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  • From: "J. Kolenovsky" <garden@hal-pc.org>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Dear oil will favor local, seasonal food as distant sources lose competitive edge
  • Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 21:35:22 -0500

Mr. Rigot, great article. For an overview of Peak Oil data, have you
visited www.energybulletin.net? There you can see ideas and concepts of all
the big names in the Peak Oil movement. Now,....back to "The Party's Over"
(Heinberg) and "The Wolf at the Door" (Thompson).

J, peaknik

p.s. - I can't wait to see peoples faces when jets no longer fly the skies.


Message: 1
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:45:03 -0400
From: Jerome Rigot <rigot.3@osu.edu>
Subject: [permaculture] Dear oil will favor local, seasonal food as
distant sources lose competitive edge
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID:
<6.2.3.4.2.20060831134418.02aad8e0@pop.service.ohio-state.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

Dear oil will favor local, seasonal food as distant sources lose
competitive edge
Long-term scarcity will put cities, suburbs, global trade under
stresses they weren't created to endure.

http://www.newfarm.org/features/2006/0606/peakoil/brown.shtml
By Lester R. Brown

Posted June 8, 2006: Peak oil is described as the point where oil
production stops rising and begins its inevitable long-term decline.
In the face of fast-growing demand, this means rising oil prices. But
even if oil production growth simply slows or plateaus, the resulting
tightening in supplies will still drive the price of oil upward,
albeit less rapidly.

Few countries are planning a reduction in their use of oil. Even
though peak oil may be imminent, most countries are counting on much
higher oil consumption in the decades ahead, building automobile
assembly plants, roads, highways, parking lots and suburban housing
developments as though cheap oil will last forever. New airliners are
being delivered with the expectation that air travel and freight will
expand indefinitely. Yet in a world of declining oil production, no
country can use more oil except at the expense of others.

Some segments of the global economy will be affected more than others
simply because some are more oil-intensive. Among these are the
automobile, food and airline industries. Cities and suburbs will also
evolve as oil supplies tighten.

Stresses within the U.S. auto industry were already evident before
oil prices started climbing in mid-2004. Now General Motors and Ford,
both trapped with their heavy reliance on sales of gas-hogging sport
utility vehicles, have seen Standard and Poor's lower their credit
ratings, reducing their corporate bonds to junk bond status. Although
it is the troubled automobile manufacturers that appear in the
headlines as oil prices rise, their affiliated industries will also
be affected, including auto parts and tire manufacturers.

Two-way impact on food

The food sector will be affected in two ways. Food will become more
costly as higher oil prices drive up production costs. As oil costs
rise, diets will be altered as people move down the food chain and as
they consume more local, seasonally produced food. Diets will thus
become more closely attuned to local products and more seasonal in nature.

At the same time, rising oil prices will also be drawing agricultural
resources into the production of fuel crops, either ethanol or
biodiesel. Higher oil prices are thus setting up competition between
affluent motorists and low-income food consumers for food resources,
presenting the world with a complex new ethical issue.

Airlines, both passenger travel and freight, will continue to suffer
as jet fuel prices climb, simply because fuel is their biggest
operating expense. Although industry projections show air passenger
travel growing by some 5 percent a year for the next decade, this
seems highly unlikely. Cheap airfares may soon become history.

Air freight may be hit even harder, perhaps leading to an absolute
decline. One of the early casualties of rising oil prices could be
the use of jumbo jets to transport fresh produce from the southern
hemisphere to industrial countries during the northern winter. The
price of fresh produce out of season may simply become prohibitive.

During the century of cheap oil, an enormous automobile
infrastructure was built in industrial countries that requires large
amounts of energy to maintain. The United States, for example, has
2.6 million miles of paved roads, covered mostly with asphalt, and
1.4 million miles of unpaved roads to maintain even if world oil
production is falling.

Modern cities are also a product of the oil age. From the first
cities, which took shape in Mesopotamia some 6,000 years ago, until
1900, urbanization was a slow, barely perceptible process. When the
last century began, there were only a few cities with a million
people. Today there are more than 400 such cities, 20 of them with 10
million or more residents.

The metabolism of cities depends on concentrating vast amounts of
food and materials and then disposing of garbage and human waste.
With the limited range and capacity of horse-drawn wagons, it was
difficult to create large cities. Trucks running on cheap oil changed all
that.

As cities grow ever larger and as nearby landfills reach capacity,
garbage must be hauled longer distances to disposal sites. With oil
prices rising and available landfills receding ever further from the
city, the cost of garbage disposal also rises. At some point, many
throwaway products may be priced out of existence.

Suburbs facing hardest hit

Cities will be hard hit by the coming decline in oil production, but
suburbs will be hit even harder. People living in poorly designed
suburbs not only depend on importing everything, they are also often
isolated geographically from their jobs and shops. They must drive
for virtually everything they need, even to get a loaf of bread or a
quart of milk.

Suburbs have created a commuter culture, with the daily roundtrip
commute taking, on average, close to an hour a day in the United
States. While Europe's cities were largely mature before the
onslaught of the automobile, those in the United States, a much
younger country, were shaped by the car. While city limits are
usually rather clearly defined in Europe, and while Europeans only
reluctantly convert productive farmland into housing developments,
Americans have few qualms about this because cropland was long seen
as a surplus commodity.

This unsightly, aesthetically incongruous sprawl of suburbs and strip
malls is not limited to the United States. It is found in Latin
America, in Southeast Asia, and increasingly in China. Flying from
Shanghai to Beijing provides a good view of the sprawl of buildings,
including homes and factories, that is following the new roads and
highways. This is in sharp contrast to the tightly built villages
that shaped residential land use for millennia in China.

Shopping malls and huge discount stores, symbolized in the public
mind by Wal-Mart, were all subsidized by artificially cheap oil.
Isolated by high oil prices, suburbs may prove to be ecologically and
economically unsustainable.

In the coming energy transition, there will be winners and losers.

Countries that fail to plan ahead, that lag in investing in more
oil-efficient technologies and new energy sources, may experience a
decline in living standards. The inability of national governments to
manage the energy transition could lead to a failure of confidence in
leaders and to failed states.

National political leaders seem reluctant to face the coming downturn
in oil and to plan for it even though it will almost certainly become
one of the great fault lines in the history of civilization. Trends
now taken for granted, such as urbanization and globalization, could
be reversed almost overnight as oil becomes scarce and costly.

Developing countries will be hit doubly hard as still-expanding
populations combine with a shrinking oil supply to steadily reduce
oil use per person. Such a decline could quickly translate into a
fall in living standards. If the United States, the world's largest
oil consumer and importer, can sharply reduce its use of oil, it can
buy the world time for a smoother transition to the post-petroleum era.

Lester Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute
(<http://www.earth-policy.org/>www.earthpolicy.org), Washington, D.C.
He started his career as a farmer, growing tomatoes in southern New
Jersey through his college years. Brown helped to pioneer the concept
of environmentally sustainable development and his writings have
given practical policy handles to the world's complex ecological challenges.

Adapted from Chapter 2, "Beyond the Oil Peak," in Lester R. Brown,
Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in
Trouble (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), available for free
downloading or for purchase on-line at
<http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB2/>www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2.

--
Energy shortages prove its right.
Peak Oil changing is your lifestyle.
www.energybulletin.net - exhilirating
www.peak-oil-news.info/ - informative
www.theoildrum.com/ - interesting
www.postcarbon.org/ - practical
www.celestialhabitats.com - cool








  • [permaculture] Dear oil will favor local, seasonal food as distant sources lose competitive edge, J. Kolenovsky, 08/31/2006

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