.
“The politics of food will become the central issue of every government.”
36
climate change and american environmentalism
American environmentalists also took a keen interest in global environ-
mental issues in the 1970s, but they responded slowly and cautiously to the
issue of climate change. The U.N. Conference on the Human Environment
revealed deep concerns within America's nongovernmental environmental
organizations over global population, land use, species protection, ocean
dumping, toxic wastes, and deforestation, but these concerns did not extend
to climate change in a meaningful way. Throughout the 1970s and early
