Food Price Riots Popping Up Around The World

[drpmjhess]

And when Catholics, Muslims, or whoever ask you “How do we keep our family size limited?” how do propose that Catholics answer that question?

ricmat, you’ve heard of self-control, no doubt?

 

[rlg94086]

No, that’s not a misprint. Before the commercial discovery and exploitation of oil in1859, earth’s sustainable population was around one billion. Fossil fuels (for tractors, fertilizers, transportation, and food processing) pushed population to 6.6+ billion. When the oil runs out during this decade, the population will probably collapse back to the pre-oil, solar-sustainable level. Of course, we have more efficient technologies now, so we may be able to sustain twice the 1859 number; optimists them three billion is possible, but that’s the upper level estimate among agronomists working with the petroleum issue.

The challenge for Catholics and other people of faith is how to maintain a voice in the transition back to a sustainable human population. We want to engineer the collapse in the direction of a “soft landing,” so that the more horrific aspects of population control are not imposed upon the world by ruthless dictatorships. That’s why we need to work for education and voluntary family size limitation. If we refuse to do this, Ribozyme is right: nature will take care of the excess population above carrying capacity, in ways we will likely not find very pleasant at all. I hope we’ll find the moral will to exert our voices in this.

Petrus

Ah, but it seems this is all predicated on oil. You do realize that, with God’s help, we won’t be as dependent on oil in the near future, don’t you? The sky is not falling.

 

[drpmjhess]

Ah, but it seems this is all predicated on oil. You do realize that, with God’s help, we won’t be as dependent on oil in the near future, don’t you? The sky is not falling.

I never said the sky is falling. I merely pointed out that our agriculture is overwhelmingly based upon a temporary supply of affordable oil and natural gas for the planting and cultivation, fertilization, harvesting and processing, and transportation and distribution of food. You have not offered a convincing alternative to oil and gas as an ingredient of food. Is that because you don’t have one?

Petrus

See Pfeiffer, Dale Allen. Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture. New Society Publishers, 2006. The miracle of the Green Revolution was made possible by cheap fossil fuels to supply crops with artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. The sustainable number of humans is about two billion.

 

[rlg94086]

I never said the sky is falling. I merely pointed out that our agriculture is overwhelmingly based upon a temporary supply of affordable oil and natural gas for the planting and cultivation, fertilization, harvesting and processing, and transportation and distribution of food. You have not offered a convincing alternative to oil and gas as an ingredient of food. Is that because you don’t have one?

Petrus

See Pfeiffer, Dale Allen. Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture. New Society Publishers, 2006. The miracle of the Green Revolution was made possible by cheap fossil fuels to supply crops with artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. The sustainable number of humans is about two billion.

Oh, I’m sorry, did you ask?

eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=QNE3SGFBRLT0YQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=206801669

Technology got us into this mess, and technology will get us out of this mess. We can create a hydrogen fuel-cell based vehicle today, and one of my principles is demonstrating how cheap Hydrogen can be made in your home or vehicle. This will make the transition easier, as the article explains. Can it happen overnight? Of course not, but if things get dire, it will just accelerate the process.

How much time do your “experts” say we have before we start eating our children?

 

[vern_humphrey]

How much time do your “experts” say we have before we start eating our children?

Right after we finish eating the Congressmen and others who prevented us from drilling for the oil we have but cannot use.

And for dessert we have those who have blocked construction of new, safe nuclear power plants.

 

[rlg94086]

Right after we finish eating the Congressmen and others who prevented us from drilling for the oil we have but cannot use.

And for dessert we have those who have blocked construction of new, safe nuclear power plants.

Yep. I see drilling for our oil reserves and building our nuclear power plants as something we need to start sooner, rather than later. They both take a long time to ramp up. Nuclear power holds the most promise for electrical power demands, though some alternatives (solar, ocean, etc.) will help, they probably can’t fulfill the current electrical needs, let alone the future. Also, while my hydrogen fuel-cell cars aren’t that far from realization, there is still a lag time to get them out into the market, and a lot of cars to replace.

I’m not someone who thinks that oil demand will go from lots to zero, but then I don’t think we are going to run out with little or no warning either.

 

[ribozyme]

How much time do your “experts” say we have before we start eating our children?

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/duncan/images/olduvai.gif

http://dieoff.org/synopsis_files/image002.gif

The “cliff” is the final interval in the Olduvai schema. It begins with the 7th event in 2012 (Note 7) when an epidemic of permanent blackouts spreads worldwide, i.e. first there are waves of brownouts and temporary blackouts, then finally the electric power networks themselves expire. The 8th event in 2030 (Note 8) marks the fall of world energy production (use) per capita to the 1930 level (Figure 4). This is the lagging 30% point when Industrial Civilization has become history. The average rate of decline of ê is 5.44 %/year from 2012 to 2030.

Question: Where will the Olduvai die-off occur? Response: Everywhere. But large cities, of course, will be the most dangerous places to reside when the electric grids die. There you have millions of people densely packed in high-rise buildings, surrounded by acres-and-acres of blacktop and concrete: no electricity, no work, and no food. Thus the urban areas will rapidly depopulate when the electric grids die. In fact we have already mapped out the danger zones. (e.g. See Living Earth, 1996.) Specifically: The big cities stand out brightly as yellow-orange dots on NASA’s satellite mosaics (i.e. pictures) of the earth at night. These planetary lights blare out “Beware”, “Warning”, and “Danger”. The likes of Los Angeles and New York, London and Paris, Bombay and Hong Kong are all unsustainable hot spots.

The Olduvai ‘slide’ from 2001 to 2011 (Figure 4) may resemble the “Great Depression” of 1929 to 1939: unemployment, breadlines, and homelessness. As for the Olduvai ‘cliff’ from 2012 to 2030 — I know of no precedent in human history.

Governments have lost respect. World organizations are ineffective. Neo-tribalism is rampant. The population is over six billion and counting. Global warming and emerging viruses are headlines. The reliability of electric power networks is falling. And the instant the power goes out, you are back in the Dark Age.

In 1979 I concluded, “If God made the earth for human habitation, then He made it for the Stone Age mode of habitation.” The Olduvai theory is thinkable.

dieoff.com/page224.htm

“I always thought of a scenario where the food and supply shortage situation gets too out of hand.
The government would actually authorize nuclear euthanizations of mass population areas (LA, NYC, Dallas, etc) to quell the suffering.
Kind of like putting a dying horse out of its misery.”

peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/08/21-doom-chronicles.html

 

[vern_humphrey]

And here I thought Rube Goldberg was dead.

 

[drpmjhess]

And when Catholics, Muslims, or whoever ask you “How do we keep our family size limited?” how do propose that Catholics answer that question?

Are you familiar with abstinence?

If that doesn’t work, time and the horsemen of the Apocalypse will do their gruesome work. Regrettably, I don’t have faith that humanity can live with abstinence, and I foresee periodic spasms of famine. epidemic and genocide. How I wish that weren’t likely to happen, but when food drops to a quarter of the present production without fossil fuel based fertilizers, and without petroleum to fuel the machines that cultivate, plant, harvest, transport, process and deliver the food, I doubt people will stand by peacefully watching while their children starve and supermarket shelves empty out.

Of course, if we commence a rational planning process now, we might forestall the worst of these spasms, at least in the US, but that takes political will that I don’t see on either side of the aisle. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md) is a lone voice in Congress who understands how serious this situation is.

Petrus

 

[drpmjhess]

How much time do your “experts” say we have before we start eating our children?

We won’t eat our children!

 

[drpmjhess]

And for dessert we have those who have blocked construction of new, safe nuclear power plants.

So what are we waiting for? We should have started building them twenty years ago, instead of assuming oil would last forever.

 

[MugenOne]

It is not only the triumph of globalized Western culture over traditional society that threatens them (Arab), but the ascendancy of Asia. Last week’s food riots in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East bring the point home. Arabs are hungry because Chinese are rich enough to eat meat, and buy vast quantities of grain to feed to pigs and chickens. If the rise in Asian protein consumption portends a permanently higher plateau of food prices, the consequences are dire for populations living on state subsidies, from Morocco to Algeria to Cairo to Gaza.

 

[rlg94086]

So what are we waiting for? We should have started building them twenty years ago, instead of assuming oil would last forever.

The reluctance to build nuclear plants and drill in ANWR have nothing to do with an assumption that “oil would last forever.” It has to do with another group of alarmists (environmentalists) who insist that we will all die from a massive nuclear meltdown and/or “climate change.”

Y’all are in competition for whose apocalypse will happen first.

Or…are you part of both groups and just keeping a back-up apocalypse plan, in case one of them doesn’t work out?

 

[ribozyme]

The reluctance to build nuclear plants and drill in ANWR have nothing to do with an assumption that “oil would last forever.” It has to do with another group of alarmists (environmentalists) who insist that we will all die from a massive nuclear meltdown and/or “climate change.”

Y’all are in competition for whose apocalypse will happen first.

Or…are you part of both groups and just keeping a back-up apocalypse plan, in case one of them doesn’t work out?

I have a plan for the apocalypse… I said I had a plan in other threads.

 

[rlg94086]

I have a plan for the apocalypse… I said I had a plan in other threads.

Okay…let’s here it…what’s your plan?

 

[ribozyme]

Okay…let’s here it…what’s your plan?

It seems to put this in a broader perspective, the news about the Bakken formation seems to only make it a minor detour to the road to Olduvai Gorge. But if the worst case scenario happens, do not worry about me because I have a plan to avoid all that suffering.

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=232692

But I have a way to evade all that pain and suffering if technology doesn’t save us. I might be squemish in enacting my plan though. And some people here might criticize me for commiting a “mortal sin” - well, it is a mortal sin.

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=231180&page=2

However, if the worst case scenario happens, I have a plan to evade the misery and suffering. I hope I do not have enact it out though.

But if the die off scenarios happen, why should I care about “social justice?” Why should Catholics care about the Gospel’s directive to feed the poor when the means for doing that no longer exist? Why should a liberal like myself care about providing for the vulnerable of society (and the world) if we lack the capability to feed a majority of the world’s population? The material written by John Rawls and John Stuart Mill will simply be pablum in such a scenario. Survivial becomes a zero-sum game - a game that I refuse to play in such a scenario.

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=176717&page=43

 

[rlg94086]

Ribozyme,

Your links didn’t help, and you aren’t speaking plainly. Are you talking about committing suicide or a Mad Max scenario?

 

[peregrinus_WA]

Food commodity prices have been kept higher than they should be for years due to socialist interference in reducing the acreage planted by subsidizing farmers not to plant. With rising prices, farmers are now seeing those subsidies worth less than planting on the unused land. Also, the possibility of replacing undesirable crops like tobacco with useful crops will increase due to the economic gains due to prices. The result will be an increase in crops thus lowering prices until a new equilibrium is reached.

In addition, bio-fuels out of foodstocks is not the way to go. I have said this from the beginning. There are other sources of materials that can and will be used to produce bio-fuels. I have mentioned them in other posts.

 

[ribozyme]

Food commodity prices have been kept higher than they should be for years due to socialist interference in reducing the acreage planted by subsidizing farmers not to plant. With rising prices, farmers are now seeing those subsidies worth less than planting on the unused land. Also, the possibility of replacing undesirable crops like tobacco with useful crops will increase due to the economic gains due to prices. The result will be an increase in crops thus lowering prices until a new equilibrium is reached.

Any links for the “socialist” bogeyman? Or that is just the standard answer that conservatives use?

James Connaughton, chairman of the White House’s council on environmental quality, said biofuels are only one contributor to rising food prices. Rising prices for energy and electricity also contribute, as does strong demand for food from big developing countries like China.

online.wsj.com/article/SB120813134819111573.html?mod=fpa_mostpop

Didn’t mention socialism, and the Wall Street Journal isn’t sympathetic towards socialism either.

Standard answers people use include rising Asian demand and biofuels.

Your links didn’t help, and you aren’t speaking plainly. Are you talking about committing suicide or a Mad Max scenario?

Yes, they were intentionally cryptic, but you would infer my plan right?

 

[Doug50]

Interesting. Isn’t is something how our arguments get recycled more than our trash

I read through some of the arguments here and the same arguments keep coming up as did in the petroleum thread.

For the 21st century the world faces a huge logistics problem. And at the heart of this problem is “where are we going to get our energy from?” The modern world runs on oil, natural gas (or just gas), and coal (and to a lessor extent hydro electric and nuclear).

Since I like to visualize the problem here it is: The US economy uses 10,000 gallons of oil every second. It uses 60 billion cubic feet of gas every day and if you stacked those on top of each other they’d reach to the moon and back making the round trip 25 times…that’s every day. And the US economy burns 20 railcars of coal every minute, so that’s a 100 railcar train in 5 minutes…every 5 minutes of every day.

Take a look around you, and not just at the plastic in you key board or the carpet under your feet or the petrochemical medicines and hygenes in you bathroom. Everything you take for granted in your modern world was made possibe by petroleum. EVERYTHING. Without petroleum the US’s 20th century economy would not have happend…at all. You would not have the professional sports to watch anywhere near the capacity you see today. Oil built the whole thing. Why? Because is was the cheap abundent energy supply that drove the whole thing.

How much oil does the modern world use? At a rate of 1000 barrels per second, the world consumes 86 million barrels per day, or enough to fill 5600 Olympic pools every day. In one year that 2,044,000 Olympic pools. If you lay those pools end to end, you’d have a single pool 63,488 miles long…that’s every year.

From petrochemical pesticides to natural gas derived fertalizers petroleum feeds the modern world. What’s going to replace that in this the 21st century?

Here’s what’s going on with oil:
Since 1980 (28 years) in any one year the world consumes more oil than what was found. At some point the growing comption on that graph will not be able to grow anymore and begin heading down. New production attempts to keep production levels flat or overcome decline rates. But as older discoveries deplete the world will experience what’s commonly termed “peak oil”. It doesn’t have to be experienced as a litteral peak. It could be a rollover, or a plateu for a period of years and then head downward.

At present there is nothing to replace petroleum.
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