Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Shortages coming
        Analysts from the Washington-based PFC Energy group recently warned that the world will soon be unable to produce enough oil to meet rising energy demands. Currently, the world uses up about 82 million barrels a day. Within a decade, we\’ll be using 100 million barrels a day.
        “Every year since the 1970s we have been consuming much more oil than we have been discovering,” said PFC\’s Roger Diwan.
        Most analysts now expect oil production to peak around 2010.
        For a long time, optimists could claim that we were finding new oil reserves as fast as we were using up old ones. Not any more.
        Meanwhile, China and India, with half the world\’s population, are starting to consume energy at higher rates. Most forecasts assume growth rates of around two per cent per year. This last year, demand rose by 3.18 per cent, pushing prices past $50 a barrel.
        Not even the vast reserves of the Middle East or Alberta\’s own Oil Sands can supply this demand indefinitely.
        Two things will happen. The price of oil will continue to go up. And our standard of living will come down.

Food not cars
        Most discussions of energy shortages focus on cars and gasoline. Don\’t worry, say the people with blind faith in technological solutions, we\’ll find another energy source. They\’re missing the point.
        Cars are the least of our worries.
        Think food, instead.
        Today, for every calorie of food value that we get out of farm fields, we put in about four calories in the form of fertilizers.
        Richard Manning wrote in Harper\’s Magazine that “It takes 5.5 gallons of fossil fuel to restore a year\’s worth of lost fertility to an acre of land.”
        Modern American farming “requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre… Iowa\’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.”
        The Green Revolution of the 1960s tripled food production around the world. It staved off starvation for decades. But it achieved this result by modifying plants to more “efficiently” benefit from fertilizer and mechanization.
        The increase in food production required enormous artificial supplements to soil fertility. “Every single calorie we eat,” Manning wrote in Harper\’s, “is backed by at least a calorie of oil – more like ten.”
        Turning raw grain into a breakfast cereal – grinding, milling, shaping, baking – uses up about four calories of energy for each calorie that ends up in your bowl, for example. Add the energy used in packaging and transportation, and, says Manning, the “food processing industry… uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel for every calorie of food energy it produces.”
        Meat eaters consume even higher levels of energy. Plants are the bottom of the food chain. Everything that eats either eats plants, or eats animals that eat plants. It takes about ten times as many calories to produce a calorie of beef as a calorie of wheat. Manning – who has done more research on this than I have – says “It takes 35 calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef; 68 to make one calorie of pork.”
        He summarizes: “Agriculture in this country is not about food; it\’s about commodities that require still more energy to become food.”

Starving our grandchildren
        Daniel Pimental, who studies food and energy at Cornell University, estimates that if the rest of the world ate like us, humans would exhaust all known fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years.
        Critics challenge Pimental\’s figures. They claim he\’s off by as much as 30 per cent.
        Okay. That would make it ten years, instead of seven.
        When the oil runs out or gets prohibitively expensive, food production will plummet. And no infusion of money will change that.
        We, in the wealthy industrial world, are particularly vulnerable. Peasant farmers in Africa or India who have never been able to afford fertilizers anyway will be little worse off. But our agribusinesses depend heavily on artificial fertilizers, and even more on trucks and planes to shuttle tomatoes from Mexico and shrimp from Ecuador to our supermarkets.
        Recently I took part in a corporate executive\’s performance review. A key consideration was the ability to distinguish between short-term and long-term goals. Especially if short-term gains become long-term losses.
        By that criterion, we humans are lousy managers. All our decisions about resources – oil, water, coal, timber – are short-term solutions, intended to save us from facing any serious changes in our lifestyles.
        If we can pump a little more oil, tap another river, find another mineral deposit, to keep us going with our present lifestyle for another year, two years, ten years, we\’re happy.
        We do not ask how this will affect our grandchildren\’s grandchildren.
        Personally, I believe the earth is not ours to scavenge. We are here as stewards or trustees, to protect and maintain this planet for future generations.
        Forget about those isolated verses from scripture that grant humans “dominion” over the earth. How many of us would deliberately starve our grandchildren?
        But that\’s exactly what we\’re doing to their inheritance, so that we can continue to pig out today.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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