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You all hopefully have heard of peak oil: that the easy oil is gone, and so now we're down to fracking. If fracking costs $120/barrel output, then the price of oil isn't going to go down below $120 a barrel ever again.
And you aren't going to find 2-ton copper nuggets in the streambeds either: the mines now get 0.04% rich ore, which takes a lot of oil to work the mines. So peak oil means peak copper, too.
Peak oil means peak everything. So that means peak growth.
But our world's national debts, which are all far above the highest debt-Gdp ratio that has ever been repaid, assume infinite growth.
Worse, growth and prosperity depend on the same resources, so that means an end to prosperity.
So what's coming? And how do we prepare?
Chris Martenson, a former Fortune-300 CEO, has put together a website including forums, groups, and above all three crash courses: a free 1-hour overview course, a free 4-hour 2008 version broken into 2-6 minute chapters, and half free/half paywalled 2014 version. The 2008 and 2014 versions are basically equivalent, but the 2014 contains better graphics and a bit more info.
He's asking people to get the word out:
Go watch the crash course, and then prepare.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Boxzy on Sunday August 24 2014, @03:35PM
Especially food and water. Reading about how many calories are required to extract one calorie from the ground sends chills down my spine.
We are talking transportation, sowing, tilling, harvesting, AND fertilising.
Basically the first world countries have been eating fossilised calories for decades.
Expect major land grabs of fertile areas to become a growth military objective.
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by evilviper on Sunday August 24 2014, @08:57PM
You're probably being lied to by eco-nuts. Market forces simply dictate how things are done. If oil is dirt cheap, you'd be stupid not to burn a bunch of it to save time and effort. Once it's not so cheap, you'll switch to the next-cheapest-thing. If you were to analyze at the US, you'd think that people are highly dependent on CORN for survival, and PEAK-CORN will be the end of civilization. Cast a wider net, and you'll see others do just fine without corn.
Certainly rice makes an interesting case for comparison. It's not hard to grow, it's dirt cheap to produce, people can survive on relatively little of it, etc. And while production is highly mechanized in the west, much of the Asian production is still done with traditional methods and lots of man-power, and comes out at about the same prices thanks to lower labor costs.
In a Blade Runner-esque future, you simply won't be eating steaks on a regular basis, but there will be plenty of rice for everyone.
That's ridiculous. Just because petrochemical fertilizers aren't as cheap isn't going to change much, except farming methods. We've got absolutely ridiculous amounts of biomass available, that could be used for fertilizing soil. In addition, basic crop rotation allows for different nutrients to be reintroduced to the soil in alternate years. Beans, for example, take nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil.
Even without crop rotation, we've got many centuries worth of biomass available for use as fertilizer, if we just mine it out of landfills. Or a slightly "icky" perpetual long-term solution could be using treated sewage as crop fertilizer. Pathogens are already neutralized by modern sewage treatment plants, so there's very little-to-no risk to human health from closing the food cycle.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday August 24 2014, @10:02PM
The Chinese closed the food cycle thousands of years ago. They called it "night soil" and harvested it out of outhouses they placed along roads and in highly trafficked areas. It was one of the most coveted jobs in Imperial China, because at one point through their inheritance practices the amount of land per farmer had shrunk to subsistence levels, so fertilizer became worth its weight in gold to get more yield out of the land you had. So the United States could get really far doing the same with its sewage, given how much people eat here. There are still vast swaths of the West that could be turned into productive farmland (think: the greater part of Wyoming) if it could be fertilized and irrigated adequately. And that's just the traditional kind of farming, without taking into account new trends like vertical farms and urban gardening.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 25 2014, @04:42AM
What you just described there is not a closed food cycle; it's an exploited food cycle with a bunch of middlemen holding subsistence to hostage, owing to inflexibly, bureaucratically managed societal practices. Also, the farming practices were so labour intensive that simply trying to survive required massive social coordination. That was the brink of starvation, not a model to emulate. The most useful thing about that is that yes, dung is a good source of plant nutrients - but the rest of it is a nightmare.
Oh, goody! Yay, who's going to truck all that to my farm from the big city a hundred miles away when fuel gets expensive? Who will pay for the roads and the trucking and the everything? You?
What, not you? You'll want me to pay for it myself? Yeah, that will be a problem. A problem for you, because I won't be doing it - it would make more economic sense for me to drop my productivity like a rock, to sustainable levels, and not subscribe to traditional chinese inheritance practices.
What's more, as farmers stop using petrochemical power to do everything, including pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, soil tillage, harvest, crop treatment and so on, more and more manpower will be needed. And guess what? The price of food relative to the price of a day's labour will rise until it's justifiable for farmers to do that - because if it doesn't happen, farm production will simply drop like a rock. That means we're looking at food riots. Revolutions. Societal upheaval on a par with the napoleonic wars.
OK, now I know you haven't done the math. Which city will be providing the humanure for Wyoming? Cheyenne? No, wait, Cheyenne is tiny. Chicago, maybe? Salt Lake City? Las Vegas? The fact is that it doesn't matter. The energy footprint of trucking 500 tons of humanure daily from Chicago to Wyoming is not only breathtaking, but even if you just knife it into the soil, assuming no difficulties with delivery, you still aren't creating a healthy soil biome. You still aren't improving the climate (which in Wyoming is punishing), you aren't improving the partial pressure of carbon dioxide at that altitude, and you haven't even begun to address how the hell you're transporting massive quantities of water uphill (Wyoming is mostly high up, not at ocean level at all) and then distributing it across the state. Hell, at Wyoming's rainfall rates, even if you captured every drop of water or chip of ice to fall on the land you'd still be left with a semi-arid climate in most of the state.
The energy footprint of greening Wyoming, in the teeth of the loss of the energy surplus which let Norman Borlaug's green revolution even take off, is so breathtakingly expensive that I'm not sure that it could ever be justified.
If I sound as if I'm yelling at you, don't take it personally. I, and many of my brother (and sister) farmers are just getting awfully tired of armchair agronomists telling us how we're doing it all wrong when many of us not only went to college for this, but also deal with the commercial realities on a daily basis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 25 2014, @01:50PM
People are already actively working on that one. ;-)
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday August 26 2014, @01:06AM
The same people who do so with the (more expensive) petrochemical fertilizer you currently use.
If transportation costs are too high to haul the fertilizer, you're going to have a hell of a time transporting your crops back to market, too. It's true that some farms are too damn far out in the middle of nowhere, and they will probably close up shop. But others, closer to towns or at least railroad tracks, will do fine and keep the food supply going.
No, plenty of that can be done using non-petrochemical sources of power, with minor inconveniences. Eventually, your tractor and combine will likely have a long extension cord...
Yes. It will hurt, but won't be the end of the world. Like I said, people will be eating rice instead of steaks, but they'll survive. Right now, you can buy 25 lbs of rice for under 2 hours of minimum wage labor in the US. That bag will provide enough calories for an adult for more than a month. Oil doubling, tripling, quadrupling, etc., even without alternatives, won't result in starvation for anybody with any income...
And in that time, alternatives to oil will be popping up left and right, since there's so much money to be made fixing the problem... A simple doubling of fossil fuel prices would cause an instant explosion of solar panel installations, wind, etc. More efficient products will fly off the shelves. etc.
The top farming state is California, which happens to be the most populous. Plenty of supplies from huge cities located both north and south of the farmland. Plus a short distance to market. You can either find a solution for your farm in Wyoming, or you can give up and let others do it. Other farmers better suited to the changes aren't going to refuse to make big money, and starve the public, in order to make a big protest out of your bad luck and your lack of both foresight and innovation.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Monday August 25 2014, @02:47PM
Human waste, and the waste of carnivores makes... ahem... shitty fertilizer. This is the reason why manure from cows and horses is used for fertilizer.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday August 24 2014, @10:51PM
Common fertilizer from sewage treatment is a unusable because it contains to much toxic contaminants.
(Score: 2) by khakipuce on Monday August 25 2014, @12:17PM
In the UK Sewage sludge is regularly used as agricultural fertilizer. I don't know what you are eating and putting in your bath water but my output is free from toxins!
Think about it, the vast majority of sewage treatment is a biological process, toxins in the mix would kill off the process and the polluter would be prosecuted. For example a few decades ago a dairy dumped a load of surplus orange juice down the drain, the acidity killed the treatment process, they were prosecuted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 24 2014, @09:03PM
Eritrea Turns Saltwater and Desert Into A Sustainable Ecosystem [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [dankalia.com]
The only other stuff they had is sunlight, seeds, eggs from a few critters, and humans with hand tools.
Now, the guy who figures out a cheap method of desalination will get the Nobel and everything else someone can think to give him.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday August 24 2014, @10:46PM
I have seen some serious innovation regarding desalination. I have forgotten about it however. But it means it's worth to search for current innovations in that area. Because a lot have happened. There's more than evaporation and reverse osmosis.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday August 25 2014, @01:20AM
I thought that reverse osmosis [wikipedia.org] was fairly cost effective.
1702845791×2
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 25 2014, @04:52AM
Apparently, "cost effective" isn't good enough.
If it was, you'd think that California, which is now in SEVERE drought, [wordpress.com] would have that big old coastline covered with those things--or at least be building them as fast as possible.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 25 2014, @12:41PM
We just need a pipeline going from the sea inland, instead of say from the inner delta to SF (one of the pre-Brown projects that he's helping push, along with a bunch of real estate shenanigans. 'Common man' my ass.)
If seawater was pumped to the Salton Sea, the Mojave, Death Valley, or up into the less hospitable parts of the Sierras, we could use natural filtration to desalinize, recover the water table, and if pumped up into the sierras, energy storage for future hydroelectric energy production. Dedicate a nuke plant or two to handle the pumps and it could probably be made more cost effective than alternative solutions since it could utilize baseline power 24/7 to fill the storage location. Provided sufficient outflow, it could be balanced to keep the reservoirs full while providing filtered water, gravity fed hydro, and potentially salt and other mineral extraction via the filtration process. It wouldn't be a small undertaking, but the long term benefits both locally in California, and possibly abroad into the central states could be game changing.
And yes I'm well aware of the engineering involved. But between the canal system which pumps water over the coast range from the central valley to LA, and the new Delta to SF water line, I'm pretty sure we're up to the engineering challenges.