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Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture, by Dale Allen Pfeiffer
Free PDF Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture, by Dale Allen Pfeiffer
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The miracle of the Green Revolution was made possible by cheap fossil fuels to supply crops with artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. Estimates of the net energy balance of agriculture in the United States show that ten calories of hydrocarbon energy are required to produce one calorie of food. Such an imbalance cannot continue in a world of diminishing hydrocarbon resources.
Eating Fossil Fuels examines the interlinked crises of energy and agriculture and highlights some startling findings:
• The worldwide expansion of agriculture has appropriated fully 40 percent of the photosynthetic capability of this planet.
• The Green Revolution provided abundant food sources for many, resulting in a population explosion well in excess of the planet’s carrying capacity.
• Studies suggest that without fossil fuel-based agriculture, the United States could only sustain about two-thirds of its present population. For the planet as a whole, the sustainable number is estimated to be about two billion.
Concluding that the effect of energy depletion will be disastrous without a transition to a sustainable, re-localized agriculture, the book draws on the experiences of North Korea and Cuba to demonstrate stories of failure and success in the transition to non-hydrocarbon-based agriculture. It urges strong grassroots activism for sustainable, localized agriculture and a natural shrinking of the world’s population.
- Sales Rank: #1184739 in Books
- Brand: Brand: New Society Publishers
- Published on: 2006-10-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .40" w x 5.40" l, .35 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 125 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
null (2006-10-24)
The miracle of the Green Revolution was made possible by cheap fossil fuels to supply crops with artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. Estimates of the net energy balance of agriculture in the US show that ten calories of hydrocarbon energy are required to produce one calorie of food. Such an imbalance cannot continue in a world of diminishing hydrocarbon resources.
Eating Fossil Fuels examines the interlinked crises of energy and agriculture and highlights some startling findings:
- The world-wide expansion of agriculture has appropriated fully 40% of the photosynthetic capability of this planet.
- The Green Revolution provided abundant food sources for many, resulting in a population explosion well in excess of the planet's carrying capacity.
- Studies suggest that without fossil fuel based agriculture, the US could only sustain about two thirds of its present population. For the planet as a whole, the sustainable number is estimated to be about two billion.
Concluding that the effect of energy depletion will be disastrous without a transition to a sustainable, relocalized agriculture, the book draws on the experiences of North Korea and Cuba to demonstrate stories of failure and success in the transition to non-hydrocarbon-based agriculture. It urges strong grassroots activism for sustainable, localized agriculture and a natural shrinking of the world's population.
(2006-05-01) About the Author
Dale Allen Pfeiffer is a novelist, freelance journalist and geologist who has been writing about energy depletion for a decade, building a reputation as a detailed but accessible science journalist. The author of The End of the Oil Age, he is also widely known for his web project: www.survivingpeakoil.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
null (2006-10-24)
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Eating our seeds
By daveyd
In this book's Forward by Andrew Jones we find the old solutions to our nation's (and the global) food scarcities: increased production and better utilization of existing resources.
Thankfully the book's author, Dale Allen Pfeifer, wastes no words as he begins on page 1 his scholarly attack on the wasteful and unsustainable exploitation of fossil fuels in the pursuit of unlimited agricultural expansion.
Two respected consultants to the oil industry predict that world production would peak and then begin an irreversable decline around 2010. The result will be "food shortages and massive starvation".
The Green Revolution that began a half century past did nothing to alleviate world hunger but it did stimulate the relentless trajectory of population growth within the globalization of food production. This was all under the parentage of cheap and abundant oil and natural gas that incrementally created a dependency on unsustainable energies to seed crops, harvest and transport them to processors and then to market.
The intensity of big agri practices soon strips the soils of nutrients and depletes water aquifers. This requires greater dependence on energy intensive irrigation and ever greater reliance on nonrenewable hydrocarbons.
Some 10,000 years past humanity transitioned from hunters/gathers to agriculture. This was the beginning of "civilization". And so began the unrelenting population growth that would displace other competing life forms.
On page 6 the authors note "The need to expand agricultural production has been one of the root causes behind most of the wars...Today land on this planet is being exploited by agriculture". the Green Revolution industrialized world grain production during mid-20th century when fossil fuel fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation reflected a 250% increase in grains
The Green Revolution's industrial practices leave behind degradation of the land and water supply. Since 1945 more than 43% of the land's vegetated surface has degraded because of soil depletion, desertification and destruction of rain forests. Sixty percent of world deforestation is related to arable land needs to feed the 84 million people born each year. Farmland loses millions of acres annually to erosion, urbanization, road building, industry... The production of one pound of maize requires 175 gallons of water. Forty percent of all grain production worldwide goes to poultry and meat farms.
According to one study the U.S. food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces. More than 40% of food-related energy consumption is used in refrigeration, 20% in used in cooking and a similar amount for heating water.
Americans individually consume one-third of their calories from animal and dairy sources. Fast food provides one-third of all caloric intake. The farming behind all this uses 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides in the U.S. annually. That is five pounds for every member of humanity. Each year we lose more crops to pests despite more pesticide use.
Page 25 has an interesting narrative regarding how far food travels from farm to table. A Swedish study found that the mileage estimated for an entire breakfast was equal to the circumference of the earth.
Eating Fossil Fuels might best be described as a treatise on the profligacy of unrelenting waste in humanity's quest for the good life but leaving the medusa for the unsuspecting. It may be worth noting that as chapter 6 proclaims: "the underpinning of life on this planet has been diminished... to the breaking point... our agricultural system is ready to collapse". In old census data 34.6 million people were living in poverty and it happened during cheap oil and gas, limitless water for irrigation, and transportation without borders.
Indubitably.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
good concise review of the coming crisis in agriculture
By John G. Curington
"Eating Fossil Fuels," by David Allen Pfeiffer, is a fascinating review of the upcoming crisis in production of food for our population. He starts with a quick discussion of land degradation and water degradation, and then goes into the data behind the use of fossil fuels in modern agriculture. With the approaching decline in global oil production, our ability to produce food will be severely compromised.
For anyone who reads much about "peak oil" or modern agricultural policy, this will come as no surprise. Pfeiffer's book shines, though, in his discussions of the examples of South Korea and Cuba. It is fascinating to consider the different paths taken by each of these countries during their politically-imposed sudden drop in oil availability.
Pfeiffer goes finishes with a discussion of sustainable agriculture and some ideas for what a concerned activist might do.
On the whole, I learned much from the short, well-written book about an important topic.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Feast or famine without oil? (review by author of When Technology Fails)
By Matthew I. Stein
Concerned about food and how a world economy fueled by oil will continue to feed over 6 ½ billion people when the oil squeeze comes? I suggest you read this book. Pfeiffer, a geologist and science journalist who has been intimately involved with peak oil issues for more than ten years, provides profound insight with his analysis of two parallel nations suffering from similar predicaments, but with radically different outcomes. He uses the powerful example of how Cuba and North Korea each dealt with nearly instantaneous loss of their supplies of oil after the Soviet Union dissolved. In the case of North Korea, their economy was shattered and millions of people died of starvation and disease. In the case of Cuba, people lost weight and made do with less, but a shift to sustainable agriculture and natural healing averted catastrophe. Cuba provides us with a glimpse of a possible future that avoids violent collapse and provides a good quality of life in spite of having to get by using less energy and buying less stuff.
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