Peak Oil: It's not just about Oil.
(from a post on Yahoo's Energy Resources Group)

There is something that is very important for people to get their
heads around. Peak oil is not about the oil, not about gasoline and
diesel and heating oil and jet fuel. It's not about cars, SUVs,
vans, trucks, busses, trains, planes or ships.

Peak oil is about food and our progressive inability, after we pass
the oil peak, to produce enough of it to feed our 6.5 billion global
population. Even now, every day over 40,000 people worldwide die of
starvation, malnutrition and nutrition related diseases. Each 1%
gap between global demand and global supply will increase those
deaths by 10-25%.

Food production in today's world is critically dependent on oil (for
pesticides, herbicides, agrichemicals, and agricultural, irrigation
and distribution fuels) and natural gas (for artificial fertilizers)
and clean water from ever scarcer and shrinking lakes and rivers and
ever shrinking underground aquifers.

A shrinking global food supply is not just a problem for the third
world. Everybody has to eat and we in the developed world tend to
like to do that far more than those in the third world.

Reversion to organic farming methods not dependent on artificial
fertilizers and pesticides will not be as easy as the uninitiated
may think. Our commercial agricultural land is essentially toxic
and sterile through our use of petrochemicals and limited-nutrient
artificial fertilizers. Commercial agriculture is essentially an
export business, exporting the nutrients from the soil on which we
grow the crops and never re-importing those nutrients. If the
agrichemicals on which commercial agriculture relies were to
disappear tomorrow, it is reliably estimated that those same
commercial soils will produce between 5-20% of the crops they do
today, assuming even then that there is sufficient fresh water to
irrigate them. It is estimated that it would take 10-20 years or
more to rebuild the natural fertility of thyose commercial soils.
Without those agrichemicals that means a drop of 80-95% in the
productivity of those soils until their natural fertility is
restored.

The other key factor, of course, is crop pests. Without oil-derived
pesticides crops will be susceptible to invasion by those pests in
numbers possibly never seen before. We have, through our use of
pesticides, helped those pests evolve resistance. Commercial
farmers today use 33 times as much pesticides as just three decades
ago and yet lose 25% more of their crop to pests than they did
then. We are already losing the battle against crop pests. When
the pesticides are gone we will lose the war. That same use of
pesticides have also prevented our crops from evolving their natural
defences against pests. Our current crops generally have very low
survival potential without those pesticides. All of this, of
course, parallels our own weakened immune systems because of the
over-use of antibiotics, vaccines and other modern medicines, all of
which take over the immune response rather than strengthen the
immune system.

In closing, this is the important point. People will not
really "get it" about peak oil until they get their heads away from
worrying about transportation fuels and understand the implications
for food in our world of 6.5 billion people.

Rick Embleton,
Richmond Hill, ON
Author: Oilephant Down: Canada at the End of the Age of Cheap Oil
posted by Paul at 6:14 PM