Runnin’ on Empty October

Runnin’ on Empty

Conversations with Caren Black on the View from Oil’s Peak

October

“A very large proportion of the world's population depends for food from high agricultural yields achieved by the use of fossil fuels….” It would take three weeks of manual labor to produce the food eaten by the average American in one day, a fact we ignore by spending our “inheritance.” “World population will have to adjust to lesser food supplies by a reduction in population…. If it is not done, famine on a large scale is likely to ensue.” (Pfeiffer, ibid)

Intensive petroponic farming (to coin a term) affects the land as well as population. Remember the desertification of the “fertile crescent”? Our farming has reduced the Midwestern prairie “breadbasket” to “little more than a sponge into which we must pour hydrocarbon-based fertilizers in order to produce crops.” Pfeiffer (ibid) quotes “approximately three-quarters of the land area in the United States is devoted to agriculture and commercial forestry²⁵” but we erode 4.25 billion tons of topsoil every year, 30 times faster than it regenerates.

What can we do?

We can be more efficient. We feed 12-16 pounds of grain to cattle to get 1 pound of beef. Only one-fourth of our grain goes to people. We spend 78 calories of fossil fuel for each calorie of feedlot beef. Overall, we squander ten times more energy to produce food than the food gives us. We have choices: We can produce 250 pounds of beef per acre or 40,000 pounds of potatoes. Relegating meat to a garnish will not solve the problem, but could slow it, because eating grains and beans, not meat, could reduce U.S. oil consumption by nearly 20 percent.

We could eat closer to home, eating foods in season, locally grown, with little packaging. Increasing fuel efficiency and using alternative fuels help as well, but nothing will solve the problem without lower population levels, not just “over there” among third world people (who consume 83 percent less than we do!), but here where overconsumption equals normality.

“Pimentel and Pimentel (1996) state: ‘... the nations of the world must develop a plan to reduce the global population from near 6 billion to about 2 billion. If humans do not control their numbers, nature will….’ The end of this decade could see spiraling food prices without relief. And the coming decade could see massive starvation on a global level such as never experienced before by the human race.” (Pfeiffer, ibid) The end of this decade is coming soon. Katrina and Rita further depleted the oil supply. We have some work to do.

This is what Peak Oil has to do with food.

(University of Michigan, “Global Change” course)

Developing petroleum into fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation produced the “Green Revolution” (1950-2000), increasing agricultural energy usage 50 to 100 times and more than doubling yields with nearly 20 percent fewer workers. Look at what it did to population!

Fossil fuels are an energy “inheritance” or “trust fund” -- literally ancient sunlight trapped and stored in plant matter over thousands of years to become an incredibly powerful energy source. A gallon of gasoline equals the energy of one ton of conventional electric storage batteries. It would require 300 horses working ten minutes – about 165,000 foot-pounds per second – to do the work of a gallon of gas.

By supplementing daily sunlight with this powerful ancient sunlight, we grew more food and, consequently, more people. We began living off our inheritance.

We all understand that an inheritance is finite. Certainly interest and other factors come into play, but if we continually take money out of the bank and never put any back, at some point the money will all be gone. If our lifestyle is dependent on that money – if we are using our inheritance for necessities like rent, food, heating, and medical bills – when the money is gone, we face a crisis.

Compare the graph showing oil production from 1850 to 2100 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil) with the population chart.

Graphic courtesy “History of Agriculture” course, University of Reading, UK

We are hunter-gatherers (shopping’s in our genes) who settled down to farm in the “Fertile Crescent” (the Middle East) around 9000 BC and created “civilization.” Poor farming practices turned much fertile Middle Eastern land into desert, but the region is still responsible for the world’s food supply. How? Why is food the topic of a Peak Oil column? Indeed.

Last winter I mentioned Peak Oil to a woman at a political gathering. She scoffed, “I wish everybody would just buy an SUV so we could use up all the gas and get it over with,” and seemed impatient to move on to more interesting things in life, like a conversation with someone else. Peak oil’s just about cars, right?

“Threats to our oil supply are also threats to our food supply.” (http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2005/Update48.htm Earth Policy Institute) “In a very real sense, we are literally eating fossil fuels.” (Dale Allen Pfeiffer, “Eating Fossil Fuels,” 2004 From The Wilderness.com.) "Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food" (A.A. Bartlett, “Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis”, American Journal of Physics, 46(9), 876-888, p.880) Petroleum fertilizers, irrigation, and pesticides increased U.S. production from 30 bushels of corn per acre to 130 bushels. (David Pimentel, et al, “Impact of Population Growth on Food Supplies and Environment”, American Association for the Advancement of Science, annual meeting, Baltimore MD, 1996)

The chart shows total world population (curved line) since 1000 AD, population leaving farms (bars), and energy used (symbols.)

What Goes Up Must Come Down

David Clayton-Thomas, “Spinning Wheel”, 1969

Humans have farmed for one-half of one percent of our history.