The End of the Age of Oil

Humans can adapt quickly to almost anything; but the rest of the species cannot. The rest of the species are every other living thing on planet earth.
I’m of the school that we fix what’s wrong or we die. Stupid human tricks, such as engineering our way around, to band-aide what’s wrong, will lead from bad to worse.
Either we face reality or we deserve to self extinct; which is exactly the course we’re on. Turn the ship or sink it, so-to-speak.

Not quite sure what you mean by “intensive agriculture”. Pretty much everything that results in higher yields has higher costs, and you don’t seem to be addressing those. The costs in this case being water, as you mentioned, and also topsoil integrity. Is it worth producing more food per unit area if doing so damages the health of the soil more in the long term? Especially since greater food production influences population to expand? Eh… I don’t think so.

I would add that to the extent demand ramps up through increased deployment of electric, innovation in battery tech becomes more likely.

scruff, “Intensive Agriculture”, at least what I practice in my retirement, would have a major impact on food prices. No question. I guess that at a minimum a 30% increase for basic vegetables would be in order. A lot of that cost would be labour.

The alternative is a food system where the prices are so cheep that slave labour and subsidies must be used in order to stay competitive. The alternative is heavily reliant as well on oil and gas. If it takes more calories to produce your crops than the crops contain – that’s a big problem and from what I understand, typical for modern agriculture. The alternative is is a food system where communities, and even countries have no control over their food supply.

It is not at all obvious that there would be a major increase in water. One commercial “Intensive Agriculture” set up near where I live has built a very large cistern for watering. (They specialize in providing local high quality vegetables to restaurants.) An organic farm I purchase meat from showed that it is not only what you put on your crops that affect water usage. Land practices make a huge difference. A major rain storm caused extensive damage to stream beds and banks throughout our region a few years ago. Bare soil eroded badly in the extremely heavy rains. The organic farm suffered mild damage in their CSA garden area but that was it. They just didn’t have much in the way of bare ground. Their stream beds were not carefully carved out for maximum efficiency, but instead were covered in plants and grasses and thus did not erode in the flood conditions.

We cut water evaporation by use of row covers – or even in the case of carrots – covering rows with old sheets of plywood. I haven’t experimented with it, but I suspect that old cotton sheets would also work as row covers. It is something that a small scale agriculture set up could consider, while a commercial operation could not.

Low dentistry agriculture can be extremely resourceful in limiting water usage. I understand that some of the native communities in semi-desert areas practiced it. Commercial operations can’t do that. It really tends towards one size fits all. Small scale operations are far more flexible to local conditions than commercial sized operations can be.

I don’t know why you think that topsoil integrity is better in commercial operations. The commercial operation I’ve been talking about, and us, use fixed beds and do not till. We do not use chemical fertilizers, but have regular rotating applications of compost, most of which we produce ourselves. We are beginning to study the possibilities of permanent cover crops so our fields are less exposed bare to the sun. Round-up ready crops are not part of what we do. The pesticides and fungicides don’t enter our practices – organic or otherwise. We select crops that handle the insects and diseases present in our soil, and in cases where plants don’t exist that are adapted to our climate or conditions, we have started breading them. We are small enough that hand controls of insect infestations are possible. Often standard commercial agriculture has responded to these types of problems in our area by leaving and going somewhere else. Our area is more and more becoming meat and related production, apple production (with severe problems competing with China and diseases), specialized intensive agriculture, or in some cases abandonment of farms.

There are things you should look at for truly intensive agriculture – like the city of Paris before the invention of the automobile. For what Paris was doing, the inputs were extreme labour and otherwise, but I don’t see the damage that you are talking about. The density can actually helps to carefully control water usage. A lot less drip irrigation is needed per bushel of harvest. Small scale solutions can be used.

What you seem to be proposing is the continuation of shipping slave-labour produced food half-way around the world – coating it in diesel as it were. I would recommend reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma for a better understanding of what intensive agriculture looks like. 4 season Gardening would be another book to take a look at.

Desert areas may very well become basically uninhabitable – ie. much of the United States – and much of Canadian agricultural areas. Small scale agriculture will become crucial because it will have the flexibility to handle local conditions and implement local solutions to cover local needs – especially in marginal areas.

“Especially since greater food production influences population to expand?” I don’t think I want to head down this road, except to say that the current population growth of Canada does not seem to support this conclusion.

@JSN

The ever increasing ramp of demand for energy makes these technical solutions to AGW mostly feel good PR for wealthier people and nations to use to justify continuing their unsustainable overconsumption.

Stopping the growth in consumption of energy doesn’t seem to be possible when our capitalist economy depends on endless growth and the only way to actually address AGW, massive reduction of energy use isn’t even contemplated.

Jeff Wegerson, the world rainfall is increasing, but so is evaporation. Worse still, wet places tend to get wetter and dry places drier. You have places like North-Africa, the Middle-East and India which are experiencing simultaniously increasing drought, growing population, failing political systems and increasing prices of food exports. Think Syria, except a few billion people.

India might not be dry, but the population density is high.

https://np.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4c8ecf/india_is_dying_of_thirst_can_we_please_talk_about/

Of course, if a city loses water for a few months, it’ll all balance out.

I’ve read some analyses of wind power, but it’s intermittent and still heavily subsidized. While we could transfer to renewables, that would take decades of heavy investment and retooling of the entire society.

Permaculture is also not a thing we are moving to. Farm sizes are growing around the world. College graduates are not magic. College teaches you specific skills, usually relating to manipulating specialized infomation. If Ian is right about energy being cheap and plentiful, that’s great, but those skills are of no help in permaculture. Permaculture systems take years to set up, the skills needed to effectively run them take years and it is very hard to compete with subsidized industrial farms. Building such a system if you have student debt is nigh impossible, and is even harder if the food prices rocket and you are struggling to survive.

Permaculture systems require high investment and as such need to be built before the crunch time. But the political and technological system are pushing towards large industrial farms. So they will not be built in any scale that matters.

Russia has a huge swathes of its own land to develop. It also can not wage a war against the US in the North America. The comparison does not work.

Well, gosh, look at it this way Ian – you know those breaks between geological eras? Cambrian, Jurassic, Paleocene, and so on? Well, all those breaks represent extinctions. And one of the things these extinctions all have in common, and we know this from the fossil record, is that the coral reefs all died.

Every. Single. Time.

But, hey, look at it this way. There\’s still time to vote for Bernie Sanders!

Regarding intensive agriculture in urban areas

The Association for Vertical Farming:
https://vertical-farming.net/

The Vertical Farm Project:
http://www.verticalfarm.com/

http://www.greenroofs.com/

@ Boris March 31, 2016

The West has spent a great deal of effort arming the living bejesus out of Saudia Arabia with large amounts of state of the art weapons. What happens when that country destabilises?

The possession of sophisticated weapons systems and the ability to use them are two very different things. The average Saudi “soldier” is a barely literally peasant good for the repression of internal dissent using low-tech weaponry and good for nothing else*. Most of the high-end weaponry sold to Saudi Barbaria sits in depots unmaintained. Furthermore for much of it the US retains operational sovereignty what that means is that the weapon can only be used after the US supplies the codes to “unlock” it. (The system(s) used are similar to IFF but heavily encrypted).

I’ve been saying for a while that I’m not sure the internal stability in the US is nearly as firm as it once was.

Any federal system is subject to centrifugal and centripetal forces it seems increasingly likely that in the US the centrifugal forces are becoming so strong that they will prevail. And that’s a good thing for everyone else but probably a bad thing for Americans caught up in the collapse. Given the barbaric way the US has behaved abroad for generations it’s hard to feel any sympathy for them.

Dead oceans. We need a stable economy and production system to move food from farms and oceans into bellies. Fishery collapse, political upheaval, etc disrupt this and just-in-time delivery systems mean there is no strategic food reserve.

Most armies have enough food stockpiled to ensure that their core will survive for a fairly long time. For the civilian population (and that includes the police in the USA) mass starvation is entirely likely. The small number of survivors left will make perfect serfs and are likely to hail their new(ish) overlords with traumatised and exhausted relief.

mfi

*The SNG is a different proposition but there aren’t all that many of them and when Saudi collapses into its natural state the consensus is that they’ll be swamped.

@ Ian: hope isn’t enough though, is it?

https://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/2358/

All those renewables require vast amounts of rare earth metals, steel, glass, plastics, and concrete. And then water.

China has shown that an authoritarian/capitalist state is a successful model while the West has adopted an inverted totalitarian model with a superficial democratic veneer, except in the case of Greece, to maintain the control and dominance of capital.

It is doubtful that any other model will replace these entrenched forces with or without a collapse of the present world order and authoritarianism and barbarism are already used liberally to maintain capitalism as was seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Syria by Russia and the West.

China’s new military doctrine shows they are planning and preparing to project their military power to protect their capitalist economic interests especially in Africa where they are already involved in policing with the UN.

The price of both installed photo-voltaic as a whole and the price of utility scale KWh have steadily declined over the past 3o years and continue to decline in a readily predictable way. Likewise the price of wind based production. All the hyperventilation about the costs of installation are, largely, beside the point in that we were going to have to replace all those coal (and ultimately all the carbon based energy) plants anyway AND the thing about renewable based energy is that most of the cost is up front. Once they’re up and running, the maintenance tends to be comparatively minimal. There have also been substantial breakthroughs in mass energy storage based on high efficiency compressed air. Compress the air to store energy; decompress to spin generators, hardly any loss in the transfer, easy to maintain without loss over time. The only question about the end of the carbon era is not “if” but how soon. We had something like this conversation a couple of years back when P/V in the desert Southwest of the US hit grid parity for the first time. That SHOULD have been the dope-slap wake call for the “carbon uber alles” crowd and yet there’s still whinging of “It’ll be TOO EXPENSIVE”. No. It will in fact be amazingly cheap once the economy of scale is actually given a chance to kick in. The knock on effects of the collapse the value carbon based fuels are going to be pretty vicious for everybody dim enough not to have dropped everything that smells even vaguely of carbon. Oligarchs with a monopoly that suddenly nobody wants, I wonder what color their parachute is?

Nitrous oxides (NOXs) are another powerful global warming set of gasses. To the best of my lay amateur science buff knowledge, they come from mainly two sources: forced oxidation of N2 in high-pressure high-temperature internal combustion engines . . . and the gas-off of NOXs from farmland which has been dosed with more Nitrogen-compound fertilizers than what the plants grown thereon can suck up as it becomes available in plant-usable forms. So what could be done to reduce NOX production from those two sources?

Agriculture first: if N could be applied as complex compounds which are so slow to break down that they can’t break down any faster ( or become otherwise liberated any faster) than the plants can pick them up, then there would be little or no N-compounds sitting around to be oxidized to NOXs which would then gas up out of the soil and into the air. The most complex N-bearing compounds I can think of are proteins such as are found in seedmeals, fish meal, kelp meal, etc. Then too, the more branched-carbon long-chain humus a soil contains, the more binding sites that soil contains for simple little N-compounds and the more “stably” held in place those compounds are till the plants can wrench them off their humus binding sites. Biologically-fixed N products and biologically-fixing N organisms are the best slow-releasers or slow-providers of just-in-time plant-friendly simple N-compound molecules.

But how to get enough bio-fixed N-compounds into agro-systems that we can lower the amount of Haber-Bosch NH4 or its work-ups that we have to apply? Aren’t we limited by the semi-meager supplies that legumes with their root-born rhizobial N-fixing bacteria can supply? Well, no we are not. It turns out that legume-hosted rhizobial bacteria are not the only people who are bio-fixing atmospheric N2 into bio-available N-compounds.

I read once a very interesting post on a site called Permaculture Reflections ( which has recently been uglified and user-hostilified as so many blogs now are these days) which described in detail all the NON-legume plants which also harbor N2-fixing root organisms.
Sea buckthorn (Hypophae rhamnoides and other H. species), the Eleagnus (autumn olive and etc.) species, tamarisk, casaurina, and others I don’t even remember. In tropical rice paddies there grows a kind of floating fern called Azolla which harbors N-fixers on its roots and is a major source of N to the rice-paddy system. I believe I have read that temperate zone duckweed does the same. I personally wonder whether water hyacinth, water lettuce, Nile cabbage, etc. don’t do the same thing too.

Termites eat wood for the cellulose. They harbor in their intestines various protozoa which oxidize the celluluse and use some of the energy to fix their own N to make their own proteins with. I read somewhere that termites are fixing about 25% of the total N which gets fixed and brought into tropical forest and savannah ecosystems. Perhaps termites could be domesticated and farmed for termite-meal. Or perhaps the termite-gut protozoa could be grown in isolation in huge industrial scale fermenters and dried into N-fixer protozoa meal fertilizer. And consider the fruit fly. If any fruit flies can find a pound of stale fruit, they reproduce on it and a pound of rotting fruit can breed-up at least half-a-pound of fruit flies.
Fruit flies are made of protein. Where are they getting the N to make their own protein-based selves? It isn’t in the pre-rotten fruit. Are fruit-decay organisms fixing their own N2? Do the fruit flies harbor N2 fixers inside their own guts?

What’s going on in the ocean? There is lots of protein in the life in the sea. There are no legumes growing in the ocean. Who is fixing all that N2 down in the sea? Somebody sure is fixing it.

So we don’t need Haber and we don’t need Bosch for our agro-bio N-compounds. All we need to do is to really understand all these different N-fixers well enough to work them into our agro-systems and work our agro-systems around the slow-release near-zero NOX-polluting N compounds these N bio-fixers can supply. And we thereby delete one of two big sources of powerful Warming NOX gases into the atmosphere.

Peter*,

That’s an interesting comment and an interesting thought. If I am in error and confusion, it is a confusion and error which I picked up from whomever wrote the material where I read about it. I mean about the NOXs being infrared-absorptive heat-trapper gases. Confusing the name “nitrous oxide” with the NOXs was purely my own error and not a term-switcheroo I would have read somewhere else. Thank you for pointing it out.

As to NOXs being or not being greenhousers, I know I have read they are in several places. I will have to go back and find those places. Are those places all wrong? Does anyone else have something to contribute on the matter? Separately , NOXs’s danger to health and reacting to produce ground-level ozone ( where we DON’T want ozone to be) are good enough reasons to suppress release or creation of NOXs. And we can certainly abort the production and release of mass quantities of NOXs from agriculture if we can force the right agronomic methods and policies into unanimous use. NOX from high compression ICEngines will be much harder to suppress.

@Peter*,

If N-fixing plants are themselves producing NOXs today, they were probably always doing it. And the biophysichemical ecosystem has long since been used to it and has factored it in.

So if we get our manmade NOXs down to near-zero, the plantmade NOXs won’t hurt us any more than they hurt the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon. So as you say, we can live with them.

I am just a lay amateur science buff and I don’t know enough to say that the problems @tony links to are not real. I suspect they are real. We will have to shrink our energy use and therefor probably our economy down to what renewable energy can renewably support.

Buckminster Fuller once said that clever brilliant engineering and designing would let us do more with less. The problem is that our current growthaholic economic system and value system leads us to say that if we can do more with less, then we can do more-than-before with as-much-as-before, and WAY more than before WITH more than before. We would have to adopt a long term shrinkage-based economic system and value system which leads us to say that if we can do more with less, we can do “the same” with STILL less, and we can do less than before with way less than before. If we could target the shrinkage against the top economic classes and work our way down till we were all consuming little enough apiece that our net collective consumption reached renewable sustainability, then we would raise the chances of our long term survival.

The very firstest step would be to restrict the use of electricity to those things which only electricity can do. Blogging and computering can only be done with electricity to feed the grids which feed the computer machinery systems. What electricity uses are people prepared to give up so as to save electricity for computering and bloggering with?

People who think “society” and “government” should do this and that to lower energy use and carbon net emissions should expect their neighbors to say: “oh yeah? What’s in YOUR footprint? People who want to be given a serious and respectful hearing by their neighbors or anyone else will have to demonstrate that they are doing what personal conservation lifestyling they can in the teeth of a society designed to prevent conservation in every possible way. Such visible conservation lifestyle modeling would at least give us the personal “walking the talk” credibility to be given a respectful hearing when we point out the ways “society” would have to be changed to make possible the conservation which only society-wide re-engineering would make possible.

There are websites available which contain information people can use to lower their own stuff-and-energy use in ways that others can see and be favorably impressed by. Such “propaganda of the conservation-lifestyle demonstration” would get its practitioners listened to. Here are a few websites containing such information for those who wish to use it and to be seen to be using it by those who have eyes to see.
There used to be a site called The Energy Guy based in California with all kinds of conservation lifestyling facts and advice, but I can’t find it now, what with the constantly degraded quality of search engines.
There is still a blog called Do The Math which has some theoretical posts but also some practical how to/ why to posts on it. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/
There is a site called Journey To Forever with many links to many sub-subjects in the field of low-stuff/ low-energy living. http://journeytoforever.org/
There is a site called Red Rock Energy with all kinds of interesting articles about various gizmos and methods for personal energy conservation, as well as interesting general-information articles. http://www.redrok.com/main.htm
There is a magazine called Backwoods Home with a partial online presence. It has a strong Rural Chauvinist Libertarian bias, but some of its articles are practical how-to for living okay on less energy than the average consumer. http://www.backwoodshome.com/
And of course there are others.

If eleventeen million individuals did this stuff-and-energy use-reduction lifestying, would they make a difference against Global Warming all by themselves? No. But they would have the personal credibility to advocate and press for the social and civilizational re-engineering changes needed for whole societies and civilizations to shrink their stuff-and-energy use enough to shrink their heat-trapping gas-release enough to stop Warming the Global, and maybe even to DeWarm the Global back to where it was a few decades ago. Such pressure will probably have to start from those eleventeen million people with their “propaganda of the good example”.