Not straight crude oil,
but diesel fuel.
Diesel fuel is food.
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I just saw this diary:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
I was already set to write this one,
and that diary inspired me to forge ahead.
Let's start by looking at some tractors:
http://www.ebay.com/...
http://www.ebay.com/...
http://www.ebay.com/...
Now let's look at some bigger, newer tractors:
http://www.farm-tractors.com/
I can just smell that new tractor smell,
from looking at all those big, new tractors lined up,
can't you?
Check out this tractor:
http://www.applefarmservice.com/...
Eight huge tires,
count them!
That tractor is the size of a small house!
Another nice looking tractor:
http://www.kubota.com/
I think you can see my point:
Modern day farming is done with huge tractors;
smaller tractors of past decades
led the way,
and the trend has been,
simply,
bigger and bigger tractors,
to farm more efficiently,
to feed three hundred million Americans,
with,
simply,
more than enough food,
food beyond our wildest dreams,
at least in quantity,
and efficiency of production,
leading to low prices.
And that takes a lot of diesel fuel.
But in the near future,
say within 25 years from now,
the oil companies,
forced to use more and more expensive methods for extracting oil
from the Earth,
(offshore drilling,
horizontal drilling,
fracking,
oil shale,
tar sands,
synthetic oil from coal)
will be forced to either raise prices to something like
$25 per gallon for diesel fuel,
which would shut down farming,
or to ask the Government
for subsidies,
which they will get,
so that the farmers will pay less than $5 per gallon
for diesel fuel,
and the Government will pay the rest,
the rest of the cost of getting oil from the earth,
since failure to do so
means failure to feed America.
But the hard cold fact is:
there is only so much easy oil
to extract from the Earth,
and we've already got all the easy oil.
Now,
we're reaching for oil that soon will cost more oil to extract,
than the oil that's extracted.
I worked on an oil drilling rig for six months,
back in the seventies.
All the machinery on the drilling rig uses diesel fuel.
One pair of large diesel engines
turns the drill pipe,
generating enough twisting force
to drill through solid stone;
another pair of large diesel engines
pumps the mud down the middle of the drill pipe;
the mud carries the small chunks of stone up the hole,
to the surface,
and around to a large pit.
Electricity for lights at night is provided by
a diesel generator.
When it takes more than a gallon of diesel fuel
to get the amount of oil out of the ground
that will yield a gallon of diesel fuel,
then there will be no diesel fuel
for the farmer's tractor.
No fuel for the farmer's tractor
means no food.
If we want to build plants for making diesel fuel from coal,
it will take a lot of earth moving equipment,
and cement mixers,
all burning vast amounts of
diesel fuel.
If we try using biofuels,
such as peanut oil,
http://www.mass.gov/...
it would certainly work,
but then we'd have to set aside so much land,
just to produce biofuels,
and we'd have to use so much biofuels,
to plant and harvest the biofuels.....
I don't even know if we could produce more than one gallon of biofuel,
by using one gallon of biofuel,
but even if we could,
we would take so much land out of food production,
then that would make America
short on food.
I predict that after the period of subsidizing oil companies,
we will have a period of oil shortage,
diesel fuel shortage,
gradually getting worse and worse,
until we truly have severe famine in America,
and as the famine progresses,
since America is the land of guns,
(three hundred million Americans,
three hundred million guns,)
there will be a lot of shooting,
until everyone runs out of ammo.
The survivors will be forced to farm the old fashioned way,
using horses and mules.
Not tractors.
But the worst tragedy will be,
if the survivors act like the most ignorant folks on Earth,
and start up big families,
ten kids per family,
and the whole thing gets bad again,
too many mouths to feed,
fighting over land,
fighting over water.
The long term plan,
to keep humanity stable,
is consistent contraception,
to keep the birth rate down,
to keep our numbers down,
three million for the whole USA,
not three hundred million,
not even thirty million.
Three million humans
should be easy to feed,
from the land with good rainfall
in the North American continent.
And one more thing:
to deal with the coming crisis,
and for all time after,
we should eliminate money.
The fix we're in now
was caused by big business,
who wanted America
to grow as it did,
so that Walmart,
and farmers,
and oil companies
could make lots of money.
The only way we can ever have
a sustainable civilization
is by governing ourselves
with that sustainability
as our clear, firm goal;
never letting the desire for more money
on the part of some of us
dictate the way we organize ourselves.
Thanks for reading.
4:34 PM PT: I simply want to emphasize my last paragraph,
so I'm putting in an update,
to get folks to read it again.
The only way we can ever have
a sustainable civilization
is by governing ourselves
with that sustainability
as our clear, firm goal;
never letting the desire for more money
on the part of some of us
dictate the way we organize ourselves.