The Oil We Eat

[acmavm]

Following the food chain back to Iraq

Posted on Friday, July 23, 2004. Originally from Harper's Magazine, February 2004. By Richard Manning.

http://harpers.org/

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The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.—Balzac

The journalist’s rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We’ll follow the energy.

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

<snip>

Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” Kennan wrote. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”“The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”

<snip>

I’ve already mentioned that we humans take 40 percent of the globe’s primary productivity every year. You might have assumed we and our livestock eat our way through that volume, but this is not the case. Part of that total—almost a third of it—is the potential plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or when tropical rain forests are cut for grazing or when plows destroy the deep mat of prairie roots that held the whole business together, triggering erosion. The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it’s mostly a form of grass and grass roots that humans can’t eat. So we replace the prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today. Our ancestors found it preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move on.

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It might seem that I've gone over my limit of four paragraphs, but I haven't. The quote by Balzac is essential to the article, but is not covered by copyright. Neither Harpers or the author have the copyright to any quote by Balzac, and since'Balzac is long dead, I don't think he'll come after me either.

This four paragraph thing, while I understand the purpose, sometimes limits the posting of the material from the article that makes the potential reader understand what the writer is trying to say. So, if this post seems sort of half-assed, please go the the article and decide for yourself what the author is trying to say.

[Warpy]

1. People don't like to think about it, but the Green Revolution

brought about by mechanized, large scale farming and chemical fertilizers and pesticides/herbicides is largely oil fueled. As the oil starts to run out, either we're going to have to rethink our farming methods, or we're going to start paying a whole lot more than we ever thought we'd have to for basic foodstuffs.

No, we don't have to go back to hardscrabble farms with a mule and a single blade plow. However, the huge factory farm is no longer going to be that attractive a model, and the production from such enterprises is likely to be more expensive than what the organic growers are producing. Huge agricultural enterprises run by a handful of hired workers using monumental machinery HAVE to use oil based fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. With little time to pay attention to what is going on with the land, they have to keep dumping this stuff on it to prevent problems that somebody with the time to observe things could treat more cheaply as they came up.

As the oil runs out, thinks are certainly going to get more intersting, to say the least.

[enough]

2. "the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet"

snip from the article>

The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain—wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased “efficiency” of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.

snip>



Thanks for posting this, acmavm. A fascinating article.

[brokensymmetry]

3. Good points...but....

I wonder if you may not have dismissed the hardscrabble farms a bit too quickly. It takes energy to transport food, to store/refrigerate it, and to process it. Bigger farms make better use of expensive machines as long as energy is cheap - but what if energy becomes quite expensive?

I'm reading "The Oil Factor", and they expect $100 per barrel oil in the present decade. The price goes up from there...

So, what happens? Purely my opinion, but I wonder if we won't see lots of small farms that cannot afford many machines. It's a pity too...I love strawberries out of season...

[Boomer]

4. Riveting article

This provides hard factual evidence for an uneasy feeling of mine: that we've been a doomed species ever since we turned from hunting/gathering to agriculture. It's a Faustian bargain of short-term gains (on a cosmic time scale, mind you) in exchange for ultimate ruin for us and all the other inhabitants of this planet.