Climate dreaming 207 reducing food demand, or some unforeseeable revolution in food production was created, radically increasing the food supply that could be grown with any given amount of land and water.11 If population growth and food production continue more or less as expected, pressures on land and water are liable to grow more intense even without BECCS. Food supply might continue to be adequate in aggregate if the productivity of agriculture continued to increase in the intervening decades or, better, if demand were managed to reduce over-consumption and waste.12 With BECCS at a scale sufficient to make a substantial difference in global carbon levels, the land and water removed from food production seem almost certain to drive up prices. And as Amartya Sen showed decades ago, famines can result, not from absolute aggregate insufficiency of food, but from skewed distribution of food, because the poorest people are priced out of the market as the better-off drive up the prices when the supply tightens.13 Second, however, if enough land and water were taken out of food production, absolute shortages of food could of course result. Many factors would be relevant, including what percentage of people were by then living on vegetarian diets that require considerably fewer resources than diets centred on meat, and how much agriculture was as water-intensive as, for example, California agriculture in areas that are naturally dry. But whatever the type of food and method of production, barring genuinely radical technological changes, some considerable amount of both land and water must be devoted to food production for any given number of people on the planet. Obviously, then, either price-driven mal-distribution or absolute shortages of food could undermine food security and disrupt sustainable development, especially if over-consumption and waste by the affluent had not meanwhile been tackled. Worse still, if the emissions ‘over-shoot’ had been great enough, the negative emissions might by then be no more optional than the food production. Indeed, if climate change became severe enough without the negative emissions, climate change itself might undermine food production. The choice would then become, not between food production and climate stabilization, but between undermining food production by removing too much land or water from food production and undermining food production by not removing enough land or water from food production to produce the negative emissions necessary to keep the climate from undermining the food production. That could constitute a ‘Sophie’s Choice’, a forced choice between two terrible alternatives, which is a situation we should never knowingly contribute to creating or even allow to arise. 14 The only way out at that point would be to weave a way between the horns of a dilemma. Adopting BECCS is gambling on being able to walk a narrow tight-rope: take over enough land and water to stabilize climate but not so much land and water as to cause malnutrition. Gambling on ‘surgical precision’ in public policy is foolhardy. 11. See, however, J Gillis, ‘With an Eye on Hunger, Scientists See Promise in Genetic Tinkering of Plants’ (2016) New York Times, 17 November, <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/ 11/18/science/gmo-foods-photosynthesis.html?_r=0> accessed 29 April 2017. 12. See note 8. 13. A Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1983). 14. S Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford University Press, New York 2011) 385–9. © 2017 The Author Journal compilation © 2017 Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd