The Peakist

Howard Kunstler wrote ‘The Long Emergency’ on the premise that in the near future our lives will change dramatically due to a confluence point of simultaineous global problems. The primary issue here being peak oil. A secondary issue he touched on was climate change, to which many are attributing this summer’s uncharacteristic weather patterns.

I believe this is the first micro effects of a confluence of problems that will directly effect the standards of living in the western world.
” In the 40 years between 1950 and 1992, the area of planted arable land increased by 14.5 per cent from 611 million hectares to 700 million hectares; in the same period, grain output rose from 692 million tons to a staggering 1,920 million tons, an increase of 177.5 per cent…….. The ability of agriculture to produce far greater quantities food this century than in previous centuries can be attributed to four factors: advanced plant breeding techniques, the use of intensive irrigation, the availability of fertilizers on a commercial scale, and the development of plant protection products. Applied together, these four technologies have produced a remarkable outcome: although there has been an enormous increase in world population during the twentieth century, and although there are still parts of the world where people are suffering from malnutrition, nowadays, starvation is no longer a common cause of death, as it was in the last century. Nevertheless, because the population of the world continues to rise, 680 million people - or 12 per cent of the world’s population - could be chronically undernourished by 2010, according to FAO projections. This means that the demands on agriculture to be both productive and sustainable are increasing. ” source EFMA

(more…)

For every calorie of food produced by agriculture, 10 calories of fossil fuel is burned. And today Bush announces the intention to cut US petroleum consumption by 20% in ten years - mainly through substituting corn-derived ethanol. The corn required to fill an SUV tank with bioethanol just once could feed one person for an entire year. Lester Brown has described the boom in bioethanol as a competition between the 800 million people in the world who own cars with the 3 billion people who struggle to feed themselves on less than $2 a day. This year’s Soil Association conference is on the theme of “Preparing for a post-peak oil food and farming future,” with keynote speakers from the peak oil fraternity, Colin Campbell, Richard Heinberg, Jeremy Leggett and Rob Hopkins. Jonathon Porritt, no less, (another speaker) had an piece in the Guardian today bylined “Declining oil reserves will impact hugely on energy prices and the way we eat and farm.” He points out that the idea that the UK might be forced back on predominantly its own productive resources is dismissed as “retro-protectionist rambling.” I predict the term “deglobalisation” will mainstream in the not too distant future. Let’s hope this comes about through reasoned response to the unfolding crisis rather than in shocked post-hoc analyses following a successful attack of the Saudi Abqaiq facility or a tanker in the Straits of Malacca. Jonathon Porritt’s article… (more…)

In the 2006 budget the UK Government introduced the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO)- a requirement on transport fuel suppliers to ensure that, by 2010 5% of all road vehicle fuel is supplied from renewable sources, bringing the UK roughly in line with the 2003 EU biofuels directive. In the US, with federal subsidies for bioethanol production, and in the EU with targets to be met, biofuels are big business. A recent study by the Worldwatch Institute concluded that, for Europe to provide for 5% of its transport fuel needs, a wholly unrealistic 36% of its agricultural land would have to be dedicated to biofuels. While currently British Sugar supplies much of the feedstock for UK biofuels, most of it blended with supermarket forecourt petrol, there is no way to meet the modest 2010 biofuel target utilising crops from European land. Instead the targets will be met with imports of biodeisel and ethanol - both of which currently present huge enviornmental problems and to greater or lesser extent displace the CO2 emissions that are the raison d’etre of the RTFO from European tailpipes to the US grain belt and Indonesian palm oil plantations.

Sasha Lilley reports for CorpWatch on the reality of the “green fuel” ethanol:

“The town of Columbus, Nebraska, bills itself as a “City of Power and Progress.” If Archer Daniels Midland gets its way, that power will be partially generated by coal, one of the dirtiest forms of energy. When burned, it emits carcinogenic pollutants and high levels of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming. Ironically this coal will be used to generate ethanol, a plant-based petroleum substitute that has been hyped by both environmentalists and President George Bush as the green fuel of the future. (more…)

With the annoucement yesterday that Fidel Castro is handing power over to his brother, due to ill health, this is perhaps a good time to have a look at how Cuba coped with it’s own artificially enforced version of peak oil. When the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it Cuba’s supply of subsidised oil, Cube underwent an profound oil crisis that can provide some interesting lessons on how we might cope with the reality of peak oil. Today Hugo Chavez is supplying Cuba with oil and it would be interesting to know to what extent things have changed back to oil dependency.

Perhaps the most profound change caused by the Cuban oil crisis was the forced areplacement of centralised, industrial monocultural agriculture with a revolution in permaculture. The following piece, which first appeared in Permaculture Activist, Spring 2006 (www.permacultureactivist.net) was written by Megan Quinn, outreach director for The Community Solution ( www.communitysolution.org). (more…)

Dozens of factories that turn corn into the gasoline substitute ethanol are sprouting up across the US, often in places hundreds of miles away from where corn is grown, the New York times reports:

“Once considered the green dream of the environmentally sensitive, ethanol has become the province of agricultural giants that have long pressed for its use as fuel, as well as newcomers seeking to cash in on a bonanza. The modern-day gold rush is driven by a number of factors: generous government subsidies, surging demand for ethanol as a gasoline supplement, a potent blend of farm-state politics and the prospect of generating more than a 100 percent profit in less than two years. The rush is taking place despite concerns that large-scale diversion of agricultural resources to fuel could result in price increases for food for people and livestock, as well as the transformation of vast preserved areas into farmland. (more…)

Vandana Shiva

Recent research has shown that a 50g bag of leaf salad sold in British supermarkets and grown in Africa costs the consumer 99p. To cultivate it will have required almost 50 litres of water. Other salads take as much as 300 litres. Yet global retail chains are increasingly sourcing fruits and vegetables from Africa and India while appearing impervious to the fact that every kilo of food moving around the world is generating global warming gases, taking precious water; and pushing farmers off the land and denying them access to water as corporate farming for exports takes over. (more…)

NAIROBI, 14 March (IRIN) - More frequent and
more severe droughts are likely to blight the Horn of Africa as global warming increases and commercial activities continue to destroy the environment’s ability to bounce back from dry spells, leading environmental experts have cautioned.

Deforestation and commercial exploitation of wetlands have brought about climate change and decreased rainfall on a massive scale across eastern Africa, and if these harmful practices continue, millions of people could face starvation annually. Global warming has exacerbated the situation: According to a March 2006 report from the University of Cape Town, global warming could cause 25 percent drop in surface water across Africa by the end of the century.

(more…)

The mainstream media’s treatment of the peak oil issue amazes me. The ability, to see how dependent all aspects of our social structure are on cheap oil, and how the declining supply of that oil will directly lead to a decline in our social structures is staggering. It will not be a case of getting the train to work instead of your car. The practical reality is, a significant amount of our jobs won’t exist in the post carbon world. (more…)

ST. LOUIS — The search for El Dorado in the Amazonian rainforest might not have yielded pots of gold, but it has led to unearthing a different type of gold mine: some of the globe’s richest soil that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground.That’s not all. Scientists have a method to reproduce this soil — known as terra preta, or Amazonian dark earths — and say it can pull substantial amounts of carbon out of the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, helping to prevent global warming. That’s because terra preta is loaded with so-called bio-char — similar to charcoal.

“The knowledge that we can gain from studying the Amazonian dark earths, found throughout the Amazon River region, not only teaches us how to restore degraded soils, triple crop yields and support a wide array of crops in regions with agriculturally poor soils, but also can lead to technologies to sequester carbon in soil and prevent critical changes in world climate,” said Johannes Lehmann, assistant professor of biogeochemistry in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Cornell University, speaking today (Feb. 18) at the 2006 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (more…)