Tuesday August 26 2008
Note from JWR:
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Letter Re: Holster, Sling, and Web Gear Recommendations
Dear Mr. Rawles,
I just read "Patriots" and "Tappan On Survival". Both were greatly helpful and entertaining as well. Can you recommend any type of web gear to have ammo, handgun and rifle at the ready, both at home and on the farm? I see our military forces with all kinds of web equipment configurations, most notable is the hand gun in a thigh mounted holster. Front Sight taught me to shoot from a belt mounted holster and discourages shoulder holsters. It seems to me that a shoulder holster has a place, especially in a vehicle. Any thoughts on tactical rifle/shotgun slings?
Thanks for all you do, - RP
JWR Replies: Like you, I do not advocate thigh-level pistol holsters. These seem to have proliferated in recent years mostly because they look snazzy in SWAT television shows and movies. They are actually quite impractical for just about all situations except rappelling. (Which, if I really correctly is what they were originally designed for.) At thigh-level, a holstered pistol is quite tiring to wear when hiking. They are also slow to access, which increases the time to draw and fire your pistol. My advice is to instead buy a sturdy belt holster, and leave those thigh-level holsters for the Mall Ninja crowd.
I cannot over-stress the following: You must tailor a full web gear rig for each of your long guns. This should include a USGI LC-2 web belt, Y-harness (or H-harness) type padded suspenders, two ammo pouches, a couple of first aid/compass pouches, and a canteen with cover. Granted, you can only carry one long gun at a time, but odds are that you will be arming equipping a lot of family and friends after the Schumer hits the fan. So you will need a set of web gear for each gun. To simplify things, I bought a pile of new nylon sleeping bag stuff sacks in various earth tone colors, and placed a set of web gear and magazines in each of them. I then attached a label card to each sack's drawstring, associating it with its respective gun, for quick "grab it and go" reference.
It is important to think through: how, where, and and when you will need to carry or access your guns on a day-to-day basis. How will you carry in you car, on your tractor, on your quad, or on your horse? How will you carry a pistol if you need to conceal it? How will you carry in foul weather? What will you carry when gardening or during other chores? How and when will you carry accessories such as cleaning kits, bipods, and spotting scopes? What other items will you need to carry in the field that will also need to be kept handy, such as binoculars, flashlights, night vision gear, and GPS receivers?
For holsters, I recommend Kydex Blade-Tech brand holsters and mag pouches. That is what we use here at the Rawles Ranch. And when carrying just a pistol by itself, we use modestly-priced Uncle Mike's black nylon/velcro belts. (They are "Plain Jane", but sturdy and functional.) We do have a couple of leather "Summer Special" concealment holsters made by Milt Sparks Holsters. Their belts and holsters are highly recommended. I've been doing business with them for more than 20 years. They don't skimp on quality. The Milt Sparks belts and holsters range in style and price from utilitarian (like the rough-side out "Summer Special") to some that are downright stylish. (And priced accordingly.) The Blade-Tech holsters inexpensive enough that I put one holster and pistol magazine pouch on each of my sets of my sets of long gun web gear. This makes them much more readily available and eliminates the need to constantly reconfigure rigs, as situations change. Keep in mind that what is nothing more than a time-consuming inconvenience today, could cost be a huge problem en extremis, tomorrow!
I agree that shoulder holsters are undesirable in most situations. They do make sense, however, when you are a car for more than an hour. The bottom line is that if you find yourself removing your belt holster on long drives, then you are probably better off with a shoulder holster in those situations. If you ever have to "bail out" of a car in a hurry, you need to be armed. That means that the pistol has to be attached to your person. And if that means using a shoulder holster for the sake of comfort--despite their drawbacks--then so be it.
For rifle slings, I recommend a traditional two-loop military sling design. They really help steady a rifle for accurate long-range shooting. Attending a weekend WRSA or Appleseed rifle shooting clinic (both highly recommended, BTW) will show you how to properly adjust a two-loop sling for various shooting positions. (Once you've identified your "summer" sling adjustment notches (when wearing just a shirt) for prone and sitting positions, I recommend that using a black magic marker you circle the holes and mark them with a "P" and "Sit" , for quick reference. Draw another line or preferably a "W"--for Winter--at each adjustment, and again a circle around the notch holes, to indicate the longer adjustment needed when wearing a winter coat, a target shooting jacket, or a field jacket. OBTW, speaking of positions: I don't advocate using standing unsupported positions for either hunting or most defensive shooting situations. It takes just a moment to sit down, and just a bit longer to get prone. Not only will you be much more steady (and hence more accurate), but you will also present a much smaller target to your opponent(s). Yes, there are situations where you need to stand (such as when you are in tall brush, or when you are moving tactically), but the general rule is: If the situation allows it, then sit down, or better yet get prone!
For shotgun slings, in my experience a padded nylon extra-long sling (such as an M60 sling) works well. Unfortunately, most shotguns come from the factory with sling swivel studs that are mounted on the bottom of the gun. These are designed for duck hunters, not tactical use. Properly, they should have the front sling swivel mounted on the side, and the rear sling swivel mounted on the top of the stock. This way, when you carry a riotgun with the sling around the back of your neck (to keep the gun handy to come up to your shoulder quickly ) the gun won't flop upside down when you remove your hands. Retrofit your riotguns, as needed, for this configuration.
Locking quick detachable (QD) sling swivels are a must, because there are many tactical situations in which you won't want a sling at all. You need to be able to quickly attach and detach a sling.
For horse or quad (ATV) scabbards, I like the new brown Cordura nylon scabbards that are now on the market. Leather is more traditional, but it takes a painfully long time to dry out, which can induce rust on a gun in short order. Brown nylon won't win any beauty contests but it works. OBTW, buy a couple of spare tie-down straps for each scabbard, to give them greater mounting versatility.
OBTW, dull (non-glossy) olive drab (O.D.) duct tape is your friend. Buy a couple of big rolls of it. It has umpteen uses out in the field. I wrap each of my Y-harness snaps with duct tape, to keep them from rattling or coming loose. It is also useful for toning down any reflective objects. The best field gear is very quiet, very secure, and very unobtrusive. Applying O.D. duct tape helps with all three of those.
In closing, I 'need to add one important point: You can own the very best guns, and have the very best holsters and accessories, but they will be marginal at best in untrained hands. Once you've invested in your first gun, you should follow through and invest in the best training available. I most strongly recommend taking advantage of Front Sight's current "Guns and Gear " offer. I should mention that The Memsahib and I have both taken the Four Day Defensive Handgun course at Front Sight, and we can vouch that it is absolutely top notch. The trainers exude a quiet professionalism that is amazing. There is no shouting, bullying, or theatrical posturing. These folks are the best, and they know how to pass on their knowledge. We saw some shooters that had literally never fired a handgun before walk away at the end of that course with a level of combat handgun shooting proficiency that was better than most police officers! And I learned more about practical pistol shooting in four days than I had leaned in six years as a US Army officer! I guarantee you that the training at Front Sight will not disappoint you. Go for it! If you are serious about preparedness, then you should get the best training available. The Memsahib Adds: There were several women in our class that had never fired a gun before--including one that was attending Front Sight because her life had recently been threatened, and she was being stalked. The Front Sight instructors are exceptional in their ability to work with novice shooters, and were willing to work with students one-on-one, to encourage them.
Four Letters Re: What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?, by Richard Heinberg
Jim:
What scares me [in Heinberg's article] is the use of words like “policy,” “regulations,” “controls,” “comprehensive plan,” etc.
At the least, this is government control of the economy. At the worst, of our personal lives. (Population control.)
He may have some technical points, but he is a bad sociologist. And a bad economist.
A free economy may not be the most efficient, but it works very well when the social side is considered.
There are all ready farmers of multi thousand acre places on the Great Plains, both US and Canada that are growing a few hundred acres of oil seed stock for their own, on farm, bio diesel operations.
Solar heated pig houses have been around for decades.
It is not uncommon for today’s dairy farms to create more electricity than they need with generators running off methane made on site.
I just read a story where a local ice company converted from electric refrigeration to a solar heated ammonia system. His electric bill was virtually eliminated.
All this so Joe Sixpack can get a bag of ice on his way to the lake.
All this is being done by individuals looking at current events, and thinking about the future. On their own.No “comprehensive plan” needed. No government involvement needed. (Or wanted.)
People are not stupid. They can, and do, make mistakes. But in the end, no control has always won out over control.
Do I think we have problems on the horizon? Sure. And I am making plans.
But I do not think running out of oil will be the cause. There are two factors keeping this from happening. First,
People, and companies, are, on their own, starting to conserve and convert.(Wal-Mart, and others, are putting solar panels on their store roofs.)
Second., There are still huge, untapped reserves around the Earth.
To date they have been bypassed for economic and political reasons, but when the price becomes right, those obstacles seem to go away.
According to Paul Ehrlich we all should have starved to death 30 years ago if we didn’t come up with a “comprehensive plan.”
We didn’t, and I don’t know about you, but I weigh about twice what I did 30 years ago. - Ken S.
Jim,
The article by Richard Heinberg was very informative, but after all is said and done the fact remains that the problem is not food production, peak oil, peak water, phosphorous or anything else. Unless population growth is addressed, no amount of organic farming, technology or other methods of increasing production can be anything but a temporary fix.
Thank you for your fine blog. - E.L. in Washington
James:
I am not so sure about the veracity of the two-part article by Richard Heinberg . Let me give you two examples:
On the point of needing fertilizer he wrote:
"The only solution here will be to recycle nutrients by returning all animal and humans manures to cultivated soil, as Asian farmers did for many centuries, and as many ecological farmers have long advocated."
It has been long known that spreading human waste in the field also spreads stomach ailments and other diseases. I would advise thinking about this a bit more
before doing it.
At the end of his article Richard Heinberg mentioned no-interest loans for farm land purchases. Didn't we just see what low interest rates for home loans did? Something like create a bubble in house prices, bubble pops, people lose their homes, banks around the world start failing. God only knows what else is in store for us because of bad monetary policy. And this guy wants to repeat this who thing by putting the same conditions on farm land, the thing that grows our food. - Ben M.
Dear Jim:
Well Richard Heinberg’s article certainly alarmed me, but not in the way he intended!
Yes, Peak Oil is real - but like any other commodity in a free market, shortages produce higher prices. Higher prices produce conservation, substitution, innovation, and a horde of entrepreneurs seeking to profit from the changed economic circumstances by giving consumers better options. No guarantees that our standard of living won’t go down during the transition to other energy sources, but the free (or currently semi-free) market has produced an incredible rise in living standards for a few centuries now (even before oil came on stream).
Richard Heinberg seems blind to the power of the market, and instead worships the power of the state to solve the Peak Oil problem. My jaw dropped when he spoke approvingly of how Cuba’s command economy adapted to the loss of Soviet oil. Yes, let’s just listen to the “experts” and go back to using oxen like the Cubans! Yikes! Somehow I think the human race has the creativity and ingenuity to do a little better than that!
But the biggest clue to his statist mindset - he calls for government subsidies of the “appropriate” solutions. And exactly which "omniscient" bureaucrat or politician figures out the optimal solution(s) to subsidize? To quote Thomas Sowell roughly: “I can’t think of a worse system than having the the people making the decisions be the same ones who pay no price for being wrong.”
How about entrepreneurs with their own money on the line making those decisions? How about consumers, voting with their own money, deciding which of these entrepreneurs profits? You know, the free market system that has the poorest folks in our society living better than the kings of 300 years ago…
Finally, the US government that Mr. Heinberg thinks can make rational decisions currently subsidizes the insane ethanol boondoggle. Many studies indicate ethanol takes more energy in oil inputs than the energy produced as ethanol. So our government subsidizes this energy sinkhole, sucking up scarce grain supplies, and consequently grain prices are artificially high. This is causing malnutrition of some of the poorest people on the planet. Why not even a peep about the reality of government subsidies distorting the market, and the truly evil results.
The sad part is that all the good that comes from his organization (the Post Carbon Institute) and its’ promotion of creative solutions will be overshadowed by the damage done by giving more intellectual support to government intervention.
So, indeed I am alarmed. If the Congress Critters listen to “experts” like this, who are ignorant of free market economics, we will have more boondoggles like the ethanol subsidies. If Peak Oil is a big a problem as he thinks it is, then we can’t afford government “help” misallocating scarce resources into losing propositions - while over taxation and over-regulation strangles entrepreneurs searching for viable solutions. Yours truly, - OSOM
Odds 'n Sods:
New SurvivalBlog reader Brad H. mentioned the old farmer's standby product: Bag Balm. It is a medicated petroleum jelly that is marketed towards livestock but works wonders for dried skin on humans Brad notes: "Working winters in construction, my hands constantly become cracked. After a few days of using the balm, the crack is healed. I also use it for abrasions and small cuts and shortens the healing time. Most Agway [and other feed] stores carry the product."
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Costa Rica Jones flagged this: Diesel-Powered Mitsubishi Racing Lancer Fulfills Every Post-Apocalypse Fantasy Ever, Has 480 Lb-Ft Of Torque.
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Cheryl N. found this: Imminent Bank Failures- Credit Crisis Worst is Yet to Come. And this: Looming Financial Catastrophe: A Real Inconvenient Truth
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Two readers suggested watching Chris Martenson's video primer on Peak Oil.
Jim's Quote of the Day:
"Self-sufficiency isn't a sexy idea. At best, people who say they're interested in being self-sufficient are stereotyped as dour, old-fashioned rural types. At worst, they're seen as fanatical survivalists planning for an apocalypse. Economists also tell us that self-sufficiency is an anachronism. Instead, it is specialization that produces wealth, and economies - including the world economy - produce the most wealth when everyone, including countries, specializes in what they do best and then trades their products for the other things they need. The more specialization, the more connectivity among specialists, and the more trade along those connections, the better." - Thomas Homer-Dixon and Sarah Wolfe, ia a recent Globe and Mail editorial titled "Everything is Not Peachy"
Monday August 25 2008
Note from JWR:
Today, with permission, we present a guest editorial from Vox Day, the editor of the widely-read Vox Popoli blog.
Stock Market Suckers, by Vox Day
Suckers! Many conservatives are aquiver with excitement that George Delano is daring to brave the third rail of American politics, the much-beloved welfare program set up by his philosophical predecessor, FDR. It is true, of course, that Social Security is nothing but a government-run Ponzi scheme, that there is no trust fund, that as an investment it is a complete rip-off, that it rewards white women at the expense of black men and that it is an outrageous violation of the Constitution of the United States of America.
But this does not mean that the Bush administration's plan to allow a modicum of private investment in the stock market is necessarily a winner or even an expansion of individual freedom in America. A single column is not sufficient to address a subject this complex, so I shall simply focus on one erroneous argument that is often used to support the administration's plan, namely, the notion that stock prices inevitably move up over time.
Superficially, this appears to be a most persuasive argument. If one looks back to 1965, which is when 65-year-olds retiring now were first entering the job market en masse, the Dow was around 900. Last Friday, the Dow closed at 10,800, a 12x gain. There can be little question that no Social Security recipient is getting back $12 for every dollar he put into the system, and yet, we must consider the first of several flaws in this crude analysis, namely, inflation.
Of that $12, almost half was nothing but inflation. One 1965 dollar is worth $5.81 now. That phenomenal gain doesn't looks so great now, given that one could do better than half as well just collecting compound interest, even at the miserable interest rates offered in basic savings accounts. But that's not all – it gets much worse.
One of the many dirty little secrets of Wall Street is that the Dow of 1965 is not the Dow of today. In fact, the Dow of 1995 is not the Dow of today, nor is that of 2003, for that matter. This is due to "rebalancing," which is a reconstitution of the index to get rid of companies that are underperforming or disappearing altogether. It is vital to understand this, because no investments are made in indices and relatively few are made in index-matching funds. Most investments are made in the stocks of individual companies and, due to this "rebalancing," the return on the dogs and the bankrupted dead are not reflected in these historical comparisons. Since 1999, seven corporations representing almost one-quarter of the Dow have been dropped and replaced.
The situation is significantly worse with regard to the NASDAQ-100 (NDX), which flip-flops more often than John Kerry running for office. Last year alone, eight companies were kicked out of the showcase technology index – Cephalon, Compuware, First Health Group, Gentex, Henry Schein, NVIDIA, Patterson-UTI Energy and Ryanair. Some of these corporations had been added only recently, and it is even possible for companies to bounce in and out of the NDX as their stock price alternately soars and sinks. For example, Synopsys and Symantec both rejoined the index in 2001 after being previously dropped.
In the last four years, there have been 44 changes to the 100 companies making up the NDX – 1999 was a banner year for such beauty-enhancing alterations, as the addition of 30 new companies helped drive the index to its all-time high of 4,816.35 on March 24, 2000. Despite the rebound year of 2003, and the aforementioned attempts to pretty up the index, the NDX is still down 68 percent since that 2000 high.
And if you'd been unfortunate enough to invest in some of those 30 corporations added in 1999, you'd have done even worse. You'd likely have nothing at all. Global Crossing (GX) was one of those high-flying newcomers – it was dropped by December of the following year and an attempt to see how it's doing on today an online financial site will reveal the following result: "Symbol(s) do not exist: GX."
Yes, and neither does your retirement fund ...
A legitimate historical analysis of any index must account for all of this rebalancing turnover. Unfortunately, the market masters do not make this easy. The NASDAQ even claims not to keep track of this information – it's much more interested in explaining how it is the stock market for the next 100 years, even if its annual rate of 11 percent turnover means it will have fewer original pieces left to it than Cher in a decade, let alone a century.
The ancient Roman saying caveat emptor is applicable to every proposed transaction, but never more so than with regard to the stock markets, where history is rewritten on an annual basis. The Bush administration's plan features a number of questionable assumptions, but its biggest flaw is that its logic is based on a foundation of historical fiction.
About the Author: Vox Day is a novelist and Christian libertarian. Visit his web log, Vox Popoli, for daily commentary and responses to reader e-mail.
Stabilized Gasoline From Three Years of Abusive Storage Performs Well
Jim -
Last week, I rotated some gasoline that was put into storage ont he 1st of March, 2005. It was in plastic fuel cans with Sta-Bil added, per the directions. They sat in a storage garage subject to midwest summer temps for one year, in an un-cooled basement garage the other years. I poured the fuel into a 1/3 tank of gas in my car. No noticeable difference in starting or running of the engine. Almost 3.5 years - not bad - just wish I could have replaced it for te same cost I originally filled the cans for![It was then around $1.95 per gallon.] I did buy on the recent dip to $3.65 per gallon [when I re-filled the cans.]
On another topic: Last week, the home market in KC dropped an average of 1% in just one week. How much longer before the house of cards collapses? - Beach
Two Letters Re: A Do-It-Yourself Denture Adhesive Formula
Jim:
In answer to the recent query in SurvivalBlog about denture adhesives, Sea-Bond is an all natural wafer with [a very long shelf life--] no expiration. It sells for $5.99 for three boxes of 15 wafers each. It is the only thing I could find that would do. I'd stock up on these for long term use. - TD
Mr. Rawles,
This formula comes from a book that I have in my arsenal of survival books, entitled "Formulas, Methods,Tips and Data for Home and Workshop" by Kenneth M. Swezey (I can't tell you how many times over the years we have used it but I had to buy an extra one just in case.)
He states "Most of the proprietary adhesives consist of just one or two common gums or a combination of them, with the addition of a trace of flavor".
Here is his denture adhesive recipe:
Gum-Tragacanth-Powder 3 ounces (available most craft stores for cake decorating/check the grocer aisle in the cake mixes too)
Powdered Karaya gum 1 ounce (health food/herbal/supplement stores)
Sassafras Oil 35 drops (not available anymore because of health concerns and illicit use. Mrs. Foxtrot suggests peppermint oil, it is what she uses for our Toothpaste recipe)
Shake the two powdered gums in a dry wide mouthed bottle until thoroughly mixed. Add the oil and shake again until the oil has blended with the powders. Sprinkle sparingly on the denture and place in mouth.
Best wishes for Reader Bill T. - Mr. Foxtrot
JWR Replies: I've posted this solely for educational purposes. Consult your dentist! Beware of any formulas from old formulary books that pre-date modern food and drug safety regulations. I do not recommend experimenting with any chemicals that will contact human tissue. I'm only presenting this because the topic was in the context of a worst-case societal collapse. If anyone were ever to use such a formula in an emergency, then they should first test a very small contact area, both to test the adhesive's its strength, and for gum or other tissue irritation. In this instance, it is quite important that if it is a partial denture that you make sure that it would not "over bond" or inadvertently bond to your teeth or other dental work!
Peppermint oil is a great essential oil to keep on hand. It is particularly useful for settling stomach upsets. (Just one drop on your tongue will do.) However, be forewarned that it is highly aromatic, so just few drops would probably suffice for the four-ounce formula that you cited.
As I've mentioned before, old formulary books are worth collecting. One of my favorite formulary reprints is Kurt Saxon's book: "Granddad's Wonderful Book of Chemistry"--primarily a reprint of the classic formulary "Dick's Encyclopedia", circa 1872. Saxon also assembled a dictionary of old fashioned chemical terms and synonyms and included it in the front of his reprint. This is worth its weight in gold. (Having an old formulary is great, but if you don't know that "oil of mirbane" is now called nitro-benzene, then a lot of formulary knowledge verges on useless.) Kurt has some far-out political beliefs which, as a Christian, I find abhorrent. (Kurt Saxon is both an atheist and a eugenicist.) But if you skip past those rantings, all of his books are great references. I've heard that a few of his hard copy books are now out of print, but that they are all still available on CD-ROM.
OBTW, if you search through used book stores, you will occasionally find other old formulary book from the late 1800s. Buy them when you find them. They are treasure troves of useful arcana!
Special notes of caution on home chemistry: Use extreme care whenever working with chemicals--even when doing something as basic as making soap. Always wear full goggles, long sleeves, and gloves. Always work in a well-ventilated area. Wear a respirator mask, when appropriate. Always keep an A-B-C fire extinguisher handy. Keep an emergency eyewash bottle handy. When working with a chemical that could burn your skin, be prepared with a bucket of water (if appropriate) or the appropriate neutralizer. Never use any of your regular kitchen utensils, containers, or measuring instruments when working with chemicals. (Have a dedicated set, and clearly mark them as such!) Never work alone. Study reactivity tables, and always keep them in mind. Whenever working with anything flammable or potentially explosive material, always work with minute quantities for your experiments. Keep in mind that 19th Century safety standards were considerably more relaxed than today's, so old formularies often omit safety warnings. Always remember that exposure to some substances such as lead, mercury, and carbon monoxide are insidious and cumulative. FWIW, I'm not putting forth all these strong warnings simply to cover my assets from a lawsuit. I really sincerely mean them, since I've "been there, done that". As an over-exuberant teenage chemistry hobbiest I caught my hair on fire a time or two.
Odds 'n Sods:
FerFAL (SurvivalBlog's correspondent in Argentina) recently posted some interesting comments on resisting violent crime, in his personal blog
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The WRSA has another "Grid-Down Medical Course" scheduled in Everett, Washington, September 12th to 14th. Their training is inexpensive, and highly recommended.
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Pauly from Canada recommended the National Geographic documentary "Guns, Germs, and Steel" to add some historical perspective to Richard Heinberg's recent article.
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Update: I spoke too soon yesterday when I mentioned that Detroit's Big Three Auto makers are courting Congress for a $25 billion bailout. "Photo Tom" sent this: GM, Ford Seek $50 Billion From U.S., Double Request
Jim's Quote of the Day:
"We are not only headed for a Depression, but a violent Depression that will be far worse than [the one that started in] 1929. Some experts believe the United States will fall into the chaos, bedlam and anarchy that tore apart Yugoslavia. I am not going that far, but I know our morals and ethics are not the same as they were in 1929. Moreover, we are a far more violent society and totally dependent upon a well oiled system for delivery of food and basic services." - Mike Morgan
Sunday August 24 2008
Note from JWR:
Today we present the conclusion of a lengthy and scholarly guest article from Richard Heinberg, the author of eight books, and a Research Fellow of PostCarbon.org. (Part 1 was posted on August 23, 2008.)
What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out? (Pt. 2) , by Richard Heinberg
Impact of Biofuels
One factor influencing food prices arises from the increasing incentives for farmers worldwide to grow biofuel crops rather than food crops. Ethanol and biodiesel can be produced from a variety of crops including maize, soy, rapeseed, sunflower, cassava, sugar cane, palm, and jatropha. As the price of oil rises, many farmers are finding that they can produce more income from their efforts by growing these crops and selling them to a biofuels plant, than by growing food crops either for their local community or for export.
Already nearly 20 percent of the US maize crop is devoted to making ethanol, and that proportion is expected to rise to one quarter, based solely on existing projects-in-development and government mandates. Last year US farmers grew 14 million tons of maize for vehicles. This took millions of hectares of land out of food production and nearly doubled the price of corn. Both Congress and the White House favor expanding ethanol production even further - to replace 20 percent of gasoline demand by 2017 - in an effort to promote energy security by reducing reliance on oil imports. Other nations including Britain are mandating increased biofuel production or imports as a way of reducing carbon emissions, though most analyses show that the actual net reduction in CO2 will be minor or nonexistent.14
The US is responsible for 70 percent of world maize exports, and countries such as Mexico, Japan, and Egypt that depend on American corn farmers use maize both as food for people and feed for animals. The ballooning of the US ethanol industry is therefore impacting food availability in other nations both directly and indirectly, raising the price for tortillas in Mexico and disrupting the livestock and poultry industries in Europe and Africa.
Grain, a Barcelona-based food-resources NGO, reports that the Indian government is committed to planting 14 million hectares with jatropha for biodiesel production. Meanwhile, Brazil plans to grow 120 million hectares of fuel crops, and Africa up to 400 million hectares. While currently unproductive land will be used for much of this new production, many millions of people will be forced off that land in the process.15
Lester Brown, founder of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, has said: "The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its two billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue."16 This is an opinion no longer being voiced just by environmentalists. In its twice-yearly report on the world economy, released October 17, the International Monetary Fund noted that, "The use of food as a source of fuel may have serious implications for the demand for food if the expansion of biofuels continues."17 And earlier this month, Oxfam warned the EU that its policy of substituting ten percent of all auto fuel with biofuels threatened to displace poor farmers. Jean Ziegler, a UN special reporter went so far as to call the biofuel trade "a crime against humanity," and echoed journalist George Monbiot's call for a five-year moratorium on government mandates and incentives for biofuel expansion.18
The British government has pledged that "only the most sustainable biofuels" will be used in the UK, but, as Monbiot has recently noted, there are no explicit standards to define "sustainable" biofuels, and there are no means to enforce those standards in any case.19
Impact of Climate Change and Environmental Degradation
Beyond the push for biofuels, the food crisis is also being driven by extreme weather events and environmental degradation.
The phrase "global warming" implies only the fact that the world's average temperature increase by a degree or more over the next few decades. The much greater problem for farmers is destabilization of weather patterns. We face not just a warmer climate, but climate chaos: droughts, floods, and stronger storms in general (hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, hail storms) - in short, unpredictable weather of all kinds. Farmers depend on relatively consistent seasonal patterns of rain and sun, cold and heat; a climate shift can spell the end of farmers' ability to grow a crop in a given region, and even a single freak storm can destroy an entire year's national production for some crops. Given the fact that modern agriculture has become highly centralized due to cheap transport and economies of scale, the damage from that freak storm is today potentially continental or even global in scale. We have embarked on a century in which, increasingly, freakish weather is normal.
According to the UN's World Food Program (WFP), 57 countries, including 29 in Africa, 19 in Asia and nine in Latin America, have been hit by catastrophic floods. Harvests have been affected by drought and heatwaves in south Asia, Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay.20
Last week the Australian government said drought had slashed predictions of winter harvests by nearly 40 percent, or four million tons. "It is likely to be even smaller than the disastrous drought-ravaged 2006-07 harvest and the worst in more than a decade," said the Bureau of Agriculture and Resource.21
In addition to climate chaos, we must contend with the depletion or degradation of several resources essential to agriculture.
Phosphorus is set to become much more scarce and expensive, according to a study by Patrick Déry, a Canadian agriculture and environment analyst and consultant. Using data from the US Geological Survey, Déry performed a peaking analysis on phosphate rock, similar to the techniques used by petroleum geologists to forecast declines in production from oilfields. He found that "we have already passed the phosphate peak [of production] for United States (1988) and for the World (1989)." We will not completely run out of rock phosphate any time soon, but we will be relying on lower-grade ores as time goes on, with prices inexorably rising.22
At the same time, soil erosion undermines food production and water availability, as well as producing 30 percent of climate-changing greenhouse gases. Each year, roughly 100,000 square kilometres of land loses its vegetation and becomes degraded or turns into desert, altering the temperature and energy balance of the planet.23
Finally, yet another worrisome environmental trend is the increasing scarcity of fresh water. According to United Nations estimates, one third of the world's population lives in areas with water shortages and 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water. That situation is expected to worsen dramatically over the next few decades. Climate change has provoked more frequent and intense droughts in sub-tropical areas of Asia and Africa, exacerbating shortages in some of the world's poorest countries.
While human population tripled in the 20th century, the use of renewable water resources has grown six-fold. According to Bridget Scanlon and colleagues, writing in Water Resources Research this past March 27, in the last 100 years irrigated agriculture expanded globally by 480 percent, and it is projected to increase another 20 percent by 2030 in developing countries. Irrigation is expanding fastest in countries such as China and India. Global irrigated agriculture now accounts for almost 90 percent of global freshwater consumption, despite representing only 18 percent of global cropland. In addition to drawing down aquifers and surface water sources, it also degrades water quality, as salts in soils are mobilized, and as fertilizers and pesticides leach into aquifers and streams.24
These problems all interact and compound one another. For example, soil degradation produces growing shortages of water, since soil and vegetation act as a sponge that holds and gradually releases water. Soil degradation also worsens climate change as increased evaporation triggers more extreme weather.
This month the UN Environment Program concluded that the planet's water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks are all in "inexorable decline." Much of this decline is due to agriculture, which constitutes the greatest single source of human impact on the biosphere.25
In the face of all these daunting challenges, the world must produce more food every year to keep up with population growth. Zafar Adeel, director of the International Network on Water, Environment and Health (INWEH), has calculated that more food will have to be produced during the next 50 years than during the last 10,000 years combined.26
What Is the Solution?
International food agency officials spin out various scenarios to describe how our currently precarious global food system might successfully adapt and expand. Perhaps markets will automatically readjust to shortages, higher prices making it more profitable once again to grow crops for people rather than cars. New designer-gene crop varieties could help crops adapt to capricious climactic conditions, to require less water, or to grow in more marginal soils. And if people were to simply eat less meat, more land could be freed up to grow food for humans rather than farm animals. A slowdown or reversal in population growth would naturally ease pressures on the food system, while the cultivation of currently unproductive land could help increase supplies.
However, given the scale of the crisis facing us, merely to assume that these things will happen, or that they will be sufficient to overcome the dilemmas we have been discussing, seems overly optimistic, perhaps even to the point of irresponsibility.
One hopeful sign is that governments and international agencies are beginning to take the situation seriously. This month the World Bank issued a major report, "Agriculture for Development," whose main author, economist Alain de Janvry, appears to reverse his institution's traditional stance. For a half-century, development agencies such as the World Bank have minimized the importance of agriculture, urging nations to industrialize and urbanize as rapidly as possible. Indeed, the Bank has not featured agriculture in an annual report since 1982. De Janvry says that, since half the world's population and three-quarters of the world's poor live in rural areas where food production is the mainstay of the economy, farming must be central to efforts to reduce hunger and poverty.27
Many agencies, including the INWEH, are now calling for an end to the estimated 30 billion dollars in food subsidies in the North that contribute directly to land degradation in Africa and elsewhere, and that force poor farmers to intensify their production in order to compete.28
In addition, there are calls for sweeping changes in how land use decisions are made at all levels of government. Because soil, water, energy, climate, biodiversity, and food production are interconnected, integrated policy-making is essential. Yet policies currently are set by various different governmental departments and agencies that often have little understanding of one another's sectors.
Delegates at a soils forum in Iceland this month took up a proposal for a formal agreement on protecting the world's soils. And the World Water Council is promoting a range of programs to ensure the availability of clean water especially to people in poorer countries.29
All these efforts are laudable; however, they largely fail to address the common sources of the dilemmas we face - human population growth, and society's and agriculture's reliance on fossil fuels.
The solution most often promoted by the biggest companies within the agriculture industry - the bioengineering of crops and farm animals - does little or nothing to address these deeper causes. One can fantasize about modifying maize or rice to fix nitrogen in the way that legumes do, but so far efforts in that direction have failed. Meanwhile, and the bio-engineering industry itself consumes fossil fuels, and assumes the continued availability of oil for tractors, transportation, chemicals production, and so on.30
To get to the heart of the crisis, we need a more fundamental reform of agriculture than anything we have seen in many decades. In essence, we need an agriculture that does not require fossil fuels.
The idea is not new. The aim of substantially or entirely removing fossil fuels from agriculture is implicit in organic farming in all its various forms and permutations - including ecological agriculture, Biodynamics, Permaculture, Biointensive farming, and Natural Farming. All also have in common a prescription for the reduction or elimination of tillage, and the reduction or elimination of reliance on mechanized farm equipment. Nearly all of these systems rely on increased amounts of human labor, and on greater application of place-specific knowledge of soils, microorganisms, weather, water, and interactions between plants, animals, and humans.
Critics of organic or biological agriculture have always contended that chemical-free and less-mechanized forms of food production are incapable of feeding the burgeoning human population. This view is increasingly being challenged.
A recent survey of studies, by Christos Vasilikiotis, Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley, titled "Can Organic Farming Feed the World?", concluded: "From the studies mentioned above and from an increasing body of case studies, it is becoming evident that organic farming does not result in either catastrophic crop losses due to pests nor in dramatically reduced yields..."31
The most recent publication on the subject, by Perfecto et al., in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, found that "Organic farming can yield up to three times as much food on individual farms in developing countries, as [conventional] methods on the same land..."32
Moreover, is clear that ecological agriculture could help directly to address the dilemmas we have been discussing.
Regarding water, organic production can help by building soil structure, thus reducing the need for irrigation. And with no petrochemical runoff, water quality is not degraded.33
Soil erosion and land degradation can be halted and even reversed: by careful composting, organic farmers have demonstrated the ability to build humus at many times the natural rate.34
Climate change can be addressed, by keeping carbon molecules in the soil and in forests and grasslands. Indeed, as much as 20 percent of anticipated net fossil fuel emissions between now and 2050 could be stored in this way, according to Maryam Niamir-Fuller of the U.N. Development Program.35
Natural gas depletion will mean higher prices and shortages for ammonia-based nitrogen fertilizers. But ecologically sound organic-biological agricultural practices use plant and manure-based fertilizers rather than fossil fuels. And when farmers concentrate on building healthy topsoil rich in beneficial microbes, plants have reduced needs for nitrogen.36
The impending global shortage of phosphate will be more difficult to address, as there is no substitute for this substance. The only solution here will be to recycle nutrients by returning all animal and humans manures to cultivated soil, as Asian farmers did for many centuries, and as many ecological farmers have long advocated.37
What Will Be Needed
How might we actually accomplish this comprehensive transformation or world agriculture? Some clues are offered by the example of a society that has already experienced and dealt with a fossil-fuel famine.
In the late 1980s, farmers in Cuba were highly reliant on cheap fuels and petrochemicals imported from the Soviet Union, using more agrochemicals per acre than their US counterparts. In 1990, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Cuba lost those imports and faced an agricultural crisis. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds of body weight and malnutrition was nearly universal. The Cuban GDP fell dramatically and inhabitants of the island nation experienced a substantial decline in their material standard of living.38
Several agronomists at Cuban universities had for many years been advocating a transition to organic methods. Cuban authorities responded to the crisis by giving these ecological agronomists carte blanche to redesign the nation's food system. Officials broke up large state-owned farms, offered land to farming families, and encouraged the formation of small agricultural co-ops. Cuban farmers began employing oxen as a replacement for the tractors they could no longer afford to fuel. Cuban scientists began investigating biological methods of pest control and soil fertility enhancement. The government sponsored widespread education in organic food production, and the Cuban people adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity. Salaries for agricultural workers were raised, in many cases to above the levels of urban office workers. Urban gardens were encouraged in parking lots and on public lands, and thousands of rooftop gardens appeared. Small food animals such as chickens and rabbits began to be raised on rooftops as well.
As a result of these efforts, Cuba was able to avoid what might otherwise have been a severe famine.
If the rest of the world does not plan for a reduction in fossil fuel use in agriculture, its post-peak-oil agricultural transition may be far less successful than was Cuba's. Already in poor countries, farmers who are attempting to apply industrial methods but cannot afford tractor fuel and petrochemical inputs are watching their crops fail. Soon farmers in wealthier nations will be having a similar experience.
Where food is still being produced, there will be the challenge of getting it to the stores. Britain had a taste of this problem in 2000; David Strahan relates in his brilliant book The Last Oil Shock how close Britain came to political chaos then as truckers went on strike because of high fuel costs. He writes: "Supermarket shelves were being stripped of staple foods in scenes of panic buying. Sainsbury, Asda, and Safeway reported that some branches were having to ration bread and milk."39 This was, of course, merely a brief interruption in the normal functioning of the British energy-food system. In the future we may be facing instead what my colleague James Howard Kunstler calls "the long emergency."40
How will Britain and the rest of the world cope? What will be needed to ensure a successful transition away from an oil-based food system, as opposed to a haphazard and perhaps catastrophic one?
Because ecological organic farming methods are often dramatically more labor- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture, their adoption will require an economic transformation of societies. The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. Nearly every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a forced pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.
Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs, and make necessary transportation more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions capable of supporting only small populations from their regional resource base. In some cases, relocation of people on a large scale may be necessary.
We will need to grow more food in and around cities. Recently, Oakland California adopted a food policy that mandates by 2015 the growing within a fifty-mile radius of city center of 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the city.41
Localization of food systems means moving producers and consumers of food closer together, but it also means relying on the local manufacture and regeneration of all of the elements of the production process - from seeds to tools and machinery. This again would appear to rule out agricultural bioengineering, which favors the centralized production of patented seed varieties, and discourages the free saving of seeds from year to year by farmers.
Clearly, we must also minimize indirect chemical inputs to agriculture - such as those introduced in packaging and processing.
We will need to re-introduce draft animals in agricultural production. Oxen may be preferable to horses in many instances, because the former can eat straw and stubble, while the latter would compete with humans for grains. We can only bring back working animals to the extent that we can free up land with which to produce food for them. One way to do that would be to reduce the number of farm animals grown for meat.
Governments must also provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. It would be a mistake to think of this simply in terms of the need for a larger agricultural work force. Successful traditional agriculture requires social networks and intergenerational sharing of skills and knowledge. We need not just more agricultural workers, but a rural culture that makes farming a rewarding way of life capable of attracting young people.
Farming requires knowledge and experience, and so we will need education for a new generation of farmers; but only some of this education can be generic - much of it must of necessity be locally appropriate.
It will be necessary as well to break up the corporate mega-farms that produce so much of today's cheap food. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that will be utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land reform will be required in order to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots.
In order for all of this to happen, governments must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways this could be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping it in its tracks might be advantageous; but, given the fact that rapid adaptation is essential, offering subsidies for education, no-interest loans for land purchase, and technical support during the transition from chemical to organic production would be essential.
Finally, given carrying-capacity limits, food policy must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means of economic incentives and improve the economic and educational status of women in poorer countries.
All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying mere techno-fixes - will almost certainly lead to dire consequences. All of the worrisome trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of Earth would be degraded significantly, and perhaps to a large degree permanently.42
So far we have addressed the responsibility of government in facilitating the needed transformation in agriculture. Consumers can help enormously by becoming more conscious of their food choices, seeking out locally produced organic foods and reducing meat consumption.
The organic movement, while it may view the crisis in industrial agriculture as an opportunity, also bears an enormous responsibility. In the example of Cuba just cited, the active lobbying of organic agronomists proved crucial. Without that guiding effort on the part of previously marginalized experts, the authorities would have had no way to respond. Now crisis is at hand for the world as a whole. The organic movement has most of the answers that will be needed; however, its message still isn't getting through. Three things will be necessary to change that.
- The various strands of the organic movement must come together so that they can speak to national and international policy makers with a unified voice.
- The leaders of this newly unified organic movement must produce a coherent plan for a global transition to a post-fossil-fuel food system. Organic farmers and their organizations have been promoting some of the needed policies for decades in a piecemeal fashion. Now, however, there is an acute need for a clearly formulated, comprehensive, alternative national and global food policy, and there is little time to communicate and implement it. It is up to the organic movement to proactively seek out policy makers and promote this coherent alternative, just as it is up to representatives of government at all levels to listen.
- I have just called for unity in the organic movement, and to achieve this it will be necessary to address a recent split within the movement. What might be called traditional organic remains focused on small-scale, labor-intensive, local production for local consumption. In contrast to this, the more recently emerging corporate organic model merely removes petrochemicals from production, while maintaining nearly all the other characteristics of the modern industrial food system. This trend may be entirely understandable in terms of the economic pressures and incentives within the food industry as a whole. However, corporate organic has much less to offer in terms of solutions to the emerging crisis. Thus as the various strands of the organic movement come together, they should do so in light of the larger societal necessity. The discussion must move beyond merely gaining market share; it must focus on averting famine under crisis conditions.
Richard Heinberg: Conclusion and Footnotes
To conclude, let me simply restate what is I hope clear by now: Given the fact that fossil fuels are limited in quantity and that we are already in view of the global oil production peak, we must turn to a food system that is less fuel-reliant, even if the process is problematic in many ways. Of course, the process will take time; it is a journey that will take place over decades. Nevertheless, it must begin soon, and it must begin with a comprehensive plan. The transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a distant utopian proposal. It is an unavoidable, immediate, and immense challenge that will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society. A hundred years from now, everyone will be eating what we today would define as organic food, whether or not we act. But what we do now will determine how many will be eating, what state of health will be enjoyed by those future generations, and whether they will live in a ruined cinder of a world, or one that is in the process of being renewed and replenished.
About the Author
Richard Heinberg is one of the world's foremost Peak Oil (oil depletion) educators and is a Research Fellow of Post Carbon Institute. He is the author of eight books including The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society, 2003, 2005), Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (New Society, 2004), and The Oil Depletion Protocol (New Society, 2006).
Heinberg is a journalist, educator, editor, lecturer, a Core Faculty member of New College of California where he teaches a program on “Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community,” and a Research Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators. His monthly MuseLetter has been included in Utne Magazine’s annual list of Best Alternative Newsletters. Since 2002, he has given over three hundred lectures on oil depletion (“Peak Oil”) to a wide variety of audiences—from insurance executives to peace activists, from local and national elected officials to Jesuit volunteers. Richard is married to horticulturist/herbalist/massage therapist Janet Barocco; they live in a suburban house retrofitted for energy efficiency and food production.
Footnotes:
- 1. See Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1982)
- 2. See Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Boston: WIT Press, 2004)
- 3. David Pimentel, "Constraints on the Expansion of Global Food Supply," Kindell, Henry H. and Pimentel, David. Ambio Vol. 23 No. 3, May 1994. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. http://www.dieoff.com/page36htm
- 4. See also Roger D. Blanchard, The Future of Global Oil Production: Facts, Figures, Trend and Projections (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005)
- 5. Longwell, "The future of the oil and gas industry: past approaches, new challenges," World Energy Vol. 5 #3, 2002 http://www.worldenergysource.com/articles/pdf/longwell_WE_v5n3.pdf
- 6. Energy Watch Group, "Crude Oil - The Supply Outlook," http://www.energywatchgroup.de/fileadmin/global/pdf/EWG_Oilreport_10-2007.pdf
- 7. "Oil Supplies Face More Pressure," BBC online, July 9 2007 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6283992.stm
- 8. Energy Watch Group, "Coal: Resources and Future Production" (April, 2007). http://www.energywatchgroup.org/files/Coalreport.pdf
- 9. John Vidal, "Global Food Crisis Looms as Climate Change and Fuel Shortages Bite," The Guardian, Nov. 3, 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange
- 10. Jacques Diouf quoted in John Vidal, op. cit.
- 11.http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange
- 12. http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ah876e/ah876e00.htm
- 13. Peter Apps, "Cost of Food Aid Soars As Global Need Rises, Reuters, October 16 http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN648660.html
- 14. See Jack Santa Barbara, The False Promise of Biofuels (San Francisco: International Forum on Globalization, 2007)
- 15. Vidal, op. cit.
- 16. Lester Brown quoted in Vidal, op. cit.
- 17. "IMF Concerned by Impact of Biofuels of Food Prices," Industry Week online, October 18, 2007, http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=15197
- 18. Ziegler, quoted by George Monbiot http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/11/06/an-agricultural-crime-against-humanity/
- 19. Monbiot, op. cit.
- 20. Vidal, op. cit.
- 21. Vidal, op. cit.
- 22. Patrick Déry and Bart Anderson, "Peak Phosphorus," http://energybulletin.net/33164.html
- 23. http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39083
- 24. "Agriculture Consuming World's Water," Geotimes online, June 2007 http://www.geotimes.org/june07/article.html?id=nn_agriculture.html
- 25. "Unsustainable Development 'Puts Humanity at Risk'," New Scientist online, October 17 2007, http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12834
- 26. "Between Hungry People and Climate Change, Soils Need Help," Environmental New Service, August 31, 2007, http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2007/2007-08-31-03.asp
- 27. Celia W. Dugger, "World Bank Puts Agriculture at Center of Anti-Poverty Effort," New York Times, October 20, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com...
- 28. Stephen Leahy, "Dirt Isn't So Cheap After All," http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39083
- 29. Ibid.; http://www.worldwatercouncil.org
- 30. See, for example, William M. Muir, "Potential environmental risks and hazards of biotechnology," http://www.biotech-info.net/potential_risks.html
- 31. http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~christos/articles/cv_organic_farming.html
- 32. (vol 22, p 86) University of Michigan, July 10, 2007
- 33. "Organic Agriculture," FAO report, 1999, http://www.fao.org/unfao/bodies/COAG/COAG15/X0075E.htm
- 34. Ibid.
- 35. "Between Hungry People and Climate Change, Soils Need Help," Environmental New Service, August 31, 2007, http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2007/2007-08-31-03.asp
- 36. FAO, op. cit.
- 37. F.H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea and Japan, (New York: Dover Publications, 1911, ed. 2004)
- 38. The story of how Cuba responded to its oil famine is described in the film, "The Power of Community," http://www.powerofcommunity.org
- 39. David Strahan, The Last Oil Shock (London: John Murray, 2007), p. 15
- 40. James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (Nerw York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)
- 41. Matthew Green, "Oakland Looks toward Greener Pastures," Edible East Bay, Spring 2007, http://www.edibleeastbay.com/pages/articles/spring2007/pdfs/oakland.pdf
- 42. Peter Goodchild, "Agriculture In A Post-Oil Economy," 22 September, 2007
Odds 'n Sods:
The latest news is that Detroit's Big Three Auto makers are courting Congress for a $25 billion dollar bailout. This will make the $1.2 billion in loan guarantees to Chrysler in 1979/1980 seem small, by comparison. Just as I had warned, the Mother Of All Bailouts (MOAB) continues to expand in both size and scope. It seems that Congress knows no bounds when it comes to plunging their hands into our wallets.
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Cheryl N. flagged this: US Still Naked to EMP Threat
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Cheryl also sent us this raft of economic articles and commentaries:
Another Friday, Another Bank Closing (#9-Columbian B&T of Kansas), Sterling Tumbles as UK Economy Grinds to a Halt, Goldman Sachs Research Says Half the World Economies Are In Recession or on the Brink, The Silver's So Cheap It's Practically Free, The Final Fate of Fannie and Freddie, and The Gold Rush Is Still On.
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Farmer's Almanac Says Cold Winter Ahead
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Tamiflu Resistance at 100% in Australia and South Africa (for the H1N1 virus)
Jim's Quote of the Day:
"The US economy is crumbling because the way we conduct the activities of daily life is insane relative to our circumstances. We've spent sixty years ramping up a suburban living arrangement that has suddenly entered a state of failure, and all its accessories and furnishings are failing in concert. The far-flung McHouse tracts are becoming both useless and worthless in the face of gasoline prices that will never be cheap again. The strip malls and office "parks" are following the residential real estate off a cliff. The retail tenants of all those places are hemorrhaging customers who have maxed out every last credit card. The lack of business is now leading to substantial layoffs. The airline industry is dying and will probably cease to exist in its familiar form in 24 months. The trucking industry is dying, threatening the entire just-in-time distribution system of things that even people with little money to spend still need, like food.
These conditions will now get a lot worse, no matter whether the banks continue to conceal their problems. All of it leads to an inflection point that coincides with the November election. By then, I expect that quite a few banks will be toast, job layoffs will rise spectacularly, foreclosures and bankruptcies will be raging across the land, and homeowners north of the magnolia belt will be shattered by the cost of staying warm this winter." - James Howard Kunstler
Saturday August 23 2008
Note from JWR:
Today we present part one of a lengthy and scholarly guest article from Richard Heinberg, the author of eight books, and a Research Fellow of PostCarbon.org. Part two will be posted tomorrow.
What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out? (Pt. 1), by Richard Heinberg
The first dilemma consists of the direct impacts on agriculture of higher oil prices: increased costs for tractor fuel, agricultural chemicals, and the transport of farm inputs and outputs.
The second is an indirect consequence of high oil prices - the increased demand for biofuels, which is resulting in farmland being turned from food production to fuel production, thus making food more costly.
The third dilemma consists of the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events caused by fuel-based greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is the greatest environmental crisis of our time; however, fossil fuel depletion complicates the situation enormously, and if we fail to address either problem properly the consequences will be dire.
Finally comes the degradation or loss of basic natural resources (principally, topsoil and fresh water supplies) as a result of high rates, and unsustainable methods, of production stimulated by decades of cheap energy.
Each of these problems is developing at a somewhat different pace regionally, and each is exacerbated by the continually expanding size of the human population. As these dilemmas collide, the resulting overall food crisis is likely to be profound and unprecedented in scope.
I propose to discuss each of these dilemmas briefly and to show how all are intertwined with our societal reliance on oil and other fossil fuels. I will then argue that the primary solution to the overall crisis of the world food system must be a planned rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels in the growing and delivery of food. As we will see, this strategy, though ultimately unavoidable, will bring enormous problems of its own unless it is applied with forethought and intelligence. But the organic movement is uniquely positioned to guide this inevitable transition of the world's food systems away from reliance on fossil fuels, if leaders and practitioners of the various strands of organic agriculture are willing to work together and with policy makers.
Structural Dependency
Until now, fossil fuels have been widely perceived as an enormous boon to humanity, and certainly to the human food system. After all, there was a time not so long ago when famine was an expected, if not accepted, part of life even in wealthy countries. Until the 19th century - whether in China, France, India or Britain - food came almost entirely from local sources and harvests were variable. In good years, there was plenty - enough for seasonal feasts and for storage in anticipation of winter and hard times to come; in bad years, starvation cut down the poor, the very young, the old, and the sickly. Sometimes bad years followed one upon another, reducing the size of the population by several percent. This was the normal condition of life in pre-industrial societies, and it persisted for thousands of years.1
By the nineteenth century a profound shift in this ancient regime was under way. For Europeans, the export of surplus population to other continents, crop rotation, and the application of manures and composts were all gradually making famines less frequent and severe. European farmers, realizing the need for a new nitrogen source in order to continue feeding burgeoning and increasingly urbanized populations, began employing guano imported from islands off the coasts of Chile and Peru. The results were gratifying. However, after only a few decades, these guano deposits were being depleted. By this time, in the late 1890s, the world's population was nearly twice what it had been at the beginning of the century. A crisis was in view.
But crisis was narrowly averted through the use of fossil fuels. In 1909, two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in fossil fuels. The process initially used coal as a feedstock, though later it was adapted to use natural gas. After the end of the Great War, nation after nation began building Haber-Bosch plants; today the process yields 150 million tons of ammonia-based fertilizer per year, producing a total quantity of available nitrogen equal to the amount introduced annually by all natural sources combined.2
Fossil fuels went on to offer other ways of extending natural limits to the human carrying capacity of the planet.
In the 1890s, roughly one quarter of British and American cropland had been set aside to grow grain to feed horses, of which most worked on farms. The internal combustion engine provided a new kind of horsepower not dependent on horses at all, and thereby increased the amount of arable land available to feed humans. Early steam-driven tractors had come into limited use in 19th century; but, after World War I, the effectiveness of powered farm machinery expanded dramatically, and the scale of use exploded throughout the twentieth century, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia.
Chemists developed synthetic pesticides and herbicides in increasing varieties after World War II, using knowledge pioneered in laboratories that had worked to perfect explosives and other chemical warfare agents. Petrochemical-based pesticides not only increased crop yields in North America, Europe, and Australia, but also reduced the prevalence of insect-borne diseases like malaria. The world began to enjoy the benefits of "better living through chemistry," though the environmental costs, in terms of water and soil pollution and damage to vulnerable species, would only later become widely apparent.
In the 1960s, industrial-chemical agricultural practices began to be exported to what by that time was being called the Third World: this was glowingly dubbed the Green Revolution, and it enabled a tripling of food production during the ensuing half-century.
At the same time, the scale and speed of distribution of food increased. This also constituted a means of increasing human carrying capacity, though in a more subtle way. The trading of food goes back to Paleolithic times; but, with advances in transport, the quantities and distances involved gradually increased. Here again, fossil fuels were responsible for a dramatic discontinuity in the previously slow pace of growth. First by rail and steamship, then by truck and airplane, immense amounts of grain and ever-larger quantities of meat, vegetables, and specialty foods began to flow from countryside to city, from region to region, and from continent to continent.
The end result of chemical fertilizers, plus powered farm machinery, plus increased scope of transportation and trade, was not just an enormous leap in crop yields, but a similar explosion of human population, which has grown over six-fold since dawn of industrial revolution.
However, in the process, conventional industrial agriculture has become overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. According to one study, approximately ten calories of fossil fuel energy are needed to produce each calorie of food energy in modern industrial agriculture.3 With globalized trade in food, many regions host human populations larger than local resources alone could possibly support. Those systems of global distribution and trade also rely on oil.
Today, in the industrialized world, the frequency of famine that our ancestors knew and expected is hard to imagine. Food is so cheap and plentiful that obesity is a far more widespread concern than hunger. The average mega-supermarket stocks an impressive array of exotic foods from across the globe, and even staples are typically trucked or shipped from hundreds of miles away. All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable, but the fact that nearly all of this recent abundance depends on depleting, non-renewable fossil fuels whose burning emits climate-altering carbon dioxide gas means that the current situation is not sustainable. This means that it must and will come to an end.
The Worsening Oil Supply Picture
During the past decade a growing chorus of energy analysts has warned of the approach of "Peak Oil," the time when the global rate of extraction of petroleum will reach a maximum and begin its inevitable decline.
During this same decade, the price of oil has advanced from about US$12 per barrel to nearly $100 per barrel.
While there is some dispute among experts as to when the peak will occur, there is none as to whether. The global peak is merely the cumulative result of production peaks in individual oilfields and whole oil-producing nations, and these mini-peaks are occurring at an increasing rate.
The most famous and instructive national peak occurred in the US in 1970: at that time America produced 9.5 million barrels of oil per day; the current figure is less than 5.2 Mb/d. While at one time the US was the world's foremost oil exporting nation, it is today the world's foremost importer.
The history of US oil production also helps us evaluate the prospects for delaying the global peak. After 1970, exploration efforts succeeded in identifying two enormous new American oil provinces - the North Slope of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. During this period, other kinds of liquid fuels (such as ethanol and gas condensates) began to supplement crude. Also, improvements in oil recovery technology helped to increase the proportion of the oil in existing fields able to be extracted. These are precisely the strategies (exploration, substitution, and technological improvements) that the oil producers are relying on to delay the global production peak. In the US, each of these strategies made a difference - but not enough to reverse, for more than a year or two at a time, the overall 37-year trend of declining production. To assume that the results for the world as a whole will be much different is probably unwise.
The recent peak and decline in production of oil from the North Sea is of perhaps of more direct relevance to this audience. In just seven years, production from the British-controlled region has declined by almost half.
How near is the global peak? Today the majority of oil-producing nations are seeing reduced output: in 2006, BP's Statistical Review of World Energy reported declines in 27 of the 51 producing nations listed. In some instances, these declines will be temporary and are occurring because of lack of investment in production technology or domestic political problems. But in most instances the decline results from factors of geology: while older oil fields continue to yield crude, beyond a certain point it becomes impossible to maintain existing flow rates by any available means. As a result, over time there are fewer nations in the category of oil exporters and more nations in the category of oil importers.4
Meanwhile global rates of discovery of new oilfields have been declining since 1964.5
These two trends (a growing preponderance of past-peak producing nations, and a declining success rate for exploration) by themselves suggest that the world peak may be near.
Clearly the timing of the global peak is crucial. If it happens soon, or if in fact it already has occurred, the consequences will be devastating. Oil has become the world's foremost energy resource. There is no ready substitute, and decades will be required to wean societies from it. Peak Oil could therefore constitute the greatest economic challenge since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
An authoritative new study by the Energy Watch Group of Germany concludes that global crude production hit its maximum level in 2006 and has already begun its gradual decline.6 Indeed, the past two years have seen sustained high prices for oil, a situation that should provide a powerful incentive to increase production wherever possible. Yet actual aggregate global production of conventional petroleum has stagnated during this time; the record monthly total for crude was achieved in May 2005, 30 months ago.
The latest medium-term report of the IEA, issued July 9, projects that world oil demand will rise by about 2.2 percent per year until 2012 while production will lag, leading to what the report's authors call a "supply crunch."7
Many put their hopes in coal and other low-grade fossil fuels to substitute for depleting oil. However, global coal production will hit its own peak perhaps as soon as 2025 according to the most recent studies, while so-called "clean coal" technologies are three decades away from widespread commercial application.8 Thus to avert a climate catastrophe from coal-based carbon emissions, our best hope is simply to keep most of the remaining coal in the ground.
The Price of Sustenance
During these past two years, as oil prices have soared, food prices have done so as well. Farmers now face steeply increasing costs for tractor fuel, agricultural chemicals, and the transport of farm inputs and outputs. However, the linkage between fuel and food prices is more complicated than this, and there are other factors entirely separate from petroleum costs that have impacted food prices. I will attempt to sort these various linkages and influences out in a moment.
First, however, it is worth taking a moment to survey the food price situation.
An article by John Vidal published in the Guardian on November 3, titled "Global Food Crisis Looms As Climate Change and Fuel Shortages Bite," began this way:
Empty shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico.
Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products.
Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18 percent food price inflation in China, 13 percent in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10 percent or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).
Wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50 percent higher than a year ago and rice is 20 percent more expensive...
Last week the Kremlin forced Russian companies to freeze the price of milk, bread and other foods until January 31...
India, Yemen, Mexico, Burkina Faso and several other countries have had, or been close to, food riots in the last year...
Meanwhile, there are shortages of beef, chicken and milk in Venezuela and other countries as governments try to keep a lid on food price inflation.9
Jacques Diouf, head of the FAO, said in London early this month, "If you combine the increase of the oil prices and the increase of food prices then you have the elements of a very serious [social] crisis..." FAO statistics show that grain stocks have been declining for more than a decade and now stand at a mere 57 days, the lowest level in a quarter century, threatening what it calls "a very serious crisis."10
According to Josette Sheeran, director of the UN's World Food Program (WFP), "There are 854 million hungry people in the world and 4 million more join their ranks every year. We are facing the tightest food supplies in recent history. For the world's most vulnerable, food is simply being priced out of their reach."11
In its biannual Food Outlook report released November 7, the FAO predicted that higher food prices will force poor nations, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, to cut food consumption and risk an increase in malnutrition. The report noted, "Given the firmness of food prices in the international markets, the situation could deteriorate further in the coming months."12
Meanwhile, a story by Peter Apps in Reuters from October 16 noted that the cost of food aid is rising dramatically, just as the global need for aid is expanding. The amount of money that nations and international agencies set aside for food aid remains relatively constant, while the amount of food that money will buy is shrinking.13
To be sure, higher food prices are good for farmers - assuming that at least some of the increase in price actually translates to higher income for growers. This is indeed the case for the poorest farmers, who have never adopted industrial methods. But for many others, the higher prices paid for food simply reflect higher production costs. Meanwhile, it is the urban poor who are impacted the worst.
Odds 'n Sods:
Reader RH says: "I have been collecting Foxfire books for some 20 years now. I was so happy to find Foxfire.org! These books have so much important information from the past for our future, lest we forget."
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Tina in the Philippines sent us this article: Iligan folk seek St. Michael help, also bear arms. Tina's comment: "A real big surprise for me, cause I've been asking around about the gun laws here, and generally understand that its very restrictive. So many various permits are needed, and separate permits if you want to transport your gun to the range, and even then, for a good chunk of the year, guns are banned from the streets because politicians tend to get shot. Guns aren't practical or usable for self defense, with laws like this. I hope there'll be positive effects from what happens in Iligan when the fighting stops."
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Cyberiot recommended a piece of insightful economic commentary by James Quinn, posted over at The Prudent Bear: The Great Consumer Crash of 2009
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Terry B. In Upstate New York flagged a piece of commentary by The Mogambo Guru: The new silver - made with paper. Terry's comment: "This article explains why it's important to own actual physical silver, not a piece of paper promising silver."
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There is now talk that the pending bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may force the breakup of the organizations into numerous regional privatized organizations. If this happens it will very likely push up mortgage interest rates. And this in turn, will further exacerbate the collapse of residential real estate prices in the US. To my mind, this represents a huge "lose-lose". Not only will it balloon the cost of the Mother Of All Bailouts (MOAB), but it will also make the impending depression deeper and last longer. (And to add insult to injury, the cost of the bailout will be extracted from our wallets. The Fannie and Freddie debaclesare indicative that the global credit market is indeed badly broken. It will be many years until global liquidity is restored, and I'm certain that there will be be plenty of pain in the interim.
Jim's Quote of the Day:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool.
He laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.
The shivering grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold. - Aesop (620BC - 560BC)
Friday August 22 2008
Note from JWR:
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Letter Re: How to Store All Those Saved Nickels
Mr. Rawles:
I diligently read your “nickels”article and archived follow-ups, but nowhere do you mention which size ammo can it is that cubes rolled nickels for storage most efficiently?
I have cleaned out my children’s bank accounts slowly over the last few weeks and am walking into random banks and grocery stores converting the cash into rolled nickels. ”Havin’ a yard sale, don’t ya know.”.Wink. It keeps the Stepford bank weenies from asking unnecessary questions.
- Laura C.; Hiding in Plain Sight, Somewhere Deep In The People’s Republic of Northern Virginia
JWR Replies: In my experience, the USGI .30 caliber ammo cans work perfectly for storing rolls of nickels. Each will hold $180 face value (90 rolls of $2 each) of nickels. The larger .50 caliber cans also work, but when full of nickels are too heavy to carry easily. Speaking of weight, several bags of "junk" silver coins or ammo cans full of nickels coins make great "ballast" for the bottom of a gun vault. This makes it more difficult for a burglar to haul away a vault intact. (But of course gun vaults also need to be securely bolted to a floor, for the same reason.)
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