Unmitigated peak oil causes extinction
Malcolm Riddoch, Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries at Edith Cowan University, 6-19-‘04,
(http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2004/06/72000_comment.php)
There are lots of recent 2004 reports speculating about the Saudi's ability to increase production suggesting that the peak plateau may already have arrived with midpoint by 2008. OPEC is apparently pumping at its full rate, while everyone else from the Russians, US, North Sea to our own oil fields are apparently depleting already. The first major oil shock could be as early as the fourth quarter of this year and some analysts suggest that the Saudi's are on the verge of a collapse in their major Gawar oil field, the largest in the world. The oil Beyond the current oil wars and the short term economic effects of unstable oil supply and prices over the next 5 years, peak oil threatens an irreversible global economic decline that will force a massive, radical and sustained change in our way of life as we transition to alternative energy sources and the economic/political order they support. The cost of everything will rise and rise with the poorest of us the first to start suffering. A terminal economic decline will begin with a recession in Australia the size of the one that occurred in WW2, and this possibility is already being discussed in our mainstream media. Think an end to public welfare across the board, food stamps and eventually food riots, massive rising unemployment, the collapse of Medicare and public hospitals, a severe crisis in the cost and delivery of water ... but at least the roads will be less congested, more room for the ultra wealthy and their gas guzzling limousines. At worst peak oil could mean a complete global economic collapse sometime after 2010, middle class poverty and the breakdown of law and order, truly gigantic starvation in the third world and the unrestrained outbreak of global warfare with the risk of numerous 'limited' nuclear conflagrations. It could ultimately mean the extinction of the human species through global nuclear war and its companions famine and pestilence.
Peak oil will cause extinction-we must act now.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘5
(The Party's Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, p. 224) [Bozman]
Those who live in industrialized countries happen to have been born into the most complex societies in history, ones that have reached the stage where ? as Joseph Tainter would put it ? the returns on their ongoing investments in greater complexity are quickly diminishing. We have arrived at a point where global societal collapse ? meaning a reversion to a lower level of complexity ? is likely, and perhaps certain, over the next few decades. Once humanity has passed through the coming period of shedding complexity, it is entirely possible that our descendants will attain a much less-consuming, fulfilling way of life. But the process of getting from here to there is likely to be horrendously difficult, and the desirability of the outcome will depend to a very high degree on actions taken now.
A. Peak oil will collapse agriculture worldwide-all aspects of modern food production require oil.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘5
(The Party's Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, p. 193-196) [Bozman]
Modern industrial agriculture has become energy-intensive in every respect. Tractors and other farm machinery burn diesel fuel or gasoline; nitrogen fertilizers are produced from natural gas; pesticides and herbicides are synthesized from oil; seeds, chemicals, and crops are transported long distances by truck; and foods are often cooked with natural gas and packaged in oil-derived plastics before reaching the consumer. If food-production efficiency is measured by the ratio between the amount of energy input required to produce a given amount of food and the energy contained in that food, then industrial agriculture is by far the least efficient form of food production ever practiced. Traditional forms of agriculture produced a small solar-energy surplus: each pound of food contained somewhat more stored energy from sunlight than humans, often with the help of animals, had to expend in growing it. That meager margin was what sustained life. Today, from farm to plate, depending on the degree to which it has been processed, a typical food item may embody input energy between four and several hundred times its food energy. This energy deficit can only be maintained because of the availability of cheap fossil fuels, a temporary gift from the Earth?s geologic past. While the application of fossil energy to farming has raised productivity, income to farmers has not kept pace. For consumers, food is cheap; but farmers often find themselves spending more to produce a crop than they can sell it for. As a result, many farmers have given up their way of life and sought urban employment. In industrialized countries, the proportion of the population that farms full-time fell precipitously during the 20th century. In 1880, 70.5 percent of the population of the United States were rural; by 1910, the rural population had already declined to 53.7 percent. In the US today, there are so few full-time farmers that census forms for the year 2000 included no such category in their list of occupations. Mechanization favors large-scale farming operations. In 1900, the average size of a farm in Iowa was 150 acres; in 2000, it was well over twice that figure. However, the proportion of food produced by family farmers on a few hundred acres is itself dwindling; the trend is toward production by agribusiness corporations that farm thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of acres. In addition, a few giant multinational corporations control the production and distribution of seed, agricultural chemicals, and farm equipment, while other huge corporations control national and international crop wholesaling. The transportation of food ever further distances has led to the globalization of food systems. Rich industrialized nations have used loans, bribes, and military force to persuade nations with indigenous populations surviving on small-scale, traditional subsistence cultivation to remove peasants from the land and grow monocrops for export. In the early part of the 20th century this practice gave rise to the phrase ?banana republic,? but the latter half of the century only saw the trend increase. In nation after nation, tiny subsistence plots were joined together into huge corporate-owned plantations producing coffee, tea, sugar, nuts, or tropical fruits for consumers in the US, Europe, and the increasingly prosperous countries of the Far East. Meanwhile, the ranks of the urban poor grew as peasants from the countryside flocked to shantytowns on the outskirts of places like Mexico City, Lagos, Sao Paulo, and Djakarta. Today in North America, food travels an average of 1,300 miles from farm to plate. Consumers in Minneapolis and Toronto enjoy mangoes, papayas, and avocados year-round. In London, butter from New Zealand is cheaper than butter from Devon. The production of meat and the harvesting of fish have likewise resulted in more energy consumption over the course of recent decades. A carnivorous diet is inherently more energy-intensive than a vegetarian diet; as growing populations in the Americas and Asia have adopted a more meat-centered fastfood diet, energy inputs per average food calorie have increased. Motorized fishing boats are much more effective at harvesting fish from the sea than their 19th-century sailing equivalents, though they are far less energy-efficient. But their very effectiveness poses a problem in that nearly all marine fisheries are now in decline as a result of overfishing. The ecological effects of fossil fuel-based food production have been catastrophic, particularly with respect to agriculture. Farmers now tend to treat soil as an inert medium with which to prop up plants while force-feeding them chemical nutrients. As a result, the complex ecology of the living soil is being destroyed, leading to increased wind and water erosion. For every bushel of corn produced in Iowa, three bushels of topsoil are lost forever. Meanwhile, agricultural chemicals pollute lakes, rivers, and streams, contributing to soaring extinction rates among mammals, birds, fish, and amphibians. There are signs that limits to productivity increases from industrial agriculture are already well within sight. Global per-capita food production has been falling for the past several years. Grain surpluses in the exporting countries (Canada, the US, Argentina, and the European Union) relative to global demand have disappeared, and farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain production rates of a range of crops due to the salinization of irrigated croplands, erosion, the loss of pollinator species, evolved chemical resistance among pests, and global warming. For each of the past several years, world grain production has failed to meet demand, and grain in storage is being drawn down at a rate such that stocks will be completely depleted within two to five years. Prospects for increasing food production above the global level of demand are dim, largely due to continued population growth. In his 1995 book Who Will Feed China?: Wake-up Call for a Small Planet, Lester Brown documents how and why China will need to import more and more grain in the decades ahead in order to feed its expanding population. Brown notes that ?[a] lthough the projections ... show China importing vast amounts, movements of grain on this scale are never likely to materialize simply because they, along with climbing import needs from other countries, will overwhelm the export capacity of the small handful of countries with an exportable surplus.? 2 Add to this already grim picture the specter of oil depletion. It is not difficult to imagine the likely agricultural consequences of dramatic price hikes for the gasoline or diesel fuel used to run farm machinery or to transport food long distances, or for nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides made from oil and natural gas. The agricultural miracle of the 20th century may become the agricultural apocalypse of the 21st.
B. FOOD SHORTAGES CAUSE WORLD WAR III
William Calvin, theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington, ATLANTIC MONTHLY, January, The Great Climate Flip-Flop, Vol 281, No. 1, 1998, p. 47
The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields would cause some powerful countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands -- if only because their armies, unpaid and lacking food, would go marauding, both at home and across the borders. The better-organized countries would attempt to use their armies, before they fell apart entirely, to take over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or starving their inhabitants if not using modern weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for the remaining food. This would be a worldwide problem -- and could lead to a Third World War -- but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. Present-day Europe has more than 650 million people. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic.
Share with your friends: |
