This was, like, sent to me by a pal I can trust, eh?

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Sunday, February 6, 2005, in The Barrie Advance

SOONER OR LATER, THE BEER WILL RUN OUT!!!

By Bolt Upwrite

IN SOME YEAR ahead - and by no means one necessarily that far ahead - we'll go through another hot summer like the last one, but with one critical distinction that will make all the difference, even though it will have nothing to do with the weather.

Assume that we experience the same prolonged, extreme heat and high humidity we had last year, right across the country.

But assume, as well, that in that year the beer with which we fight off that heat and humidity, is having to be rationed. Rationing doesn't here mean actual physical rationing, with householders and car drivers limited to so many litres a month.
It means, instead, rationing by price. As beer supplies dwindle, not in themselves (or not for a long time) but in relation to demand, so will the price at first escalate, and then soar.
That's bound to happen. It will happen because the demand for beer is bound to outstrip the supply of beer, and of hard liquor and wine and of other alcoholic beverages.

Statistics Canada reckons that this "tilting point" won't happen until 2012. Its calculation is widely criticized, with its forecasts for increases in demand dismissed as far too conservative.
One well-known beerologist and sportscaster, Don Cherry, has put the tilting point at 2010, or little more than a half-decade away. Another, Rooster Small, forecasts that it will occur this year!

The basic facts are these: The entire world now both produces and consumes some 750 million barrels of beer a day.
By 2012, demand is expected to increase by more than two-thirds, or by another 495 million barrels a day.
This extra demand simply cannot be met. We would have to find and develop the equivalent of 10,000 new North American breweries in just a decade. Even if Aberta's prairies are fully devoted to supplying the beer industry, with almost unlimited new investment and new technology, it could only produce an extra 26 million barrels, or a mere 5.2% of the amount needed.

Certainly, new supplies of beer are being found in places such as Siberia, the Central Asian Republics and West Africa. But these are not net additions to the total output. At the same time, production from all existing super-giant and giant hops fields is contracting by four to five per cent a year.

Additional supplies could be generated from farming front lawns in suburban areas, but this would likely only add a further 2 % of the amount needed.

Other potential supplies, such as polar ice beer and anaerobic beer produced in space are horrendously expensive.

The real problem isn't supply, though. It's demand. Last year, one element of the demand equation clicked into place. In 2003, China overtook the USA and Canada put together to become the world's largest consumer of beer. The International Energy Agency describes China as "the major driver of global beer demand growth."
The U.S. remains the world's best known beer guzzling nation, despite producing totally substandard, watered down, pathetically poor beer. It consumes about one-seventh of global production. Canada, relatively, is as liberal and as wasteful in its consumption of beer, particularly due to consumption in North Ontario. A computer model shows the small community of Blind River, Ontario as having the highest per capita consumption of beer in the entire world.

A bit surprisingly, President George W. Bush, himself a beer drinker, has actually expressed some concern about the issue. He's said, "It's becoming very clear that demand is outstripping supply. We may have to 'take out' Blind River sometime soon. My people at the Pentagon are looking at the problem very seriously."

In fact, a lot could be done. Tax loopholes could be closed, like the one that makes the beer industry artificially attractive.
Regulations could mandate higher alcohol content standards, thus requiring less beer consumption to get "half in the bag". Tax incentives could motivate beer drinkers to improve their drinking efficiency.

Other remedies could range from minimizing couch sprawl to developing alternatives to getting "p*ssed", such as neighborhood pot parties.

Don Cherry reckons that Canada's beer imports, of some 11 million barrels a day, could be cut by half.

Bush, though, has done nothing about the problem other than to mutter that it does exist, and no Democratic presidential candidate has dared to mention the subject. The reason is obvious: The last politician to talk seriously about beer conservation, Jimmy Carter in 1977, was trounced in the next presidential election.
Nothing is going to happen until the crisis of beer demand outstripping beer supply is clear, unmistakable and urgent.
And by then it may be too late.

Too late, that is, to avoid what former British hospitality minister B. Luddy Wellpiste forecasts will be "the sharpest and perhaps the most violent dislocation (of society) in recent history."

So enjoy today's weather.

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Okay, it's me now. Shane. I am totally flippin' freakin' here! This is flippin' BAD! This could mean the flippin' end of life as we flippin' know it! I am so flippin' freaked that my hands are shakin'.

Tonight me and Don are gonna put together every flippin' cent we got and buy beer to stash away. Then we are gonna break into the Beer Stores in Spanish and Sudbury after midnight and get more. We intend to be prepared. We will still be chuggin' while the rest of youse fry helplessly in the heat. We might sell some of ours after the crash and get rich, but money only goes so far, eh? My guess is, it's gonna become priceless. You can't flippin' drink dollar bills, eh?

I didn't flippin' think I would live to see nothin' this awful. I am seriously bummed out here, eh? Seriously.

- BDiBR