I think this is the beginnings of an economy based on perpetual growth and fossil fuel energy running headlong into geological energy constraints. Basically I see an undulatory downward path for the rest of my life. From here out, I think any rallies in our economic condition are going to be met with spiking commodity prices that knock us right back down.
Joined: May 26, 2004 Posts: 1195 Location: Zoorope
Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2004 6:22 am Post subject:
Yes Licho,
here in Italy, unbelievable, we throw away oranges and tomatoes simply because it's chaper to buy them from north Africa than harvest ours. (Sometimes I think this kind of world deserves a good lesson )
I was hearing on Tv just ten minutes ago that we fish 300.000 tons of fish, and 75% is sold to Asia.
But I couldn't find a good calculation on how much bioagricolture and fishing is needed to feed 450 millions people, it would be nice to know.
Joined: May 31, 2004 Posts: 920 Location: Brno, Czech rep., EU
Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2004 6:31 am Post subject:
If you think that declining oil won't suffice to cover food production, then check some your local statistics.
I'v checked statistics from my country and there are some results:
Total energy from fossils consumed by economy each year
coal : 788 PJ (peta Joules - *10^15)
natural gas : 204 PJ
benzines (petrol,gas) : 10 PJ
diesel : 55 PJ
other oil products : 50 PJ
Energy used in agriculture
benzines : 0.3 PJ
diesel : 9 PJ
As you can see oil itself is very little compared to coal and natural gas. Agriculture is using just 16% of diesel
Used for chemical production (including production of fertilizers)
benzines : 0.13 PJ
diesel : 0.2 PJ
other oil products : 5 PJ
coal : 36 PJ
natural gas : 15 PJ
As you can see, there are huge "reserves". Agriculture is just using 16% of diesel and chemical industry just 10% of other oil products. If things are getting harder, these areas will get priority and will be well supplied. No reason to expect some huge famines in western world.
Another interesting values are numbers consumed by electricity production/transmission, generation of heat/cold and heating of water, these totals are:
coal: 529 PJ
natural gas: 39 PJ
other oil: 6 PJ
diesel: 0.3 PJ
Joined: May 02, 2004 Posts: 66 Location: Denmark (Scandinavia)
Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2004 8:45 am Post subject:
I am not only talking about basic food exports, the EU exports alot of other food to the african countries too. Like cookies And alot of other stuff... I saw the a program on our danish national TV. It was 2 hours long and it showed how our subsidies has ruined almost all countries in africa.
They can produce nothing down there beacuse its so cheap to buy it from us. And thay cant sell their own products to the EU because thier price isnt competitive even though the workers down there only gets a small fraction of the paycheck we get here....
Why do you think we have subsidies here in the EU? We have it because the export from the direct farming an indirect food products to the third world is a GIGANTIC part of oyur economy. If it wasnt, then why bother with subsidies??
Try ask a farmer in france, germany or denmark or another EU country if he can live from his farming without subsidies.... I know the answer.. NO! And i know that as i have asked several local farmers here.
If subsidies would be gone, the whole agriculture would collapse in EU because suddenly prices cant compare with the prices from the third world. Heck, even with subsidies we cant compete on tomatoes in spain as barbara says...
Joined: May 02, 2004 Posts: 66 Location: Denmark (Scandinavia)
Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2004 8:54 am Post subject:
Oh and by the way: You say our export of food products is only a very little fraction of EU economy...
Here is a quote:
Quote:
Over the past two weeks, European agriculture ministers have been haggling over changes in the CAP, which now consumes some 40 billion euros, roughly half of the EU budget.
If 50% of the EU budget to subsidies is a small fraction of our economy then i must be crazy These 40 BILLION euros reflects how much money we are taking from the poor countries by not letting them export their food let alone produce it because of our low prices pushing all world prices down...
And heres another quote supporting my theory:
Quote:
So, the end of the CAP could raise sub-Saharan GDP by nearly $26.4 billion per year -- enough to increase the annual income of every person in these countries by nearly 13 percent. If these benefits flowed to rural Africans, it could save hundreds of thousands of lives and improve the lots of millions more.
Joined: May 31, 2004 Posts: 920 Location: Brno, Czech rep., EU
Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2004 9:14 am Post subject:
I didn't say that agriculture is small industry, I just said, that EU food exports are not major one. EU food exports were just 7% of total exports value in 1999.
But the real question is why would subsides go away? If things are getting worse it's only logical to raise subsidies to calm down farmers and ensure that food prices are lower than real.
Other part of this is, that you stated EU will be hungry - this is nonsense, because right now we are exporting. We produce enough to feed local market + as much as possible for export (countries that got biggest subsidies).
So if subsidies fall and transport prices rise and EU exports are no longer competetive with African made food, then only exports are cut off, but we still have enough of food produced here.. Farmers won't stop farming without subsidies, they will just loose competetivness on global market and farm less only to feed local market and not export. It's market regulated - if there is lack of food, food prices rise causing farmers to grow more of it. After all, we have far higher buying power and in the end could buy this extra food from flourishing hypothetical African farmers
Joined: May 02, 2004 Posts: 66 Location: Denmark (Scandinavia)
Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2004 9:45 am Post subject:
The reason that you see this different than me is that you have a different wiev of things to come.
I have a lot less optimistic view of the future when peak oil hits than you have. Therefore its not so hard for me to see a future where food is scarce throughout the world as economies all around the globe collapses.
And the buying power of europeans dont mean anything when the rest of the world is going down around us. They will drag us with them thanks to the globalisation our civilazation has created.
Most African countries are not self-sufficient in food and rely to varying extents on imports and on having the income to pay for them.
One thing at least, when Australia can no longer afford to grow for the world, the soil erosion and river rape will cease. To me it's insane to KILL the land to feed a load of foreign mouths who are destined to die anyway.
I think one very big point is missing in this thread. The world's debt-based money system requires continued growth. Continued growth requires an increase in the consumption of energy. When peak-oil arrives full-blown, growth in GDP will slow, then stop. 1 out of every 6 Americans makes his livelihood from businesses and services tied to the automobile industry. This isn't about just paying higher prices, conservation, or subsidizing. Without growth in our economy, new people won't have jobs. Many jobs will disappear overnight. Most Americans buy their food in a grocery store fed by a massive convoy of never-ending semi-tractor trailers criss-crossing American night and day. If they stopped hauling for 6 hours, the store shelves would be bare. Inflation could get rampant, jobs scarce. Does anyone know how the rest of the world faired during the Great Depression? I think that would be a good point of reference for today. People in America got awful hungry then. They lost their homes, their jobs, and their ability to crawl out of it. With our current real estate bubble, I can see another great transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich. _________________ A Saudi saying, "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel."
Live in Arizona? Check out: http://sustainablearizona.org and read my blog.
Joined: Aug 14, 2004 Posts: 2068 Location: San Diego, Ca.
Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2004 9:04 pm Post subject:
I have noticed a trend. There are some people here (mostly "soft landers") who only take certain problems into account while ignoring other related problems. What we need are people to weigh in with the big picture. Responses like: 'Food will still be around, it will just be more expensive' does not help when vast amounts of people are broke and unemployed.
Monte, thank you for providing the big picture. _________________ "Peak oil isn't more than an interesting industry factoid and doesn't have anything to do with the hysterics speculated on ad nauseum around here!" ReserveGrowthRulz
Jato - I'd count myself as one who sees a soft landing as a possibility, given a new degree of co-operation internationally, and a major slice of luck.
I don't care to speculate on the detail of dieback as doing so seems fatuous given the myriad variable in play. For example, this week's New Scientist reports that the asian-chicken-flu viruses have now achieved a human to human infection. Given appallingly bad luck (which could just be the karma of allowing battery chicken farming) further mutations of the viruses could end our over-population problem within a year.
Identifying the organizational and technical changes that will optimize the chances of a soft landing looks to me to be the real potential value of this site. To this end I well agree with you there's no point in looking at any one part of the 'problematique' and speculating on its solubility without integrating its effects, and the proposed solution's effects, on the other key factors - the big picture is a necessity.
Thus far across the site I've seen reference to four prime factors in that problematique: the decline of supplies of oil & gas, of fertile soils, of potable water, and of climatic stability. Also numerous secondary issues have been suggested ranging from divisive nationalist ideologies and theocratic creeds through to key minerals' depletion.
Under these combined stresses, I don't see any nation as being secure even in its food supplies, let alone in more sophisticated wants.
IMHO Monte is entirely right in pointing out the unsustainability of the system of continued economic growth, particularly under declining fossil energy supplies, and in sketching in the impoverishment this implies. As that system decays into collapse there will perforce be a wholesale re-evaluation of nations' wealth according to their most basic Capital Resources, (their renewable energy potentials, fertile soils, water supplies and climates) rather than by the present notional values of so-called Capital Assets (papers and perhaps gold in a vault, or some electronic code on a disc).
I would agree with those posters who've highlighted the priority for liquid fuel supplies that food production and distribution will be given in most countries, and so don't see that as an early domino, particularly in view of liquid biofuels' major potentials. But, those nations that lack sufficient fertile soils and the climatic stability to gain reliable harvests will be dependent on:
another nation having food surpluses over and above its wish to maximize its food reserves, and
on being able to export something, or gain international credits, on a scale to pay the going rate for those food supplies;
or on having signed a global agreement to preclude profiteering by managing a strategic global food reserve from which to ship supplies to whichever nations are most in need.
From this perspective it is the climate issue that puts all nations at the same risk:we have no way of defining who will be hit when, how hard, how often, by which sort of impact or in what order.
Given that some posters have yet to see the climate issue as even being relevant, I'd point out that beside the intensifying mayhem elsewhere, in the last few years Europe has faced two winters with 500yr rains and a 250yr drought and heatwave that killed over 27,000 people. And, with man-made Global Warming having been acknowledged by the Whitehouse as having started in 1950, we're now over 50 years into a rising curve of climate destabilization.
The nearest we've got to long term climate forecasting is from:
several countries' super-computers using Global Circulation Models, which largely agree on the broad changes but can neither forecast in detail nor give reliable account of potential climatic 'flips' such as the loss of the gulf stream; and from
the statements by significant parts of the global insurance industry, such as the Assoc. of British Insurers and Munich Re, that global weather damage costs are now around $100bn/yr and are on a well-established rising trend of about 12%/yr (i.e. doubling about each six years).
This amply confirms that we cannot tell which nations are going to suffer to what degree, or even whether impacts will be evenly spread.
In this light all nations have a common interest in co-operating over remedial measures (such as a global food reserves system above) as if they expected to be the hardest hit.
By this point I guess that some of those readers who've been brought up to have no faith in international co-operation are groaning. So here I must ask them, as one small example of such co-operation, just why isn't there any smallpox in their countries ? Wasn't it the UN that organized the co-operation ended that terrible scourge ?
While all nations share that common incentive for remedial action for the climate, the international rationing of oil and gas supplies is just a non-starter as a focus of that action. The culture of devil-take-the-hindermost is just too deeply imbedded in the industry and in producer nations' ministries for any real prospect of success.
By contrast, governing the other end of the fossil fuel industry, namely its emissions, offers at least a serious prospect of the effective remedy of Global Warming, and the news that Russia is to ratify the Kyoto protocol initiates a useful first gesture toward this end. Kyoto was of course more shortcomings than substance (it had for instance no formal structure for allocating emissions rights even between its industrialized participants) but it did at least set the precedent of using tradeable emissions permits to optimize those allocations' usage and to fund 'renewable' energies.
Under the successor to Kyoto, which will in effect be a Treaty of the Atmospheric Commons, all nations will be invited to participate. Whether the developing countries choose to do so, and so to forego the growth that their coal reserves would allow (as ours have allowed us), depends on the extent to which negotiation can develop a treaty that is:
efficient in Contracting nations' GHG output down to a globally sustainable level in an agreed period, and is
equitable in Converging nations' per capita GHG output to global parity within an agreed period.
This climate policy framework of Contraction and Convergence, which has already gained widespread diplomatic and political recognition, is a very large subject; those interested can learn more about it at: www.gci.org.uk
The achievement of such a treaty would address the issue of climate destabilization on the necessary global scale, and in rapidly reducing fossil fuel usage it would also largely disarm the threats posed by peak oil. Yet IMHO, neither of these is really its central potential; its operational presence as an unassailable bulwark of the international co-operation that underpins the global civilization would be its greatest function.
I don't think it's putting it too strongly to suggest that in the absence of such a multi-yield treaty to address the problematique, a widespread descent into the 'Somalia syndrome' of increasing famines, disease, civil strife and warlordism seems, sadly, all too likely.
Just a figure i ran accross with today on the third world debate:
International Energy Agency estimates that a $10 rise in the oil price reduces growth in rich (OECD) countries by 0.4%; and in sub-Saharan Africa by a full 3%. So if we are to tackle poverty and underdevelopment in Africa, we need to address the energy needs of the poorest, who often have to spend the highest proportions of their incomes on basic energy such as cooking fuel. And if growth in developing countries such as China and India is to continue at present rates – lifting millions out of poverty – then we must ensure that the growing energy demands of those countries can be met.
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And alot of other stuff... I saw the a program on our danish national TV. It was 2 hours long and it showed how our subsidies has ruined almost all countries in africa.
