Climate Change Finally Impacts Important Industry

Socguy writes "According to a New Zealand scientist, Jim Salinger, the price of beer in and around Australia is going to be under increasing upward pressure as reductions in malting barley yields are experienced as a side effect of our ongoing climate shift. "It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up," Mr. Salinger told the Institute of Brewing and Distilling convention."

Trying to regulate every little thing is stupid

[UbuntuDupe]

I'm sorry, it seems pretty ridiculous to me to attack climate change by trying to go after *each* and *every* little thing someone deems inefficient given the benefit and environmental cost. You'll never be able to enumerate everything that's inefficient, because a) there are so many activities, and b) it depends on quantity that exists solely in other people's minds.

We're going after barley today, and tomorrow it will be celery or lack of solar panels on buildings or computer that go to sleep too slowly etc etc etc.

A much more rational and simple approach would be: Tax all fossil fuels at the current cost of sinking the resulting carbon out of the air. (Actually, you just want to sink the fraction of existing output that needs to be removed in order to stabilize concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere but if I put that in the definition it would be too hard to untangle.)

Apply the funds to sinking CO2.

Then, all product use is carbon neutral. For all people, adjusting to climate change is simply a matter of buying whatever you want, so long as its cost is justified by its current price (which has been changed to account for the tax.) Given the new prices, all entrepreneurial activity redirects to account for higher fossil fuel costs and raises resources spent on minimizing this input.

This method is necessarily the least painful approach because and change in activities necessarily comes from those activities that have least benefit, as people currently judge them, and work up from there.

Furthermore, as the price of sinking goes down, the tax can go down.

Furthermore, this is robust against non-compliant countries, as their goods can be tarriffed to pay for whatever sinking they won't pay for. Or, if necessary, other countries can sink CO2 using general tax revenues.

Oops, I forgot, people would still be able to drive SUVs under this, so scratch it.

Going on two years

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The barley yields have been underperforming since 2006, so this is cumulatively a big problem for the beer industry and its customers.

However, there are many other crops from which alcohol can be derived. A sudden price increase in beer will send drinkers to the arms of other libations. This should, in principle, keep the price of beer from fluctuating too wildly. In another couple years when barley yields are back at their maximums, this will all have been a bad memory.

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

Unlike fuel

[WormholeFiend]

People will not pay whatever the beer industry charges.

I remember reading a Newfoundland drug enforcement police officer's comment once to the effect that beer and spirits stores profits were up whenever the police managed to put a big dent in the illegal drug market.

Uh, not due to climate change though...

[JRHelgeson]

The reductions in Malted Barley yields are a direct result of more farmers growing corn in place of barley in order to produce ethanol. The price of corn has gone up because demand has gone up, so therefore more farmers are producing/planting/harvesting corn.

Just once, why can't one of our poorly considered quick fixes work?

Re:Going on two years

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12449705 [npr.org]

Spanish winemakers have already started moving their vineyards into the mountains because of climate change.

Maybe that's what the barley and hops growers need to do

Re:Uh, not due to climate change though...

[garcia]

Yup [startribune.com] and it's really hurting everyone from large pizza chains [news-press.com] right down to the local Asian restaurant my wife and I frequent at least three times a month.

Flour prices have skyrocketed due to the corn (as you have mentioned) and the fact that farmers are then locked into subsidy land because farmers who grow other crops on corn acreage lose their subsidy for the current year and are fined the market value of the crop they chose to grow instead but are also threatened that they may be permanently ineligible to receive future subsidies (link [nytimes.com]).

So while we are getting more "inexpensive" gas and we are lessening our dependencies on foreign oil, we are creating an uncomfortable situation in our food stores and prices. I'd rather we deal with more mass transit and alternative fuel sources that don't fuck with our domestic food supplies.

Re:No peer-review necessary as long as you agree..

[unixcorn]

Exactly! The brewer at the local micro brewery told me that the decreasing harvests were simply due to farmers getting out of the business. It seems the larger breweries had stockpiled so much hopps they drove prices into the dirt..so to speak. He said it was a normal supply and demand thing and that as soon as it once again became profitable to grow hopps the farmers would replant.

that's been going on a lot longer than that

[khallow]

We have a number of examples of desertification [wikipedia.org] which is in large part a local climate change. Supposedly there are examples going back to ancient times though I can't think of examples older than some tropical empires (Mayan and Khmer empires). There is the "heat island effect", namely that urban areas are warmer than surrounding areas, which is due to the lower albedo of these regions. These are man-made changes in climate. The global temperate has changed over the past few thousand years (according to ice and tree-ring data) resulting in a number of climate changes that have probably affected human industry. And the current global warming trend has supposedly resulted in shifts in the seasons and the start of the growing season for temperate regions.

Re:home brewers

[Sigismundo]

Indeed, the hop shortage is really bad. The place where I get homebrew supplies won't sell the hops by themselves, only as part of a complete recipe, to prevent people from hoarding.

If the barley problem gets worse, I can only imagine that it could get harder for homebrew shops to stay in business, which would be a shame.

Re:Going on two years

[Thundersnatch]

Considering that 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop was converted into 5 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, (and that amount replaced only 1 percent of U.S. oil consumption).

Source? Almost all gasoline is actaully 10% ethanol these days. Since gasoline accounts for 60% of oil consumption [doe.gov], wouldn't it stand to reason that ethanol replaces about 6% of our oil consumption at this point?

Finally, after processing corn for Ethanol, a great deal of high-protien livestock feed remains. The sugars from the corn get converted to ethanol, and the "everything else" is still used as livestock feed.

It's really a lot more complicated than you make it sound. Corn-based Ethanol will not solve our transportation energy needs, but it isn't all bad.

Re:home brewers

[baldass_newbie]

Grow your own hops. It's not that tough and is easily grown in most places.

Besides, prices don't seem that high. A little high, sure, but not overwhelming:
http://www.northernbrewer.com/hop-pellets.html [northernbrewer.com]

Re:home brewers

[Coryoth]

The "Mini Ice Age" of 1400-1800 destroyed the Wine Industry in Britannia. For 1400 years Romans and their descendents had been growing vineyards and producing wine in the warm England climate. Then suddenly the earth grew cold, and the vines stopped growing.

That's a somewhat dubious claim. There were vineyards in southern England around 1000 (based on Domesday records), however the reason for their demise is rather speculative. Certainly a cooling climate may have played a role, but there is also the fact that the English had a significant culutural shift toward beer as the preferred drink, and that may have had at least as much to do with the decline. This can be seen in the recent rise of the English wine industry, which has been driven far more by English drinking taste shifting toward domestic wine as it has been driven by climate.

Re:home brewers

[OutOfMatrix]

Fear mongering again! Any excuse to blame on Global Warming! The planet is going through a cycle of Global Cooling! The increase in prices are due to inflation! The private company called the Federal Reserve has been creating money on of thin air to bail out their banking buddies, and diluting your money! That's stealing! Google Money Masters!

Re:home brewers

[mini me]

There are much more efficient crops that could be used, corn being one of the absolute worst, but the wackos have decided to put everything into that one.

You seem to be ignoring what happens down on the farm. Corn is ideal because we already had the infrastructure in place to integrate corn-based ethanol plants into the supply chain with virtually no cost (money or energy).

Turning another crop, such as switchgrass, into a commodity is not an easy process and would waste a lot of energy in the process. Perhaps more energy than what would be gained from it having more energy potential.

Also, the new ethanol plants already support the crops you speak of, so I'm not sure we've put everything into one. There just isn't a realistic alternative to corn in the plant-based fuel sector, and there won't be for a while.

Re:Going on two years

[farmerj]

I don't think it's quite as simple as that. At the moment there are two major markets for barley:

• Animal Feed
• Malting

A minority of the barley grown goes for malting, with the remaining majority going for animal feed.
Malting barley has stricter requirements that that used for feed, there are max protein levels and germination percentage used along with the normal grain quality indexes (hectolitre weight, screening % etc.)

The interesting thing as regards to beer (larger, ale and stout) is that the price of the malting barley has very little impact on the price paid for a pint.
I don't have a quick reference but in Ireland the cost of malting barley works out at around 1-2 cent per pint, out of an average price of around €4.00 or so (pub price).

The problem is that barley as animal feed is easily subsisted for by other feeds such as wheat, soya, maize etc. This means that the price of barley moves in relation to the prices of these other grains. It is also important to note these these grains along with rice are the base constituents of most alcohol produced.

As regard to New Zealand, one of its biggest exports are milk products. As NZ sells on the world market the recent increase in milk and milk product prices is pushing up demand for animal feeds such as barley. This is because one of the ways of getting higher output from dairy cows in increasing the levels of concentrates (such as barley wheat etc.) feed.

So even with higher yields the price of barley may or may not decrease the price of barley depending on the market prices of the other grains.

Re:Climate change, guess old buzzword wasn't worki

[tomdcc]

How does this stuff get Insightful on Slashdot?

so lets latch on to something generic... even though it occurs all the time we seem to think its only bad now.

So by that logic because we used to have hot spells, we shouldn't consider an increased number of hot spells as different in any way. What nonsense.

I guess with all the stories about the earth having not warmed recently...

The stories that do the circles of the right-wing blogs? Because they're credible evidence. Take a look at the current graph of global average temperatures [wikipedia.org] and look at the five year avererage and tell me that the planet is cooling. 1998 was a peak year due to El-Nino, and this year is predicted by those same gosh-darn climate scientists as being cooler due to La-Nina, but the trend is pretty hard to argue. If you're actually interested in what the actual, you know, science says.

With the current increases in the value of corn and wheat because of the misguided ethanol production in the US would it not make sense that other areas shift to fill the gap?

Because a discussion of US politics totally negates a story about actual crop yields down under.

Putting climate change in the same story as beer either points out the hypocrisy of it all or just shows how silly we are willing to become

Except when the story is about reduced crop yields due to increased temperature. As it was.

I, for one...

[GrifterCC]

...welcome our new barley-free overlords. While there is nothing appealing paying more for Duchesse de Bourgogne or Longhammer, the prospect of Natty Light, Keystone, Budweiser, Miller, Coors, etc., disappearing forever gives me comfort in these dark, warm, melty times. We're talking about a product (yes, only one product--there are no meaningful distinctions among the brands) so bad that the tasting contests have to create a category called "American-Style Lager" (read: macrobrew) to accomodate them. And something tells me the big breweries pay the competitions to have that category there in the first place. You know the organizers have to be huge beer snobs, and even Level 1 Beer Snobs automatically get the Hating on Macrobrews feat. Check out the Bud/Miller/Coors Web sites and notice how they each win the category every four years. It's almost like they're just taking turns.

Re:Beer lovers get the shaft either way

[ilyanov]

The problem is the green house gases the dominant species of this planet has been releasing into the atmosphere. A good place to see its effects is Venus. Does a 2 degree drop in solar activity make that place any milder? The forecasts climatologists are making are stretched out decades into the future. Personally, I feel they have underestimated. The future is going to be far toastier than they predict.

Re:Trying to regulate every little thing is stupid

[Sinical]

They're not trying to regulate every little thing, they're trying to say "don't do anything that harms the environment".

And how do they do that? REGULATION.

Aside from the enormous harm that taxations place upon the economy (taxation leads to what is known as a deadweight loss, which must be offset against the benefits of whatever is being taxed), carbon sinking is not even possible given the engineering capacity we as humans have. Furthermore, even if it *were* possible, there is no way to know what damage the CO2 does in the meantime while it is being sinked.

So banning it is better than taxing it? What kind of bizarro-world do you live in where banning a previously legal activity because it is environmentally harmful is better than taxing that activity to compensate for the damage caused, i.e. rendering it less competitive than activities that do not damage the environment?

And people are definitely investigating carbon sequestration techniques, so the whole "not even possible given the engineering capacity we humans have" is not correct. I think they'd work harder if, e.g. coal suddenly cost 10x as much due to environmental damage costs. Of course the carbon-emitting activities might themselves be reduced, i.e. the need to sequestrate would be reduced, if carbon was taxed.

You really have no understanding of the problem, do you? The complete commodification of the rights to pollute simply mean that companies will simply find a way to price in the dollar value of pollution credits to get away with whatever they are doing now. Pollution and environmental issues are *the* classic economic textbook example of market failure. It takes a real fundamentalist (or a complete idiot) to attempt to solve market failure by the application of more market instruments.

To me it is *you* who don't seem to understand the problem. You handwave the ability of companies to somehow keep doing whatever they're doing that is environmentally damaging once it is more expensive (potentially much more expensive) once taxes are levied. You additionally handwave pollution and environmental issues as a classic textbook example of market failures without explaining why that is the case (perhaps I have the wrong economics textbooks). I see it as an issue that has been sidelined only because the costs weren't obvious (carbon dioxide bad?) or due to regulatory capture. Neither is a failure of markets, but a failure to even apply them. This is changing as the true costs become apparent: Europe has started its cap-and-trade market and I think California and/or some other states are interested in doing the same here. In fact, I read recently that some big companies are petitioning for a federal system (in the United States) so that there is at least a uniform system rather than several state-level systems.

One thing that could short-circuit these efforts is governmental cowardice to push something that would be unpopular: I assume that adding environmental costs to gas/oil consumption would substantially raise its price. Just as cowardice has led to refusal to tackle other hard problems like the future of social welfare systems.

Thus I state that you have failed to make your case that the grandparent poster is a "real fundamentalist" or a "complete idiot". The Market system is not magical. You simply assign costs to scarce or undesirable behaviors/objects and let the efficiency drive of the average person (read, greed) regulate what happens. The failures so far have been to assign costs to adverse consequences that were dilute or fuzzy. Like there should probably be a cost assigned based on the undesirability of propping up shitheads in the Middle East, but I don't know how you'd do that (divide the cost of the Iraq War by the oil output we receive from there?).

I think taxing carbon outright is the correct solution. I used to really like the cap-and-trade scheme