Stuart Staniford says no.
Sharon Astyk says yes.
Jeff Vail also says yes.
Will peak oil force the localization of agriculture? 9
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Posted 9:26 AM on 29 Jan 2008
by David Roberts -
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David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.
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GreenEngineer Posted 3:25 am
29 Jan 2008
But the problem I have with his analysis is that he's trying to use the past to predict the future. And one of the basic things about peak oil is that the past, with regards to oil and energy availability, is not predictive of the future.
We have had oil shocks and price fluctuations in the past, and they have not correlated to the changes in agricultural demographics that (Stuart says) are predicted by the relocalization movement. But the thing is, these events have been shocks -- they are bounded in time, and of relatively short duration. Peak Oil, or so the theory goes, won't be like that.
The expectation is that once demand permanent exceeds supply, the limit on the price will only be set by demand destruction, which will push harder ever year as oil production declines. Sustained over time, that creates a situation utterly unlike any faced by our civilization to date.
It makes sense that, under a circumstance in which the price of oil is merely high (as it was in the 70's, and as it is now), everyone who uses energy (i.e. everyone) will suffer but the little guy, who's operation is more marginal to begin with, who has fewer opportunities for economies of scale, and who has less market power, will suffer worse.
However, if the price of oil get stratospheric ($200+/bbl) and stays there, operations that rely on cheap energy will experience essentially metabolic failure. This will hit both the big guys and the little guys, but the assumption (a fair one, from my experience) is that the little guys will be able to adapt more quickly to a radically changed situation.
While I think that this logic is fairly solid, I'm not sure that it actually applies to our future. I'm not at all sure that peak oil will look like the classic "hard peak" scenario that you would get if world production followed Hubbart's curve. Indications so far suggest that convetional crude production will follow an undulating plateau, which we have probably entered. Between that, and our willingness to rape entire landscapes for tar sands, oil shale, and corn ethanol, we can probably sustain the price of oil at a high but not stratospheric level for quite some time to come. And under those circumstances, I think that Stuart's prediction are likely accurate: continued pressure on the small farmers, and continued movement towards consolidation of both land ownership and market power by Big Ag.
One could argue that the world would be much better off if Knustler's worst nightmare happened tomorrow. A collapse into chaos might be preferable (in the long term, and maybe even in the short term) to a slowly-boiled-frog spiral into corporate industrial feudalism, which will be the end result as a few entities control an increasingly large fraction of a shrinking pool of energy, political and market power.
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cfigallo Posted 4:07 am
29 Jan 2008
Changes in season length, temperatures, precipitation and water supply, overall weather patterns will become greater factors in determining what and how much can be grown where. Whether you can afford to run the tractors and artificially fertilize the soil will not help if you're in a state of drought like northern Alabama. Or if your land is submerged by flooding or overrun by pests.
How about we inject some credible global warming parameters into these future scenarios.
Cliff Figallo
Climate Frog
climatefrog.blogspot.com
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Bart Anderson Posted 4:17 am
29 Jan 2008
Cliff,
Can you point to any sources of information about how global warming would affect food production?
I'm aware of generalized warnings, but I haven't seen much on specifics. It seems that only recently has there even been much published about how climate change will affect specific regions. California for example is predicted to have less snow but more rainfall in the winter; the lowered (or missing) snowpack will mean less water available during our summer dry season. But as for figuring out exactly what this means for agriculture???
In comparison with the complexities of global warming, the computations for peak oil are a piece of cake.
But your point is well taken. Even if you can't stick numbers onto a phenomena, it's important to take note of it.
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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amazingdrx Posted 4:53 am
29 Jan 2008
The profits are going into Swiss banks. Want a safe retirement investment? Swiss banking stocks. They manage all the money we used to have. Bushco scammers have it all squirrelked away. The remnants of a once powerful empire.
That stock tip? Right from a Swiss banker on the rise in 2000. He was right, so right. Still righter than ever with globalized scamming taking over.
Meanwhile invest your energy in local agriculture with your retirement assured. You own local agricultrure, nothing better for the soul.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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mdwalsh Posted 2:43 pm
29 Jan 2008
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Colin Wright Posted 5:50 pm
29 Jan 2008
If you look at Stuart's world energy graph he shows a flat plateau til 2020 (and after that a rather optimistic global solar energy project). But that's at least 12 years of untested and trying times for a world that expects to grow energy at 2% per year. Given a growing world population (and food riots that are already breaking out) there will be an accelerated net energy per capita drop. Not to mention the economic problems associated with high energy prices.
Worse, given the tightness of supply, I can imagine some unforeseen event is going to precipitate an oil (or natural gas) shock. And a Jimmy Carter moment, complete with cardigan.
Already we see the relocalization movement (eg. farmer's markets, subscription farming) growing. So I would expect those trends to accelerate, at least surrounding the major (farmable) urban centers. A smart president may even promte Victory Gardens in the cities in an effort to bolster national solidarity and food security.
Mind you, we could well have at the same time a consolidation in the large farms of the Mid West. Which of these forces (decentalized or centralized) prevails in the long run, ... oh shit, my crystal ball is fogging over!
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GreenEngineer Posted 5:30 am
30 Jan 2008
Actually, that's not true. I read a meta-study published in Science Magazine (not online, unfortunately) that compared a bunch of different energy balance studies that had been done on corn ethanol. This meta-study compared the range of their findings on a number of matters. As expected, the estimates of estimated Energy Return on Energy Invested ranged substantially, from 0.8 (net energy loser) to 1.6 (the most optimistic, and still pretty pathetic, IMO).
However, one thing that all the studies agreed on is that the actual petroleum input into ethanol is fairly small, at about 0.2:1 (I don't recall if that was by volume or by BTU content). The other energy inputs are mostly for fertilizer (natural gas) and distillation (natural gas or coal). But the actual oil inputs are pretty modest, and even the studies that disagreed on everything else agreed on that point.
Basically, corn ethanol is a way to turn natural gas into an oil substitute, with lower efficiency than you would get with straightforward synthetic chemistry, but with more opportunities to sound green and throw subsidies to Big Ag.
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amazingdrx Posted 6:03 am
30 Jan 2008
That could be better or worse depending on how efficient the processing is. Use of heat pump or cogeneration heat distillation would vastly improve that ratio in favor of ethanol.
My cursory estimate is close to yours green-e. I guessed around 1 gallon of oil based fuel to yield 10 gallons of ethanol from corn as far as I can tell from available statistics on corn yields, ethanol from corn, fuel for transportation of raw materials,and fuel per acre calculations. Maybe you have a better source than I do for your 1 gallon of oil based fuel yielding 5 gallons of ethanol?
I previously thought it was 1 gallon of oil to 1 gallon of ethanol, but that is just the total fossil energy ratio to ethanol energy yield.
With organic farming and renewable energy powering everything from tractors to grinders and dryers and distillation, corn ethanol would be much lower in terms of total GHG release per mile.
But every acre devoted to it would still fail to sequester it's share of cO2 from the atmosphere, in a ratio of plant biomass returned to the soil to biomass converted to fuel. That boosts the GHG per mile right back up to the rate of oil based fuels. And every renewable kwh used to produce ethanol would be replaced with a fossil fuel or nuclear kwh. A self defeating anti-GHG effort.
In food farming most of the biomass can be returned, by using biogas digestion of the waste stream. Not so with fuel farming. To maximize yields and profits, as much of the biomass grown as possible is turned into fuel.
Better to use rooftop solar, wind, and other renewables to power plugin hybrids. It is a even much more efficient way to convert sunlight energy to transportation miles. Using the renewable energy to produce ethanol to fuel more gas guzzling can never beat using that same renewable energy to power an electric plugin hybrid.
And the plugin hybrid/renewable smart grid scheme does not defeat the carbon sequestration of land and soil. Like corn/ethanol or cellulosic ethanol does.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Tasermons Partner Posted 6:38 am
30 Jan 2008
Costs will be passed onto consumer, resultin' in higher fuel prices.
Long term: as oil begins to reach outlandish prices, alternatives will be found that will still support mass industrial agriculture.
There may be a small increase in organic or eco-friendly farms as well. Increased use of GMOs is also a possibility.
Longer term: changes in socico-economics and culture (due partly to oil collapse, but more for other reasons) will encourage an increase in organic and small-scale sustainable farming.
Farmers markets become more common, people begin to grow their own food in larger community gardens, and health food chains push the organic farming concept to new heights.
However, most of the food supply will likely still come from mass industrial farming...though the techniques may become more sustainable as a result of legislation and public pressure.
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