Peak Oil and Famine: 4 Billion Deaths

[clv101]

I think a question on how many people could be fed with out the use of oil or fossil fuel based fertilisers is a valid one.

Maybe about 9 billion?

That would be a remarkable coincidence wouldn't it? That the UN projection, that is not based on how many people can be fed without fossil fuel inputs is exactly the same as the number of people that can be fed without fossil fuel inputs.

The evidence does not suggest 9bn, more like 2-4bn. And that's ignoring climate change.

The World's Expected Carrying Capacity in a Post Industrial Agrarian Society

[Totally_Baffled]

But hydrogen and nitrogen must be combined under high pressure - presumably that requires some energy and fossil fuel use (probably oil?).

Also often the hydrogen used in the manufacture of ammonia (for fertilisers) is derived from the cracking process of plastic manufacture and is therefore oil derived. Globally this is no doubt important.

Of course natural gas is a fossil fuel - I think a question on how many people could be fed with out the use of oil or fossil fuel based fertilisers is a valid one.

This is all true - but the circa 100 million tonnes of nitrogen fertiliser produced every year takes only 0.75% of the worlds energy production.

I think what Biff is correct - there will no doubt be a transistionary period of several decades (if not a century) between the FF dominated agricultural system we have now and the more organic/green/lower inputs/permacultural system we will have in the future.

Given the energy required from this process can come from coal/gas (neither of which have peaked yet) and food is fundamental , I would suggest we have the resources to make some sort of transition?

[Totally_Baffled]

One other question - I just got reminded of this in another thread, how much extra food could be produced if we didnt grow the crops listed below and grew food instead?

obacco, coffee, tea, cotton, rubber, poppies, cocao etc etc ?

[Cabrone]

The evidence does not suggest 9bn, more like 2-4bn. And that's ignoring climate change

Interesting article, if grim.

It will be interesting to see how climate change affects the land available for crops. Scandinavian wines in the decades ahead?

Also what about recycling our own waste? If we got our act together on this how much of an impact would this make?

Food and water availability is a real concern.[/quote]

[biffvernon]

Of course that 9bn figure wasn't quite plucked from the air at random, but it is pretty meaningless. It could be much higher, though that's not the sort of world I fancy. Chris, I think there are quite a few shortcomings in Wisdom from Pakistan's article, some of which have been addressed in the Comments. (Nice photo, though I'm not sure fetching water on foot is the panacea for universal happiness.)

A friend dropped in this afternoon who has bought a small farm in southern Portugal. A remote area with a sparse population. Lots of land that is currently well below it's potential productivity for want of people. The folk that do live there have a largely cashless economy where they do stuff for each other, grow stuff for each other, give each other lifts when they want to go somewhere and put a lot of time and effort into being nice to their children and grandmothers. Peak Oil may come and go but their lives will carry on regardless.

I've just been reading Julian Rose's article in the latest Permaculture about farming in Poland. If they can just hold out till post-Peak, things may turn out quite nicely. See International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside (ICPPC).

TB, we may be able to make the transition quicker than you suggest. Even in countries such as the UK the fossil fuel dependant farming system is only half a century old. There were few tractors before the Second World War and very little agro-chemicals used. And we were amongst the first to 'modernise'. Another change might be made quite swiftly - things seem to go faster and faster, don't they?

Yes, Cabrone, climate change is a major spanner in the works and we seem intent on chucking more spanners in.

[jonny2mad]

Read any discussion on carrying capacity without fossil fuels and no ones that sure, and lots of people think we have exceeded the carrying capacity and are on the way to die off or population contraction if you don?t like to view things in stark terms.

Like I said in another thread some societies have a cornucopian outlook, in my former religion we had this outlook and you were encouraged to have big families as they were a blessing from god , you wouldn?t be able to convince us of a one child policy because it went against core religious beliefs .

If you have a culture like Bangladesh or Pakistan where I would say they were overpopulated and have loads of very poor people but still are doubling their population, would it be a good idea to import the future starving from those countries to somewhere like china that sees the problem of over population and does something about it with a one child policy.

Some starvation is maybe caused by the actions of outsiders, but a lot of it is caused by failures of the people starving on a society level , and if your not able to change core bad values giving them food will only increase the overall misery .

Some societies are doomed , like the tenderfeet in the jack London story, Id say Saudi is doomed long term when the oil runs out because it doesn?t have enough water or food to feed 27 million people and survives on one resource oil, when that?s gone you will get die-off or migration .
Its main reason for being doomed is the core values of that country not the environment and not outside forces , because if you arranged the population with the resources of the country there wouldn?t be die off , but you would have to get rid of things like polygamy, get women in the workforce, encourage contraception, incentives to have less children .

If you look at the west we could be said to be a society leading to its own destruction in that we over use resources, but we have a declining population apart from migration and we might be able to shake off cornucopianism when we see real shortage, I don?t see a lot of cultures changing you can go round the world now and see mass starvation and you will see people being encouraged to have more children.

This is one of the reasons I?m in favour of barbed wire and borders , and don?t believe in the lets all share our food its my fault the worlds starving method , you can advise a tenderfoot what to do but sometimes they just don?t listen and then you just have to stand back and watch them die .

Myself I think we are heading for serious reduction in population , you can see one way how that acts out in third world countries with mass starvation , you can see another in Russia with alcoholism and a declining birth rate and earlier mortality .

And things haven?t really started yet or at least they are still at a low level

[biffvernon]

I'm not signed up to your former religion either, j2m, and I'm not so much exploring what is desirable as what is possible. I like big open spaces and think a lower population would be pleasanter, but that's not an option.

You're right to suggest that we're not sure what the oil-less carrying capacity might be, but I wonder whether you aren't a bit down on Saudi Arabia. Now the Arabian desert would not be my first choice as a farming venue but they don't just have oil. They also have a great deal of sunshine - and that's what makes the leaves work. Water is obviously the key thing and mining fossil water like they do is not the permaculture approach. But it does rain. Very hard occasionally and then it gets wasted, so storage is part of the solution. And then there's using solar energy for desalination. It's not beyond the wit of mankind, but not much point while the oil is cheap. There are crops that grow in salt water. Salicornia (samphire) has an enormous potential as a human food, not least because it is a very rich source of omega-3. I just wonder whether Saudi Arabia might not be a significant sustainable food producer sometime in the not too distant future. Of course the past is no guide to the future in this case. An enlightening paper by Elie Elhadj, Camels Don?t Fly, Deserts Don?t Bloom: an Assessment of Saudi Arabia?s Experiment in Desert Agriculture is an excellent account of how not to do it. PDF
here.

[RenewableCandy]

Oooh and so is The "Groundnut Scheme" by Alan Wood: How Not To Farm in Africa!

My money's on little farms with things like terracing, great for catching water but a b***er for mechanised work. Hmm, no mechanised work in future, so back to terraces we go! Also there existed (I wish I could find more gen) an extremely cool ancient irrigation system in Afghanistan, of all places.

The trick is for people to stop shooting each other for just long enough to get these ideas up-and-running.

[biffvernon]

The trick is for people to stop shooting each other for just long enough to get these ideas up-and-running.

Absolutely. We could solve all the problems if we mastered that trick.

[RenewableCandy]

The trick is for people to stop shooting each other for just long enough to get these ideas up-and-running.

Absolutely. We could solve all the problems if we mastered that trick.

No I didn't mean change their very nature I mean just a couple of months' cease-fire or suchlike (after all before FF, and canned food, wars in Europe used effectively to shut down for the winter. The French, bless 'em, regularly used to pack up their guns to get the harvest in. And you do still get perfectly good cease-fires these days). Digging terraces/watercourses, planting perennial stuff. Then they can always go back to shooting each other if they want, but the cunning plan is, they probably won't want: with their own food growing they'd be happier using their forces to guard it rather than go raiding and risk losing it.

[syberberg]

The trick is for people to stop shooting each other for just long enough to get these ideas up-and-running.

Absolutely. We could solve all the problems if we mastered that trick.

No I didn't mean change their very nature I mean just a couple of months' cease-fire or suchlike (after all before FF, and canned food, wars in Europe used effectively to shut down for the winter. The French, bless 'em, regularly used to pack up their guns to get the harvest in. And you do still get perfectly good cease-fires these days). Digging terraces/watercourses, planting perennial stuff. Then they can always go back to shooting each other if they want, but the cunning plan is, they probably won't want: with their own food growing they'd be happier using their forces to guard it rather than go raiding and risk losing it.

That has more to do with population than you might think. Take the Romans and the various Hellenic Successor States. The only reason they had professional armies was due to industrialised (for the time) agriculture. The Romans had latifunda, the cheep energy came from slave labour, and the same was more-or-less true of the Hellenic Successor States. Contrast that with the likes of the Celts and Dacians, who didn't have the same agricultural systems, and you had a shortage of "spare" people, even though they had slaves and were wealthy, for professional armies. Although they did have enough to export as mercenaries, but they were more often than not cavalry troops made up of the younger sons of the wealthiest families.

Right, back on topic...

I think there will be a die off, but it won't be due to a lack of food from a lack of fossil fuel inputs. For starters, the current system we have is disgustingly wasteful. If the supermarkets didn't insist that the consumer wants only veg of a fairly uniform size and shape (which, IMHO, is a load of bull), we'd be able to solve a few problems right there.

[biffvernon]

World population was rather small in Roman times, so that can hardly account for their army.

[syberberg]

World population was rather small in Roman times, so that can hardly account for their army.

That wasn't the point I was making. Due to slave labour (ie cheep energy) used on the latifunda, the Romans had enough spare population to maintain a large standing army. As the Empire spread and Romanised everywhere they went, they had even more "spare" people, hence the introduction of the Auxilia after the Marian Reforms. The fact they had such a huge (for the times) supply of spare bodies was why they conquered Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor by the latter half of the 1stC BC.

For example, under Augustus, there were 28 full legions, that's 143,360 men doing nothing but soldiering for 25 years. Well, that and building roads, of course.

If anything, it helps to support your argument. I doubt that we can support a world population of 9 billion, but we can certainly manage to maintain pre-WW2 levels of population no sweat. Add Terra Preto into the equation and I'm pretty sure we can sustain 6 billion, but I think 9 billion might be pushing our luck, especially if it is decided to grow fuel for the infernal combustion engine rather than fuel for humans.

[Peter Goodchild]

Not really a typo, but an example of the common mathematical problem of "rounding." I was trying to stick to one decimal place.

3.44646097608414
3.39374093133453

Great article.

Check out the typo for the sample year 2032 however.

Otherwise points well made.

[Keela]

Great article.

Check out the typo for the sample year 2032 however.

Otherwise points well made.

Not really a typo, but an example of the common mathematical problem of "rounding." I was trying to stick to one decimal place.

3.44646097608414
3.39374093133453

But the line as given (with no qualification) is untrue!

2031 (oil 13.8G bbl): (A) 3.5 minus (B) 3.4 equals (C) 0.1
2032 (oil 13.2G bbl): (A) 3.4 minus (B) 3.4 equals (C) 0.1
2033 (oil 12.6G bbl): (A) 3.4 minus (B) 3.3 equals (C) 0.1

3.4 - 3.4 does not = 0.1

So I suggest either omitting the figures or using more decimal places. This simplification is working against you.

Just my view of course......

The article itself is a good read and deserves to be supported by examples that add up.