"We Are Eating the Earth" by Michael Grunwald

Michael Grunwald provides another take on the climate crisis. It's not just about reducing exhaust fumes from gasoline-powered cars; it's about agriculture.

The world's fossil-fuel problem is still number one, but agriculture is number two, the author maintains. Farming is taking up too much of the world's land, land that we need to use for forests and wetlands, notes Grunwald, whose book, We Are Eating the Earth, makes the case for having to do more with less if we're ever going to get out of this mess.

The star of the Eating show is Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University that Grunwald has known for some 25 years. Grunwald chronicles Searchinger's steadfast opposition to biofuels, a conviction based on land use. 

"I had last worked closely with Searchinger a decade earlier, when his first scientific paper had exposed farm-grown fuels like corn ethanol as climate disasters masquerading as climate solutions, and I had mined his work for a man-bites-dog Time cover story on 'The Clean Energy Myth,'" stated Grunwald.

Searchinger went on to develop a 564-page paper, Creating a Sustainable Food Future, a decade-long investigation of the entire food and agriculture sector.

That paper emphasizes the importance of saving whatever forests we have left. As the climate crisis worsens, we all understand the importance of trees, Mother Nature's carbon sinks that absorb and store heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But agriculture is the leading driver of deforestation, said Grunwald.

Agriculture now encompasses 20 million square miles of land on Earth, 400 times the size of Iowa, the author noted. Agriculture now uses 70 percent of our fresh water, added Grunwald.

We have to eat, but we have to do it more efficiently on less land--if we're going to get through this, said Grunwald.

"Beef is the coal of our food system," he said, pointing out that nearly 80 percent of the world's agricultural land is used to feed livestock. "Pound for pound, beef generates 50 times more emissions than coal," said Grunwald.

We Are Eating the Earth explores many of the efforts to solve the problem. There are accounts of Norwegians seeking to raise salmon on a giant fish farm in Florida, the excitement over the creation of the Impossible Whopper, and a miracle tree called pongamia.

Initial success is often followed by disappointment. Grunwald suggests it won't be easy to solve a puzzle centuries in the making. "The climate fight is not the kind of war that will end with carbon dioxide's surrender on a battleship," he noted.

But with human ingenuity, technology and maybe a little luck, especially in the political arena, we might actually make some headway, declared Grunwald.

Thanks to people like Searchinger, whose tenacious appetite for truth remains intact, there's hope, he said.