rawehage’s Recent Comments

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  Do we feed people or cars?

  Before ill-informed experts jump onto the cellulosic ethanol and other forms of biofuel bandwagon, I recommend that they read "Topsoil and Civilization" by Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale, isbn 0-8061-0332-9. People mistakenly believe that soil is an unlimited resource; all one has to do is plant seeds in it and reap its bountiful harvests. That is very far from the truth. As Carter and Dale have shown, man has turned much of Earth's Eden into uninhabitable deserts, and is working hard to finish off the rest.  It took 350 million years for living organisms to turn the earth's barren rocky surface into a lush, life-supporting humas layer. It took civilized man less than 5,000 years to turn much of that lush, life-supporting humas soil back to barren rocks and sand. Repetitive stripping of precious biomass from our remaining deteriorating lands to further pollute our atmosphere will only hasten its reversion back to barren rocks and sand. A soil's productivity comes from the living material returned to feed its living organisms that produce its living humas that contributes to its fertility; strip away the soil's living material and its organisms die, its humas disappears, and it turns back to barren rocks and sand.

  There is no free lunch! Do we feed people or cars? The earth's remaining topsoil is barely able to sustain the world's population, and it does so only because of the massive amounts of oil and natural gas used to prop up its deteriorating condition. Too much of the soil's life-sustaining humas has already been lost. Most of our remaining productive land is used primarily as a medium to support the plants, whose roots draw sustenance from energy-intensive artificial fertilizers. Without these fertilizers, crop production will drop to a fraction of current levels, and the world will fall far short of producing enough food for the masses. Then we will see an epidemic of world famine, diseases, and unrest.

  Well managed forests are an exception. It is possible to gradually remove the tree trunks and still maintain a decent amount of humas, but only if the remaining cellulosic material is left behind to feed the next generations. But there are "experts" who advocate stripping the hills and mountainsides bare to feed our cellulosic ethanol processing plants. Stripping the land bare is how civilized man turned The Land of Eden into a barren, rocky desert. Civilized man cannot strip straw or cornstalks or other life supporting materials from the land and not expect to see its precious topsoil deteriorate and wash into the sea, and deserts to follow.

  So what is the solution? Conservation! Civilization must reverse its ever-increasing "addiction" to easy energy. It is a tragedy that the average American adult weight has been growing at a pound a year! Waist sizes have been growing faster than the national debt! We work harder to avoid exercising than we work! Even the starving population in this country is obese! World population is in equilibrium with world energy production. In the future, world population will still be in equilibrium with world energy production. And both will be well below today's level. And no one, especially any government official, wants to imagine that the road back to reduced energy dependence will be a rough and deadly one.

  Change will come painfully. First, our massive road infrastructure will deteriorate with the soaring cost of oil and energy-dependent maintenance and repair. Then our massive trucking industry will collapse, because truck axles will fail on our miserable roads. And our dismal rail system will be useless. And when our grocery shelves become empty... well, you can get the picture...

  Anyone who understands the precarious nature of humanity and topsoil will conclude that converting biomass to oil or ethanol is a temporary solution, at best, and will become impractical as oil and natural gas start their inevitable decline. So we should be concentrating our efforts toward developing alternatives to our energy addiction rather than our oil addiction.
  On Hint: he's from Alabama posted 3 years, 9 months ago 34 Responses

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  one vice for another

  The trouble with peak oil is that it will be replaced by dirty coal. Not only will we still have billions of tons of CO2 spewing into the atmosphere, but we'll have thousands of additional tons of mercury, uranium, arsenic, sooty ash, and many other heavy metals and carcinogens.

  Dirty, Coal-Fired Power Plants in Illinois
  On Umbra on climate confusion posted 4 years ago 2 Responses