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By Root 6804 0

global oil prices soaring toward their historic peaks. Higher oil prices, in turn, raised food costs, because of oil’s prominence in fertilizers, food production, and transportation. So the prices for rice, corn, potatoes, and other staples that sustain the world’s poor all spiked. Rice alone is a basic food for three billion of the world’s people. The continually rising food prices heightened discontent in the Arab world (and elsewhere), which kept pressure on oil prices, which kept pressure on food prices, and so on …

This inner loop is being reinforced by another loop of steadily rising world population, plus steadily rising standards of living, plus steadily rising climate change. Egypt alone has grown from twenty-two million people in 1950 to eighty-two million today. That is one reason that FAO experts estimate that global food production will have to increase by some 70 percent by 2050 to keep up with the world’s population growth from 6.8 billion to 9.2 billion. Meanwhile, thanks to the hyper-connecting of the world, more and more people will be living, driving, and eating like Americans, increasing the demand for fossil fuels, which will put even more stress on global natural resources and oil prices. China faces major water shortages already, with industrial demand for water roughly doubling every seven to eight years. Yemen may be the first country in the world actually to run out of water.

Some of the world’s leading investors believe this is the start of a major global shift in resource supply and demand. “Accelerated demand from developing countries, especially China, has caused an unprecedented shift in the price structure of resources: after 100 years or more of price declines, they are now rising, and in the last 8 years have undone, remarkably, the effects of the last 100-year decline,” the noted money manager Jeremy Grantham wrote in his April 2011 report to investors. “Statistically, also, the level of price rises makes it extremely unlikely that the old trend is still in place … From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives. This will increasingly slow down the growth rate of the developed and developing world and put a severe burden on poor countries. We all need to develop serious resource plans, particularly energy policies. There is little time to waste.”

All these trends are being exacerbated by the fact that the more people there are on the planet, the more urbanized the world becomes. Urbanization increases global warming, which, as we have noted, many scientists predict will set off even more severe storms, droughts, deforestation, and floods of the kind that ruined harvests all over the world in 2010. The more that harvests are disrupted, the higher food prices will rise. The higher food prices rise, the more political uprisings there will be. The more uprisings, the higher fuel prices will rise. Welcome to our own 1979-like feedback loop in 2011. The only way to stop it is for America, and other big industrialized countries, to launch a virtuous cycle to counter this emerging vicious one.

“We need to bring our own cause-and-effect logic” to this dangerous feedback loop gathering momentum today, argues Hal Harvey, the ClimateWorks CEO. He proposes an approach with three parts: performance standards, a price on carbon, and research and innovation. Melded together, they can create a powerful virtuous cycle.

Twenty years’ experience in California demonstrates the gains in efficiency and innovation that can come from steadily rising performance standards. California’s strategy reduced electricity consumption in refrigerators by a full 80 percent. New houses, built with ever higher performance standards, known as building codes, have cut energy use in new homes there by 75 percent compared to precode versions. Together, these policies now save the average California family some $1,000 per year. The state is going further: It has led the nation in raising mileage standards for cars and trucks, and in raising requirements for utilities to provide