FWD:: The OTHER Energy Crisis

[Guest guest]

I remember my sophmore year at Madison when in the Spring of 1983, I took

Environmental Conservation (professor Ostregren) ancillary to my geology

training. It was the most sobering experience of my life, reading the Club of

Rome and Global 2000 reports, etc. and wondering how humanity would make it to

the 21st century. Education can (and should) be sobering, but then one moves on

to their own specialized discipline and forgets the forest for the trees. This

article brings it all back. Our wars for oil are not just about energy for

industry/transportation, but petrochemicals for our farm fields. Brace youself.

This ain't pretty, but it must be understood by everyone. (The article is long,

so at least read the excerpts below).

 

The Oil We Eat

By Richard Manning

Harper's Magazine

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080904G.shtml

 

....

 

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a

given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet's " primary

productivity. " There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity

is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent

accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single

species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary

productivity, 40 percent of all there is. ...

 

....

 

" We [the U.S.] have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent

of its population, " [George] Kennan [ head of a State Department planning

committee ] wrote [in 1948]. " 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 reason for the America uber-alles attitudes of many a

conservative] "

....

 

There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow in patches of a

single species and store almost all of their [solar energy] income as seed, a

tight bundle of carbohydrates easily exploited by seed eaters such as ourselves.

Under normal circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea for

a plant. But not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic

eruptions. Such catastrophes strip established plant communities and create

opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed bearers. ... Corn,

rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the

natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil,

that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, [ecologic] succession

[it was helpful for me to be simultaneously studying ecology that same semester]

would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would

stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide

cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of

ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe,

and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a

modern American farm. Iowa's fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs

every year.

....

Today we [empty the soil of its energy, but] now when the vault is empty we fill

it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual

primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up

over many thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy

to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land-in 1997 we

burned through more than 400 years' worth of ancient fossilized productivity,

most of it from someplace else. Even as the earth beneath Iowa shrinks, it is

being globalized.

....

 

The precolonial famines of Europe raised the question: What would happen when

the planet's supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer. In about

1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to

an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.

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. ... The way

in which the green revolution raised that grain contributed hugely to the

population boom, and it is the weight of the population that leaves humanity in

its present untenable position.

....

 

The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil,

not food. There's a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land,

food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil,

more like ten. ...

 

Focusing on pesticide pollution, though, misses the worst of the pollutants.

Forget the polysyllabic organics. It is nitrogen-the wellspring of fertility

relied upon by every Eden-obsessed backyard gardener and suburban

groundskeeper-that we should fear most. ...our own bodies cycle oxygen into

carbon dioxide and plants cycle carbon dioxide into oxygen. In fact, two of the

planet's most fundamental humors are oxygen and carbon dioxide. Another is

nitrogen. ... humans now contribute more nitrogen to the nitrogen cycle than the

planet itself does. That is, humans have doubled the amount of nitrogen in play.

This has led to an imbalance. ... It runs into the water and soil, where it

either reacts chemically with its surroundings to form new compounds or flows

off to fertilize something else, somewhere else. [like Pewaukee lake for

instance. I am currently funded studying a part of this imbalance, my study

being within a suite of USDA projects studying nitrate loading of the

Chesepeake watershed / bay.]

 

....

 

[The] chemical reaction [used to produce nitrogen fertilizer], called

acidification, is noxious and contributes significantly to acid rain. One of the

compounds produced by acidification is nitrous oxide, which aggravates the

greenhouse effect. Green growing things normally offset global warming by

sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on farm fields plus methane from

decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre, like every acre of Los Angeles

freeway, a net contributor to global warming. ... [runoff] nitrogen fertilizes

artificially large blooms of algae that in growing suck all the oxygen from the

water, a condition biologists call anoxia, which means " oxygen-depleted. " Here

there's no need to calculate long-term effects, because life in such places has

no long term: everything dies immediately. The Mississippi River's heavily

fertilized effluvia has created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of

New Jersey.

....

About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled " processed, " meaning it is milled

and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that

becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient

in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of

America's poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American

pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in

corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose

version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the

plague [of obesity] selects the poor, who eat the most processed food. [Hence

the South Beach diet craze...get rid of the corn sweetener, sugar, and white

flour, and you lose weight.]

 

....

 

There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The grinding, milling,

wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories

of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of

breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making.

All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten

calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

 

....

 

That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the

factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to

thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap.

It appears, however, that the corn cycle is about to come full circle. If a

bipartisan coalition of farm-state lawmakers has their way-and it appears they

will-we will soon buy gasoline containing twice as much fuel alcohol as it does

now. Fuel alcohol already ranks second as a use for processed corn in the United

States, just behind corn sweeteners. According to one set of calculations, we

spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it.

The Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart

of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA calls this a

bargain, because gasohol is a " clean fuel. " This claim to cleanness is in

dispute at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the

dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global

gases gathering over every farm field. Nor does this claim cover clean

conscience; some still might be unsettled knowing that our SUVs' demands for

fuel compete with the poor's demand for grain.

 

....

 

Seventy-eight percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle

eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. ... This

is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living,

continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the

loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie's productivity is lost for grain, grain's

productivity is lost in livestock, livestock's protein is lost to human fat-all

federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes

directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.

 

 

-- John Hoaglund, Research AssociateThe Pennsylvania State UniversityEarth and

Environmental Systems Institute2217 Earth-Engineering SciencesUniversity Park,

PA 16802-6813(814)

865-4792hoaglund://www.emsei.psu.edu/~hoaglund/

 

 

 

http://pets.care2.com/

 

http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com

 

WAITING