Before petroleum, China struggled to support even 200 million people. They suffered regular famines, wars, and dieoffs. Now, they use four times the world average of synthetic fertilizer per hectare, and are still falling behind.

For most of China's history, their population fluctuated between 35 and 60 million people.

I think what we will be losing with the "Green Revolution" is our insurance. China has food to export some years, and in others must import. It's no big deal, because there's plenty of food on the market. If there's no food on the market, they would suffer the same dieoffs they used to in the bad old days.

Whats gonna happen when the sanitation system shuts down in cities because of no energy to run the system? I don't think you can have millions of outhouses in the city. Only running water works for high rise buildings.

Didn't we see a such situation in New Orleans quite recently? The cause being a little different though. It won't be pretty. It will be like in the medival towns, except for the bacterias resistant to antibiotics and a population with a pampered immunesystem.

Torjus Gaaren

The main problem with sewage is that it concentrates heavy metals. If you use it as fertilizer, it will eventually poison the land and the crops.

But there has been some promising research done with certain types of bacteria. They can remove the heavy metals and make the sludge safe to use as fertilizer. There's even been some talk about recycling the metals thus extracted.

This won't replace synthetic fertilizer, though. "Night soil" was commonly used as fertilizer in the past (and still is in many places). It didn't increase food yields like the Green Revolution has.

Yeah, I heard that when the toilets stopped running in the superdome that there was shit and urine everywhere. I shudder to think about the people that were in there living like that.


I also remember reading about someone who jumped off of one of the upper floors and commited suicide at the dome. I don't remember the reason but I imagine if I was forced to live in such filth I would consider the same. I'm a clean person and couldn't tolerate living in filth. Thats one of the things that worries me most about post oil is sanitation going downhill.

[topic merged by MQ}


Hey guys I was just comparing world pop to land area and it is quite amazing how small the area per person if you assume an equal cut for everyone.

148,300,000sqkm/6,446,131,400 pop = .02300604sqkm X 1000sqm= 23sqm(about 5m x 5m footprint) per person. This makes alot of sense when considering the destruction of natural habitit. Was wondering if any of you had noticed these stats. Of course the fact that many people live in cities with multi-floors would add alot of sqm but farm takes up alot of area. I hear this is what is driving some of the deforestation to make way for the sugarcane plantation. This was just land surface and it does not take into account that Antartic, nothern regions and hot deserts are not of use for human habitation without a large amount of energy.

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/DanielChen.shtml

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=& ... tnG=Search

To convert square kilometers to square meters you have to multiply by 1,000,000 not 1,000. Your calculation is wrong by a factor of 1,000.

More relevant is the amount of land surface affected by human activities, which is about 40%. That's a lot for one species, not leaving much for all the other species which we depend on to survive.

That makes sense, I thought it was too small of a number.

What's important is the amount of ARABLE land per person. Those numbers are not so promising, and they deteriorate relentlessly as arable land diminishes and population increases. Global warming could further shift those numbers in unknowable ways.

It's also vital to consider, when it comes to food, the necessary energy inputs for that arable land to produce what it's producing, and their costs, and how those realities will change after PO.

Current agricultural practices destroy arable land, so even as the population increases, the available arable land decreases. There are methods for reversing this, but they aren't being implemented on a large scale.

I thougth that NG not was essential in produsing fertilisers?

[url=http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20051213/cm_usatoday/americanspoorernationspayhighpriceforfarmaid;_ylt=ArGBBjwpMXKiASQgzNef4ais0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3YWFzYnA2BHNlYwM3NDI-]
Americans, poorer nations pay high price for farm aid[/url]

Not sure I agree with this. It's one thing to let the free market rule for nonessentials like tobacco or cotton, but for food staples, the result could be mass starvation.

But it does show the damage that "globalization" is doing to poorer nations. I think subsidies could be a good thing, if the market was the U.S. alone. But forcing poor farmers in Third World countries to compete with subsidized U.S. agribusiness is terrible. It's killing agriculture in nations that are going to need all the food they can grow in the future. Possibly the very near future.