By Howard Whiteman
Murray State University
Flying across the ocean on my first visit to Europe, I knew what to expect in the ensuing days.
Jet lag.
My body was used to the time I had been living in, but suddenly I lost 6 hours of my life as I was thrust into a new time zone, functionally entering the future through the technology of modern travel. My body would have none of it.
It took a few days for my sleep cycle to adapt to the new time zone, which is an even more common lag: a time lag. Time lags occur whenever we don’t have the instant gratification we crave, like for example the time it takes for an item you have ordered to arrive at our doorstep. It might be overnight or a few days, but there is always some time lag inherent in the ordering of an item.
reopened. It takes six weeks for a tanker of oil to reach U.S. ports, after which it must be refined and transported throughout the nation—all adding to the time lag. (Image courtesy of Gringer under CC BY 4.0.)
Time lags are common in ecology as well, and most famously seen in predator-prey dynamics. As predators consume prey populations, there is a time lag in the response of the two populations to changes in the other, because, like our packages, they cannot reproduce more or less on a moment’s notice.
Time lags are not just for travel, packages and predation, and it is important to recognize potential time lags so we can plan ahead accordingly, like knowing that we have to make a doctor’s appointment soon because there will be an inherent time lag in when that appointment will actually occur.
One time lag that has the potential for serious negative consequences in our daily lives is on the horizon.
The Strait of Hormuz was blockaded for months, and currently is experiencing only a small fraction of its historic shipping traffic. This disruption has reduced the supply of oil to refineries which has increased fuel prices and simultaneously affected the production and transport of numerous products, including fertilizers used in crop production. We all feel this at the pump, but farmers feel it both in fuel and fertilizer costs. Some airlines have gone out of business, and others have cancelled thousands of flights, in part because of the increased cost of jet fuel. Our entire economy has been affected by the oil shortage.
As I write this, the Strait has been reopened for limited traffic due to a tentative ceasefire. But here is the rub: based on calculations of minds much brighter than mine, if all of that changed and the Strait was free from any conflict at all, allowing oil and fertilizer to flow as it has in the past, there is an inherent time lag, perhaps as many as three months, before that oil could be shipped, refined, and then affect the global supply, or until the fertilizer could reach farmers and be used on crops.
What that means is that there are potential problems locked in for the summer travel season and more importantly, the growing season, which will likely not only make transportation more expensive, but will affect global food production and distribution. In some countries that have been living on the edge already, that might mean famine. In others, like our own, it will hopefully be less draconian; only time will tell.
The problem is, of course, that none of us actually know when the Strait will reopen for good, or for how long, and when the oil and fertilizer will flow again. Every day it is closed changes the calculation and influences when the time lag will commence and how much it will affect us. Given all of that, and not wanting to be negatively affected by a time lag like a wolf population with not enough elk, it seems to me that we should all consider being prepared this year.
During World War I, “war gardens” or “liberty gardens” were promoted to help prevent food shortages. They were revived as “victory gardens” during WWII, and within three years provided nearly 40% of all fresh vegetables consumed in the U.S. Many people followed that lead during Covid-19. Like world wars and Covid, it is very likely that the ripple effects of the oil shortage will affect the cost and availability of food. Gardening doesn’t solve that problem, but it may allow a much softer landing for those of us that can plant them. Yes, I know it is July. Better late than never.
The future is certainly unclear, but with a little time and effort in the garden, we can be prepared for this time lag. That is the short-term solution, but we also cannot delay in thinking about how we got into this pickle in the first place, and why we would ever even imagine needing a garden to get through the next year. That situation has its own time lags.
We are here, in this moment thinking about time lags and food shortages, because of our addiction to oil. Over the years our lives have been enriched by oil, but too often we feel its negative effects as well. The current situation is likely to hurt more than previous oil shortages because our societies and economies are so dependent on oil, and our populations are so much larger than they were just a few decades ago. We cannot help but feel the effects more than we have in the past.
We must learn from this time lag and use this lesson to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels for good, and the sooner we do so, the sooner we can reduce another time lag—the amount of time it takes us to clean our atmosphere and stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations. Think about this time lag: if we stopped burning all fossil fuels now, the Earth’s natural systems would be able to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations to pre-industrial levels on its own, without any human intervention at all. How fast would that be?
First, the good news. Methane, a potent greenhouse gas produced through combustion, can break down in the atmosphere in just a few decades. Nitrous oxide, another important greenhouse gas, might break down within a few hundred years. Now the bad news. Unfortunately for us, carbon dioxide would take thousands to hundreds of thousands of years to reach pre-industrial levels. From a planetary perspective a few thousand years is a blink in time, but from our own perspective, it is daunting.
Like reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the sooner we can transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, the quicker we can start dealing with the climate change time lag, and start developing the technologies to clean our atmosphere over the next 100 years, rather than thousands. If we can finally commit ourselves to clean and renewable energy sources, complete the transition to electric vehicles, and use oil only sparingly (and yes, more efficient jets for those trips to Europe), the health of our planet and our human societies would both benefit, we might not ever have to worry about an oil time lag ever again, and we will help reduce the climate change time lag to something in the range of generations rather than millennia.
The question remains, will we act? Or will we continue living in this time lag of our own creation, the time it takes for humans to realize that we are making it more and more difficult to live on the planet because of our addiction to fossil fuels?
Dr. Howard Whiteman is the Commonwealth Endowed Chair of Environmental Studies at Murray State University and an occasional columnist for the NKyTribune.