Daily Kos

View Story | 35 comments

  •  I agree with you about their motivations (0+ / 0-)

    Pure greed and lust for power is nothing new, and I doubt that the current cabal is actually bright enough to see the looming danger and plan for it.

    But I agree with the diarist about what the real danger is - it's the food supply. Feeding as many people as are currently living on this planet is simply not possible without that magical black elixer known as petroleum. And producing it in the increasing quantities needed for the still increasing population is not possible.

    Everything in our current way of living depends on oil. From having enough to eat to the cheap sterile plastics that are essential to modern medicine and everything in between.

    I hope that you are right about this too passing. I hope that the dystopian visions of mass famines and refugees by the hundreds of millions are the fevered imaginings of the hysterical. But I'm not entirely convinced that they are.

    I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution. - Barbara Jordan

    by Janet Strange on Sun Feb 04, 2007 at 01:53:33 AM PDT

    [ Parent ]

    •  Actually, we can keep food going (1+ / 0-)

      The fuel required to cultivate and fertilize corn can be obtained from the stalks and leaves, with a considerable surplus.  However, this doesn't deal with the rest of the chains to and from the farm, and the demands of society at large could never be supplied this way.  They are just too inefficient to be supplied with what we can grow.

      On the other hand, we have technologies on the shelf or in the pipeline which are efficient enough to replace fossil fuels with biofuels and maintain our current standard of living (very important for political acceptance).  I wrote this up last November in Sustainability, energy independence and agricultural policy.

      --
      Work the cold equations; some answers will make you feel warm.

      by Engineer Poet on Sun Feb 04, 2007 at 07:08:41 AM PDT

      [ Parent ]

View Story | 35 comments