I’ve been thinking a lot over the last eighteen months about food security, starting way down in the basement where sun, water, and soil come together in our volume grain production. There is a tight connection between our current population overshoot and the fossil energy resources, both fuel and fertilizer, that got us here. Food production, such as we do now, is more of an energy issue than an environmental one, but pile those two issues together with the economic concerns we face and it’s a truly poisonous brew.
We’re way out on a limb here, and we either start mindfully shinnying down to the solar maximum for the planet ... or we’ll get knocked down and knocked down hard.
Humans got a warning on population dangers from Thomas Malthus two hundred years ago.. A decade or two passed and the discovery of the massive nitrate deposits of the Atacama desert on the west coast of South America drove another century of human population expansion. The famine worries were again upon us at the turn of the last century when Fritz Haber sorted out how to synthesize ammonia, not much later Carl Bosch commercialized the process, and we got another century of growth. True, there are other nutrients than biologically available nitrogen, but that one is often the Liebig minimum – the one that governs the maximum size of the system in question.
There were two billion humans when the first industrial scale ammonia plant in Oppau, Germany came online. Today we make a hundred forty million tons of the stuff annually and there are nearly seven billion of us. The math is uncertain but it’s a fair estimate to say only half of those seven billion would be here without the protein flowing to us due to the Haber Bosch process.
Humans without enough to eat do terrible things to the environment and not long after to each other, should their minimum needs not be met. I see the too thin, brown folk of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia on the TV and I have to turn my face away. It seems like that scene from a disaster movie, where a gap opens between the characters that go on and those ... who will not.
Here in North America we’re in better shape than a lot of other places. We’ve got a lot of land, not all that many people, we’re in OK shape in terms of volume and cleanliness of water, and we’re largely culturally and ethnically homogenous. Yeah, you heard right – we have none of the troubles of Darfur, or Somalia, or Afghanistan, all of which are plagued by drought and food insecurity complete with the sectarian and ethnic differences necessary to really stir up trouble.
Those who’ve noticed my work at all know that I’ve been focused on putting a renewable foundation under our grain production. The spring update to the National Renewable Ammonia Architecture isn’t yet a journal grade piece, but if I want to continue to enhance my credibility as a researcher in this field I need to shepherd something based on this through the submission process at a place like the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy. Sure, a dramatic move by our society, say to meat being a weekly rather than daily component of our diet, would change the landscape, but it’s not a total solution.
The fuel thing, that’s the one that’s going to hurt. I’ve had off and on contact with Alan Drake, the nation’s foremost rail electrification activist, and I cheer him on because he has a plan that is already proven in other parts of the world and backed by the top notch modeling of the Millennium Institute. Executive summary? Our oil usage drops 10% and the economy actually grows 25% during the rebuilding of the rail network we used to have. This is good, but it’s not a total solution for the empty miles the further west one goes in the United States.
We can either dig up fossil sunshine and wreck our atmosphere and seas, or we’re clever and we catch today’s sunshine in the rain, wind, and sun itself. Even that nuclear power is a sort of fossil sunshine – uranium atoms are born in the death throes of a star going supernova.
Today I can pick up the phone, dial 911, and shortly thereafter a vehicle with flashing lights will arrive to deal with health emergencies, fire, or criminal activity. That’s little ‘s’ security – the basic services of a civil society. Get outside the moment and you find that snow plows, road maintenance, and then delivery vehicles are needed. Your average home has a week of food and the grocery store, always a low margin business, has at most three days worth of stock.
Stretch your time frame out to a quarter or three and fuel insecurity is a bigger problem. One gas station with bags on the pumps is a hassle, a whole town full of them is a giant nuisance, and if that becomes a habit things ... change. Wallets snap shut, then business doors close, and homes on the edges go empty, then they’re opened by bored young men and Mother Nature begins her inevitable reclamation process. If it’s too intense and comes on too quickly a place like Macon, Georgia could end up looking and behaving like Mogadishu while Boston might have a go at reproducing the excitement one finds driving around Baghdad.
There are a few plans out there that begin to address this. T. Boone Pickens would have us believe that just drilling the heck out of natural gas will solve the problem. I agree that domestic resources trump exporting dollars, especially given the financial mess we have, but cleaner natural gas still isn’t clean – one CO2 molecule comes out for every four hydrogen bonds that provide us energy.
The ethanol/methanol crowd would have us depend on biological sources. Food activists with a limited knowledge of history decry the practice of "burning food", but I know the peak acres we devoted to biofuel (111 million) and the year that happened (1915). Draft animals had us using a third of our cultivated land for energy a century ago. And lets not forget that, at least for today, without natural gas driven ammonia production coupled with diesel fuel we’re not getting ethanol.
Ammonia, available in large volumes from renewable sources, would seem to jump over the concerns associated with our other two domestic fuel sources. Ethanol, which we do need in some volume for transportation, would get a renewable, carbon free floor under its fertilization requirements. Corn or soy biodiesel could fuel farm equipment and with a little more work hybrid biodiesel/ammonia fueled farm vehicles could be in the field. Natural gas, for which we have a large home heating distribution network, would be preserved for that purpose while we ponder how to heat our homes renewably.
There is a national security aspect to all of this which is seldom considered by those interested in either food security or the feel good side of renewable energy. The wealth transfer from this country to places like Russia and the Persian Gulf states is a concern, even if one holds no animus towards the residents of either region.
Grain exporter Russia has a similar set of circumstances to those we have here in North America and unlike Americans who are just beginning to grasp that our empire has slipped from our control, they’ve already suffered the imperial collapse that is fast approaching us. The resource light and population heavy Persian Gulf states have a limited amount of time (and oil) to turn their current holding into something productive in a post peak world. Productive, at a very fundamental level, comes back to grain crops or the leverage needed to gain access to them.
Like it or not there are going to be winners and losers as we get back down to a sustainable population size. Remember the Titanic survivors rowing away in partially filled lifeboats because they’d be swamped by the ones not so lucky? Peak oil is going to put us in the position where we have to make decisions to either engage in troubles which have no happy ending or to simply cut our losses, giving up any remaining claim to being the policeman of the world.
I don’t think descending entirely into the isolationism we periodically engage in would be the right approach, nor do I care much for the sloppy, activist approach of the neocons. We’re still going to project global power, both hard and soft. Grains bins filled to bursting with crops grown entirely on local resources are as powerful a soft force as our navy is a hard one. If we play our cards right we can make things ... less ugly.