Re: The Coming Greater Depression

"Techfarming" hasn't "taken over" nearly as much as you seem to want to
imply.  I've got lots of friends who farm.  Everything from "in the family
for generations" to "Gentleman Farmer."  Remember, I'm smack dab in the
middle of Ohio.  Ohio has traditionally been Farming, Coal, and Steel.
Since Coal was replaced with Oil and Gas and the skilled Steel market in
Ohio started drying up, what's left is Corn.  

Peace favor your sword (IH),
Kirk

All this farming bs is just that, bull***.

The energy inputs for industrial farming are enormous. Just take a
look when you go to the store at how small the produce section is and
where it comes from. Then compare it to the factory-produced food in
the other 90% of the store.

There's not enough farmer's market stuff to feed more than the few
hundred who "care" or whatever. Without surplus energy, food
production will suffer.

This is much of the source of the food riots now, plus inflation.
Real energy costs are creeping into *everything* because everything
that gets done needs power for the doing.

And, on the other peak oil thread, crude + condensates still has a May
2005 peak. The total production figures include tarsands which are
not crude. Sure they can be refined to crude, but the entire process
is ridiculously energy-costly. If you took that curve as an EROI
curve, you'd still see the 2005 peak. And, at any rate, I've said we
were "at peak"...it is a plateau. You will see an actual production
decline in C+C since May 05, but world production has been flat for 3
years. This blip just got us to where we were in total "oilish"
including synthetic crude like tarsands, 3 years ago despite oil
prices escalating to 117/bbl today.

What is happening, frankly, is cost arbitrage between natural gas or
coal and oil. Oil's necessity as a transport fuel has pushed more
consumption of other relatively more abundant (currently) energy
sources to produce it at far lower ROEs. The NG consumption figures
for tarsands are very frightening, in terms of the coming scarcity of
export NG from Canada as they consume more and more of their NG
surplus to produce syncrude from tarsands.

As we rely on NG for a fertilizer feedstock, the food situation is
only going to get worse.
If NG peaks soon, given the supply decline curves' steepness for NG,
the food situation could progress from bad to godawful in a real
hurry. As well as the oil production based upon NG as an input. I
mean, Alberta will eventually build a nuclear plant...to provide
power? NO...to help make OIL. How fucked up is that?

Right now, we are chasing oil by any means necessary, including stupid
*** like CTL or shale, which is enormously expensive from an EROI
perspective, just to get that liquid stuff. If you want a good long
trade, NG production or futures will do, but only until NG production
wanes. A royalty trust that pays off of NG production only does so so
long as it has production. Once in decline, its payments will decline
too.

We have a severe energy problem that is not being addressed. People
foolishly fail to realize that the entirety of our food production
system, and our diet in general, is enormously energy-costly. To
produce beef is ridiculously expensive even in the industrial fashion
that we do it. And now we plan to burn our food. And, if not that,
convert arable land to produce dieselable biofuel oils?

Arable land will now compete for farming food that is in cost scarcity
or fuel which is in the same boat. Those who claim everything is a-ok
are fools. All that empty land or farmers that are being paid not to
produce...GOOD. How in the hell do you suppose their producing
surplus food would affect the energy consumption metrics given the
need for industrial fertilizer, machinery, and the entire distribution
grid?

If food production is to become local, EVERY city is completely fucked
in the ass, and the entire southwest of the country is too. How long
before net food exporters start reigning in export because, well,
Californians need to eat this? If you're in a State that doesn't
produce food nearby, food is going to become ENORMOUSLY expensive as
the cost of transporting it begins to be reflected in its pricing.

We had a decade to build the type of rail network during the good
times, the solar grid, the turbines, to lay the power lines, to
*prepare*. Instead, we McMansionized, got FURTHER away from where we
needed to be and wasted not only capital and materials, but energy
doing so. At this point, we have to enter crisis mode. We don't have
the electric cars, the distributed power grids, any of the
technologies that we could have had years ago were the requisite
investments made to drive the technologies.

I mean, an example that I like to harp on is diamond
semiconductors...the government has been interested in nothing but
war, but LED brightness and efficiencies have been following Moore's
Law just as semiconductors in general have. But, now, silicon has hit
a wall right at Peak Oil. Right when maybe we could use lower power
devices at ALL stages, in lighting, computation, everywhere, to
improve efficiency, and to help us figure fusion out or to solve other
problems.

Technological advancement has been left to the marketplace with all
its subsidistic (coined) machinations while we war all over. We are
cutting the fuckin mars rover which is one of the greatest technical
successes of any government program in history...4 fucking million
dollars a year and they won't fund it. We lost orders of magnitude
more than that in FRNs in fucking Iraq, nevermind the real costs of
the occupation to ostensibly solve a muslim problem that is STILL NOT
SOLVED by this occupation.

It's like there is nobody who even recognizes that there is any
problem.

It took until food riots and $3.5/gal gas and $117/bbl oil before most
of you woke the *** up, how long will it be for people of even lower
intelligence?

We need to pull out of that fucking country, fuckit...we broke it,
bummer. Partition it and give them each back the dictator they want.
We have our own problems. If we're going to *** the dollar into the
shitter and run massive trade deficits let it be for solar cells and
wind turbines that eventually wean us off oil and make us a net
exporter so we can repay those deficits in cracked H2 or electric
cars. Something, anything. At least those things would be from
friendly countries that don't spend on madrassas.

Trav
.