As we began looking at Bill McKibben's book, Deep Economy a couple of posts ago, I suggested that it looked like McKibben was setting up to suggest that our way of life is not sustainable. That we have "prospered" and been able to produce food for the ~7 billion of us only because of cheap fossil fuels and water.
But as time goes on, as the population continues to increase, and, as affordable fossil fuels and water begin to run out (whether that's sooner - ten years or less, or later - 100 years from now), both water and petroleum will go up in cost. Lacking affordable water and petrol - the two resources on which our economy is based - what will become of us?
McKibben addresses this, saying:
The "food system" has been made over in the name of efficiency and growth as much as any other: the average bite of food an American eats has traveled fifteen hundred miles [!! -dan] before it reaches her lips.
The self-sufficient all-around farms with which the colonists covered the continent have largely disappeared, at least outside of Amish country...
This being the case, one must wonder what happens when affordable petroleum goes away? If we can no longer purchase food from the other side of the world, will we be able to begin to produce and buy locally again?
We all know that the Industrialists will say, "Well, something will just replace petroleum - we'll still get our stuff..." even though no such replacement exists. But short of some answer to, "Where?," I have a difficult time taking such misplaced starry-eyed optimism seriously.
So, are we ready for winters without oranges or strawberries? Or will global climate change mean that we'll be able to grow oranges and year-round strawberries in our now-temperate zones?
Is there some reason to assume that it's not a big deal that we won't be able to buy food from around the world?
34 comments:
Nope, I think that’s quite serious too – and out-of-season fruit is the least of our worries; fifteen-hundred miles is only half of the distance across America. Where does the beef in your burger come from? Where do the wheat for the bun and the potatoes for the fries get grown? What percentage of the population have a grain farm, a root-veg plantation and a cattle ranch within ten/fifty/one-hundred miles of their home?
Either people will need to pay a lot more for their basics, or you have to revert to far more localised, small-scale faming methods. That’s probably unsustainable for the world’s population as it stands now. How much worse is it going to be after the continuing population growth in ten or a hundred years time?
I am currently growing plums, pears, peaches, loquat, grapes, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, olives, limes, avacados, and pecans. Cabbages, Broccoli, Spinich, Romaine Lettuce, and various herbs round out this years garden. I think I have enough to trade with if it comes to that.
I'm planning to add coffee and figs this year to my list of 'home-growns'.
If I could afford a greenhouse I'd add cocoa and vanilla. I'd even add a Date-palm and Pomegranate if I had room... I could cut down that pesky Magnolia, and the two Dogwoods, but I like the Dogwoods too much. The Magnolia? Not so much.
Well, you surprise me, Eric. I didn't have you pegged as the gardening type. Good for you.
I'm with you, Liam, not being able to purchase strawberries in the winter is the least of our concerns.
It's great to get to be an old geezer and be able to say this: Son, back in my day (oh, let's say the 60's) almost all the food available here was local. Truck farmers hawked their wares from produce stands or traveled around neighborhoods in pick up trucks selling the corn,greens, beans, etc. that people would can and potatoes they'd store for the winter. All the eggs, milk, and meat came from local farmers. There were a score of large poultry farms, countless dairies, and a city of about 30,000 sported two slaughter houses and one meat packing plant. There were three local commercial bakeries (large ones, not artisan bakeries), three soda bottlers. Although local wheat had disappeared a couple generations before that, the staple bread was made of cornmeal which was locally grown and locally milled.
All this within living memory and not half a century ago.
It's all gone now. All of it. No poultry farms, no slaughter houses, no dairies, no bakeries, no bottlers, no millers.
I mention this to show how recent a phenomenon in human history it is to move food so glibly about the globe. Apples grown 30 miles from here cost about the same as those grown in New Zealand or Chile. It is as if we are burning the world's fuel at break-neck pace and utterly writing it off as if it were not a factor in the cost at all.
But I wouldn't take it to absolutism. Even then there were imported foodstuffs. In midwinter we had oranges, Dan, because that's when they are harvested. We didn't have them in August. They were a midwinter treat and you paid a bit for them. My father traveled for business then (by train) and would bring back a sack of oranges in January when he passed through Florida. People bought coffee and tea, but then again, we've had imported coffee and tea since the days of sailing ships.
A stock couplet in folk songs to make the line rhyme with 'all' is:
Peaches in the summer time
Apples in the fall
The only remnant of this philosophy here is that there is a large strawberry farm near by (which was all but out of business until the Mexicans came) and every spring from late May to June, three are strawberry stands on every corner and everyone gluts on strawberries.
Though everyone, I suppose, isn't in a position to make this comparison, shipping foodstuffs all round the world has given us much, much poorer quality food. Varieties of food are grown specifically for their shipping qualities. That is, now of days they are grown to sell, not to eat.
McKibben makes all these points, as well. Again, his bottom line seems to be: It'd be one thing if this modern approach were working, but we're less happy, more busy, getting crappy stuff. Where's the joy in that?
But why is he cutting off such a small piece of wood?????
pablo
www.roundrockjournal.com
It wasn't a very cold day...
about the woodcutting, that is what happens when the need is taken out of learning. Like worksheets of math problems. A shame really. It is also an awfully small piece of wood to be cutting with such a big saw. Again, practical applications left out, and people left with the impression that something is much harder than it is.
"This being the case, one must wonder what happens when affordable petroleum goes away?"
The diligent will figure things out for themselves...the Democrats will cry about it.
In addition to being a gardener I've forsaken a lot of modern foods, especially prepackaged boxes like Hamburger Helper... have you read the list of ingredients on those things!?
I'm moving slowly and surely toward a biblical diet. No refined sugars, artificial sweetners, fructose. No refined flours, but breads made from sprouted grains. No more pasturized milk, but raw unpasturized goats milk (I'd rather it be cow's but can't find a dairy farmer clean enough or willing to sell it fresh and raw). No more pork, either. Only organic grassfed beef, buffalo, chicken, and goat. Goats cheese made from raw, unpasturized milk, and raw unheated local honey. I'm also restricting my fats and oils to real butter, olive oil, grapeseed oil, and raw coconut oil.
All very expensive, but worth it in the genuine physical sense of well-being I'm experiencing. I'm more alert, less sluggish, and able to do more work throughout the day than I could just three months ago.
I can't agree more with Eleutheros, though I'd add that because of the disappearance of locally produced foods and our crazy belief that we can fortify and preserve new foods in boxes and pouches, pumped with chemicals and industrial detergents, as well as fake 'trans' fats, that America now suffers, at epidemic levels, from diseases that were extremely rare or altogether unknown a mere century ago.
The advent of the electic stove is a major player in modern disease. Folks used to take the wood ash from their stoves and fireplaces and spread them each morning in the garden. We no longer get the benefit of those nutrients in our foods. Food today has far less-- in terms of vitamins and minerals --life sustaining nutrients than just 100 years ago.
Does this make me a radical? So be it!
I'd add also that the Cavendish is experiencing a blight that if not countered in time will take bananas off the menu.
So far, from what I've read, scientists have been unable to correct the problem which is compounded by the fact that the Cavendish do not produce viable seed. Every Cavendish is a cutting from another, and therefore suffers the same susceptibility to disease.
Speculation is, within 15 to 20 years bananas will be scarce if not extinct.
I'll take the magnolia, EL!
all know that the Industrialists will say, "Well, something will just replace petroleum - we'll still get our stuff..." even though no such replacement exists. But short of some answer to, "Where?,"
First we ran out of wood. So we started using coal. We ran out of coal (well, not really, it's just that oil was cheap), and so started using oil. History has led us through this issue before.
We haven't run out of wood or coal and we're not running out of oil. We're running out of cheap oil that is used in massive quantities. There is not another resource that can match that amount of energy.
You believe the epitome of human energy production is the burning of oil, how quaint.
I believe the facts are that we use a set amount of petroleum today and our economy is dependent that set amount at roughly the price we're paying for it.
I further believe that the facts are there is no resource in the real world that can replace all or even most of that energy on which our economy is dependent.
I therefore believe that it is imprudent, foolish and immoral to continue to base our economy upon the ability to continue to have that given amount of cheap energy.
Feel free to enlighten me and tell me what can possibly replace oil. In the real world, not a fanciful but meaningless concept such as "Human ingenuity..."
We can not create energy from nothing. Human ingenuity, for all our cleverness, doesn't burn very well.
If that's true, Dan, then you should be able to name a few examples from world history in which societies exhausted their energy resources and collasped.
John:"then you should be able to name a few examples from world history in which societies exhausted their energy resources and collasped."
Oooh, oooh (raising hand excitedly) Call on me, teacher!!
Until the advent of the steam engine and then the IC engine, "energy supply" meant fuel for human and animal muscle since that was how all work was done. That and the few cases where the society depended on metals and exhausted all their wood for charcoal and couldn't work the foundries and forges any more.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic are on the same island. Haiti is hopelessly impoverished and the DR is not. In processing sugar cane into sugar, Haiti deforested itself, exhausting its energy supply beyond recovery. The DR did not and its energy supply recovered and is available to this day.
The work on Easter Island was done entirely by human muscle fueled by the fish in the surrounding waters, the bird population, fruit trees and palm trees, and the rich soil that grew taro, cane, and such. They exhausted those resources and with no fuel (in the form of food), their society collapsed.
The Norse colony on Greenland depended on the grass feeding the cattle as an energy source. When climate shifted slightly and they continued to use their resources as if it were business as usual (sound familiar?), they exhausted the energy supply within a few years and the society collapsed.
History is full of such examples.
The difference, the chilling difference, between them and us is that the energy resources upon which they depended were renewable if only they'd managed them that way (as many societies in fact did) but ours is emphatically and demonstrably (and logically) not renewable.
I'm sure there was some Norse Greenlander who said, "Well, Olaf, I know it looks as if we're grazing away the grass and the soil is eroding. But remember when we first came here 400 years ago we brought pigs and they tore up he ground so badly we had to get rid of them. Then we brought goats and they just about wiped out all the small trees so we got rid of them. Then we got sheep and they grazed the grass too short so we got rid of them. [narrator's note: this is actually what took place with the Norse Greenland colony]. So now we have cattle and it looks as if we can't sustain them here either. So what? We've always had to find some new animal to raise and you nay sayers, Olaf, are always predicting gloom and doom. But we always come up with something. True, I don't know right now what that is, but we always come up with something. Norse ingenuity, don't you know."
But they didn't. There wasn't anything else and the colony met its extinction.
Know what I mean, Olaf?
Eleutheros, you are a joy to read.
Sometimes. Today, for instance.
Alrighty then, John. Since El so ably answered your question, are you amongst those saying that there IS a replacement for oil (in the quantities and at the price we currently use it) out there "somewhere" and, if so, let us all know what that is so we need not needlessly fret about what seems to us to be an obvious matter of concern.
And, if you can't, don't you think it at least a little reasonable to rethink current policy and consumption patterns?
I fully understand not being able to come around to my little blog to carry on conversations. Life is busy.
But we have, on this topic, had repeated driveby mockings of the notion of Peak Oil ("You believe the epitome of human energy production is the burning of oil, how quaint.") and every time I offer a chance for those who dispute the dangers of peak oil to tell us what the replacement is, it's always one of two answers:
1. "Human Ingenuity"
2. [....silence]
The silence is a somber enough answer for itself.
Giving an answer of "human ingenuity" is not a useful answer. Give me specifics.
We get X amount of energy from petroleum right now. What else will we be able to get that amount of energy from?
I think that, as of right now, any time in the future someone offers an answer of "human ingenuity" or a non-answer of "You really think we won't come up with something else...?" I will delete the comment and repost it under my name with a note pointing out that this is not an answer.
Just so you know. Give me real answers or don't ask me to bet the world and my children on your hunch.
I don't think there is any hope for the world. There is, however, hope for my children.
Here's a specific example, still has hurdles to overcome, but once overcome, 2/3 of our dependance on oil goes away.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/automotive_news/4214707.html?series=16
We took a spin yesterday in the Ford HySeries Edge, the world’s first working plug-in, fuel-cell, hydrogen-powered car, which the Detroit automaker plans to show off as a concept at the New York auto show tomorrow.
...what really made our test special was actually being able to drive a car running on advanced hydrogen fuel-cell technology that can power itself with a 336-volt battery pack.
Now I'm not kidding myself, I know because I haven't offered up a perfectly working, ready to go right now, replacement for gas powered vehicles you'll poo poo it but you've made yourself irrelevant. These alternatives will someday become a reality regardless of what you think about it.
Eben,
Let my join Dan in a sigh of frustration in trying to address this subject.
The hydrogen car is a "let them eat cake" solution.
So what if you perfect a car that will run on hydrogen? Where are you going to get the hydrogen?
Hydrogen fuel cells are only a sophisticated form of electric storage battery. You have to have some form of energy to separate the hydrogen from water to use as the fuel. Where you gonna get that energy?
The cornucopians will say, "From solar, or wind, or such." But as Dan has pointed out, do the math and add up ALL the energy from those sources necessary to replace the oil being consumed and we still fall woefully short.
Pointing to hydrogen cars as a solution to rapidly depleting oil would be like saying that since the cost of corn is going up (because so much of it is being distiled into ethanol for motor fuel), the price of beef is going up. No problem, isn't the solution obvious, eat pork instead!
Isn't it a fair question to ask what we will be feeding the pigs if we have no corn? Then too it's a fair question to ask where all that hydrogen is going to come from.
Easter Island, Haiti, the Norse colony at Greenland -- all examples of small societies dying out or being severely impoverished. What do they have in common? They are all extremely isolated. And that is why they died out. It was not from a lack of energy resources. It was that human life was sufficiently complex that they could not maintain functionality without access to a greater variety of materials.
How about nation states? Empires? You're drawing a false correlation between the whole human race and isolated colonies. History has not shown a large society -- that is, one that is not isolated -- to have ever died out from energy depletion. And that is why these apocalyptic fears are mere hysteria.
DING! DING! DING! We have a winner. John was the first one to respond with yet another non-answer! (Actually, Eben was, but his was at least an ATTEMPT at an answer, even if it was still a non-answer).
John said:
"History has not shown a large society -- that is, one that is not isolated -- to have ever died out from energy depletion. And that is why these apocalyptic fears are mere hysteria."
THIS is a non-answer. The question is, once again:
SHOW ME where the replacement is for the ~400 Quadrillion BTUs of energy we use derived from fossil fuels?
The answer should be in the form of something like, "We can replace the ~400 Quadrillion BTUs of energy we currently derive from fossil fuels by..." and then providing an answer. To the question being asked.
Not a NON-answer.
[with apologies for using wikipedia as a source for my BTU link, but it's relatively easy to understand as compared to some of the other sources.]
But to answer the question that John raises, those societies died off (or were severely damaged) from over-consumption of available resources. They were isolated.
So are we. We are isolated on planet Earth with x amount of resources. If we set up an economic system that requires 2x or 16x (as we are doing), we will similarly overconsume the available resources.
The difference between those societies and ours is that, at least they had the POSSIBILITY of moving elsewhere where more supplies might be had.
We have no such possibility. It's the only earth we got.
John:"Easter Island, Haiti, the Norse colony at Greenland -- all examples of small societies dying out or being severely impoverished. What do they have in common? They are all extremely isolated."
The basis of Roman culture in the beginning was independently owned small holdings worked by extended families (which often included slaves, but they were viewed then as part of the extended family). All the orators, politicians, and soldiers were also farmers or craftsmen. The most important gods were not state gods but family gods (lars, genius, etc.)
By the time of the empire there was a large urban leisure class, professional priests tending state gods, professional politicians, and a professional military. It was supported by vast state owned farming collectives worked by state owned (or collective owned) slaves.
So at this time in Roman history, the source of energy was mainly human labor (with some draft animal labor) much as ours is oil today. As the population increased and the use of products produced by forced human labor increased, the military was pressed to obtain slaves from an ever expanding military presence (sounding familiar?). Finally the ancient world managed to resist in a meaningful way and within a much shorter time than it took to build the empire, it lost its energy source and collapsed.
A similar thing happened with the Mayans, ancient Sumer, and a number of other very large and very un-isolated cultures.
You guys constantly put up a strawman and then beat it down, namely you don't have to replace the energy production from oil in a one to one basis. Energy from oil, namely internal combustion engines, is woefully ineffecient. A simple hydrogen modification to a current engine, that's been around since the 1970's, is 25% more efficient than gasoline. Hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as gasoline engines meaning you need half of the current energy supply to meet current demands.
And Eluthero's asks, where do you get the hydrogen? Well, where don't you get it from? Currently 95% of of America's hydrogen comes from natural gas, not oil, but I suppose you'll then start talking about 'peak natural gas'. Well, we get the rest from splitting water, I suppose then you'll start talking about 'peak water'. Hydrogen is, after all, the most plentiful element in the universe. But with you guys the sky will never stop falling.
Yes, hydrogen is plentiful.
The question is how do you isolate hyrdogen out so that you can have it in a usable format. To separate it from water is one common suggestion.
But what is the process of separating hydrogen out of water? It involves energy. And where does that energy come from...?
I'll say it again, if you want to make the case that our hyperconsumption based upon a dependence upon fossil fuels is not a dangerous thing, all you have to do is show us how we get along without the fossil fuels on which our hyperconsumption is based.
Saying that we'll replace it with hydrogen without explaing how we'll obtain the hydrogen is not a complete answer. As you rightly noted we'd ask.
Eben:"Well, we get the rest from splitting water, I suppose then you'll start talking about 'peak water'."
And we split the water ....how? With electricity. And where does the electricity come from?
When you use any energy source to 'split' water into hydrogen and oxygen, the resulting hydrogen when applied in a power plant (engine) to do useful transportation work is LESS efficient than the original source of energy. This is because no energy conversion or storage system is 100% efficient and almost none are anywhere near that.
That is, Eben, you have to have the energy to begin with in order to end up with that energy stored in the form of electrolytically separated hydrogen.
If you use natural gas to produce hydrogen, you end up with less energy in the resulting hydrogen than you had in the original natural gas. There is no perpetual motion machine in the offing, no 'free lunch'.
Until these principles of physics are understood by the aspiring cornucopian, they will always greet news of this or that battery system or this or that gain in efficiency as if it were 24th century dilithium crystals giving us unlimited power with no consequences and no limitations.
25% gain in efficiency isn't going to do it. Even if (and this is of course impossible) we came up with a way to make all our available energy sources 100% efficient, we still face an overwhelming energy crisis, just a very few years later than is upon us now.
During GW Bush's first term (and this is for time frame reference, it has little to do with Bush), the world used 10% of all the petroleum it had used since the beginning of time (or history, what have you). During his second term, we bid fair to use another 10% off all the petroleum ever used (including the first 10% in that figure!).
Three years ago I was buying feed corn for $2.60 for the 50#. Today it's just over $5.00 because it is being bid up by ethanol plants. Millions of acres that have been in soybean and cotton production are being planted in corn (which will cause the price of clothing and food to go up sharply). If energy is so plentiful and cheap, why the rush to scarf up corn and other agricultural products and drive the price up beyond the reach of most of the world's population? Why the need for expensive ethanol if we are awash in energy?
And it's not alarmism to ask responsible questions, is it?
Given that
1. we are utterly and painfully dependent upon fossil fuels today and,
2. fossil fuels are a finite resource which is about to be priced out of reasonable use,
it is only responsible to ask "When fossil fuels peak in the coming years (or decades, if you want to be generous), what then?
To try to make it out that those who ask these sorts of questions are somehow alarmists and doomsday-ers is a way of not answering the question that remains unanswered.
You guys have an agenda in which there is only one answer: a make-believe, cornucopian, agrarian society where the world's population is shrinking. Nothing will ever convince you otherwise.
That being said, next-generation nuclear power plants will reach temperatures high enough to produce hydrogen as well as electricity, either by adding steam and heat to the electrolysis process, or by adding heat to a series of chemical reactions that split the hydrogen from water. These probably wont come on line for another decade though. IF achieved, though, you'll have a virtually endless supply of cheap hydrogen.
I'll be waiting patiently for the 'peak uranium' replies.
Eben:"I'll be waiting patiently for the 'peak uranium' replies."
As an example in case, France pats itself on the back as being much more energy stable than most of the world since much of its energy comes from nuclear.
Yet what is not common knowledge is that France once had rich uranium deposits. The rate of recovery (mining) uranium went up steadily from the early 50's and peaked in 1988. It went into steep decline and now the uranium resources of France are completely exhausted. Almost all the uranium used in French reactors is imported, they are just as dependent on imported uranium as we are on imported oil.
Uranium used in the world's reactors today comes from two sources, 1) uranium stockpiled in the 1980's and 2) newly mined uranium.
The stockpiles are near exhaustion and we are rapidly exhausting the recoverable deposits.
If the present reactor capacity remains constant, the annual demand amounts to 67 kt/yr. If the annual production amounts to 45 kt and if 22 kt are taken from stocks, then stocks will be exhausted by 2015 (possible changes due to uranium enrichment and MOX fabrication are marginal). The continuing consumption of 67 kt/yr exceeds the reserves below 40 $/kgU by between 2030 and 2035. The inclusion of reasonably assured resources below 130 $/kgU would exhaust these resources by around 2050. Even the inclusion of the inferred resources below 130 $/kgU would lead to exhaustion of resources by around 2070.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379
Eben, a refutation of the above would run like this: No, there is lots more uranium than that, or we are not using it nearly that fast ...along with the corrected numbers.
So as far as replacing the untold billions of BTU's we are consuming as oil, you picked door number nuclear and the prize is not there.
And Dan's question remains.
Eben:"You guys have an agenda in which there is only one answer:"
We do have one agenda. If there is a substitute for oil, then state what it is along with the numbers. Not vague pie in the sky science fiction. Numbers. It's easy to get all wrapped up in hybrid cars, fuel cells, solar, wind, hydrogen economy, dilithium crystals..etc.. Just like watching a good science fiction movie with good CGI effects.
Numbers aren't nearly as much fun. I guess it comes from all that primitive agrarian thinking some of us do. If we plow X amount of ground and plant Y number of seeds we anticipate Z amount of harvest. We don't have a knack of expecting that a magic bean will give us 50Z of harvest or that fairies will show up at the last minute to make it 100Z harvest.
Anyone reading this far below the fold, here's another bit of recent news about depletion of uranium:
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/iran-uranium-russia/403
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