Sustainability has recently become an issue that more and more people are taking seriously. It should have always been a no-brainer but wasn't; but better late than never. Sustainability means, by clear implication, self-sufficiency and self-reliance over the long term.
The current increase in awareness and interest is, of course, partly due to the most serious global economic crisis since the great depression, through which even the uninitiated are finally seeing that our global, perpetual-growth-oriented economic system is no longer sustainable, if it ever was.
Yet, however, when most people think at all about sustainability they are still thinking in terms of economic sustainability, about sustainability of the materialistic lifestyle to which we have become accustomed this past half century, sustainability of sprawling suburbia and the family car, about sustainable development and growth, some way to sustain business as usual. But it's the thought that counts. Right?
The ability to get a significant number of people to think about real sustainability, long-term societal, environmental and species sustainability, is going to require a deep and fundamental change in mindset. The core of sustainability planning can not be that which is itself unsustainable. A problem cannot be its own solution.
I see it all the time, even in the peak oil groups in which I participate. People assume that a certain aspect of civilization or technology which they are particularly dependant upon will survive. So many people assume, for example, that if/when society collapses the internet will survive. It is so useful, after all. But most people are surprised to learn that it takes a tremendous amount of energy and technology to run the internet, especially in its global incarnation with which we have become so accustomed. I have friends in England, Germany, Brazil, South Africa, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand with whom I communicate all the time. It may be by e-mail. It may be live chat, either by text or even, frequently, by video and audio using our webcams. Sure, it's great. But I definitely do not assume that facility will still exist if society and the global economy seriously and terminally collapse.
The basic problem is that people think about changes relative to what currently is. They get fixated on what they are going to lose. They view the whole journey into the future negatively, as a journey away from the present with which they are knowledgeable and comfortable, like somebody moving out of their well-loved old house after the bank forecloses, rather than an exciting journey toward the future, like someone happily choosing to move into a new or different house.
The simple reality that seems to elude most people in the discussion about peak oil is that peak oil means peak food! There are far more people (6.6 billion) on this planet than the planet can sustain naturally, without the use of fossil fuels (many serious and credible researchers estimate the natural carrying capacity to be between 500 million and 1.5 billion). When those fossil fuels go into serious and irreversible decline, which they will, we are going to have to try to feed our massive population without them. Sustainability means, simply, the ability to feed the population, whether that consideration be local or global.
So, forget about the present! Our current society as it is can not survive peak oil. It is the business as usual of our human society that has turned peak oil into a crisis, if not an outright disaster/catastrophe. The loss of oil, after all, is not a crisis by itself. The crisis is created by our deep dependence on oil, especially for the production, processing and distribution of food.
Don't bemoan what we are leaving behind. Think about where we are going forward to. What will that future look like? If you are focused on the past the future will make itself and you will have to live with the results, whatever they are. Only by focusing on that future do you have any potential of controlling what that future will be. One way or another, a post-fossil-fuel future is coming. You can prepare for it but you can't prevent it. The best way not to be negatively affected by oil depletion is to not be dependent on oil. Set yourself free now, and many people are proving that is possible, while it is in your control to do so rather than have it forced on you.
I don't know what the future will be like. There are far too many variables. But I am reasonably convinced that whatever society emerges will not be based on cities as we have come to know them this past century (in recent decades we have reached the point where over half the world's population live in cities). Cities do not, and generally cannot, produce all of the resources they consume nor manage the refuse they generate (Toronto recently went through a 5-week garbage strike during which 25,000 tons of garbage piled up temporary dump sites in parks and rinks).
Modern cities, with their ever-expanding suburban sprawl and centralized concentration of business, industry and labour, are unsustainable, a product of the high energy age that will follow the energy downslope into the abyss. They draw their resources from ever larger externalities, starting with regions criss-crossed with canals and railways at the onset of the Industrial Revolution and now expanded to sucking in resources from all over the globe, those resources moved about the globe by energy-intensive ships and aircraft.
Long term sustainability as we approach and pass the end of the high-energy age is going to have to see a reversal of that trend. The focus will be forced into ever-decreasing spheres, from the global resource base down to the regional and community resource base. Sustainability for a community will mean resource self-sufficiency and community self-reliance. That which a community needs will have to be available within the community or its immediately surrounding area, only rarely by trade with neighbouring communities.
Let's look at some of the key components of that future community self-reliance and self sufficiency.
Seeds
The first key to community self-sufficiency will be food self-sufficiency, the ability of a community to produce all of the food needed to sustain its population. Almost all agriculture today is dependent on centralized seed companies. The crop varieties available are limited, having shrunken steadily since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Access to seeds is dependent on those central seed companies and an energy-intensive global distribution system. There are several companies, like Monsanto, Archer-Daniels-Midland and Cargill, whose corporate objective is to control the means of global food production. Increasingly seeds are both hybridized and genetically engineered, many with terminator genes so they will not produce seed, negating the age-old practice of seed-saving, saving the seed from this year's crop to produce next year's crop.
As global industry falters and the global distribution system grinds to a halt for lack of energy that seed system will, at first, become increasingly unreliable with the energy expense of distributing anything to rural areas. Eventually it will simply disappear.
For any community to be self-sufficient beyond the end of the oil and high-energy age it is going to have to become both willing and able to produce next year's seed from this year's crop. It is going to have to develop and maintain local crop variations suited to the local climate and soil conditions. This requires critical farming skills that have been lost over this past century that are going to have to be relearned before a community can develop this type of self-sufficiency. This will, of course, require some head start time (reliable estimate is two decades) so that the skills are built up before the industrial seed industry collapses.
There are, however, other aspects of this that require a head start as well. Few farmers today keep on hand seed for two years of crops. Why should they? They get their seed fresh each year from the seed company. If we wait until the seed companies collapse, however, where are the seeds going to come from with which to get started without them? If your crops are already in the ground, assuming they aren't genetically modified with terminator genes, you are going to have to let a significant portion of your crop go to seed at the end of the season in order to have enough seed for next year's crop. But suppose the seed industry collapses in winter or spring, after you have harvested your crops and before new seeds would normally be ordered. You will be absolutely dead in the water.
If you start saving seed now, or soon, you will not only develop skills in seed-saving but you will have your own seed on hand in the event of the collapse of the seed industry. You will also develop the knowledge of what crops are genetically modified and learned to avoid them in favour of natural crops that will produce seed which you can save.
This is not that easy, however. The seed industry is extremely aggressive in protecting its turf. Saving seed from crops produced using seeds purchased from a major seed company will probably be prohibited by law. You need to learn what heritage seeds are available to you, generally from small local seed companies, and use those as your starting point. Even then, however, as was the case with Percy Schmeiser and others, if your crop gets cross-contaminated from a nearby crop from patent-protected or genetically modified seed, you may be prohibited by law from saving seed produced by that entire crop. And the courts thus far have come down very much in favour of the seed companies in these cases. So there are many roadblocks in the way of your early preparation for this and almost all aspects of future sustainability. But persevere.
Water
In order to be self-sufficient and self-reliant on the other side of the energy collapse a community is going to be critically dependent on a safe, reliable, clean water supply. That's a no-brainer, right? There are the municipal water supply, the heavy duty industrial pumps to supply water for crop irrigation, water purification systems, running water in all the houses. All of these, of course, require a heavy investment of funds both to acquire but also to maintain. Once we are seriously into energy decline and the global distribution system begins to collapse and global industry runs into supply and distribution and cost problems all of these systems will begin to break down. Not too long afterward they will simply cease to function. The community is going to need in place a water supply system that is not dependent on fossil fuels, big expensive industrial machinery and equipment, heavy and expensive maintenance, and capable of supplying sustainably all of the community's water needs.
Unless you are starting a new community from the ground up, and I am definitely not recommending this, that is going to have to be done through an established, and probably very conservative, community council. Getting them to replace the current water systems with a new one designed for a post-fossil-fuel age that they do not understand is fast approaching is not going to be an easy task but, as with seeds above, waiting until it becomes a necessity is not going to work. The groundwork is going to have to be laid well in advance.
The safety issue concerns the presence of water management infrastructure upstream from the community. Dams, causeways, canals and canal locks, and other similar infrastructure has a limited lifespan and requires extensive and expensive maintenance. If any of these are upstream from the community the potential for catastrophic inundation of the community is elevated and the potential for interruption of the water supply gets greater over time. Global warming also has a significant potential to impact the future viability of your water supply, both in terms of seasonal flow and contamination. In addition, any industrial infrastructure upstream, such as mining operations with their toxic tailing ponds, has the high potential of contaminating your water source once maintenance of that infrastructure ceases with the collapse of the company or the industry.
Soil Fertility
Soil, like water, is critically important to all life on earth. The foundation for all higher life-forms is the plants that grow in the soil. Over millions of years nature has perfected techniques for creating, building and maintaining soil fertility for crops, fields, woodlands and wetlands.
Unfortunately nature's systems were not built around man. Our use of pesticides kills the important micro-organisms in the soil that are critical to fertility. Our use of artificial fertilizers seriously upsets the natural complex balance of minerals in the soil, those fertilizer focusing on primarily just three elements; nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. Herbicides destroy the other plants (we call them weeds) that are critical to support for the broad spectrum of soil micro-organisms that create complex soil fertility. Our monocropping encourages the overpopulation of specific groups of micro-organisms at the expense of others. Our plowing of fields upsets and even destroys the soil environment particular micro-organisms need, exposing deep soil organisms to the deadly (for them) air and the sun, suffocating shallow sub-surface micro-organism by burying them deep in the soil. Constant use of heavy farm equipment and plowing have built up a hardpan 6-8 inches below the surface that prevents the movement of critical micro-organisms up and down through the soil, prevents many plants from sinking roots deep enough to get sub-surface water, and builds up a layer of toxins just above the hardpan. Our constant irrigation of crops leaches critical nutrients out of the top soil, causes those crops to develop shallow root systems negating the ability of roots to bring minerals up from the deep sub-soil to the topsoil to nourish plants and micro-organisms and to bring up water from deep within the soil. The combination of over-irrigation and constant application of agro-chemicals has dramatically increased the salt content in the soil, so much so that long-used commercial agricultural soil and even whole farms have had to be abandoned because of the salt burden.
Almost all commercial agricultural soil is sterile, with all the nutrients for plants supplied by fertilizers and other agrochemical additives, soil and plant immune system functions dependent on pesticides and herbicides, water supplied by mechanical irrigation. When the advancing energy crisis forces us to farm without those the fertility needed to grow crops on that soil will simply not exist. It will have to be carefully rebuilt, either by nature or by us, before those soils can produce healthy, abundant crops. With the current levels of global population producing sufficient food on chemically sterilized soils will be impossible, another reality that will force the focus away from global and down to regional and community.
The basic components that must be restored to sterile soils are a full spectrum mineral complex, carbon, organic matter, nitrogen and, most importantly, a broad spectrum of soil micro-organisms. There are many soil improvement techniques that are beneficial, such as creating terra preta soil, but over time the full complexity of living soil must be restored if sustainability is to be achieved.
Farming skills
There is an unfortunate tendency today to think that those who own and run and work on farms are farmers, that they know how to farm. A fairer characterization would be mechano-chemical food producers. Take away their chemicals and their big equipment and and their mechanical irrigation and they wouldn't know where to begin.
There are, in the industrialized world in which we live, very few traditional farmers left and even fewer of their children are choosing to follow in their parents' footsteps. There are far too few to serve as a base for a new, post-fossil-fuel farming industry when the fossil fuels run out and the high-tech farm equipment stops running. That is not to suggest that traditional farming is the only method by which to produce sufficient volumes of food to feed a significant community. Permaculture, for example, is proving to be an excellent technique. But this too requires the long-term development of an extensive, in-the-field skill set, only the rudiments of which can be learned in a classroom.
The farming skills necessary to eke the optimum amount of food out of a piece of land are not easily come by. Even our agricultural schools today tend to focus on chemical/industrial farming techniques. Those fortunate enough to be learning traditional farming skills are doing so at the hand of one of those few traditional farmers still practicing their craft, by apprenticing at their shoulder.
And, of course, today's industrial farms are far too large to be farmed using traditional farming skills. They are designed for and dependent on fossil fuels and large equipment, designed for technological efficiency. They use specialized varieties of seeds to produce crops that can be efficiently harvested with massive mechanization. A return to traditional farming will also necessitate a return to traditional-sized farms, small, labour-intensive farms. The transition from industrial farming to traditional is going to require major land redistribution. The good news is that crop yields using traditional techniques (once the fertility of the soil has been re-established) are 20-50% higher or better.
Sustainable forest management
In any climate, particularly northern climates like Canada and Northern Europe, forests are going to be critical for sustainability in a post-fossil-fuel age. Unfortunately, in the climates in which they will be most needed the forests have long-since been decimated by clear cutting for agricultural land, building materials and urban development and expansion.
Most of the major forests that remain today are not near the population centers that are going to need them in a post-oil world. In a post-oil world forests are going to be needed still for building materials, for fuel, for soil retention and as a habitat for wild animals which will probably increasingly be turned to as a food source. As animal habitat what forests remain are sadly lacking, those forests hacked up into disconnected stands that offer little in the way of contiguous habitat.
In order to not further decimate the forests as fossil fuels run down and then run out a great deal of forest regrowth is going to be needed. It takes, if one includes hardwoods like maple and oak, a hundred years or more to grow a forest from seedlings. Even with the most optimistic peak oil forecasts we do not have that long. There is a lot of reforestation taking place today but most of that is for fast growing softwoods like pine, the objective of which is to quickly produce trees that can again be cut commercially. Sustainable forest management is only being practiced in a few places.
We need a massive, broad-based reforestation effort now to ensure that those forests are going to be there when the fossil fuels can no longer satisfy our needs. We need to stop the clearing and degredation of what forests still remain and give them an opportunity to develop old growth.
Draft Animals
Before fossil fuels farming was conducted using a combination of human and animal power. Before the advent of the automobile the population of horses in North America exceeded the number of humans. Today it is a small fraction of the human population and the vast majority of what stock does exist is for pleasure riding and racing. There are very few draft horses around and even fewer oxen, mules and donkeys.
The amount of labour that is going to be required to produce the food needed for a global human population of 6.6 billion plus when the fossil fuels have gone into irreversible decline is going to be massive. To enter that era without a massively increased stock of draft animals will mean that all of that work is going to have to accomplished with human labour. That will require well over half the human population (experienced) just producing food. It will take a minimum of two decades to build up the stock of draft animals to a level that we can effectively manage food production for that level of population without fossil fuels and mechanized farm equipment.
Non-mechanized farm equipment
Most of the non-mechanized farm equipment still in existence is being used for planters on suburban lawns or as decoration in front of country stores or rusting away behind dilapidated barns. There are few, if any, manufacturers of this equipment left in the industrialized world. An industry to produce such equipment is unlikely to build up before the demand is there for the product.
That presents an interesting Catch-22. The demand is not likely to be there before the fossil fuels needed for mechanized farming have gone into serious decline. It is unlikely that a whole new industry with heavy fossil fuel needs is going to be able to get off the ground when those very fossil fuels have gone into heavy decline. And government subsidies to facilitate development of such an industry are unlikely with a rapidly eroding tax base due to a shrinking labour market with the inevitable demise of industry as we know it.
Additionally that non-mechanized farm equipment manufactured and used in under-developed and developing countries, though it could in theory fill the need in the industrialized world, will not likely become available in the industrialized world due to the lack of raw materials and fuels in the countries of origin and the lack of shipping and fuel for it to be transported to the industrialized world.
Unless the political leadership in the industrialized world accept the imminence of peak oil, understand the implications that that event will encompass, and take it very seriously while there is still time to prepare, the transition to a post-carbon society in the industrialized world is going to be a very painful one.
Of course, another piece of non-mechanized equipment (not necessarily for the farm) that is manufactured and available in abundance in underdeveloped and developing countries is the bicycle. Utilitarian, rugged and, relative to the recreation and sport cycles available in the industrialized world, inexpensive. The bicycle is the perfect personal transport for a post-carbon world.
Trades, Arts and Crafts
Probably the greatest change on the community landscape over the past century is the loss of local community trades, arts and crafts. The former personal and community self-reliance has been traded for the convenience of the global market place driven by the availability of cheap, reliable fuel. Gone is the village blacksmith, the village cobbler, the village tailor, the village dressmaker, the village butcher. Gone are the local handmade furniture, clothings, the owner-built home, the locally-milled grain. Gone are the jacks-of-all-trades, which would describe half the population a century ago. Those trades that still exist within most communities are practiced in specialization to the exclusion of all others.
The village of a century ago could have survived the loss of oil. Hell the people might not even realize it had happened until well after the event when they noticed no trucks had come through town in the past six months. That same community today may have trouble surviving that six months. They would have long since run out of not just fuel but food and probably most durable goods, and be in no position to replace them locally. If that were the dead of winter in most Canadian communities teams of people would have to clean out the bodies in the spring.
Self-reliance.......... Without a global manufacturing and distribution system, or even a national one, self-reliance for the individual and the community, especially rural communities, is critical one we get well into the post-peak era. If the global and national manufacturing and distribution systems to not crash suddenly they will disintegrate gradually, becoming increasingly unreliable until they finally break down. The impact of this will be hardest in rural communities away from the manufacturing centers.
Conclusion
Peak oil is going to mean much more than the loss of oil and derivative fuels and other products. It is going to mean peak food, in an overpopulated world of over 6.6 billion people. The ability to produce food for that level of population with petro-chemical inputs will be severely hampered because of the impact that chemically-based farming has had on the commercial agriculture soils in the industrialized, food exporting countries of the world. It is going to take decades of highly focussed effort to ready ourselves for food self-sufficiency in a post-peak world, decades that should have started long ago.
With billions of lives at stake, including those of people in the industrialized world, we cannot afford to enter the peak oil era naively optimistic that technology will see us through, that we will find and develop alternative energy sources in time. And we certainly can't afford to enter this era blissfully ignorant of the severe ramifications of getting there unprepared.
Showing posts with label peak food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peak food. Show all posts
Monday, August 10, 2009
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
GMOs are N O T the Solution to the Current Global Food Crisis
In the current game of political football, as the world's leaders meet to discuss the means by which the current global food crisis might be solved, there seems to be a growing momentum building around support for a solution based on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The suggestion is that the world's industrial seed companies (e.g. Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland) should develop new genetically modified strains of food crops able to produce higher yields in the face of shifting global climates brought about by global warming.
Haven't we been here before? Aren't GMOs a major part of the reason we have gotten to this point?
The Green Revolution of this past half century came about as a response to the last global food crisis. It was centered on the use of high-yield GMO seeds, the liberal use of soil and water polluting artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, large-tract, mechanized, industrial agriculture, high density irrigation using mechanical pumps and water drawn from both increasingly polluted surface water and and dangerously over extracted groundwater sources, an energy-intensive global food distribution system. It was based on the industrial production of food and the building of a global industrial dependence through the supplying of food to the world's poor, rather than supplying to them the ability to produce their own food. And ultimately it created the current global food crisis through allowing, even encouraging, a tripling of the world's population from a little more than two billion to the current 6.6 billion with a new U.S. (300 million people) added to the population every year.
So what's the problem? The problem is that the Green Revolution was and continues to be dependent on the constant availability of cheap energy, especially cheap oil. GMOs are a high-tech solution to a natural problem. And high-tech means high energy consumption.
A problem cannot be its own solution. We cannot solve the current global crisis caused by the Green Revolution by doing more of the same. Those high yields on which the Green Revolution was based come at the expense of tremendous loss of life-supporting topsoil through erosion and overcropping, and the irreversible destruction and drawdown of both surface water and groundwater (aquifers) sources. It has led to the unsustainable destruction of forests critical to the planet's ability to balance the climate, and critical to the planet's water cycle, atmospheric cycle and carbon cycle. To seek to solve those problems with even more industrial agriculture and even higher yields, which will undoubtedly require higher uses of petrochemicals and water and the higher loss of critical topsoil, is no solution at all.
Most importantly, the Green Revolution was, as mentioned above, dependent on abundant cheap energy. A key part of the reason the current crisis has developed as that the world's oil supplies are declining at a rate that has pushed us toward various alternative fuel sources. The most critical of those, of course, is biofuels which have directly contributed to the current, escalating global food crisis. To move forward into a future that will be even more deprived of the cheap abundant energy on which the Green Revolution depends with a strategy that will perpetuate that agricultural need of cheap, abundant energy is taking the crisis of today, pushing it out a couple of decades and transforming it from a crisis into a catastrophe.
The Green Revolution has already allowed - almost demanded - the global human population to push into serious overshoot. There is not enough global agricultural capacity to support the present global human population, let alone the additional human population that would result from a second Green Revolution. To attack the current global food crisis without also addressing the very sensitive and complex problem of human overpopulation and the need for global population control is to offer no solution at all.
Haven't we been here before? Aren't GMOs a major part of the reason we have gotten to this point?
The Green Revolution of this past half century came about as a response to the last global food crisis. It was centered on the use of high-yield GMO seeds, the liberal use of soil and water polluting artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, large-tract, mechanized, industrial agriculture, high density irrigation using mechanical pumps and water drawn from both increasingly polluted surface water and and dangerously over extracted groundwater sources, an energy-intensive global food distribution system. It was based on the industrial production of food and the building of a global industrial dependence through the supplying of food to the world's poor, rather than supplying to them the ability to produce their own food. And ultimately it created the current global food crisis through allowing, even encouraging, a tripling of the world's population from a little more than two billion to the current 6.6 billion with a new U.S. (300 million people) added to the population every year.
So what's the problem? The problem is that the Green Revolution was and continues to be dependent on the constant availability of cheap energy, especially cheap oil. GMOs are a high-tech solution to a natural problem. And high-tech means high energy consumption.
A problem cannot be its own solution. We cannot solve the current global crisis caused by the Green Revolution by doing more of the same. Those high yields on which the Green Revolution was based come at the expense of tremendous loss of life-supporting topsoil through erosion and overcropping, and the irreversible destruction and drawdown of both surface water and groundwater (aquifers) sources. It has led to the unsustainable destruction of forests critical to the planet's ability to balance the climate, and critical to the planet's water cycle, atmospheric cycle and carbon cycle. To seek to solve those problems with even more industrial agriculture and even higher yields, which will undoubtedly require higher uses of petrochemicals and water and the higher loss of critical topsoil, is no solution at all.
Most importantly, the Green Revolution was, as mentioned above, dependent on abundant cheap energy. A key part of the reason the current crisis has developed as that the world's oil supplies are declining at a rate that has pushed us toward various alternative fuel sources. The most critical of those, of course, is biofuels which have directly contributed to the current, escalating global food crisis. To move forward into a future that will be even more deprived of the cheap abundant energy on which the Green Revolution depends with a strategy that will perpetuate that agricultural need of cheap, abundant energy is taking the crisis of today, pushing it out a couple of decades and transforming it from a crisis into a catastrophe.
The Green Revolution has already allowed - almost demanded - the global human population to push into serious overshoot. There is not enough global agricultural capacity to support the present global human population, let alone the additional human population that would result from a second Green Revolution. To attack the current global food crisis without also addressing the very sensitive and complex problem of human overpopulation and the need for global population control is to offer no solution at all.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Peak Oil and the Three Sisters of Social Collapse
Three of the fundamental and basic human needs - food, water and shelter - have in the past century all become critically and increasingly dependent on technology and the fossil fuels that power it - at least in the developed world but also to a lesser and growing extent in the underdeveloped and developing world. These three needs will, as we pass peak oil, become the three sisters of global but uneven social collapse. Peak oil alone would make that a serious problem but they are also each going to be heavily impacted by the progression of anthropogenic or man-made global warming. Both of these serious global problems, it now appears, will occur at roughly the same time, seriously increasing the risk in these three critical areas. The whole in this case is definitely greater than the sum of the parts.
The predominant focus of debate around the peak oil issue is still, unfortunately, centered on energy itself; endless debate over when oil will peak; obfuscation over sweet versus sour versus synthetic crude, debate over the minutiae of various alternative energy options; the price of gasoline/petrol, etc. That is as much a form of denial within the peak oil community as that practiced by energy executives, politicians and the mainstream media. Peak oil is not about the oil! Focusing on the energy itself is safe, makes one appear to be aware and involved while successfully avoiding dealing with the disastrous implications of that peak and decline. Keeping the focus on energy is a self-perpetuating debate by setting up easy deniability for energy executives and their paid-for politicians, allowing them to attack the variability and imprecision in the various peak oil estimates. That in turn facilitates their continuing the climate of endless disinformation that easily serves as a smokescreen and a roadblock to beginning the increasingly critical process of preparing for the transition away from fossil fuels, a process that should have begun with the 1970s oil shocks if not earlier when the concept of peak oil was first introduced by M. King Hubbert in the 1950s.
But that transition is not or should not simply be a question of finding a workable alternative for our profligate use of oil and the other fossil fuels to power our modern society in the style to which we have become accustomed. That is, or should be, an impossible dream. Put simply, how could we move a world consisting of 6.6+billion people, 1+billion automobiles, hundreds of millions of trucks, buses, trains, planes, ships and heavy equipment, trillions of dollars of energy-dependant infrastructure and 300,000+ products at least partially made from or derived from oil and other fossil fuels into an era of declining fossil fuels that will be effectively devoid of those fossil fuels (from an EROEI perspective) within a century without impacting that society? The answer? We can't. As we approach peak oil, however (if we have not already arrived there and moved beyond it, as I believe we have), rather than dealing with that question and getting on with the transition and the massive and sometimes traumatic changes it will entail, we continue to increase our reliance on fossil energy and technology in these three areas of basic need.
The bulk of the food produced in the world today (and the foundation of the artificial carrying capacity, created as part of the Green Revolution, on which our massive surplus population survives) is very much dependant on heavy duty agricultural machinery driven by fossil fuels, massive applications of artificial fertilizers and pesticides produced from fossil fuels, on energy-intensive GMO seeds (as much as 70% of the crops we eat are now produced using GMO seeds), on the major, energy-intensive global distribution network that gets them to the farmers and the food they produce to your table, and on irrigation facilitated through powerful, fossil-energy-dependant pumps extracting water from both surface water (lakes and rivers) and groundwater (aquifers) sources (globally 70-75% of our freshwater usage is for agricultural irrigation). The building global food crisis - food riots have already occurred in several countries such as Egypt and Haiti and are probable in many more as this year progresses, and in many of the world's poorest nations food purchases already consume 50-90% of the average person's meagre income - is not so much a problem of insufficient food or even insufficient land on which to grow it. The problem is rapidly decreasing global agricultural productivity, a result of a staggering annual global loss of topsoil from erosion, toxification and salinity and a rapidly growing deficiency in soil fertility, largely a result of industrialized, petrochemical-intensive agriculture and decades of serious overcropping.
Soil fertility is produced by millions of soil micro-organisms which are all being decimated by our profligate and dangerous overuse of agrochemicals. Soil erosion and other forms of land degradation, in fact, now rob the world of 70-140,000 square kilometers per year of farm land. The total world availability of topsoil is estimated at 7,000 gigatonnes - about seventy years of topsoil at current rates of destruction and loss according to a U.N. estimate. The peak slaughter of these critical soil organisms will occur concurrent with peak oil and at the same time, therefore, that our global need for natural soil fertility will begin a dramatic increase. Globally, food availability, especially for the poor - the global emergency food grain reserve, as I detailed in my article Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity, has shrunk over this past decade from a marginal 120 day supply to a sub-critical 53-55 day supply [5] - is further exacerbated by the rapid increase in meat consumption in the world's major developing nations like India and China and in the frantic push toward biofuels in the rich, western nations, biofuels being produced from those already diminishing global stocks of food grains.
The vast majority of new water and irrigation projects in this past half century have been reliant on the use of powerful pumps to extract water from underground aquifers (many of which are non-replenishable, like the heavily-exploited Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S. midwest, and the majority of which are being drawn down at levels well above their replenishment rate - many of the world's major aquifers, both replenishable and non-replenishable, are declining by more than twenty feet per year), desalination plants heavily dependant on fossil fuels (this same desalination technology may soon have to be used on water drawn from coastal aquifers, like those in many nations in the middle east, which are becoming increasingly contaminated from saltwater intrusion because of excessive drawdown), powerful, energy-intensive irrigation equipment for irrigating large monoculture fields, desperate increases in agricultural development in arid areas, marginal lands and even deserts. It is a common fallacy, particularly in most of Europe and North America, to think that our supplies of fresh water are somewhat infinite. The reality is, as the report UN Highlights World Water Crisis outlines, "Despite the fact that 75 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by water, only 2.5 percent of it is fresh water, and three-quarters of that is locked up in glaciers and permanent snow cover. Only 0.3 percent of the water is surface water, found in rivers and lakes. The rest is buried deep in the ground."[6] The general lack of awareness of the limits of earth's easily-accessible freshwater resources leads to dangerous over-exploitation and abuse. Imagine the energy crisis we would be looking at if only 2.5% or 0.3% of the oil in the world were accessible, recoverable and usable and the cornucopean energy executives had been reassuring us for decades that it was all recoverable. It wouldn't much matter if there were people saying this wasn't true and that a crisis is coming. There is an unfortunate tendency for people to believe - and even go out of their way to find - those who are telling them what they want to hear, that there is no problem.
The infrastructure (using the broadest, social definition of infrastructure) on which our modern societies are so dependant (including the homes in which we live) has primarily been constructed in the past half century, most of it with a designed life span of fifty to seventy-five years (will all of those mass-produced McMansions really last that long?), built of materials that are derived from or dependant on fossil fuels, and requiring heavy fossil fuel inputs in their maintenance, upkeep and demolition. "There's a tremendous need," said Larry Roth, a professional engineer who is deputy executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers. "Not only are we not keeping pace with growth, but we're not keeping pace with the maintenance that's required. As a result, our infrastructure is simply crumbling."[1] Most of this infrastructure will achieve and surpass its designed life span just as we pass peak oil when the natural resources (Mike Stasse, owner and moderator of ROEOZ, in his excellent paper, What Went Wrong, calls it natural capital) to replace it will no longer be available, when the energy, materials, finances, trained people resources and technology required to maintain it will no longer be available, and even when the technology and resources to decommission or demolish it are becoming increasingly unavailable (how do you tear down a fifty storey steel and glass tower before it falls down, or decommission a massive dam before it collapses and possibly kills hundreds of thousands or even millions of people?). The costs of infrastructure maintenance, always underestimated, are sobering. “We have a major infrastructure problem in this country,” said Maureen L. McAvey, an executive vice president with the Urban Land Institute, which recently published a report on global infrastructure issues. “The civil engineers have estimated that we have a $1.7 trillion shortfall in this country [U.S.A.] alone”[2]. And the growth of this deficit is very likely to accelerate as the growth economy grinds to a halt. Maintenance is almost invariably the first place that budget managers look for cuts when finances get tight.
Much of the money that needs to be spent on preparing our society for life beyond fossil fuels in the areas of food production, water usage and infrastructure maintenance, replacement, decommissioning and rebuilding, is being drained off paying for the increasing cost of supporting our car-centric mobility and our energy-dependant lifestyle. Oil prices - as well as the cost of other fossil fuels and the cost of almost everything as everything is at least partially dependent on the cost of oil and other fossil fuels - have increased dramatically over these past several years as we are increasingly dependent on more expensive and more technologically-challenging sources of energy. Shawn McCarthy, in his Toronto Globe & Mail Report on Business article, Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war, writes, "The average cost of producing a barrel of oil has more than doubled in the past eight years, with most of that increase occurring in the past four, he[Matt Simmons] said."[3] The fossil-energy story doesn't end at oil, however. Natural gas is also fast approaching peak and prices are increasing in lockstep with the price of oil. And Richard Heinberg reports, in his article Burning the Furniture, "A soon-to-be-released study by the Energy Watch Group in Germany [the report has now been released] on the future of global coal supplies has implications so surprising and far-reaching that energy policymakers may take years to digest it. ..... The report’s central conclusion is that minable global coal reserves are much smaller than is commonly thought, and that a peak in world coal production is likely within only ten to fifteen years."[4]
Much of the misinformation and disinformation surrounding these three primary issues centers on the complexity of quantity versus quality. GMO crops, despite constant claims otherwise, produced with massive applications of artificial fertilizers and bombarded with herbicides and pesticides simply do not have either the taste or nutritional value of natural foods produced with non-chemical, organic methods. GMO seeds, particularly with the boost of global climate change, may produce larger plants and higher yields per acre but the result is like sugar- and salt-laden snack foods. The bulk is there but they are devoid of nutritional value. Like those snack foods, the more you eat the hungrier you get. The world is also lapsing into a global food allergy crisis as our digestive and immune systems struggle to adapt to relying on these unnatural foods for our nutrition.
Over one fifth of the global population today do not have access to clean drinking water. As many as a quarter of the deaths in poor third world countries is caused by water borne diseases, most commonly and crtically dehydration from diahrea caused by contaminated water. Another one fifth of the world's population only have access to one quarter to one tenth the amount of drinking water that the U.N. has established as the daily minimum requirement, and not enough water for basic hygienne. This problem worsens with each passing year. It is estimated that the majority of the global population increase over the next half century will be in areas already struggling with critical water shortages.
The glut of infrastructure development over this past half century has neglected durability and survivability in favour of speed, ease and cost reduction of construction. Sprawling suburbs of cookie-cutter houses and strip malls have grown like a cancer outward from established urban centers which are all expanding outward toward each other, gobbling up the low-density rural spaces between them. Cities have rapidly evolved over this past century into morbidly obese mega-cities covering thousands of square kilometers of concrete entombment.
It is difficult for many to understand why and how food, water and infrastructure can form the foundation of global social collapse without first gaining an understanding of the individual contributors to that collapse, the small details and problems which by themselves may seem meaningless but when combined together do build to a monumental crisis that can and will engulf the entirety of global society. This is further complicated by a general and understandable uncertainty as to the relative timing of peak oil and the subsequent decline in oil and other fossil fuels and the progression of global waming/climate change. But variability in timing ultimately affects only the severity of the challenges at any point in time. The following is by no means intended as a complete list of these problem areas but rather a representative sample.
....Over this past half century the vast majority of small, regional seed companies (many specializing in maintaining rare varieties of crop seeds) have disappeared, gobbled up by multinational companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont and others. This has resulted in a rapid decline in genetic diversity as these large multinationals focus on their favourite varieties on the basis of business economics. It has also, however, made seed production a centralized industry dependent on the global distribution system, often with global seed production concentrated in either the northern or southern hemisphere, out of sync with the seasonal seed needs of the other hemsphere. This has made global agriculture and the seeds on which it relies a handmaiden of the global economy and, with centralized production and global distribution, the global energy situation. It's not just a question of reactivating and regrowing the small regional seed companies. The biodiversity of the available seed line will not be sufficient to accomodate the needs of regional climate and soil diversity. The risk and impact of crop loss with an increasingly limited global emergency food reserves is often discussed. Rarely considered, however, is the globalization of that risk if the crops being lost are the seed production of these centralized seed production companies. A major crop loss in one area, without redundancy built into the global seed production system, could suddenly wipe out the needed seed supply of much of the world. Similarly, with the drastic reduction of crop biodiversity under the control of multinational seed companies, the risk of a sudden susceptibility of a particular, widely-used variety of crop could leave much of the world with no usable fall-back variety.
....Global demand for food crops continues to rise. This is due to continued increases in the global population (more mouths to feed), global changes in food and nutrition requirements (more people turning to meat as their source of protein), more and more food crops being diverted to the production of biofuels. The problem arises from the fact that the demand for the resources required to grow that food do not rise at the same rate. While the population has tripled over the past century the usage of fresh water ras risen over six fold and the water for agriculture over eight fold. In the past twenty five years alone global use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides has grown by an amazing thirty-three times. The amount of energy involved in food production has grown exponentially over this past century to the point that for every calorie of food energy produced and consumed more than ten calories or energy input Are required. Food miles traveled by food produced has gone through the stratosphere this past half century with food travelling now more thasn 1500 miles between field and table. Topsoil loss has grown dramatically over this past have century because of serious overcropping, erosion from irrigation and bare-field tillage, losses due to chemical toxicity and salination. Resource consumption and depletion involved in producing those ever greater quantities of food, therefore, is dramatically greater than the additional food produced.
....There was a time not that long ago when for practically ever farmer, regardless of the crop produced, saving and storing his own seed was still standard practice, and more recently still was in the underdeveloped and developing world. This localised, cultural practice of seed saving was a key component of food crop biodiversity around the world, with local varieties of the same crop genetically evolving independent of the same crop in other parts of the world. With the insidious spread of GMO seeds this critical component of biodiversity is disappearing. Everyone in agriculture knows the tremendous cost and complexity of taking on the big multinational seed companies when their seed cops invade your property and accuse you of saving seeds from their crop when your own crop has been cross-contaminated from crops of neighbouring farmers using their patented seeds. The use of GMO seeds is so ubiquitous that the ability to prevent cross-contamination of your own crop, a product of generation after generation of careful seed saving, is very slim. Often their own carefully-saved seed turns out to be sterile after cross-contamination from a GMO containing a terminator gene, a gene inserted to prevent the plant from producing seed or to cause it to produce a sterile seed so the plant can't be reproduced from its own seed, this securing the dependence of the farmer on the seed company. Even those farmers who are trying to hold out against the seed giants are finding their crops contaminated and the courts consistently come down in favour of the big multinational seed giants.
....With the bulk of modern agricultural crops being produced from GMO seeds restrictively produced in one area of the world and shipped all around the world from that one point, the production of the world's food is becoming rapidly and increasingly dependent on the health of the global economic system. This will make the next depression, when it happens, so much different from any past depression. In severe economic downturns of the past, or in times of war and heavy civil unrest, people would quickly revert to producing their own food and this was very often the key to surviving the hard times. Even if you have a crop today, the chances of your continuing to produce a crop in the event of a severe economic downturn or social chaos are extremely slim because your crop probably will not produce a usable seed and the seed company will very likely have fallen on hard times as the economy implodes. Where is the food to come from if no one is saving seeds, the small regional seed companies no longer exist, and the multinational seed companies that produce all the seed and the global distribution system that gets them to the farmer go out of business in an economic downturn?
....The bulk of the commercially produced food crops in the world (as opposed to the personal garden) are produced with the use of specialized, heavy farm equipment. With the exception of some of the equipment available in some third world nations, the equipment needed for small scale farming, the equipment meant to be used with human or animal power alone, the equipment that our ancestors used a century ago simply no longer exists, nor do the companies and the manufacturing equipment to produce it. Most of us have seen a piece or two of such equipment rusting beside a barn or planted with flowers on a suburban lawn. If the coming energy-decline economic downturn is very slow and very gradual and business, industry and government act with foresight, and the raw resources to do so are available, it is possible that the production of such equipment can be revitalized and ramped up in time to prevent an economic recession or depression turning into a critical global food crisis. That is a lot of ifs that are extremely unlikely to all come together in the right way and at the right time.
....There is an old and, at one time, frequently used expression that somewhat pinpoints the agricultural crisis that awaits us on the other side of peak oil: dirt farmer. Today's farmers are mostly chemical farmers and machine operators (I apologize to any legitimate dirt farmers who take umbrage with that generalization). When the fertilizers and pesticides are no longer available and the tractor and combine and electric milking system no longer function most of today's farmers will be as ill-equipped for farming as the person born, raised, and having spent their entire lives in the inner city. It is a common fallacy to think that when the machinery stops running we'll revert to labour-intensive manual farming as more and more people get involved, as workers, in the production of the food they consume. But who is to teach them what to do? Who is to teach them how to work a field of crops without the aid of machinery? Who is to show them the difference between a seedling of a food plant and the sprout of a weed? At the beginning of the last century as much as 50% of the population were involved in the production of food. Today that is less than 2%. Getting from here to non-chemical, non-mechanized, non-industrial, labour-intensive farming is going to take decades of rebuilding the skills and knowledge bases that will be needed. Trying to do this on the other side of peak oil, when the ability to absorb years or decades of non-productive trial and error doesn't exist, could be truly devestating.
....Along with the disappearance of local seed companies this last half century has also seen a wholesale collapse of the local grain storage and milling business. There was a time that virtually every small agricultural community had a small-scale miller where local farmers would take their seed to; be stored; turned into animal feed; turned into flour; pooled and shipped to centralized grain terminals, stored (and often mixed with that of other local producers) as seed for next year's grain crop. Local bakers would get the flour they used from the local miller. Often the miller, generally a grain farmer himself, would take as payment a set amount of the grain he was given to mill or the product he produced from that milling. Often miller and baker were one in the same. My small town had such a mill until twenty years ago. Now all of the grain produced goes into the impersonal national and global distribution system. The chance of the grain produced in an area even ending up on the tables of local residents is extremely slim. Once the distribution system begins to break down and the large, centralized milling companies begin to falter because of operating costs, lack of feed stock and lack of markets, how are small scale grain producers to have their grain processed into flour and seed? It could take a decade or more to revitalize and rebuild the local milling industry.
....Tomatoes in February. Ice-cream in July. New Zealand spring lamb and kiwi fruit in Toronto. Canadian maple syrup and bacon in Sydney Australia. Our food and our food tastes are a biproduct of a global food distribution system that is critically dependent on high-volume, long-distance shipping and energy-intensive refrigeration both in shipping and in general storage. When I was a child we had a root cellar for over-winter cold storage of root crops, nuts, grains and certain other fruit and vegetable crops. In addition we had an extensive food storage cellar that got restocked every fall with preserves and canned (meaning bottled) vegetables and fruits, dehydrated vegetable fruits, and a host of other preserved foods. Much of the food preserved we grew ourselves but that which wasn't was purchased locally and grown locally. When the global food distribution system begins to break down on the other side of peak oil, when energy-intensive refrigeration is no longer available for storing food after the harvest, when the materials such as mason jars, crocks, sterilizing equipment critical to canning food, when the supermarkets can no longer be looked upon as the primary source of the family's food, how will people manage? How will you manage? It could take a decade or longer to reaquire the skills and equipment and storage facilities necessary to ensure your family has food to eat at any time of the year.
....Over the last half century while much of the world has become increasingly dependent on groundwater from aquifers (97% of the world's liquid freshwater) for drinking water, industry, agricultural irrigation, and frivolous usage such as golf courses and casino fountains, the would's fresh surface water resources (lakes and rivers) have become increasingly contaminated with chemical toxins and aghricultural runoff. Although surface water is part of the global hydro-cycle and the water in the surface water systems turns over in a matter of days (water in aquifers is trapped there for, on average, 1400 years) the toxins in those systems build up in bottom sediments and continue to keep the water above toxic. It could take decades or even centuries for nature to remove the toxins that have built up in contaminated surface water systems. This is a matter of critical importance as we pass peak oil. Our ability to rely on deep aquifers for our fresh water (most shallow aquifers have already been sucked dry or have become contaminated in the same way and at the same rate as surface water), most of which are already heavilly over-exploited and declining by twenty feet or more per year, will disappear as the electricity and fossil fuels to run the massive pumps that are needed to draw water from these deep aquifers gets increasingly scarce and unreliable. Hand pumps - there were four of them within 200 yards of the home in which I grew up on which we relied for water in our plumbing-void house - are genrally not powerful enough to draw water from deep aquifers. Hand pumps are also a very scarce commodity in our industrialized society. This could place much of the world in the same position as one fifth of the world's people already are, having to rely on contaminated, chemically-toxic, disease-laden surface water and shallow aquifers for not just agricultural irrigation but for industrial use, basic hygienne and drinking water. The rate of incidence of death from water-borne diseases, which already claims millions every year, will most certainly increase exponentially.
....Vast tracts of homes have been constructed over this past half century in our industrial society. They are built to standards that assume there will be sufficient fossil-fuel and electrical energy to maintain heat to a level of 70F degrees or higher in winter and cool them to a comfortable 70F or lower in the heat of summer. Without this high-energy input those homes, more and more with sealed windows, do not have the insulation and thermal mass levels needed to maintain a home within livable standards. When the seriously-aging and materially-crumbling grids fail, even sporadically, and the fossil fuels are not available, sporadic, or priced beyond the reach of the average household, the vast majority of our modern homes will become increasingly problematic. To upgrade them all (hundreds of millions of them) to a thermal standard able to cope with the coming declines in fossil fuels will not only prove very expensive but will probably run up against increasing material shortages as available resources decline. And we most certainly aren't going to be able to think in terms of buldozing he suburbs and starting over again with housing suitable to a world of steadilly decreasing energy.
In what has become known as The Hirsch Report (commissioned by the U.S. congress and co-authored by Hirsch) [7] Robert Hirsch adamantly makes the point that it would take a minimum of 1-2 decades to prepare for the energy crisis presented by peak oil, if that effort were begun before peak oil arrived. That may already have become a moot point as we may already have passed that point with no such preparation having yet been done. But the energy crisis represented by peak oil, as I have tried to show here, is a small portion of the problems that peak oil will create or seriously exacerbate. Where preparation for the energy crisis may take 1-2 decades preparing for the parallel food, water and infrastructure crises could take many times that, could be 1-2 centuries rather than 1-2 decades with the same qualifier, that the effort is begun before peak oil, and with the additional qualifier that priority usage of the world's remaining fossil energy reserves be given to this effort. We spent the first half of the world's fossil fuel reserves creating the world as it is. It will take the other half to recreate the world as it will need to be to be workable without those fossil fuels.
===========================
1) Is aging infrastructure slowing the U.S.?
2) Engineers See Dangers in Aging Infrastructure
3) Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war - Shawn McCarthy, Globe & Mail - Report on Business
4) Burning the furniture by Richard Heinberg
5) Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity
6) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
7) Peaking Of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management
The predominant focus of debate around the peak oil issue is still, unfortunately, centered on energy itself; endless debate over when oil will peak; obfuscation over sweet versus sour versus synthetic crude, debate over the minutiae of various alternative energy options; the price of gasoline/petrol, etc. That is as much a form of denial within the peak oil community as that practiced by energy executives, politicians and the mainstream media. Peak oil is not about the oil! Focusing on the energy itself is safe, makes one appear to be aware and involved while successfully avoiding dealing with the disastrous implications of that peak and decline. Keeping the focus on energy is a self-perpetuating debate by setting up easy deniability for energy executives and their paid-for politicians, allowing them to attack the variability and imprecision in the various peak oil estimates. That in turn facilitates their continuing the climate of endless disinformation that easily serves as a smokescreen and a roadblock to beginning the increasingly critical process of preparing for the transition away from fossil fuels, a process that should have begun with the 1970s oil shocks if not earlier when the concept of peak oil was first introduced by M. King Hubbert in the 1950s.
But that transition is not or should not simply be a question of finding a workable alternative for our profligate use of oil and the other fossil fuels to power our modern society in the style to which we have become accustomed. That is, or should be, an impossible dream. Put simply, how could we move a world consisting of 6.6+billion people, 1+billion automobiles, hundreds of millions of trucks, buses, trains, planes, ships and heavy equipment, trillions of dollars of energy-dependant infrastructure and 300,000+ products at least partially made from or derived from oil and other fossil fuels into an era of declining fossil fuels that will be effectively devoid of those fossil fuels (from an EROEI perspective) within a century without impacting that society? The answer? We can't. As we approach peak oil, however (if we have not already arrived there and moved beyond it, as I believe we have), rather than dealing with that question and getting on with the transition and the massive and sometimes traumatic changes it will entail, we continue to increase our reliance on fossil energy and technology in these three areas of basic need.
The bulk of the food produced in the world today (and the foundation of the artificial carrying capacity, created as part of the Green Revolution, on which our massive surplus population survives) is very much dependant on heavy duty agricultural machinery driven by fossil fuels, massive applications of artificial fertilizers and pesticides produced from fossil fuels, on energy-intensive GMO seeds (as much as 70% of the crops we eat are now produced using GMO seeds), on the major, energy-intensive global distribution network that gets them to the farmers and the food they produce to your table, and on irrigation facilitated through powerful, fossil-energy-dependant pumps extracting water from both surface water (lakes and rivers) and groundwater (aquifers) sources (globally 70-75% of our freshwater usage is for agricultural irrigation). The building global food crisis - food riots have already occurred in several countries such as Egypt and Haiti and are probable in many more as this year progresses, and in many of the world's poorest nations food purchases already consume 50-90% of the average person's meagre income - is not so much a problem of insufficient food or even insufficient land on which to grow it. The problem is rapidly decreasing global agricultural productivity, a result of a staggering annual global loss of topsoil from erosion, toxification and salinity and a rapidly growing deficiency in soil fertility, largely a result of industrialized, petrochemical-intensive agriculture and decades of serious overcropping.
Soil fertility is produced by millions of soil micro-organisms which are all being decimated by our profligate and dangerous overuse of agrochemicals. Soil erosion and other forms of land degradation, in fact, now rob the world of 70-140,000 square kilometers per year of farm land. The total world availability of topsoil is estimated at 7,000 gigatonnes - about seventy years of topsoil at current rates of destruction and loss according to a U.N. estimate. The peak slaughter of these critical soil organisms will occur concurrent with peak oil and at the same time, therefore, that our global need for natural soil fertility will begin a dramatic increase. Globally, food availability, especially for the poor - the global emergency food grain reserve, as I detailed in my article Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity, has shrunk over this past decade from a marginal 120 day supply to a sub-critical 53-55 day supply [5] - is further exacerbated by the rapid increase in meat consumption in the world's major developing nations like India and China and in the frantic push toward biofuels in the rich, western nations, biofuels being produced from those already diminishing global stocks of food grains.
The vast majority of new water and irrigation projects in this past half century have been reliant on the use of powerful pumps to extract water from underground aquifers (many of which are non-replenishable, like the heavily-exploited Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S. midwest, and the majority of which are being drawn down at levels well above their replenishment rate - many of the world's major aquifers, both replenishable and non-replenishable, are declining by more than twenty feet per year), desalination plants heavily dependant on fossil fuels (this same desalination technology may soon have to be used on water drawn from coastal aquifers, like those in many nations in the middle east, which are becoming increasingly contaminated from saltwater intrusion because of excessive drawdown), powerful, energy-intensive irrigation equipment for irrigating large monoculture fields, desperate increases in agricultural development in arid areas, marginal lands and even deserts. It is a common fallacy, particularly in most of Europe and North America, to think that our supplies of fresh water are somewhat infinite. The reality is, as the report UN Highlights World Water Crisis outlines, "Despite the fact that 75 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by water, only 2.5 percent of it is fresh water, and three-quarters of that is locked up in glaciers and permanent snow cover. Only 0.3 percent of the water is surface water, found in rivers and lakes. The rest is buried deep in the ground."[6] The general lack of awareness of the limits of earth's easily-accessible freshwater resources leads to dangerous over-exploitation and abuse. Imagine the energy crisis we would be looking at if only 2.5% or 0.3% of the oil in the world were accessible, recoverable and usable and the cornucopean energy executives had been reassuring us for decades that it was all recoverable. It wouldn't much matter if there were people saying this wasn't true and that a crisis is coming. There is an unfortunate tendency for people to believe - and even go out of their way to find - those who are telling them what they want to hear, that there is no problem.
The infrastructure (using the broadest, social definition of infrastructure) on which our modern societies are so dependant (including the homes in which we live) has primarily been constructed in the past half century, most of it with a designed life span of fifty to seventy-five years (will all of those mass-produced McMansions really last that long?), built of materials that are derived from or dependant on fossil fuels, and requiring heavy fossil fuel inputs in their maintenance, upkeep and demolition. "There's a tremendous need," said Larry Roth, a professional engineer who is deputy executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers. "Not only are we not keeping pace with growth, but we're not keeping pace with the maintenance that's required. As a result, our infrastructure is simply crumbling."[1] Most of this infrastructure will achieve and surpass its designed life span just as we pass peak oil when the natural resources (Mike Stasse, owner and moderator of ROEOZ, in his excellent paper, What Went Wrong, calls it natural capital) to replace it will no longer be available, when the energy, materials, finances, trained people resources and technology required to maintain it will no longer be available, and even when the technology and resources to decommission or demolish it are becoming increasingly unavailable (how do you tear down a fifty storey steel and glass tower before it falls down, or decommission a massive dam before it collapses and possibly kills hundreds of thousands or even millions of people?). The costs of infrastructure maintenance, always underestimated, are sobering. “We have a major infrastructure problem in this country,” said Maureen L. McAvey, an executive vice president with the Urban Land Institute, which recently published a report on global infrastructure issues. “The civil engineers have estimated that we have a $1.7 trillion shortfall in this country [U.S.A.] alone”[2]. And the growth of this deficit is very likely to accelerate as the growth economy grinds to a halt. Maintenance is almost invariably the first place that budget managers look for cuts when finances get tight.
Much of the money that needs to be spent on preparing our society for life beyond fossil fuels in the areas of food production, water usage and infrastructure maintenance, replacement, decommissioning and rebuilding, is being drained off paying for the increasing cost of supporting our car-centric mobility and our energy-dependant lifestyle. Oil prices - as well as the cost of other fossil fuels and the cost of almost everything as everything is at least partially dependent on the cost of oil and other fossil fuels - have increased dramatically over these past several years as we are increasingly dependent on more expensive and more technologically-challenging sources of energy. Shawn McCarthy, in his Toronto Globe & Mail Report on Business article, Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war, writes, "The average cost of producing a barrel of oil has more than doubled in the past eight years, with most of that increase occurring in the past four, he[Matt Simmons] said."[3] The fossil-energy story doesn't end at oil, however. Natural gas is also fast approaching peak and prices are increasing in lockstep with the price of oil. And Richard Heinberg reports, in his article Burning the Furniture, "A soon-to-be-released study by the Energy Watch Group in Germany [the report has now been released] on the future of global coal supplies has implications so surprising and far-reaching that energy policymakers may take years to digest it. ..... The report’s central conclusion is that minable global coal reserves are much smaller than is commonly thought, and that a peak in world coal production is likely within only ten to fifteen years."[4]
Much of the misinformation and disinformation surrounding these three primary issues centers on the complexity of quantity versus quality. GMO crops, despite constant claims otherwise, produced with massive applications of artificial fertilizers and bombarded with herbicides and pesticides simply do not have either the taste or nutritional value of natural foods produced with non-chemical, organic methods. GMO seeds, particularly with the boost of global climate change, may produce larger plants and higher yields per acre but the result is like sugar- and salt-laden snack foods. The bulk is there but they are devoid of nutritional value. Like those snack foods, the more you eat the hungrier you get. The world is also lapsing into a global food allergy crisis as our digestive and immune systems struggle to adapt to relying on these unnatural foods for our nutrition.
Over one fifth of the global population today do not have access to clean drinking water. As many as a quarter of the deaths in poor third world countries is caused by water borne diseases, most commonly and crtically dehydration from diahrea caused by contaminated water. Another one fifth of the world's population only have access to one quarter to one tenth the amount of drinking water that the U.N. has established as the daily minimum requirement, and not enough water for basic hygienne. This problem worsens with each passing year. It is estimated that the majority of the global population increase over the next half century will be in areas already struggling with critical water shortages.
The glut of infrastructure development over this past half century has neglected durability and survivability in favour of speed, ease and cost reduction of construction. Sprawling suburbs of cookie-cutter houses and strip malls have grown like a cancer outward from established urban centers which are all expanding outward toward each other, gobbling up the low-density rural spaces between them. Cities have rapidly evolved over this past century into morbidly obese mega-cities covering thousands of square kilometers of concrete entombment.
It is difficult for many to understand why and how food, water and infrastructure can form the foundation of global social collapse without first gaining an understanding of the individual contributors to that collapse, the small details and problems which by themselves may seem meaningless but when combined together do build to a monumental crisis that can and will engulf the entirety of global society. This is further complicated by a general and understandable uncertainty as to the relative timing of peak oil and the subsequent decline in oil and other fossil fuels and the progression of global waming/climate change. But variability in timing ultimately affects only the severity of the challenges at any point in time. The following is by no means intended as a complete list of these problem areas but rather a representative sample.
....Over this past half century the vast majority of small, regional seed companies (many specializing in maintaining rare varieties of crop seeds) have disappeared, gobbled up by multinational companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont and others. This has resulted in a rapid decline in genetic diversity as these large multinationals focus on their favourite varieties on the basis of business economics. It has also, however, made seed production a centralized industry dependent on the global distribution system, often with global seed production concentrated in either the northern or southern hemisphere, out of sync with the seasonal seed needs of the other hemsphere. This has made global agriculture and the seeds on which it relies a handmaiden of the global economy and, with centralized production and global distribution, the global energy situation. It's not just a question of reactivating and regrowing the small regional seed companies. The biodiversity of the available seed line will not be sufficient to accomodate the needs of regional climate and soil diversity. The risk and impact of crop loss with an increasingly limited global emergency food reserves is often discussed. Rarely considered, however, is the globalization of that risk if the crops being lost are the seed production of these centralized seed production companies. A major crop loss in one area, without redundancy built into the global seed production system, could suddenly wipe out the needed seed supply of much of the world. Similarly, with the drastic reduction of crop biodiversity under the control of multinational seed companies, the risk of a sudden susceptibility of a particular, widely-used variety of crop could leave much of the world with no usable fall-back variety.
....Global demand for food crops continues to rise. This is due to continued increases in the global population (more mouths to feed), global changes in food and nutrition requirements (more people turning to meat as their source of protein), more and more food crops being diverted to the production of biofuels. The problem arises from the fact that the demand for the resources required to grow that food do not rise at the same rate. While the population has tripled over the past century the usage of fresh water ras risen over six fold and the water for agriculture over eight fold. In the past twenty five years alone global use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides has grown by an amazing thirty-three times. The amount of energy involved in food production has grown exponentially over this past century to the point that for every calorie of food energy produced and consumed more than ten calories or energy input Are required. Food miles traveled by food produced has gone through the stratosphere this past half century with food travelling now more thasn 1500 miles between field and table. Topsoil loss has grown dramatically over this past have century because of serious overcropping, erosion from irrigation and bare-field tillage, losses due to chemical toxicity and salination. Resource consumption and depletion involved in producing those ever greater quantities of food, therefore, is dramatically greater than the additional food produced.
....There was a time not that long ago when for practically ever farmer, regardless of the crop produced, saving and storing his own seed was still standard practice, and more recently still was in the underdeveloped and developing world. This localised, cultural practice of seed saving was a key component of food crop biodiversity around the world, with local varieties of the same crop genetically evolving independent of the same crop in other parts of the world. With the insidious spread of GMO seeds this critical component of biodiversity is disappearing. Everyone in agriculture knows the tremendous cost and complexity of taking on the big multinational seed companies when their seed cops invade your property and accuse you of saving seeds from their crop when your own crop has been cross-contaminated from crops of neighbouring farmers using their patented seeds. The use of GMO seeds is so ubiquitous that the ability to prevent cross-contamination of your own crop, a product of generation after generation of careful seed saving, is very slim. Often their own carefully-saved seed turns out to be sterile after cross-contamination from a GMO containing a terminator gene, a gene inserted to prevent the plant from producing seed or to cause it to produce a sterile seed so the plant can't be reproduced from its own seed, this securing the dependence of the farmer on the seed company. Even those farmers who are trying to hold out against the seed giants are finding their crops contaminated and the courts consistently come down in favour of the big multinational seed giants.
....With the bulk of modern agricultural crops being produced from GMO seeds restrictively produced in one area of the world and shipped all around the world from that one point, the production of the world's food is becoming rapidly and increasingly dependent on the health of the global economic system. This will make the next depression, when it happens, so much different from any past depression. In severe economic downturns of the past, or in times of war and heavy civil unrest, people would quickly revert to producing their own food and this was very often the key to surviving the hard times. Even if you have a crop today, the chances of your continuing to produce a crop in the event of a severe economic downturn or social chaos are extremely slim because your crop probably will not produce a usable seed and the seed company will very likely have fallen on hard times as the economy implodes. Where is the food to come from if no one is saving seeds, the small regional seed companies no longer exist, and the multinational seed companies that produce all the seed and the global distribution system that gets them to the farmer go out of business in an economic downturn?
....The bulk of the commercially produced food crops in the world (as opposed to the personal garden) are produced with the use of specialized, heavy farm equipment. With the exception of some of the equipment available in some third world nations, the equipment needed for small scale farming, the equipment meant to be used with human or animal power alone, the equipment that our ancestors used a century ago simply no longer exists, nor do the companies and the manufacturing equipment to produce it. Most of us have seen a piece or two of such equipment rusting beside a barn or planted with flowers on a suburban lawn. If the coming energy-decline economic downturn is very slow and very gradual and business, industry and government act with foresight, and the raw resources to do so are available, it is possible that the production of such equipment can be revitalized and ramped up in time to prevent an economic recession or depression turning into a critical global food crisis. That is a lot of ifs that are extremely unlikely to all come together in the right way and at the right time.
....There is an old and, at one time, frequently used expression that somewhat pinpoints the agricultural crisis that awaits us on the other side of peak oil: dirt farmer. Today's farmers are mostly chemical farmers and machine operators (I apologize to any legitimate dirt farmers who take umbrage with that generalization). When the fertilizers and pesticides are no longer available and the tractor and combine and electric milking system no longer function most of today's farmers will be as ill-equipped for farming as the person born, raised, and having spent their entire lives in the inner city. It is a common fallacy to think that when the machinery stops running we'll revert to labour-intensive manual farming as more and more people get involved, as workers, in the production of the food they consume. But who is to teach them what to do? Who is to teach them how to work a field of crops without the aid of machinery? Who is to show them the difference between a seedling of a food plant and the sprout of a weed? At the beginning of the last century as much as 50% of the population were involved in the production of food. Today that is less than 2%. Getting from here to non-chemical, non-mechanized, non-industrial, labour-intensive farming is going to take decades of rebuilding the skills and knowledge bases that will be needed. Trying to do this on the other side of peak oil, when the ability to absorb years or decades of non-productive trial and error doesn't exist, could be truly devestating.
....Along with the disappearance of local seed companies this last half century has also seen a wholesale collapse of the local grain storage and milling business. There was a time that virtually every small agricultural community had a small-scale miller where local farmers would take their seed to; be stored; turned into animal feed; turned into flour; pooled and shipped to centralized grain terminals, stored (and often mixed with that of other local producers) as seed for next year's grain crop. Local bakers would get the flour they used from the local miller. Often the miller, generally a grain farmer himself, would take as payment a set amount of the grain he was given to mill or the product he produced from that milling. Often miller and baker were one in the same. My small town had such a mill until twenty years ago. Now all of the grain produced goes into the impersonal national and global distribution system. The chance of the grain produced in an area even ending up on the tables of local residents is extremely slim. Once the distribution system begins to break down and the large, centralized milling companies begin to falter because of operating costs, lack of feed stock and lack of markets, how are small scale grain producers to have their grain processed into flour and seed? It could take a decade or more to revitalize and rebuild the local milling industry.
....Tomatoes in February. Ice-cream in July. New Zealand spring lamb and kiwi fruit in Toronto. Canadian maple syrup and bacon in Sydney Australia. Our food and our food tastes are a biproduct of a global food distribution system that is critically dependent on high-volume, long-distance shipping and energy-intensive refrigeration both in shipping and in general storage. When I was a child we had a root cellar for over-winter cold storage of root crops, nuts, grains and certain other fruit and vegetable crops. In addition we had an extensive food storage cellar that got restocked every fall with preserves and canned (meaning bottled) vegetables and fruits, dehydrated vegetable fruits, and a host of other preserved foods. Much of the food preserved we grew ourselves but that which wasn't was purchased locally and grown locally. When the global food distribution system begins to break down on the other side of peak oil, when energy-intensive refrigeration is no longer available for storing food after the harvest, when the materials such as mason jars, crocks, sterilizing equipment critical to canning food, when the supermarkets can no longer be looked upon as the primary source of the family's food, how will people manage? How will you manage? It could take a decade or longer to reaquire the skills and equipment and storage facilities necessary to ensure your family has food to eat at any time of the year.
....Over the last half century while much of the world has become increasingly dependent on groundwater from aquifers (97% of the world's liquid freshwater) for drinking water, industry, agricultural irrigation, and frivolous usage such as golf courses and casino fountains, the would's fresh surface water resources (lakes and rivers) have become increasingly contaminated with chemical toxins and aghricultural runoff. Although surface water is part of the global hydro-cycle and the water in the surface water systems turns over in a matter of days (water in aquifers is trapped there for, on average, 1400 years) the toxins in those systems build up in bottom sediments and continue to keep the water above toxic. It could take decades or even centuries for nature to remove the toxins that have built up in contaminated surface water systems. This is a matter of critical importance as we pass peak oil. Our ability to rely on deep aquifers for our fresh water (most shallow aquifers have already been sucked dry or have become contaminated in the same way and at the same rate as surface water), most of which are already heavilly over-exploited and declining by twenty feet or more per year, will disappear as the electricity and fossil fuels to run the massive pumps that are needed to draw water from these deep aquifers gets increasingly scarce and unreliable. Hand pumps - there were four of them within 200 yards of the home in which I grew up on which we relied for water in our plumbing-void house - are genrally not powerful enough to draw water from deep aquifers. Hand pumps are also a very scarce commodity in our industrialized society. This could place much of the world in the same position as one fifth of the world's people already are, having to rely on contaminated, chemically-toxic, disease-laden surface water and shallow aquifers for not just agricultural irrigation but for industrial use, basic hygienne and drinking water. The rate of incidence of death from water-borne diseases, which already claims millions every year, will most certainly increase exponentially.
....Vast tracts of homes have been constructed over this past half century in our industrial society. They are built to standards that assume there will be sufficient fossil-fuel and electrical energy to maintain heat to a level of 70F degrees or higher in winter and cool them to a comfortable 70F or lower in the heat of summer. Without this high-energy input those homes, more and more with sealed windows, do not have the insulation and thermal mass levels needed to maintain a home within livable standards. When the seriously-aging and materially-crumbling grids fail, even sporadically, and the fossil fuels are not available, sporadic, or priced beyond the reach of the average household, the vast majority of our modern homes will become increasingly problematic. To upgrade them all (hundreds of millions of them) to a thermal standard able to cope with the coming declines in fossil fuels will not only prove very expensive but will probably run up against increasing material shortages as available resources decline. And we most certainly aren't going to be able to think in terms of buldozing he suburbs and starting over again with housing suitable to a world of steadilly decreasing energy.
In what has become known as The Hirsch Report (commissioned by the U.S. congress and co-authored by Hirsch) [7] Robert Hirsch adamantly makes the point that it would take a minimum of 1-2 decades to prepare for the energy crisis presented by peak oil, if that effort were begun before peak oil arrived. That may already have become a moot point as we may already have passed that point with no such preparation having yet been done. But the energy crisis represented by peak oil, as I have tried to show here, is a small portion of the problems that peak oil will create or seriously exacerbate. Where preparation for the energy crisis may take 1-2 decades preparing for the parallel food, water and infrastructure crises could take many times that, could be 1-2 centuries rather than 1-2 decades with the same qualifier, that the effort is begun before peak oil, and with the additional qualifier that priority usage of the world's remaining fossil energy reserves be given to this effort. We spent the first half of the world's fossil fuel reserves creating the world as it is. It will take the other half to recreate the world as it will need to be to be workable without those fossil fuels.
===========================
1) Is aging infrastructure slowing the U.S.?
2) Engineers See Dangers in Aging Infrastructure
3) Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war - Shawn McCarthy, Globe & Mail - Report on Business
4) Burning the furniture by Richard Heinberg
5) Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity
6) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
7) Peaking Of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management
Monday, March 31, 2008
Biofuels: A Final Nail in the Green Revolution Coffin
In the middle of the last century, with a steadily rising world population and a similar steady shrinking of global food productivity due to over exploited and stressed soils and increasingly polluted water sources, the world was on the verge of perhaps the greatest humanitarian disaster in recorded history. Hundreds of millions of people were at constant risk of starvation and tens of thousands were dying of starvation and nutrition related diseases daily. Then, like the cavalry riding in on galloping steeds, under the command of Doctor Norman Borlaug the Green Revolution came to the rescue and millions were saved from starvation.
Let us be clear. The problem that we are talking about in the biofuels versus food debate did not begin with the construction of the first ethanol plant. It really began and grew with the Green Revolution over the last half of the twentieth century and is being brought to a head by peak oil which is the prime driver behind the frantic rush to biofuels. Prior to the Green Revolution it was becoming abundantly clear that the global human population of about 2.5 billion was too great for the finite carrying capacity of the earth. We could not produce and distribute enough food to feed ourselves. People were dying every day by the tens of thousands of starvation and other nutrition-related diseases. Population experts were warning of mass starvation in Africa and Asia that could claim the lives of hundreds of millions.
In fact the problem actually has its roots in the much earlier Industrial Revolution and the resulting twin, resource-gobbling scourges of overproduction and consumerism. But going back that far requires too long a lens to serve as a useful focal point. The Green Revolution is recent enough in our history, and still very much with us and contributing to the problem, that it is the appropriate place to begin.
Doctor Norman Borlaug, in response to the threat of global famine, proposed what we have come to know as the Green Revolution. The keys to this proposed solution were; a dramatic increase in agricultural irrigation largely facilitated by the exploitation of vast reserves of groundwater in deep aquifers (approximately 97% of the world's liquid freshwater is contained in these underground aquifers) using powerful mechanical pumps; the efficient, mechanized cultivation of vast tracts of hybrid (subsequently GMO) high-yield crops of feed grains like corn, wheat, soy, millet, rice and others; the development of an efficient global food distribution system to get the food from where it could be grown to where it was needed; vastly increased yields and crop security, especially on increasingly exploited marginal lands, through the use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides; the establishment of a global emergency food grain reserve to serve as a buffer against crop losses in vulnerable third world nations (that reserve has shrunk from a marginal 120 day supply to a critical 57 day supply over the past several years[37], [78]); and the development of emergency food aid NGOs to get food to those poor and malnourished most in need of it in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.
All in all, the Green Revolution seemed to most like a good and humanitarian thing to do at the time. Few other programs, after all, could claim to be responsible for saving hundreds of millions of lives. The end result, however, was far more than the millions of lives saved. The Green Revolution resulted in the fastest doubling of the human population in history, from 2.5 to five billion in less than forty years, from 2.5 to 6.5 billion in just over fifty years. Considering that the Green Revolution came about because the carrying capacity of earth could not support our then population of 2.5 billion, doubling and, now, nearly tripling those numbers could hardly be considered a success. That entire surplus of four billion people since added to the global population is living on an artificial carrying capacity that is totally dependent on finite and now rapidly diminishing fossil fuels. Whether we are already at or about to reach peak oil the situation can only worsen as our artificial carrying capacity gradually disappears.
Concurrent with the unfolding of the Green Revolution there grew a new psychology of plenty and, subsequently, affluence. We forgot that finite systems have limits and came to believe that anything was possible and that we could continue to grow forever. The previously unimaginable levels of exploitation of energy to support this growth also seemed to have no limits, a belief fostered by governments, industry and the mainstream media for the past several decades.
But all of that is changing. Despite the impressive accomplishments of the Green Revolution, despite a half century of unimaginable global economic growth, despite wondrous new technological advances, despite the first real globalization of human society, the limits that gave rise to the Green Revolution are still there, waiting like the overly-patient creditor for the loan on which we have been living for the past half century to be repaid, with interest. Like the debt-laden, third world country that pays the interest on its outstanding loans by taking on new loans, the longer we continue to live above our means, the longer we continue to survive on this artificial carrying capacity we have created through the massive over-exploitation of great reserves of energy, the greater and more devastating will be the collapse when it can no longer be avoided. We are living in a fool's paradise.
Over the past couple months I must have read over three hundred articles, columns, papers and reports from all over the world on the link between biofuels and increasing global hunger and poverty. It makes this writing of yet another article on the subject seem like kicking a dead horse. But as long as we continue our infatuation with biofuels the problem is going to continue to worsen and efforts, big and small, are still going to be needed to put the brakes on this insidious and ultimately dangerous new energy fairy.
Much of the debate over whether the production of biofuels is contributing to world poverty and hunger is an apples and oranges affair. Proponents of biofuels claim that the production of biofuel crops in third world countries can actually improve conditions in those countries by giving them another lucrative cash crop ([1], [12], [24], [59]), I guess to go along with the bananas, coffee, tea, cotton and millet that they now produce for export. But for every piece extolling the virtues of biofuels there are a hundred articles warning how they will contribute to the already existing crisis of global hunger (for example; Biofuels and world hunger[10], Will Agro fuels Usher Famine? [16], The Globalization of Hunger[21], Starving for Fuel: How Ethanol Production Contributes to Global Hunger[35] and many, many more). The benefits of the production and export of exportable cash crops, though it may increase the foreign cash influx for a third world country, do not accrue to the people most in need, those grappling with starvation and poverty. It benefits the large-scale, fat-cat industrial farmers who may, or may not, employ some of those living in poverty at a wage that is guaranteed to keep them there, and keep them barely alive nutritionally (see, for example, Neither biofuels nor biotechnology will benefit African smallholder farmers[39], Small farmers speak out against globalisation[57]).
The impact of biofuels on global food prices and global emergency food aid is not on those large farmers who grow and export biofuel crops. The impact is on the poor and starving, urban and rural. The impact is on those small farmers who have been priced off their own small piece of land because of the globalization of food prices and the fact that their small-scale production has to compete in a global market against the output from a highly-mechanized 50,000 acre farm in the U.S. heartland. The impact is on the small farmer who is forced into growing a crop he cannot afford to buy, and can't eat, in order to try to buy food at a market, food that has increased in price by 25-50% over this past year alone[26]. The impact is on the hundreds of thousands of destitute and starving refugees crowded into barely survivable refugee camps, people who have lost everything and have little prospect of ever having anything again. The impact is on the dozens of emergency food aid NGOs that are having to plead to increasingly reluctant western governments ([59], [71], [76]) for much more funding because of the skyrocketing prices of the food grains they rely on to feed starving millions in Africa and Asia ([14], [48], [52], [60], [65], [68], [71], [74]).
The biofuels debate is badly confused because of the many different, and highly variable, biofuels that are lumped under that single banner. The basic grouping of bio-diesel and ethanol/methanol is not even sufficient to lend clarity. The cost and impact of ethanol on the environment and on global hunger depends very much on what type of ethanol/methanol (distilled ethanol, celulosic ethanol, etc) and on the specific feedstock you are discussing (sugar cane, sugar beet, corn, wheat, palm oil, jatropha, cassava, rice, switchgrass, algae, etc.).
I am not a chemist so please forgive me if I oversimplify. Producing ethanol is essentially a task of turning plant sugars into alcohol through a process of esterization and fermentation. Regardless of the feedstock, this final stage is relatively similar in process, technology and cost. Where the tremendous variability occurs in both process and cost is in converting the feedstock into the required sugars, in getting the feedstock to release its sugars. This generally has to be accomplished with the aid of different enzymes that convert the carbohydrates in the organic material into sugars. But not all enzymes are created the same and different feedstocks need different enzymes. Some enzymes are very efficient, others not. The carbohydrates that the enzymes convert into sugars may be very different in molecular structure, and vary considerably in concentration within the organic matter.
The environmental impact and the contribution to soil destruction and, most importantly, to world hunger is very much dependent on that feedstock. To lump together the ethanol produced relatively efficiently from sugar cane in Brazil and the heavily-subsidized corn ethanol produced in a plant in Kansas is to completely cloud the argument. They are as different as night and day. Take away the ludicrous subsidies enjoyed by America's corn ethanol producers and you have an industry operating in the red. The EROEI on corn ethanol is negative, that of sugar cane ethanol slightly above one. In fact the majority of ethanol processes could not survive without government subsidies. Yet any suggestion that those subsidies should be removed meets with a flurry of objections ([6], [8], [9], [20], [22], [49], [51], [59]). You can't just offer the subsidies then take them away. Companies are going to suffer. Many of those companies could fail.
Well that's an argument I would very, very much like to turn around. The green revolution promised the people of the world, especially the impoverished and hungry of the third world, that food would no longer be a problem, that they could be confident of being able to put food in front of their children today and tomorrow, led them to believe that food was an inalienable right and that the world would take care of it's poor and hungry. They could bring children into the world without the risk of having to watch their bellies bloat up from hunger and have them die in their arms because there was no food. To the poor and starving that promise of food, even the most basic of food, was as important as the guarantee of lifetime employment to a factory employee in the industrial heartland. The food aid distributed by the food aid organizations to the most hungry and destitute among us was the equivalent of the corn ethanol subsidy that many governments are reconsidering. Through the surpluses produced starting with the Green Revolution we assumed the role of subsidizing global overpopulation. The end result, like corn ethanol plants sprouting up in Kansas, was that the population continued to climb. Everyday the world had to subsidize more and more excess population.
To take away that subsidy, to now begin diverting that food on which the world's poor are so dependent for their very lives away into the production of ethanol and other biofuels, to now begin to cut back on the national contributions to the emergency food aid agencies that distribute that food, to now start pressuring those poor third world countries into using their increasingly impoverished agricultural land to produce crops to produce ethanol, is going to spread unimaginable additional suffering among the world's poor and hungry. They are going to be paying the real price for our ethanol mania. Removing the corn subsidies from ethanol producers may cause many companies to fail. What we are doing in our pursuit of biofuels will cause untold additional deaths.
I must apologize for the long list of articles and other references below. This is, however, just a small sampling of the massive amount of material available. I urge you to read at least some of them.
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1) Biofuels Will Help Fight Hunger
http://biodiesel.carimson.com/2007/11/biofuels-will-help-fight-hunger.html
2) Biofuel industry says oil hike driving food prices
http://www.palmoilprices.net/news/biofuel-industry-says-oil-hike-driving-food-prices/
3) A balanced contribution
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/11/a_balanced_contribution.html
4) AGRICULTURE: Costly Prosperity
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40000
5) GSPI States: Some Biofuels Add Significant Food to Your Table
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071109005204&newsLang=en
6) Screwing the poor to secure votes
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/11/screwing-poor-to-secure-votes.html
7) Biofuels: Is corn ethanol the way to go?
http://runyogi.gaia.com/blog/2007/11/biofuels_is_corn_ethanol_the_way_to_go
8) Repeal "Biofuels" Requirements
http://dad29.blogspot.com/2007/11/repeal-biofuels-requirements.html
9) Hell hath no fury like a special interest questioned
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/business/hancock/blog/2007/11/hell_hath_no_fury_like_a_speci.html
10) Biofuels and world hunger
http://www.workers.org/2007/world/biofuels-1018/
11) Corn prices raise the specter of hunger
http://www.latinamericapress.org/article.asp?lanCode=1&artCode=5401
12) Ethanol leaders urge U.N. to review biofuel report
http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKN1247224320071112
13) A clean, green machine?
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/11/a_clean_green_machine.html
14) Biofuels eating into food security--Golez
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20071216-107111/Biofuels_eating_into_food_security--Golez
15) Are commodities a bubble ready to burst?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/money/2007/12/16/ccmines216.xml
16) Will Agro fuels Usher Famine?
http://blackstarnews.com/?c=122&a=3990
17) Zimbabwe: Myths of Agro-Fuels Boom
http://allafrica.com/stories/200712170216.html
18) The Buzz on Biofuels: Worse Than Dickensian
http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/2007/12/buzz-on-biofuels-dickensian-solution_19.html
19) Saving and Restoring Forests Saves Far More Carbon Emissions than Biofuels
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/12/370099.shtml
20) What Is The Real Cost Of Corn Ethanol?
http://culturaleconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-is-real-cost-of-corn-ethanol.html
21) The Globalization of Hunger
http://www.madre.org/articles/inter/globalizationhunger.html
22) Subsidizing Hunger On Borrowed Cash
http://www.globalpolitician.com/23911-economics
23) NCSU researchers re-engineer sweet potato for efficient ethanol production
http://biopact.com/2007/12/ncsu-researchers-re-engineer-sweet.html
24) Biofuels "Will Not Lead to Hunger"
http://coolexcooling.com/2007/12/23/biofuels-will-not-lead-to-hunger/
25) Zimbabwe: Biofuels - Promote Research On Non Food Crops
http://allafrica.com/stories/200712240568.html
26) Global food prices rise 40% in 2007 to new record
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1227-fao.html
27) Biofuels, the Biggest Scam Going
http://www.counterpunch.org/goodman12282007.html
28) The Last Word (for 2007) on Biofuels and Hunger
http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/2007/12/vandana-shiva-gets-years-last-word-on.html
29) False Solution to Climate Change
http://liberianature.blogspot.com/2008/01/false-solution-to-climate-change.html
30) How Global warming is creating global hunger
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2008/01/how-global-warm.html
31) Eating MEAT and using BIOFUELS becomes an international disaster
http://iaoeoai.blogspot.com/2008/01/eating-meat-and-using-biofuels-becomes.html
32) Three Billion Dead: The Future of Biofuels and the Future of Resistance
http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2008/01/three-billion-dead-future-of-biofuels.html
33) It's time to wake up to the danger of this infatuation with biofuels
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/brendan-keenan/its-time-to-wake-up-to-the-danger-of-this-infatuation-with-biofuels-1261870.html
34) Defra scientist: second generation biofuels need investment
http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=14033&channel=0
35) Starving for Fuel: How Ethanol Production Contributes to Global Hunger
http://www.theglobalist.com/DBweb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=5518
36) Africa: Controversial Proposals Expected At WEF Gathering
http://allafrica.com/stories/200801190055.html
37) The world has only 11 weeks of consumable corn reserves - the lowest level ever
http://12degreesoffreedom.blogspot.com/2008/01/world-has-only-11-weeks-of-consumable.html
38) World Economic Forum to look at Africa's Green Revolution and energy
http://biopact.com/2008/01/world-economic-forum-to-look-at-africas.html
39) Neither biofuels nor biotechnology will benefit African smallholder farmers
http://africanagriculture.blogspot.com/2008/01/neither-biofuels-nor-biotechnology-will.html
40) Ethanol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol
41) Ethanol The Road to a Greener Future
http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/publications/infosource/pub/vehiclefuels/ethanol/M92_257_2003.cfm
42) Methanol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol
43) Biodiesel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
44) Jatropha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatropha
45) Biofuels could generate extensive food shortages
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/296855
46) CLIMATE CHANGE: EU Persists With Biofuels
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40890
47) INSIGHTS: Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2008/2008-01-25-insbro.asp
48) Food supplies too scarce to meet relief needs
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/df52ae50-cbb1-11dc-97ff-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1
49) DEVELOPMENT: Biofuels a Lose-Lose Strategy, Critics Say
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40929
50) The Choice Between Food And Fuel
http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=15055
51) Groups call for moratorium on government biofuels incentives
http://www.brownfieldnetwork.com/gestalt/go.cfm?objectid=C7EF413E-BA4E-4A46-4486791A7CAF9782
52) UN aid chief worried by food inflation, weather
http://uk.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUKL29349230._CH_.242020080129
53) Impoverished Areas Of Africa And Asia Face Severe Crop Losses From Climate Change In 20 Years
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080131152010.htm
54) Nine Billion Little Feet on the Highway of the Damned
http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant02062008.html
55) Studies conclude that biofuels are not so green
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/07/healthscience/biofuel.php
56) Genetically modified (GM) crops ‘failing to keep promises’
http://fooddemocracy.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/genetically-modified-gm-crops-failing-to-keep-promises/
57) Small farmers speak out against globalisation
http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=&fArticleId=4254663
58) The ravages of ethanol
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/guests/s_552462.html
59) CLIMATE CHANGE: Lula Calls for Flexibility from Rich Countries
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41302
60) African NGOs call for moratorium on biofuels
http://www.afrol.com/articles/28075
61) Canadians Bemoan the Lack of Availability of Biofuels
http://domesticfuel.com/2008/02/24/canadians-bemoan-the-lack-of-availability-for-biofuels/
62) The Future is Famine
http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2008/02/future-is-famine.html
http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2008/02/future-is-famine-part-2.html
63) A recipe for inflation
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/a-recipe-for-inflation-787936.html
64) The Great Agrofuel Swindle
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3571/The_Great_Agrofuel_Swindle
65) World Food Program issues 'emergency appeal' for funds
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-food25mar25,1,6674660.story
66) "We knew we were poor before, but now it's worse than poverty."
http://12degreesoffreedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/we-knew-we-were-poor-before-but-now-its.html
67) Hot air on biofuel
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Hot-air-on-biofuel/287849/
68) Food Agencies Are Starting to ask for Extra
http://batucuda.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/food-agencies-are-starting-to-ask-for-extra/
69) EU's biofuels target could be amended amid concerns
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5j1UHdxrunQY6gK9ddDZzHUi4zrRA
70) Biofuel: The fake solution to climate change
http://carboncapstaskforce.blogspot.com/2008/03/biofuel-fake-solution-to-climate-change.html
71) Soaring Food Prices Putting U.S. Emergency Aid in Peril
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022904029.html
72) Ethanol Is Not The Answer
http://robertd.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/ethanol-is-not-the-answer/
73) NYT Hits Small Mark, Misses Big One
http://www.animalperson.net/animal_person/2008/03/nyt-hits-small.html
74) Higher grain prices putting squeeze on world food aid
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-wed-world-food-programmar05,0,2800064.story
75) 2008: The year of global food crisis
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2104849.0.2008_the_year_of_global_food_crisis.php
76) Economies face the prospect of mass migration, fear, famine and disorder
http://www.financialnews-us.com/?page=uscomment&contentid=2450009523
77) World Bank to Increase Africa Agriculture Loans
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,date:2008-03-11~menuPK:34461~pagePK:34392~piPK:64256810~theSitePK:4607,00.html
78) Hunger is set to grow as global food stocks fall
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Hunger_is_set_to_grow_as_global_food_stocks_fall/articleshow/2859771.cms
79) World Bank Loan To Complement Agricultural Reform In Kazakhstan
http://commercecan.ic.gc.ca/scdt/bizmap/interface2.nsf/vDownload/IMI_2414/$file/X_554592.DOC
80) China: Third Irrigated Agriculture Intensification Loan Project
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/EAP/eaprural.nsf/PrintFriendly/43A7075F389926A485256F970068FDE9?Opendocument
81) Results For "agriculture development"
http://extsearch.worldbank.org/servlet/SiteSearchServlet?q=agriculture%20development
82) World Bank Support of Agricultural Development Projects in Romania
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/oed/oeddoclib.nsf/DocUNIDViewForJavaSearch/18C44C3F0235EA25852567F5005D89BF
83) Agriculture & The World Bank
http://www.whirledbank.org/environment/agriculture.html
Let us be clear. The problem that we are talking about in the biofuels versus food debate did not begin with the construction of the first ethanol plant. It really began and grew with the Green Revolution over the last half of the twentieth century and is being brought to a head by peak oil which is the prime driver behind the frantic rush to biofuels. Prior to the Green Revolution it was becoming abundantly clear that the global human population of about 2.5 billion was too great for the finite carrying capacity of the earth. We could not produce and distribute enough food to feed ourselves. People were dying every day by the tens of thousands of starvation and other nutrition-related diseases. Population experts were warning of mass starvation in Africa and Asia that could claim the lives of hundreds of millions.
In fact the problem actually has its roots in the much earlier Industrial Revolution and the resulting twin, resource-gobbling scourges of overproduction and consumerism. But going back that far requires too long a lens to serve as a useful focal point. The Green Revolution is recent enough in our history, and still very much with us and contributing to the problem, that it is the appropriate place to begin.
Doctor Norman Borlaug, in response to the threat of global famine, proposed what we have come to know as the Green Revolution. The keys to this proposed solution were; a dramatic increase in agricultural irrigation largely facilitated by the exploitation of vast reserves of groundwater in deep aquifers (approximately 97% of the world's liquid freshwater is contained in these underground aquifers) using powerful mechanical pumps; the efficient, mechanized cultivation of vast tracts of hybrid (subsequently GMO) high-yield crops of feed grains like corn, wheat, soy, millet, rice and others; the development of an efficient global food distribution system to get the food from where it could be grown to where it was needed; vastly increased yields and crop security, especially on increasingly exploited marginal lands, through the use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides; the establishment of a global emergency food grain reserve to serve as a buffer against crop losses in vulnerable third world nations (that reserve has shrunk from a marginal 120 day supply to a critical 57 day supply over the past several years[37], [78]); and the development of emergency food aid NGOs to get food to those poor and malnourished most in need of it in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.
All in all, the Green Revolution seemed to most like a good and humanitarian thing to do at the time. Few other programs, after all, could claim to be responsible for saving hundreds of millions of lives. The end result, however, was far more than the millions of lives saved. The Green Revolution resulted in the fastest doubling of the human population in history, from 2.5 to five billion in less than forty years, from 2.5 to 6.5 billion in just over fifty years. Considering that the Green Revolution came about because the carrying capacity of earth could not support our then population of 2.5 billion, doubling and, now, nearly tripling those numbers could hardly be considered a success. That entire surplus of four billion people since added to the global population is living on an artificial carrying capacity that is totally dependent on finite and now rapidly diminishing fossil fuels. Whether we are already at or about to reach peak oil the situation can only worsen as our artificial carrying capacity gradually disappears.
Concurrent with the unfolding of the Green Revolution there grew a new psychology of plenty and, subsequently, affluence. We forgot that finite systems have limits and came to believe that anything was possible and that we could continue to grow forever. The previously unimaginable levels of exploitation of energy to support this growth also seemed to have no limits, a belief fostered by governments, industry and the mainstream media for the past several decades.
But all of that is changing. Despite the impressive accomplishments of the Green Revolution, despite a half century of unimaginable global economic growth, despite wondrous new technological advances, despite the first real globalization of human society, the limits that gave rise to the Green Revolution are still there, waiting like the overly-patient creditor for the loan on which we have been living for the past half century to be repaid, with interest. Like the debt-laden, third world country that pays the interest on its outstanding loans by taking on new loans, the longer we continue to live above our means, the longer we continue to survive on this artificial carrying capacity we have created through the massive over-exploitation of great reserves of energy, the greater and more devastating will be the collapse when it can no longer be avoided. We are living in a fool's paradise.
Over the past couple months I must have read over three hundred articles, columns, papers and reports from all over the world on the link between biofuels and increasing global hunger and poverty. It makes this writing of yet another article on the subject seem like kicking a dead horse. But as long as we continue our infatuation with biofuels the problem is going to continue to worsen and efforts, big and small, are still going to be needed to put the brakes on this insidious and ultimately dangerous new energy fairy.
Much of the debate over whether the production of biofuels is contributing to world poverty and hunger is an apples and oranges affair. Proponents of biofuels claim that the production of biofuel crops in third world countries can actually improve conditions in those countries by giving them another lucrative cash crop ([1], [12], [24], [59]), I guess to go along with the bananas, coffee, tea, cotton and millet that they now produce for export. But for every piece extolling the virtues of biofuels there are a hundred articles warning how they will contribute to the already existing crisis of global hunger (for example; Biofuels and world hunger[10], Will Agro fuels Usher Famine? [16], The Globalization of Hunger[21], Starving for Fuel: How Ethanol Production Contributes to Global Hunger[35] and many, many more). The benefits of the production and export of exportable cash crops, though it may increase the foreign cash influx for a third world country, do not accrue to the people most in need, those grappling with starvation and poverty. It benefits the large-scale, fat-cat industrial farmers who may, or may not, employ some of those living in poverty at a wage that is guaranteed to keep them there, and keep them barely alive nutritionally (see, for example, Neither biofuels nor biotechnology will benefit African smallholder farmers[39], Small farmers speak out against globalisation[57]).
The impact of biofuels on global food prices and global emergency food aid is not on those large farmers who grow and export biofuel crops. The impact is on the poor and starving, urban and rural. The impact is on those small farmers who have been priced off their own small piece of land because of the globalization of food prices and the fact that their small-scale production has to compete in a global market against the output from a highly-mechanized 50,000 acre farm in the U.S. heartland. The impact is on the small farmer who is forced into growing a crop he cannot afford to buy, and can't eat, in order to try to buy food at a market, food that has increased in price by 25-50% over this past year alone[26]. The impact is on the hundreds of thousands of destitute and starving refugees crowded into barely survivable refugee camps, people who have lost everything and have little prospect of ever having anything again. The impact is on the dozens of emergency food aid NGOs that are having to plead to increasingly reluctant western governments ([59], [71], [76]) for much more funding because of the skyrocketing prices of the food grains they rely on to feed starving millions in Africa and Asia ([14], [48], [52], [60], [65], [68], [71], [74]).
The biofuels debate is badly confused because of the many different, and highly variable, biofuels that are lumped under that single banner. The basic grouping of bio-diesel and ethanol/methanol is not even sufficient to lend clarity. The cost and impact of ethanol on the environment and on global hunger depends very much on what type of ethanol/methanol (distilled ethanol, celulosic ethanol, etc) and on the specific feedstock you are discussing (sugar cane, sugar beet, corn, wheat, palm oil, jatropha, cassava, rice, switchgrass, algae, etc.).
I am not a chemist so please forgive me if I oversimplify. Producing ethanol is essentially a task of turning plant sugars into alcohol through a process of esterization and fermentation. Regardless of the feedstock, this final stage is relatively similar in process, technology and cost. Where the tremendous variability occurs in both process and cost is in converting the feedstock into the required sugars, in getting the feedstock to release its sugars. This generally has to be accomplished with the aid of different enzymes that convert the carbohydrates in the organic material into sugars. But not all enzymes are created the same and different feedstocks need different enzymes. Some enzymes are very efficient, others not. The carbohydrates that the enzymes convert into sugars may be very different in molecular structure, and vary considerably in concentration within the organic matter.
The environmental impact and the contribution to soil destruction and, most importantly, to world hunger is very much dependent on that feedstock. To lump together the ethanol produced relatively efficiently from sugar cane in Brazil and the heavily-subsidized corn ethanol produced in a plant in Kansas is to completely cloud the argument. They are as different as night and day. Take away the ludicrous subsidies enjoyed by America's corn ethanol producers and you have an industry operating in the red. The EROEI on corn ethanol is negative, that of sugar cane ethanol slightly above one. In fact the majority of ethanol processes could not survive without government subsidies. Yet any suggestion that those subsidies should be removed meets with a flurry of objections ([6], [8], [9], [20], [22], [49], [51], [59]). You can't just offer the subsidies then take them away. Companies are going to suffer. Many of those companies could fail.
Well that's an argument I would very, very much like to turn around. The green revolution promised the people of the world, especially the impoverished and hungry of the third world, that food would no longer be a problem, that they could be confident of being able to put food in front of their children today and tomorrow, led them to believe that food was an inalienable right and that the world would take care of it's poor and hungry. They could bring children into the world without the risk of having to watch their bellies bloat up from hunger and have them die in their arms because there was no food. To the poor and starving that promise of food, even the most basic of food, was as important as the guarantee of lifetime employment to a factory employee in the industrial heartland. The food aid distributed by the food aid organizations to the most hungry and destitute among us was the equivalent of the corn ethanol subsidy that many governments are reconsidering. Through the surpluses produced starting with the Green Revolution we assumed the role of subsidizing global overpopulation. The end result, like corn ethanol plants sprouting up in Kansas, was that the population continued to climb. Everyday the world had to subsidize more and more excess population.
To take away that subsidy, to now begin diverting that food on which the world's poor are so dependent for their very lives away into the production of ethanol and other biofuels, to now begin to cut back on the national contributions to the emergency food aid agencies that distribute that food, to now start pressuring those poor third world countries into using their increasingly impoverished agricultural land to produce crops to produce ethanol, is going to spread unimaginable additional suffering among the world's poor and hungry. They are going to be paying the real price for our ethanol mania. Removing the corn subsidies from ethanol producers may cause many companies to fail. What we are doing in our pursuit of biofuels will cause untold additional deaths.
I must apologize for the long list of articles and other references below. This is, however, just a small sampling of the massive amount of material available. I urge you to read at least some of them.
**************************
1) Biofuels Will Help Fight Hunger
http://biodiesel.carimson.com/2007/11/biofuels-will-help-fight-hunger.html
2) Biofuel industry says oil hike driving food prices
http://www.palmoilprices.net/news/biofuel-industry-says-oil-hike-driving-food-prices/
3) A balanced contribution
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/11/a_balanced_contribution.html
4) AGRICULTURE: Costly Prosperity
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40000
5) GSPI States: Some Biofuels Add Significant Food to Your Table
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071109005204&newsLang=en
6) Screwing the poor to secure votes
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/11/screwing-poor-to-secure-votes.html
7) Biofuels: Is corn ethanol the way to go?
http://runyogi.gaia.com/blog/2007/11/biofuels_is_corn_ethanol_the_way_to_go
8) Repeal "Biofuels" Requirements
http://dad29.blogspot.com/2007/11/repeal-biofuels-requirements.html
9) Hell hath no fury like a special interest questioned
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/business/hancock/blog/2007/11/hell_hath_no_fury_like_a_speci.html
10) Biofuels and world hunger
http://www.workers.org/2007/world/biofuels-1018/
11) Corn prices raise the specter of hunger
http://www.latinamericapress.org/article.asp?lanCode=1&artCode=5401
12) Ethanol leaders urge U.N. to review biofuel report
http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKN1247224320071112
13) A clean, green machine?
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/11/a_clean_green_machine.html
14) Biofuels eating into food security--Golez
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20071216-107111/Biofuels_eating_into_food_security--Golez
15) Are commodities a bubble ready to burst?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/money/2007/12/16/ccmines216.xml
16) Will Agro fuels Usher Famine?
http://blackstarnews.com/?c=122&a=3990
17) Zimbabwe: Myths of Agro-Fuels Boom
http://allafrica.com/stories/200712170216.html
18) The Buzz on Biofuels: Worse Than Dickensian
http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/2007/12/buzz-on-biofuels-dickensian-solution_19.html
19) Saving and Restoring Forests Saves Far More Carbon Emissions than Biofuels
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/12/370099.shtml
20) What Is The Real Cost Of Corn Ethanol?
http://culturaleconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-is-real-cost-of-corn-ethanol.html
21) The Globalization of Hunger
http://www.madre.org/articles/inter/globalizationhunger.html
22) Subsidizing Hunger On Borrowed Cash
http://www.globalpolitician.com/23911-economics
23) NCSU researchers re-engineer sweet potato for efficient ethanol production
http://biopact.com/2007/12/ncsu-researchers-re-engineer-sweet.html
24) Biofuels "Will Not Lead to Hunger"
http://coolexcooling.com/2007/12/23/biofuels-will-not-lead-to-hunger/
25) Zimbabwe: Biofuels - Promote Research On Non Food Crops
http://allafrica.com/stories/200712240568.html
26) Global food prices rise 40% in 2007 to new record
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1227-fao.html
27) Biofuels, the Biggest Scam Going
http://www.counterpunch.org/goodman12282007.html
28) The Last Word (for 2007) on Biofuels and Hunger
http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/2007/12/vandana-shiva-gets-years-last-word-on.html
29) False Solution to Climate Change
http://liberianature.blogspot.com/2008/01/false-solution-to-climate-change.html
30) How Global warming is creating global hunger
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2008/01/how-global-warm.html
31) Eating MEAT and using BIOFUELS becomes an international disaster
http://iaoeoai.blogspot.com/2008/01/eating-meat-and-using-biofuels-becomes.html
32) Three Billion Dead: The Future of Biofuels and the Future of Resistance
http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2008/01/three-billion-dead-future-of-biofuels.html
33) It's time to wake up to the danger of this infatuation with biofuels
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/brendan-keenan/its-time-to-wake-up-to-the-danger-of-this-infatuation-with-biofuels-1261870.html
34) Defra scientist: second generation biofuels need investment
http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=14033&channel=0
35) Starving for Fuel: How Ethanol Production Contributes to Global Hunger
http://www.theglobalist.com/DBweb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=5518
36) Africa: Controversial Proposals Expected At WEF Gathering
http://allafrica.com/stories/200801190055.html
37) The world has only 11 weeks of consumable corn reserves - the lowest level ever
http://12degreesoffreedom.blogspot.com/2008/01/world-has-only-11-weeks-of-consumable.html
38) World Economic Forum to look at Africa's Green Revolution and energy
http://biopact.com/2008/01/world-economic-forum-to-look-at-africas.html
39) Neither biofuels nor biotechnology will benefit African smallholder farmers
http://africanagriculture.blogspot.com/2008/01/neither-biofuels-nor-biotechnology-will.html
40) Ethanol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol
41) Ethanol The Road to a Greener Future
http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/publications/infosource/pub/vehiclefuels/ethanol/M92_257_2003.cfm
42) Methanol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol
43) Biodiesel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
44) Jatropha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatropha
45) Biofuels could generate extensive food shortages
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/296855
46) CLIMATE CHANGE: EU Persists With Biofuels
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40890
47) INSIGHTS: Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2008/2008-01-25-insbro.asp
48) Food supplies too scarce to meet relief needs
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/df52ae50-cbb1-11dc-97ff-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1
49) DEVELOPMENT: Biofuels a Lose-Lose Strategy, Critics Say
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40929
50) The Choice Between Food And Fuel
http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=15055
51) Groups call for moratorium on government biofuels incentives
http://www.brownfieldnetwork.com/gestalt/go.cfm?objectid=C7EF413E-BA4E-4A46-4486791A7CAF9782
52) UN aid chief worried by food inflation, weather
http://uk.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUKL29349230._CH_.242020080129
53) Impoverished Areas Of Africa And Asia Face Severe Crop Losses From Climate Change In 20 Years
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080131152010.htm
54) Nine Billion Little Feet on the Highway of the Damned
http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant02062008.html
55) Studies conclude that biofuels are not so green
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/07/healthscience/biofuel.php
56) Genetically modified (GM) crops ‘failing to keep promises’
http://fooddemocracy.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/genetically-modified-gm-crops-failing-to-keep-promises/
57) Small farmers speak out against globalisation
http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=&fArticleId=4254663
58) The ravages of ethanol
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/guests/s_552462.html
59) CLIMATE CHANGE: Lula Calls for Flexibility from Rich Countries
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41302
60) African NGOs call for moratorium on biofuels
http://www.afrol.com/articles/28075
61) Canadians Bemoan the Lack of Availability of Biofuels
http://domesticfuel.com/2008/02/24/canadians-bemoan-the-lack-of-availability-for-biofuels/
62) The Future is Famine
http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2008/02/future-is-famine.html
http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2008/02/future-is-famine-part-2.html
63) A recipe for inflation
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/a-recipe-for-inflation-787936.html
64) The Great Agrofuel Swindle
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3571/The_Great_Agrofuel_Swindle
65) World Food Program issues 'emergency appeal' for funds
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-food25mar25,1,6674660.story
66) "We knew we were poor before, but now it's worse than poverty."
http://12degreesoffreedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/we-knew-we-were-poor-before-but-now-its.html
67) Hot air on biofuel
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Hot-air-on-biofuel/287849/
68) Food Agencies Are Starting to ask for Extra
http://batucuda.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/food-agencies-are-starting-to-ask-for-extra/
69) EU's biofuels target could be amended amid concerns
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5j1UHdxrunQY6gK9ddDZzHUi4zrRA
70) Biofuel: The fake solution to climate change
http://carboncapstaskforce.blogspot.com/2008/03/biofuel-fake-solution-to-climate-change.html
71) Soaring Food Prices Putting U.S. Emergency Aid in Peril
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022904029.html
72) Ethanol Is Not The Answer
http://robertd.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/ethanol-is-not-the-answer/
73) NYT Hits Small Mark, Misses Big One
http://www.animalperson.net/animal_person/2008/03/nyt-hits-small.html
74) Higher grain prices putting squeeze on world food aid
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-wed-world-food-programmar05,0,2800064.story
75) 2008: The year of global food crisis
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2104849.0.2008_the_year_of_global_food_crisis.php
76) Economies face the prospect of mass migration, fear, famine and disorder
http://www.financialnews-us.com/?page=uscomment&contentid=2450009523
77) World Bank to Increase Africa Agriculture Loans
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,date:2008-03-11~menuPK:34461~pagePK:34392~piPK:64256810~theSitePK:4607,00.html
78) Hunger is set to grow as global food stocks fall
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Hunger_is_set_to_grow_as_global_food_stocks_fall/articleshow/2859771.cms
79) World Bank Loan To Complement Agricultural Reform In Kazakhstan
http://commercecan.ic.gc.ca/scdt/bizmap/interface2.nsf/vDownload/IMI_2414/$file/X_554592.DOC
80) China: Third Irrigated Agriculture Intensification Loan Project
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/EAP/eaprural.nsf/PrintFriendly/43A7075F389926A485256F970068FDE9?Opendocument
81) Results For "agriculture development"
http://extsearch.worldbank.org/servlet/SiteSearchServlet?q=agriculture%20development
82) World Bank Support of Agricultural Development Projects in Romania
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/oed/oeddoclib.nsf/DocUNIDViewForJavaSearch/18C44C3F0235EA25852567F5005D89BF
83) Agriculture & The World Bank
http://www.whirledbank.org/environment/agriculture.html
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Solving the World's Problems
We collectively in society have a pervasive belief that big problems are someone else's to solve. When someone points out a problem to us our general reaction is to ask what they intend to do about it. I am not sure when it became that he who recognizes a problem has the responsibility to fix it. Where is the responsibility of the person(s) who created the problem in the first place? To me the first responsibility of someone who recognizes a large systemic problem that they cannot fix themselves, especially one not of their own making, is to make others aware of it so they can collectively fix it, or avoid it if it can't be fixed.
I have a confession to make. I cannot fix global warming and climate change. I cannot prevent peak oil. I can not solve resource nationalism. I cannot correct the global freshwater crisis. I cannot rebuild the planet's lost soil fertility. All of these problems are beyond my meagre talents to rectify. All of them will affect me as much as the next person so I very much want to see them corrected but I am powerless, on my own, to do anything significant about them. Does that mean, therefore, that I should just accept them (like the old quote from Anonymous suggests, "Accept the things you cannot change, have the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.") and wait for someone else to recognize them, speak about them and offer solutions? I am personally very skeptical of anyone promising solutions to large global problems. They are generally simplistic and focused on the symptoms, not the underlying cause. And I do not believe you can effectively solve any problem unless you correct the underlying cause. Fixing the symptoms without fixing the underlying cause just sets up a return visit to fix other symptoms, and then others. The symptoms may change but the problems will persist.
Why do I write about global problems without proposing solutions? The problem with proposing solutions to large problems, especially systemic global problems, is this. What is the next response when you tell someone a solution to a problem? "That's great. Now go do it and don't bother me about it anymore."
Let me illustrate. I could tell you that the underlying cause of peak oil is that we are using far too much oil and have become too dependent on it and have no other alternatives to fall back on when it can no longer satisfy our needs. The solution? Reduce our oil dependence, reduce our oil consumption through greatly improved efficiencies, develop and ramp up the alternatives for us to fall back on so we are ready as the oil supply diminishes. "Great. Now go away and do it and don't bug me." See how it works?
The solutions to our global problems are not simple. They are as complex as the intricate web of underlying causes of the problems. No one can tell you "in seventy-five words or less" how to solve peak oil, global warming or any of the other serious global problems on the horizon. If the primary requirements for any proposed solution are simplicity, brevity and the ability to be done (by someone else, of course) without affecting people's lifestyles then no workable solutions can be put on the table. Period!
Why do peak-oilers wallow in despair? Because people do want brief, simplistic solutions that will not affect their lifestyle. Well, how about this. That lifestyle is the underlying cause of peak oil, global warming, resource depletion, soil contamination, the freshwater crisis, pollution and the rest of the whole long list of global problems we are facing. This planet cannot sustain a massive population of a single parasitic species at the very top of the food chain (we 6.6 billion humans) in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. For starters we have to drastically change and simplify our lifestyles, stop globalization, eliminate our obsession with and dependence on the personal auto, abandon the perpetual growth economy, re-orient our consumption to satisfying needs not wants, oh, and reduce our population to one billion by the the middle of this century. But that does not fit within the criteria that acceptable solutions must satisfy - brevity, simplicity and no changes.
Because there are no solutions that can satisfy those criteria!
Of course there are solutions! But they are complex, intricate, they are going to be painful, and they are going to involve massive changes. At this late stage there is no other option. The time for simple, easy solutions was centuries ago when the contributors to the problems we have created were simple and easy. But the layers of complexity that we have added to those problems are going to require similar layers of complexity in the solutions. And governments and politicians, industry and the media continually telling people what they want to hear - that there are no problems, that life is good, that the American way of life is not negotiable, and that people living beyond their means is acceptable (nay, required) - simply serves to make the proposal of "real" solutions that much more difficult and to be viewed as that much more unacceptable.
Peak-oilers are seen as pessimists and doom-n-gloomers because they won't share in the false euphoria that permeates mainstream society. We wont sing Kumbaya and validate the cornucopean proclamations of society's cheerleaders. Most importantly, and very mistakenly, we are accused of wishing for the collapse of human society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Don't shoot the messenger.
Every peak-oiler I know hopes beyond hope to be able to head off some of the disasters they see coming by alerting unaware people to those disasters in hope they will collectively take action and make the necessary changes and sacrifices to prevent them or reduce their impact. The pessimism comes from the constant confirmation that that is unlikely to happen. People do not seem to be interested in saving themselves, their children and their grandchildren if it means giving up or changing anything. So be it! At least we try. You can't force people to unplug themselves from the matrix. All you can do is try to make them aware that they are part of it. If they like it in there and feel comfortable and secure and don't want to come out, all you can do is move on and try to save those that you can. It's very lonely and often times it seems like the easiest course of action is to just give up and re-insert the plug and rejoin the matrix. After all, your chances of survival on your own, while the matrix is still there, are very remote. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?
But enjoy what exactly? What benefits are there to be derived from blissful ignorance of the problems we have created and continue to make worse? It's a little like marching knowingly into the Auschwitz gas chambers blithely joining in the celebration of the wonderfully cleansing shower they have told us we are about to have. You know you are about to be gassed to death but you go along with the pretense and put on your best, silk bathrobe.
How do we solve all of the problems I talk about? With a universal change in attitude. We have to collectively start treating the earth and the environment like we are part of it, like we belong to it rather than it belonging to us. How we achieve that, I do not know. Maybe we need massive, penalizing luxury taxes on all non-essential goods. Maybe we need to build into every item the true environmental cost and compel both the manufacturers and users of those products to invest that money in correcting the environmental damage done by their manufacture and use. I don't know what the answers are. But I do know there are answers. I may know some of them. You may know some of them. Charlie on the next block may know some. But if we never talk about the problems, if we continue to act like they don't exist, we will never solve them.
The solution to any problem starts with the understanding and acceptance that there is a problem that needs solving. And I don't think we have collectively reached that point yet. I believe the majority of people still think everything is fine and life is great. And why wouldn't they? Every mountain of a problem is reduced by the media and politicians to a molehill and every tiny molehill of a solution is built up as a Mount Everest. Black is white, red is green and pigs fly.
I am as guilty as the next person and as much a part of the problem, perhaps more guilty because I already know the things I should be doing but am not. Others can at least plead ignorance, even if selective and voluntary. I can only plead advancing age and ill health. But we do have to fix the problems, if the human race is to have any long-term survivability as a viable species, and the time to do so is rapidly running out. Fixing the problems will not involve more of the same. We cannot continue on with human society as it is presently constituted. There must be a serious change in direction. There simply are not sufficient resources - be that oil, natural gas, coal, water, soil, a wide variety of metals and minerals, or any other resources - to continue on the way we have, especially for these past few hundred years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
One of the most controversial and painful subjects of discussion among peak-oilers is the so-called die-off. This is the theory (strongly held belief?) that when we pass peak oil the massive global human population, which has virtually exploded since the Industrial Revolution but, most particularly, since the beginning of the oil age in which time it has more than tripled, will begin to diminish rapidly back to a level, it is believed, approximating global population before the Industrial Revolution. That population was about one billion. This theory or belief is based on an analysis of the amount of energy (most derived from oil and other fossil fuels) required to produce the food and other life essentials needed by a human population, and the close co-relation between population and energy use. (See my article in this blog, Energy as the Catalyst in the Punctuated Equilibrium of Human Population Growth).
It is reasonably estimated, for example, that in western industrialized societies it takes about ten calories of energy, again mostly from fossil fuels, to produce every calorie of food. That, to me, despite being a shocking ratio, is a very low, conservative estimate. Why? Because it does not take into account the massive amount of topsoil loss caused by so much human agriculture and the effort, time and energy that will be required to revitalize that soil to the level needed to produce the food needed by the population without modern agricultural machinery, chemicals and practices (See my article in this blog, Post-Peak Agricultural Capacity). It does not take into account the damage done to our lakes, rivers and oceans from agricultural run-off and the effort and energy it will require to recover them. It does not account for the massive depletion and toxification of the planet's underground aquifers, especially non-replenishable fossil aquifers like the Ogallala aquifer in Western U.S. (See my water articles in this blog; The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis, Peak Water, and Mining Water), and the effort, energy and time that will be involved in bringing them back to health. It does not account for the spent and wasted energy that will be involved in crop losses in storage without modern storage techniques. In other words, it is an estimate that has little applicability to human society on the other side of peak oil where, one way or another, the food needed by the population will have to be produced without today's prodigious energy inputs.
Whatever level of population exists on the other side of peak oil, and regardless of all the other "things" that population produces and consumes and surrounds itself with, that population is going to require the same quantities of food per person as today's population. If every calorie of that food requires ten calories of energy to produce where is that energy to come from without those fossil fuels? Obviously if it is to be produced from human power, manual labour, human energy, we will not survive long as a species if we are expending ten calories of human energy for every calorie of food we produce and consume. Food production in our modern, globalized society is perhaps one of the most inefficient uses of energy we are guilty of. There is absolutely no choice but to find greater efficiencies in food production on the other side of peak oil. But we are constantly told, and very incorrectly so, that food production using fossil energy and the practices instituted with the Green Revolution are the most efficient in history. They are the most efficient in one respect only, the reduction of the amount of human labour involved in that food production. We use so much energy in food production because we have replaced human energy with machines, massive, energy-gobbling machines. We produce more food with fewer man-hours of effort than at any time in human history. But we do so, and can do, only because of the massive amount of energy fossil fuels have allowed us to exploit. The practices we use today simply are not applicable to a post-fossil-fuel world. We are going to have to relearn agriculture and food production, and we need to begin now.
I have a confession to make. I cannot fix global warming and climate change. I cannot prevent peak oil. I can not solve resource nationalism. I cannot correct the global freshwater crisis. I cannot rebuild the planet's lost soil fertility. All of these problems are beyond my meagre talents to rectify. All of them will affect me as much as the next person so I very much want to see them corrected but I am powerless, on my own, to do anything significant about them. Does that mean, therefore, that I should just accept them (like the old quote from Anonymous suggests, "Accept the things you cannot change, have the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.") and wait for someone else to recognize them, speak about them and offer solutions? I am personally very skeptical of anyone promising solutions to large global problems. They are generally simplistic and focused on the symptoms, not the underlying cause. And I do not believe you can effectively solve any problem unless you correct the underlying cause. Fixing the symptoms without fixing the underlying cause just sets up a return visit to fix other symptoms, and then others. The symptoms may change but the problems will persist.
Why do I write about global problems without proposing solutions? The problem with proposing solutions to large problems, especially systemic global problems, is this. What is the next response when you tell someone a solution to a problem? "That's great. Now go do it and don't bother me about it anymore."
Let me illustrate. I could tell you that the underlying cause of peak oil is that we are using far too much oil and have become too dependent on it and have no other alternatives to fall back on when it can no longer satisfy our needs. The solution? Reduce our oil dependence, reduce our oil consumption through greatly improved efficiencies, develop and ramp up the alternatives for us to fall back on so we are ready as the oil supply diminishes. "Great. Now go away and do it and don't bug me." See how it works?
The solutions to our global problems are not simple. They are as complex as the intricate web of underlying causes of the problems. No one can tell you "in seventy-five words or less" how to solve peak oil, global warming or any of the other serious global problems on the horizon. If the primary requirements for any proposed solution are simplicity, brevity and the ability to be done (by someone else, of course) without affecting people's lifestyles then no workable solutions can be put on the table. Period!
Why do peak-oilers wallow in despair? Because people do want brief, simplistic solutions that will not affect their lifestyle. Well, how about this. That lifestyle is the underlying cause of peak oil, global warming, resource depletion, soil contamination, the freshwater crisis, pollution and the rest of the whole long list of global problems we are facing. This planet cannot sustain a massive population of a single parasitic species at the very top of the food chain (we 6.6 billion humans) in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. For starters we have to drastically change and simplify our lifestyles, stop globalization, eliminate our obsession with and dependence on the personal auto, abandon the perpetual growth economy, re-orient our consumption to satisfying needs not wants, oh, and reduce our population to one billion by the the middle of this century. But that does not fit within the criteria that acceptable solutions must satisfy - brevity, simplicity and no changes.
Because there are no solutions that can satisfy those criteria!
Of course there are solutions! But they are complex, intricate, they are going to be painful, and they are going to involve massive changes. At this late stage there is no other option. The time for simple, easy solutions was centuries ago when the contributors to the problems we have created were simple and easy. But the layers of complexity that we have added to those problems are going to require similar layers of complexity in the solutions. And governments and politicians, industry and the media continually telling people what they want to hear - that there are no problems, that life is good, that the American way of life is not negotiable, and that people living beyond their means is acceptable (nay, required) - simply serves to make the proposal of "real" solutions that much more difficult and to be viewed as that much more unacceptable.
Peak-oilers are seen as pessimists and doom-n-gloomers because they won't share in the false euphoria that permeates mainstream society. We wont sing Kumbaya and validate the cornucopean proclamations of society's cheerleaders. Most importantly, and very mistakenly, we are accused of wishing for the collapse of human society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Don't shoot the messenger.
Every peak-oiler I know hopes beyond hope to be able to head off some of the disasters they see coming by alerting unaware people to those disasters in hope they will collectively take action and make the necessary changes and sacrifices to prevent them or reduce their impact. The pessimism comes from the constant confirmation that that is unlikely to happen. People do not seem to be interested in saving themselves, their children and their grandchildren if it means giving up or changing anything. So be it! At least we try. You can't force people to unplug themselves from the matrix. All you can do is try to make them aware that they are part of it. If they like it in there and feel comfortable and secure and don't want to come out, all you can do is move on and try to save those that you can. It's very lonely and often times it seems like the easiest course of action is to just give up and re-insert the plug and rejoin the matrix. After all, your chances of survival on your own, while the matrix is still there, are very remote. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?
But enjoy what exactly? What benefits are there to be derived from blissful ignorance of the problems we have created and continue to make worse? It's a little like marching knowingly into the Auschwitz gas chambers blithely joining in the celebration of the wonderfully cleansing shower they have told us we are about to have. You know you are about to be gassed to death but you go along with the pretense and put on your best, silk bathrobe.
How do we solve all of the problems I talk about? With a universal change in attitude. We have to collectively start treating the earth and the environment like we are part of it, like we belong to it rather than it belonging to us. How we achieve that, I do not know. Maybe we need massive, penalizing luxury taxes on all non-essential goods. Maybe we need to build into every item the true environmental cost and compel both the manufacturers and users of those products to invest that money in correcting the environmental damage done by their manufacture and use. I don't know what the answers are. But I do know there are answers. I may know some of them. You may know some of them. Charlie on the next block may know some. But if we never talk about the problems, if we continue to act like they don't exist, we will never solve them.
The solution to any problem starts with the understanding and acceptance that there is a problem that needs solving. And I don't think we have collectively reached that point yet. I believe the majority of people still think everything is fine and life is great. And why wouldn't they? Every mountain of a problem is reduced by the media and politicians to a molehill and every tiny molehill of a solution is built up as a Mount Everest. Black is white, red is green and pigs fly.
I am as guilty as the next person and as much a part of the problem, perhaps more guilty because I already know the things I should be doing but am not. Others can at least plead ignorance, even if selective and voluntary. I can only plead advancing age and ill health. But we do have to fix the problems, if the human race is to have any long-term survivability as a viable species, and the time to do so is rapidly running out. Fixing the problems will not involve more of the same. We cannot continue on with human society as it is presently constituted. There must be a serious change in direction. There simply are not sufficient resources - be that oil, natural gas, coal, water, soil, a wide variety of metals and minerals, or any other resources - to continue on the way we have, especially for these past few hundred years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
One of the most controversial and painful subjects of discussion among peak-oilers is the so-called die-off. This is the theory (strongly held belief?) that when we pass peak oil the massive global human population, which has virtually exploded since the Industrial Revolution but, most particularly, since the beginning of the oil age in which time it has more than tripled, will begin to diminish rapidly back to a level, it is believed, approximating global population before the Industrial Revolution. That population was about one billion. This theory or belief is based on an analysis of the amount of energy (most derived from oil and other fossil fuels) required to produce the food and other life essentials needed by a human population, and the close co-relation between population and energy use. (See my article in this blog, Energy as the Catalyst in the Punctuated Equilibrium of Human Population Growth).
It is reasonably estimated, for example, that in western industrialized societies it takes about ten calories of energy, again mostly from fossil fuels, to produce every calorie of food. That, to me, despite being a shocking ratio, is a very low, conservative estimate. Why? Because it does not take into account the massive amount of topsoil loss caused by so much human agriculture and the effort, time and energy that will be required to revitalize that soil to the level needed to produce the food needed by the population without modern agricultural machinery, chemicals and practices (See my article in this blog, Post-Peak Agricultural Capacity). It does not take into account the damage done to our lakes, rivers and oceans from agricultural run-off and the effort and energy it will require to recover them. It does not account for the massive depletion and toxification of the planet's underground aquifers, especially non-replenishable fossil aquifers like the Ogallala aquifer in Western U.S. (See my water articles in this blog; The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis, Peak Water, and Mining Water), and the effort, energy and time that will be involved in bringing them back to health. It does not account for the spent and wasted energy that will be involved in crop losses in storage without modern storage techniques. In other words, it is an estimate that has little applicability to human society on the other side of peak oil where, one way or another, the food needed by the population will have to be produced without today's prodigious energy inputs.
Whatever level of population exists on the other side of peak oil, and regardless of all the other "things" that population produces and consumes and surrounds itself with, that population is going to require the same quantities of food per person as today's population. If every calorie of that food requires ten calories of energy to produce where is that energy to come from without those fossil fuels? Obviously if it is to be produced from human power, manual labour, human energy, we will not survive long as a species if we are expending ten calories of human energy for every calorie of food we produce and consume. Food production in our modern, globalized society is perhaps one of the most inefficient uses of energy we are guilty of. There is absolutely no choice but to find greater efficiencies in food production on the other side of peak oil. But we are constantly told, and very incorrectly so, that food production using fossil energy and the practices instituted with the Green Revolution are the most efficient in history. They are the most efficient in one respect only, the reduction of the amount of human labour involved in that food production. We use so much energy in food production because we have replaced human energy with machines, massive, energy-gobbling machines. We produce more food with fewer man-hours of effort than at any time in human history. But we do so, and can do, only because of the massive amount of energy fossil fuels have allowed us to exploit. The practices we use today simply are not applicable to a post-fossil-fuel world. We are going to have to relearn agriculture and food production, and we need to begin now.
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