A Taste Of The Future?

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The Europeans are getting a taste of life without air transport.  Are they also getting a taste of the future?  Brian Kaller thinks the answer may be yes.  Our dependence on air transport is like the rest of our civilization dependent on cheap oil.  The age of abundant cheap oil is coming to a close.  Kaller reminds us that our dependence on air transportation goes well beyond airline passengers.

As the skies remain quiet here, we are reminded how much we rely on
air travel, not just for business meetings and holidays but to keep the
supermarket stocked. According to the Guardian newspaper, Ireland and
England might experience a temporary shortage of fruit, which is grown
in Australia, New Zealand and other distant lands and transported to the
other side of the planet every day to be eaten in huge quantities in
Europe. The shortage may spread to other foods, the article said, from
baby corn from Thailand to pineapple chunks from Ghana. In fact, 90
percent of Britain�s fruit and the 60 percent of its vegetables are
imported.

�Many of Britain's supermarkets operate their supply chains
incredibly tightly, using the principle of �just in time� delivery,� the
article said. �When disaster strikes, shortages of some items can start
appearing within a few days.�

The hiatus � I don�t know that it really qualifies as a �disaster�
yet -- could also create a temporary shortage of flowers, which are
regularly shipped to Europe from Kenya and other countries, as well as
pharmaceuticals and high-tech items that have a short supply chain.

Little events like this help us see in microcosm the larger
disruptions we might see in the years ahead. It shows us just how
tightly the world economy is bound together, so that an Icelandic
volcano can ruin a Kenyan plantation. It also shows us how profoundly
longer disruptions would affect us -- some other weather catastrophe,
another spike in fuel prices, or another dip in the economy.

The good news; this dependence is not necessary.

On the bright side, however, most of this constant circulation of
planes around, and the goods they transport, are unnecessary. In fact,
like so much of modern life, they involve a great leap backward.

Take fruit, for example, since so much of it is flown in. Medieval
Britons didn�t need to ship apples in from New Zealand, even had they
known about the place � they gathered apples in the autumn and kept them
cool in the attic until they needed them. We are no less able to do
this than they were, yet how many garden sheds and closets could you
open to see stacks of apples?

Victorians commonly built greenhouses, in which they could grow many
fruits or flowers not ordinarily found in Europe. With our
ready-to-assemble parts and clear plastic sheeting, we could do the same
things more easily. We just don�t.

If towns in Ireland or Iowa began feeding themselves again, though,
oranges and bananas might still return to their former exotic status �
my elderly relatives in the USA got oranges in their Christmas
stockings, and community dances in wartime Britain often gave away a
banana as first prize in raffle drawings. But perhaps that is as it
should be. We just don�t have a human right to regularly eat large
amounts of food that can only be grown thousands of kilometers away,
especially when � as a recent survey indicated � a third of the food
that comes into our homes is thrown away uneaten.

And the end of cheap oil will not just impact air transportation.  Sea transportation also depends on cheap oil.  How high must the price of oil go before it's no longer economical to manufacture toasters in China to sell in Iowa?  Thomas Friedman's "Flat Earth"  was dependent on cheap fossil fuels.  So who will suffer?  Large multinational corporations and the oligarchs who profit from them certainly - the rest of us maybe not so much.