In Victoria, Australia, an open-cut coal mine is on fire, and expected to burn for days. (Plenty of greenhouse gases there – the sort of positive feedback mechanism the scientists are getting worried about.)

It is just one of 230 fires in the state, and its neighbour, NSW, is also expecting a great number as the same weather conditions reach it.

It is October. Early October. That never used to be fire season. But judging by someone to whom I was speaking yesterday, Australians really are getting worried about this apparent effect of global warming – as they are about the wheat crop, likely to be less than 50 per cent of last year’s, an estimate that is falling even lower by the day.

World wheat reserves are at their lowest level since 1981.

“The concern now is what happens next year. If we have poor conditions for growing wheat again, supplies could get very tight and we might see some demand rationing,” said Dan Cekander, grains analyst at Fimat.
James Barnett, grains analyst for Man Global Research, part of the Man Group, said there was more concern in the global corn market after the USDA cut crop estimates in the US by 209 million bushels to 10.9 billion after it said that 800,000 fewer acres were growing corn than had previously been expected. The US is the world’s largest corn grower.
“We are looking at a structural change in the corn market, because demand is going to increase next year from the ethanol industry, and we might not be planting corn in enough acres to satisfy that demand,” said Mr Barnett.

To a talk by Tom Hall of Lonely Planet (and travel columnist on the Observer) on this question … so you know what the answer is going to be.

But there were some interesting snippets: There are currently 61 accreditation schemes for “ethical travel” … so pretty tough for an “ordinary” traveller to tell if they mean anything at all. But a survey of the customers of the mass travel company First Choice say 83 per cent of customers are concerned about the environmental effects of their holiday. (Of course that doesn’t mean they aren’t going, but it certainly is a base to build on.)

We were pointed to a great website, The Man in Seat 61, which offers advice on how to travel by plane and ship pretty well everyone – Japan via Vladivostok by train and ferry anyone?

The speaker said that Lonely Planet was concerned about the distorting effects of its advice, citing the Vietnamese guide that raved about a guesthouse run by a mute local man. The next time they went back there was a whole street of guesthouses apparently owned by mute men…

But he didn’t really say what they were doing about it, probably because there is nothing you can do if you are going to offer specific advice.

Twenty years ago now, when I was studying agriculture at university, there was just dawning an awareness that much of the arable farming in Australia, and particularly the irrigation farming, was unsustainable. Ancient soils were having unprecedented quantities of water poured on them, and the rising water table was bringing millennia of salt to the surface; trees were still being felled, destroying the land’s capacity to retain moisture (and soil) in Queensland, at the start of the great Murray-Darling system that is Australia’s only great river and on which the entire city of Adelaide depends for water. (And there were even government subsidies for felling these trees, at least until a few years ago – any Australian readers know if there still are?)

Yet still the fantasy continues. A story in tomorrow’s SMH (time difference) starts by excitedly saying record prices are being offered for Australian rice. Then, and only then, does it say that many farmer’s water allocation has been cut to zero due to the acute shortage, so very few of them will be getting these “record” prices.

On September 19, the federal commodities forecaster, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics, slashed its rice crop forecast to less than 40 per cent of last year’s 1.05 million tonnes.
The next day, the NSW Department of Primary Industries went further, estimating the area of rice-growing land would be 20 to 30 per cent of last year’s.
“This is an incredible climatic event, the worst drought in recorded history, and we’ve got the joy of living through it,” said the president of the Ricegrowers Association of Australia, Laurie Arthur. “There’s not going to be more than a quarter of last year’s production.”

Even if you ignore the strong possibility that the greenhouse effect is starting to have transformative effects on climate (a largish “if”), Australia still, astonishingly doesn’t get the fact that “drought” (by definition supposedly an extraordinary event) is a normal part of the Australian climate.

I’m reminded of an expert I interviewed many years ago who said the only sustainable “farming” in Australia would be to turn nearly all of it over to the kangaroos and harvest the meat from them. Except that won’t go a long way towards feeding 20 million people.

How is it that Britain has a “Labour” government whose first thought is to privatise everything …

Ministers are proposing an extraordinary scheme to tackle climate change in which the Amazon rainforest would be turned into an international trust and its trees sold to individuals and groups.
Plans for the wholesale “privatisation” of the rainforest will be raised by David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, at a summit in Mexico this week.
The scheme, endorsed by Tony Blair, aims to protect the plants and wildlife from logging. About 13 million hectares of the world’s forests are lost annually to deforestation, according to the Government.

Miliband admits there might be “sovereignty” issues…

Talking to a friend yesterday about all of the free newspaper distributors in London.

(For those unfamiliar with the backstory – Metro, distributed from racks in Tube stations in the morning, has been joined by two evening freebies thelondonpaper and Londonlite, while the Evening Standard now has a free version handed out at lunchtime. All of which means if you pass by Euston Station, as I do quite often, you could collect enough newspapers in one day to have destroyed a small forest.)

I haven’t seen any overall figures, but the Tube is certainly seeing the effect, to the tune of a 43 per cent increase in newspaper waste.

There really is a problem that these days material objects are so cheap, they are literally given away…

I think I should say at the outset that it you are feeling a bit down today you really shouldn’t read this post.

Some notes from a fringe session at the Green Party conference entitled “after the crash”.

Seven possible causes of a “crash” were identified:
1. Economic cycles
2. Peak oil
3. US economy
4. Iran war
5. Climate change (an explosion of Katrina-like events)
6. Avian Flu (or another epidemic) *
7. Unknowns …

The initial speaker, Tom Lyons(sp?), a former Reuters commodity writer, focused mainly on the US economy: “The aggressive stance of the US government is not at all unconnected with the growing weakness of the economy. It is not hegemonic, as it was fifty or sixty years ago,” he said. Cited particularly was the current account deficit, which “has to be paid for sometime”.

Currently it is being supported by China, Japan, Taiwan and the rest of Asia. They are supporting the “hoover effect”, by which goods and services are sucked in to support the US way of life (or at least the way of life of the rich). So China et al buy Treasury Bills.

But the problem is, given the declining level of the US dollar, these are a declining asset. And it cannot even be sustained at the level it is now. There’s a problem for Europe too, since the economy has a dependence on the US export market.

For the majority of poor countries the crash has already happened – in the 1980s’ debt crisis. Since then the IMF structural adjustment programme has ensured that the cost of the speculative lending boom of the Sixties and Seventies was borne by the poor states. So we have arrived at this distribution of income: GDP person par parity – US $34,320 and Sierra Leone $470 (UNDP 2001 figures).

On these figures the c. 30 developed states at the top are racing ahead, while the states at the bottom are stagnant. Their problem is commodity prices: from 1977 to 2001, 46 basic commodities (agricultural and mineral) have fallen by an average of 2.5% per year.

The worst is “hides and skins”, very important to the poorest states, which have fallen by 4.8% per year, while coffee has fallen by 5.1% per year. The number of “least developed states”, using an eighties classification, has risen from 25 to 50; only one country, Botswana, has got out of the condition.

Dr Richard Lawson, author of Bills of Health, said the likely effects of a crash, whatever its cause were: business failures, mass unemployment and mass poverty, social conflict and unrest, and wars might be promoted as a “cure”.

How to cope? “This is when green economics really cuts it for real” – a localised economy would supply the essentials of human existence. Greens should get involved in work on emergency plans.

Not sure which speaker said this, but an interesting thought: One possible US action would be to withdraw quickly from the world, as Britain withdrew very quickly from the empire after World War Two.

Update: Frank’s comment below leads me to add an additional note – it is not suggested that the “cut it for real” comment means the speaker wants this to happen. The emphasis was on trying to stop “the crash” happening (except where it has already happened) – first by understanding the situation. This was perhaps intended as a push to work harder to stop it happening, plus a “what to do in the worst case scenario” point.

* Personally I discount avian flu and similar on the ground that while indeed it could happen, this is one area where virtually all that can be done is being done, and due to that it is less likely to happen than ever before. Worrying about it is a bit like worrying about an asteroid.