[Tanada]

What you mean is that agribusiness is efficent in terms of human labor. It is horribly inefficient in terms of energy. After peak oil, energy efficiency will become more important.

No, that's not what I mean. I mean it's efficient, in that it produces a whole hella of a lot of food.

Remember Malthus' Doom? People seem to think that because we haven't seen it yet, Malthus was wrong. He didn't foresee colonialism and the Green Revolution.

But he was wrong only in timing. Even if oil doesn't run out, worldwide famine is likely to be a problem within our lifetimes. By 2020, the U.S. and Canada will be eating all the food they produce. They are the last major food exporters. And the population, at home and abroad, is still growing.

Add in peak oil, and yes, disaster is looming.

Although I appreciate many of your points, Leanan, I think this is hysteria.

Ironic, because agriculture is one of the things I understand best. Since I grew up in the field, so to speak.

If Cuba, a much poorer country than the US and the industrial West, can make the transition to a low-energy agriculture, why can't we?

One, they are a communist dictatorship. If Fidel says "Food will be rationed, and everyone shall carpool," it happens. Two, they are a tropical country. Plenty of warmth, sunshine, and water. They can grow food all year around. They are about the size of Pennsylvania, with about the same population. It's a fairly low population density, for such fertile land. Three, they have the rest of the world to bail them out. Their staples - rice and beans - are mostly imported. So they don't have to grow all their own food.

When we're in this situation, the wealthy will continue to eat filet mignon and drive SUVs, while the poor and middle class are priced out of the market. We won't be able to grow food year-round in most of the U.S. And perhaps most critically, there will be no one to bail us out. No UN food handouts, no bags of rice or corn or flour stamped "A Gift From the People of United States of America." No imports, because no one will have any food to sell.

Food has always been so plentiful for us that most of us have no concept of what it was like before the Green Revolution, when one bad year could result in millions starving. (Though it's still like that in some countries.)

China is right on the edge. Though they are considered "food sufficient" by the UN, that is only on the balance. Some years they grow enough so that they can export, some years they must import. But of course, once the "insurance" of cheap food imports whenever you need them is gone, it will be a different story. You can't tell people to wait until next year to eat.

Could we be more efficient? Yes, of course. And I'm sure we will be. But it won't be enough. We are, as the saying goes, "Eating Fossil Fuels."

http://www.energybulletin.net/281.html

One bad year only results in mass starvation because of the goofy system we currently use, shipping all of the excess grain out for cash. Grain can be stored for a long time without loosing its food value with quite low technology, yet today we ship it out within a couple months to the 'world market' where it is consumed.

I live in farm country, I grew up in farm country on a very small farm. If you drive around here for any real distance you will see two kinds of silo's at most farms. The open top silo's are for silage, but the closed top silo's were designed for grain storage. Drive (or bike if you prefer) up to the farm house and ask how much grain thaey have stored. None is overwhelmingly likely to be the answer, they get a better profit selling than storing so off it goes soon after harvest. Then check out the local grain elevator company, they will have a large number of silo's. Except for strictly local needs for feed grain almost everything they take in is shipped back out to world markets within a few months.

This system developed because transport was so cheap with cheap oil that you could get a better return selling on the world market than internally. It is also a truism that if cheap oil goes away the incentive shifts back. In the past grain not needed right now was stored long term, then when you had a shortage in the future years you made a good profit selling off your stored grain. People have forgotten what famine is in the USA, and dumping every ton of excess production on the world market has had two major effects outside the USA. One effect is to make food cheaper than ever before, which has led to a lot of fat people in the first world and a lot fewer skinny people in the third world. The second effect is more horrible, by dumping grain in the world market the USA has created major disinsentives for people to farm in the rest of the world. Why be a subsistence farmer and bust your hump 12 hours a day (72 hours a week) year round to get enough for you and your family to eat when you can move the whole group to a nearby city, work for low wages for 10 hours a day (60 hours a week) and feed them all well with time and energy left over for recreation?
If the USA converts a significant portion of its excess ag bussiness to bio-fuels as so many wish they would this dynamic will change. Given the choice between a 72 hour week to feed your family or a 60 hour week where someone in the family starves most people will go for the longer work week.
I also see a lot of statements about how it takes zillions of calories of energy to make Ammonia based nitrate fertilizers for modern Ag and how this will screetch to a hault with the peak. This statement has a lot of problems, starting with the fact that the current method of making Ammonia using Methane as the feed stock is horribly wasteful of energy, but it has been so cheap that farmers have been over using nitrates by a large margin. As the price cloimbs the excess use will decline because the marginal financial gain from over fertilizing will be quickly offset by the increase fertilizer cost.
Secondly all throughout the USA you have running water in homes and septic or sewer systems connected to them. Setting up a fertilizer plant at the sewage treatment site to seperate out the uric acids in the sewage would replace the need for most of the fertilizer used in farming. You won't get it for free because you will have to process the sewage and make sure your fertilizer is sterile, not to mention store it for months until it is needed for the crops. Everything here will depend on which method turns out cheaper, sewage to nitrates and uric acid or Ammonia through hydrogen production and the Haber-Bosch process. Either way liquid fertilizer for Ag bussiness will still be availible, it just won't be as cheap as using Natural Gas to make the Hydrogen and produce the heat for the process.

As for Father Thomas Malthus, he lived in a world of dynamic change and all he saw was bad things resulting. He ignored the fact that if you look at history as a whole humanity has gone through boom and bust agricultural production many many times. The Bible exhorted Malthus himself as a Christian to store up one seventh of produced grain every year and rest the land every seventh year while consuming the stored grain. The grain stored under the biblical planning of the old testement provides a healthy cushion for a bad year, if you grew up in farm country you know a 'bad year' rarely means you have NO crop, it just means you have a small crop. Just like the USA with the refinery situation, we actually had enough gasoline stored before Katrina that we could have gotten through the winter without imports from other IEA signatories, the fact that we did get those imports has lowered price by 25%. Unless you get some odd blight like Locusts that eat your crop to the root you will get something back for the effort expended to plant a crop. Even in droughts or wet seasons you get a crop, albeit a much smaller one. If you take whatever crop you get in a bad year and add it to the average stored excess of the 7 year plan in the old testement you get this years small return plus 14% per year storage. Rarley is yeild less than half of 'normal', that is how a normal average is calculated after all, so if you are at half a normal yeild and you have 3 years of excess storage which is 43% of a 'normal' crop you can get by with a 7% reduction in your usage for your bad year. If you have 7 bad years in a row you are dead or you moved somewhere else, but the current system of just in time food shipments is more stupid, because you have no fall back position.
Agricultural wisdom from ancient times, produce a crop, subtract seed for the next year and store in spot A, subtract family needs for next 12 months and store in spot B, Subtract 14% for long term strage and store in Spot C. Take remainder to market and sell it.
Agricultural wisdom in 2005. Produce a crop, sell everything. Use money received to buy seed and pesticide and herbicide and fertilizer for next year. Store nothing, because the market might go down if China or India have a good crop, so you need to get to the market ASAP. Next year repeat.
Method A is sustainible long term, method B only works if energy is cheap and you never have to worry about a local crop failure causing a local famine.
Which method makes more sense from a long range planning point of view? Modern people scoff at the Bible, but if you read through it as a set of guidlines and analize it you will be surprised. It teaches you how to store up for bad times, it teaches basic hygene for all the faithfull, and it teaches sanitation. The Jew's have been attacked through the centuries for not dieing in plagues or famines like their 'Christian' neighbors in Europe. Because they followed the bilical guidlines for hygene, sanitation and food storage they did not become famine weakened and they did not act as vectors for disease the same way the dirty (as in covered in dirt and germs, defecating in the street not washing before eating) neighbors they suffered far fewer losses during hard times. The response of their 'christian' neighbors was to attack them as witches or poiseners because they could not understand why the difference in lifestyle meant a difference in survival rates during plauge or pandemics.
If you could get everyone to store up even 10% of their food budget each year, wash their hands frequently, and wash their bodies at least once a week, you would cut death due to famine and disease 90%.

[MonteQuest]

I live in farm country, I grew up in farm country on a very small farm. If you drive around here for any real distance you will see two kinds of silo's at most farms. The open top silo's are for silage, but the closed top silo's were designed for grain storage. Drive (or bike if you prefer) up to the farm house and ask how much grain thaey have stored. None is overwhelmingly likely to be the answer, they get a better profit selling than storing so off it goes soon after harvest.

Own a 212 acre working farm in NW Missouri. It belonged to my grandfather. Each harvest, most of the farmers did as you sated, they sold their entire crop right away; from field straight to the elevator.

My grandfather, and a few others put their harvest into storage,(corn crib, silos, sometimes using snow fence to build temporary storage).

What was the difference? We were not in debt. We could wait for prices to rise if we choose to. Most farmers are up to their eyeballs in debt for equipment, seed, fertilizers, and herbicides to plant that crop. They have to sell their crop right away to service their debt and to get "credit worthy" to borrow more money to plant next years crop.

It is a viscious cycle. It will not change overnight.

Why do you say they get a better profit selling than storing? Depends on whether the market price is rising or falling, doesn't it?

[Ludi]

The thing is, there's not enough arable land for 3/4 of the population to grow gardens. It may look like we have a lot of land, but much of it is unsuitable for farming. People denounce ranching, saying we don't "need" meat, but cattle graze in areas that are too dry to grow human food crops.

Yes there is. The issue is water, not land.

Please study up on biointensive. There's plenty of information available, if you need links, I'd be happy to provide them.

[Tanada]

I live in farm country, I grew up in farm country on a very small farm. If you drive around here for any real distance you will see two kinds of silo's at most farms. The open top silo's are for silage, but the closed top silo's were designed for grain storage. Drive (or bike if you prefer) up to the farm house and ask how much grain thaey have stored. None is overwhelmingly likely to be the answer, they get a better profit selling than storing so off it goes soon after harvest.

Own a 212 acre working farm in NW Missouri. It belonged to my grandfather. Each harvest, most of the farmers did as you sated, they sold their entire crop right away; from field straight to the elevator.

My grandfather, and a few others put their harvest into storage,(corn crib, silos, sometimes using snow fence to build temporary storage).

What was the difference? We were not in debt. We could wait for prices to rise if we choose to. Most farmers are up to their eyeballs in debt for equipment, seed, fertilizers, and herbicides to plant that crop. They have to sell their crop right away to service their debt and to get "credit worthy" to borrow more money to plant next years crop.

It is a viscious cycle. It will not change overnight.

Why do you say they get a better profit selling than storing? Depends on whether the market price is rising or falling, doesn't it?

It does matter if the market is rising or falling and some of them will try and hold out for certain price levels, but as you point out most of them have overload of debt and have to make payments.

Around here it used to be a lot of small to very small farms where people worked a regular job and farmed as a sideline. Many if not most of those small holdings have become sub divisions and some have combined. Also the farm kids I grew up with? Of the three farmer brothers in my fathers generation they had 8 sons combined. Of those 8, only 1 is a full time farmer and half of the land owned by the three brothers is now leased out to other neighbors. If I had the money I would offer to buy back the 80 acre's my grandmother sold them when I was very young, but with a house and a mortgage and the fact that I live 25 miles from the old family farm it just isn't practicle for me to do so. My dad still lives in the house, the 1 acre parcel with the house and outbuildings except the barn was kept in the family.

[bbadwolf]

It interests me that most people think we will be left with so much after the end of oil.

First though, how far would we have gotten without carbon fuels? We would have had a different sort of peak, that's all. Without fuels, we would have run out of easily accessible metals and would have had to regress back to things like hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers without metal tools. Horses are fine animals but their efficiency is drastically reduced by wooden or stone ploughs. One of the main advantages of fuels has been the greatly enhanced availibility of metal.

All you guys that imagine a future with nuclear power and stuff. Sorry lads. Perhaps in the near future, while I'm still alive. In fact, I'm sort of a half-assed optimist. In my own lifetime, I expect us to degrade economically to the point of Russia or Argentina. Ugly, but not really Mad Max stuff. But by about 2050 (I'm currently 48, I don't expect to live that long), we'll be using almost no fossil fuels and the costs of metals and cement will be extreme. No nuclear plants and metal will be too valuable to string it up around the country on poles. The looters will grab it if anyone tries that.

We've mined all the easy metal deposits and are currently chewing our way through the hard ones. Without fuels, we will be forced to use only salvage. We'll have enough of this for the first few centuries to make swords and knives to carve each other up with, but after it rusts away, we will be without both fuels and metals, just like the above scenario. Cities will become quite rare and very small, more like big villages. The distant future will be dominated by subsistence farming (where the land configuration allows) and hunting/gathering (everywhere else). We will keep only our more basic medical technologies because only very fortunate areas will have any formal education. Before you jump to tell me about the education of the ancients, remember that they had the advantage of metals! Hammers, nails, metal ploughs, all sorts of stuff. We are going to lose that (not soon, but eventually). Without metal guns, we will hunt with arrows and spears. We will eventually regress to the sort of culture/technology of the North American Indian before our arrival. That is, essentially the stone age, minus the caves and other romantic stuff.

The end point doesn't really look that bad. Big step down for humanity but still liveable. What scares me though is the fact that our population will have to be reduced drastically. This will not be voluntary. It will probably be messy.

-bbad

[bbadwolf]

Let's go back to the question I posed in posting this thread:

I did that! (tho I seem to be the only one of late). In short, if we'd never had oil we'd have run out of metals first (the easy to mine stuff) and gone gradually back to the stone age, never having achieved "high technology". Since we did find fossil fuels, we've developed the technology to exhaust much more of our metals and such, but will still end up working our way back to the stone age (think Native culture, forget the caves and stuff). Fossil fuels were just a diversion. A 200 year bloom. I'm a moderate in that I expect some of the West to be technological, if not very "civilized" for the next 20 years and truly hope our decline won't be too abrupt. (I guess I'd rather get old and die first, before things get truly extreme.) Brown people will die in droves before us North Americans (I'm Canadian) get clobbered.

In an era of declining energy and resources, the investments that will draw the most interest will be those that offer possible solutions.

In this, you are profoundly incorrect. Investors will not look for "solutions", they never have and never will. They do and will look for "PROFIT", nothing else. Afgan farmers grow poppies for cash and nearly starve the country. We might decide to grow ethanol instead of food in similar fashion, to provide PROFIT to the rich. Just understand that what the rich do is and always will be based on profit, any bit of common good that arises is/will be purely coincidental and of no concern to them.

-bbad

[orz]

There will be tons of scrap metal lying around for centuries if civilization collapses everywhere. It will eventually wear, but metal isn't something we consume like oil, we just fashion it into tools and much of the product remains after we're done using it. Besides, there is absolutely 0 chance of burning up all the fossil fuels on earth before we leave, there will still be numerous minor fields left, that a greatly reduced population can easily get by on, especially if they situate themselves by it and don't go back to cars and sprawl.

1) Start off with wind turbines, very cheap materialistically to build compared to other power sources, and they last for centuries with proper materials. Depending on where they are, hydroelectric or geothermal sources can be built with little materials as well.
2) Once you have enough to power manufacturing plants, build a nuclear plant. The secrets are too widespread to be lost.
3) After that they can go anywhere.

Can I prove any of this? Of course not. But you can't prove that we couldn't achieve any of these things again without oil. But thinking we're going to be stuck back in the stone age shows such a callous disregard for the human mind that it's disgusting. Not a doomer? Let's see you imply that there will be a:

a) collapse of civilization
b) followed by a die off
c) followed by a gradual regression to the stone age from which we will never be able to rise again.

I guess you get bitter with age.

[Omnitir]

How much technology would the world have achieved without the advent and exploitation of fossil fuels?

Most likely not much. That however does not prove that the high technological state we are at thanks to fossil fuels cannot make a transition.

In an era of declining energy and resources, the investments that will draw the most interest will be those that offer possible solutions.

In this, you are profoundly incorrect. Investors will not look for "solutions", they never have and never will. They do and will look for "PROFIT", nothing else.

This is a widely held misconception that flies in the face of reality. Perhaps half a century ago business only concerned itself with the bottom line. Most of those businesses have died. A study of modern management and organisations (as I have just completed at university) actually reveals that businesses need to maintain a high level of social responsibility.

I don’t have time to elaborate at the moment, but it’s an issue I’ve been planning on addressing on these boards. Organisation social responsibility will not fly out the window with cheap oil.

In any case, investments offering solutions to resource depletion will be the investments offering the most profit.

[MonteQuest]

How much technology would the world have achieved without the advent and exploitation of fossil fuels?

Most likely not much. That however does not prove that the high technological state we are at thanks to fossil fuels cannot make a transition.

A transition to what?...that doesn't require fossil fuels to make or construct the machinery to make?

Will it be cheap enough to continue growth enough to service the debt?

And as the transition is taking place, how will you provide for the 3 billion newcomers arriving at the party?

Increase the current population by 50% and transition to another "energy source" at the same time?

Good luck!

[bbadwolf]

I guess you get bitter with age.

Now that wasn't very kind at all. There are those who would say that age also brings wisdom. I guess you're not encumbered by such thoughts.

I guess you also didn't trouble yourself to read my original post before you started your tirade. I had started this post to explain my thoughts to you but it isn't what was requested by the originator of the thread and besides, I've learned there's little benefit in arguing with the young and foolish.

-bbad

[orz]

A transition to what?...that doesn't require fossil fuels to make or construct the machinery to make?

Will it be cheap enough to continue growth enough to service the debt?

And as the transition is taking place, how will you provide for the 3 billion newcomers arriving at the party?

Increase the current population by 50% and transition to another "energy source" at the same time?

I believe that omnitir believes that there will be a limited die off going off during this transition phase and decreased living conditions, not a population boom.

Priority during transition would be to

a) Refine technology to switch to, while expanding to alternative fuels such as nuclear and coal
b) Make the technology self sufficient so that its replicable, aka, if you're making solar sheets, use the first GW that you may create to power a factory that can refine the material you need to make the sheets in the first place.
c) Build up from there.


Also, for the record, any scenario that envisions the eventual collapse of modern civilization entirely without hope for reattaining the state we're at is a doomer scenario.

As for the age thing, the ones who are the most pessimistic technology wise are those that are generally the oldest on the board. And none are actually in any fields that they undermine. Wisdom != intelligence.

[MonteQuest]

Also, for the record, any scenario that envisions the eventual collapse of modern civilization entirely without hope for reattaining the state we're at is a doomer scenario.

The state we are in caused the problem. It is a doomer scenario to try to maintain or return to an unsustainable system. It is a phantom.

As for the age thing, the ones who are the most pessimistic technology wise are those that are generally the oldest on the board. And none are actually in any fields that they undermine. Wisdom != intelligence.

Pretty broad statement. A rather spurious, specious, spiel.

[orz]

The state we are in caused the problem. It is a doomer scenario to try to maintain or return to an unsustainable system. It is a phantom

Hypothetically, if 100% of our energy needs were met by solar, wind and nuclear fusion, how would returning to our normal energy consumption state not be sustainable?

Pretty broad statement. A rather spurious, specious, spiel.

You're 50+, Aaron's 50+. You two are half the serious posts on this site anyway >_> The average person on this board seems to be married with kids.

[MonteQuest]

Hypothetically, if 100% of our energy needs were met by solar, wind and nuclear fusion, how would returning to our normal energy consumption state not be sustainable?

From the late Richard Smalley:

Getting there will be incredibly difficult. If we knew today how to transform the makeup of our energy mix by exploiting fission/fusion, solar, or wind, it would take an inordinate amount of time. If I could go out tomorrow and turn on the switch of a new power plant that would produce a thousand megawatts of power from some new, clean, carbon-free energy source, I would have to turn on a new plant every day for 27 years before I generated even 10 terawatts of new power.
Ten terawatts plus 14 terawatts does not add up to even half of the 60 terawatts we will eventually need. Of course, we do not currently have the technology to build a fleet of nuclear fission breeder reactors— let alone a solar or geothermal plant—that could produce that amount of energy cheaply. I believe that if we do not find a way to build such power plants over the next decade, or at most two, this 21st century is going to be very unpleasant.

And, because the earth's population is beyond the carrying capacity of the earth by 4.5 billion heading for 9 billion.

We won't have the water.

We won't have the arable land.

We won't have the biodiversity necessary for stability.

The way we live is unsustainable. Always has been.

[Omnitir]

The average person on this board seems to be married with kids.

And have indicated that they are sick of the rat race and want a change. Meanwhile it seems most of the optimists that come along are young and either starting a new and exciting career or are college/university students, both with their whole lives to look forward too.

Easy to see where the biased comes into play.

And apparently the problem with youth is that they are young and foolish. But the problem with the oldies is that they become so set in their opinions that they often can’t see reason, and this makes the young with their new ideas look to them to be the young and foolish.

[orz]

That's why I included the hypothetical. I know it's not going to happen overnight (or at all, if most on this board are to be believed).

If we had such inordinate amounts of energy, we wouldn't need much arable land. Hell, we wouldn't even need land. Hydrophonics are highly energy intensive, but hell if we could tap into fusion and solar, we would have more than enough energy to feed 10 billion (which is where Peak Population is expected to occur). Water is a bigger issue, but desalinization of seas would work for awhile. I would suspect that water can be synthesized given enough energy.

The bio diversity part, I don't follow you on. I'm definitely all for building up instead of out, so we could keep the rainforest and all.

Essentially my dream is your nightmare and vice versa is what we seem to be getting at. Sustainability to me, means stasis, and stasis is death.

Who will win in the end? Well thats not up to you or me to decide, really. But the one thing that gives me hope is that no matter what may happen with peak oil (ok, barring nuclear winter), humanity can and will one day rise up again to our current standard of life. I have stated how it can do so, and I believe in it, as much as you do in your theories.

[MonteQuest]

If we had such inordinate amounts of energy, we wouldn't need much arable land. Hell, we wouldn't even need land. Hydrophonics are highly energy intensive, but hell if we could tap into fusion and solar, we would have more than enough energy to feed 10 billion (which is where Peak Population is expected to occur).

Fusion Power; Blessing or Curse

[Omnitir]

And, because the earth's population is beyond the carrying capacity of the earth by 4.5 billion heading for 9 billion.

M, are you now saying that there won’t be a die-off until after we reach 9 billion? Or are you saying that if we manage to keep going business as usual, we will need to provide for 9 million?

My argument, and many optimist arguments, is not that business will continue as usual. I do not deny that we will probably be facing some very tough times. However, the main argument from many optimists is against the doomer concept that civilisation is going to utterly collapse. That all nations will experience massive die-off and technology will fail us. That we are heading for total chaos.

Yes the way we currently live is unsustainable, but collapse does not last forever. Eventually what remains of modern civilisation will get back on the horse. A transition to a new system is obviously inevitable, because we are at the end of the oil age. Doomers seem to think that the transition will be to some drawn out mad max scenario, eventually followed by a small population living sustainable of the scraps of the industrial age. Optimists tend to think that the transition will be a bad recision with terrible human costs in the third world, followed by redevelopment of the current system to one that is more sustainable.

[orz]

Fusion Power; Blessing or Curse

Blessing.

[bbadwolf]

A transition to a new system is obviously inevitable, because we are at the end of the oil age.

This is the part that isn't so, I'm afraid. You see, we are aware of all elements and know that there are none missing (re: periodic table of elements). We understand all possible chemical reactions well enough to fully understand that there is no chemical source of fuel on the planet that is capable of taking over for fossil fuels, neither above or below ground. We are quite knowledgable in what's underground from all the drilling and such. Similar for nuclear, we understand it very well. It could help a lot for a while, but can't replace the convenience in particular of fossil fuels. Not good for much but electricity, really.

Fusion is a wild card, I'll admit. It could happen. But I could win the lottery! I'm not counting on either. And it will suffer from being mostly electricity only also, although with enough electricity we'd find a way around most things.

Alternatives can only help somewhat, they can't come anywhere near replacing what we have had.

So a new energy source is far from inevitable, rather it is quite unlikely. We will be going back to old ones, like chopped wood. I rather like the concept of "Little House on the Prairie" and all, it's just that there isn't enough prairie for 6-7 billion people. We won't "collapse utterly", but it's going to be ugly for a fair while, till we get the populations down to something sustainable. Then we can look forward to a few centuries of comparative civilization and "good night John-boy" while our access to metals gradually deteriorates. At this point, we should be at some sort of equilibrium/peace with nature. We'll have lost nearly all the capacity to harm our planet and humanity will be evolving again. We haven't evolved for a while, since evolution depends on not just "survival of the fittest" but also "death to the less fit". With our near 100% survival rate, there has been no differential in survival and thus no evolution. Once we begin to evolve again, who knows.

-bbad