Reply #4: Agriculture

[Dogmudgeon]

Ten calories in, one calorie out. And don't forget, when the ethanol industry gets going, there will be stiff competition for agricultural resources, even if ethanol production can break the EROEI=1.0 barrier in the long run.

Neither vegetarianism nor whipping those bad American fatties into shape will make much of a difference. Feeding six -- then seven -- then eight billion people takes a LOT of energy, and Green Revolution plants demand great pampering.

More efficient use of energy, getting away from current automotive technology, and re-urbanization would be very helpful. They may even be vital. But the "800-pound gorilla" is agriculture.

The 700-pound gorilla, by the way, is sustaining our economic system, which depends on energy input growth to drive prosperity. If we default on that, we won't be sitting around the fireplace getting to know our family members in the absence of TV. We'll be huddling around campfires fighting for scraps of food in the massive relocation camps we'll be hustled off to when society crashes, worldwide. Remember Year Zero in the Glorious People's Republic of Kampuchea? Such will be our world.

The way we handle a crash would be up to us. If the world falls into "Kampucheanism," we will have no one to blame but ourselves. And enlightened leadership (formal and informal) could turn the situation around.

So we could manage through a crash without much pain at all, but then NBL kicks in -- "Not Bloody Likely". But it is impossible to bargain with famine.

We need lots of energy for non-trivial reasons.

On the other hand, we're neither building many power plants (nuclear AND otherwise) nor rebuilding infrastructure to be more energy-efficient. We're setting ourselves up for disaster.

But there is a simple solution to all of this. Simply kill 90-98% of the population. That would be all of Asia, Africa, most of South America, and all the poor people in the "developed" world. We could do it with a world war, a series of pandemics, or a world-wide agricultural disaster (see John Christopher's novel The Death of Grass).

"Gee whillikers! I'll take 'All Of The Above'!"

Then, we could have over a century of what James Kunstler calls "easy motoring" -- and easy livin'.

I seriously think that this is the scenario our masters have chosen for the world. So we will not get many more nukes. Nor will we get many windmills, nor new oil rigs, nor better infrastructure or planning, nor anything else that might change our course. We will instead get a decade of misery and mass death and horror, followed by the most efficient cover-up ever executed in the long saga of civilization.

I yearn to be proven wrong by history.

--p!