I wrote an article for Debbie’s and my column on BuscoVoice.com about the food vs. fuel debate. It was fairly calm, although a bit more opinionated than I really wanted for that forum. Our column on BuscoVoice is about the pleasures of gardening and eating, not a discussion of the issues of the day.
But here at zumbrun.net I can say whatever pleases me.
I think the food vs. fuel debate misses the point. We’re in a car, driving towards a cliff with the pedal to the metal – and we’re arguing about what to put in the gas tank? Ethanol? 10% blend? 15% blend? Tariffs? Subsidies? Madness.
The discussion we need to be having is about our insane[1] food production and distribution system that only works as long as we have an essentially limitless supply of cheap fossil fuel. When the fuel runs out… well, it won’t run out, but will get progressively and probably logarithmically more expensive …. the food system will collapse. Why? Because our food system is now based of cheap fossil fuels. Fuel to plant and harvest the crops. Fuel to produce the fertilizer and chemicals that makes the yields possible to feed billions. Fuel to transport food around the world. Fuel to process raw commodities into food. Fuel to store the food.
When the fuel becomes too scarce to support that system, literally billions of people will starve. Actually, probably not, I’m not a global thinker or a macro-economist or a political scientist. What seems more likely is food will become increasingly scarce and expensive, which will lead to global conflict and we’ll solve our problems by slaying each other on scale that will make WWII seem tiny.
“Jeez, Chuck, can’t you write about drinking beer or something a lot more happy?”
Hey, if you think the previous paragraphs weren’t enough of a downer, consider this. There’s a lot of oil in this world. It’s not going to run out anytime soon. And maybe that deep environmental thinker Sarah Palin is right, global warming is ‘snake oil’, so we don’t have to worry about smothering in carbon dioxide. Even if the oil does run out, maybe our technology will save us, by tapping the sun or the wind or tides or by sources yet unimagined. In any case, it’s very unlikely that fuel scarcity will do anything more than make us slightly uncomfortable in our lifetimes.
But, are you willing to stake your children’s, or your grandchildren’s lives on the hope that those possibilities will sustain their lives? One of the most ancient and plaintive and bitter laments in the world is written in the Old Testament, Second Samuel 18:33: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” King David weeps bitterly in this passage for the many mistakes both he and Absalom made that resulted in Absalom’s death. I’m about as far from a King of Israel as you can get, but that lament rings true to me. I’m not willing to risk my children’s or my grandchildren’s future on the hope that something will come along to miraculously fix situation we’re in.
Sounding pretty dire here, but I believe we’re in the early days of this crisis and small changes today can fix this thing.
[1] I chose ‘insane’ carefully there. It’s not hyperbole. The path we are on is, as Webster would say, “the utmost folly; chimerical; unpractical.”
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