RE: Oil and overproduction 3

["Mark Jones" <markjones011@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

David Schanoes wrote:

>oil is produced.  It
> is a commodity.  So either Marxist analysis applies to oil like it does to
> automobiles, sugar, computers, dram chips, and soybeans or we
> have a serious
> problem getting to a revolution.

This list of products neatly encapsulates not the way oil is the same as
other commodities but the way it is different from all other commodities.

Nuclear physicist  Albert A. Bartlett wrote that modern "agriculture uses
land to turn oil into food". All of the goods mentioned above directly
depend for their production on readily available supplies of petroleum. But
petroleum is the one "commodity" which is NOT being made any more.

 Gever et al. (1991, Beyond Oil, Colorado, University of Colorado Press.)
suggest that by 2020, agriculture will be recognized as the highest user of
petroleum products. Nitrogen fertilizer is essential to achieving high
agricultural yields. Fish such as anchovies, guano (bird droppings), and
nitrogen-fixing plants such as legumes are natural sources of nitrogen but
insufficient to meet the demands of industrial agriculture. A new nitrogen
source emerged in 1909 from a process developed by Fritz Haber and Carl
Bosch, who learned to combine atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen to produce
ammonia - with natural gas as the fuel of choice. Today, the ammonia
synthesis process invented by Haber and Bosch accounts for ?99 percent of
all inorganic nitrogen inputs to farms? (Heinberg 2003). Without the
Haber-Bosch process, the human population would not have risen six-fold as
it did in the 20th century.

Oil is the one irreplaceable commodity on which all industry, agriculture
and transport depends. It is easily transported; and petroleum products are
the feedstock for a myriad of industrial and agricultural processes. In the
form of pesticides and fertilizers, petrochemicals are essential to modern
agriculture and almost certainly irreplaceable in this context for the
foreseeable future.

Each year, chronic hunger and malnutrition kills millions of people, stunts
development, saps strength and cripples victims? immune systems. Where
hunger is widespread, mortality rates for infants and children under five
are high, and life expectancy is low.   Even if agricultural productivity
were increasing in all parts of the world, we would still have a serious
problem.  The reason is that high-yield species and energy-intensive methods
of production are unsustainable without massive petroleum inputs.  If the
petroleum inputs go away, or even just stop growing and remain stable for a
while, this will exert strong negative pressure on the world?s food
production systems, as we shall likely witness in the next few years.

The ratio of petroleum energy to solar-derived food energy was explored for
the U.S. by Steinhart and Steinhart in 1975. They found that the total
energy subsidy for all food types in the U.S. was 1000%.  For every calorie
of food energy consumed it took about ten calories of fossil fuel subsidy to
grow, harvest, process, and deliver the food. Though it is probably not
nearly this high in world average terms, the fossil fuel subsidy required to
simply maintain current high-yield food production is an integral part of
world agriculture, and a warning of famine to come. For the most energy
intensive, urban industrial countries the solar energy content of the
industrially produced food we eat is so low that, in reality, we are not
?eating solar energy? but are ?eating? oil.  As petroleum production starts
declining, as water shortages grow, and if agricultural yields drop from
environmental effects of fossil based agriculture, such as accelerated
erosion and climate change, food output will decline and prices will rise.
If world population continues its currently inexorable increase after Peak
Oil then per capita food supplies can be expected to shrink relatively
rapidly.  The resource wars have already begun.

Mark Jones



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