This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is reprinted here with Tom’s kind permission.
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Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39 percent last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you’re shelling out at the pump and the grocery store, but, unless policymakers begin to address all three of these trends as one major crisis, it could get a whole lot worse.
Just ask the North Koreans.
In the 1990s, North Korea was the world’s canary. The famine that killed as much as 10 percent of the North Korean population in those years was, it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe — though few saw it that way at the time.
That small Northeast Asian land, one of the last putatively communist countries on the planet, faced the same three converging factors as we do now — escalating energy prices, reducing food supplies, and impe... Read more
