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

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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…)