As Trump finds distraction in Iran, US economic outlook dims and droughts loom

(Originally published June 23 in “What in the World“) As Trump resorts to a tried-but-true distraction for domestic ills—war in the Middle East—an historic enemy is rising as surely as retaliatory strikes between Tehran and Tel Aviv.

Drought. Climate change is making droughts worse, threatening the world’s food supply. Wheat in China, Russia, and Ukraine. Grazing pastures for cattle. Coffee in Brazil and Vietnam. The European Central Bank warned in May that water scarcity posed a risk to roughly 15% of the bloc’s economic output. War tends to make food shortages worse by disrupting supply routes and driving up prices for commodities such as oil.

Drought isn’t the only effect of climate change. There’s more intense heat and wind, not to mention the many manifestations of drought’s calamitous counterpart: rain, snow, and floods. Combined, climate change is bad for farming. A new paper in Nature calculates that, for every 1°C rise in global temperatures, global agricultural production will drop by the equivalent of 120kcal per person, or roughly 4.4% of the daily amount of food a person needs to eat.

U.S. economic outlook continues to darken, meanwhile. The Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index fell by 0.1% in May, its sixth consecutive monthly decline. April’s 1.4% drop was the index’s largest decline since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.