Article in Harper's on Energy Usage - Richard Manning

[Guest guest]

Rupanuga (das) TKG (Dallas, TX - US) wrote:

 

>Some interesting points are made by one Richard Manning, in his article,

>"The Oil We Eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq," appearing in the

>February, 2004, issue of Harper's Magazine.

>

 

Here are more excerpts from this. He's like a Casandra, futily

prophecying dangers to a country that cannot hear.

 

Naturally, I can't help wondering if Manning ever read our BTG articles,

like "How Long Can Modern Agriculture Feed Us?" and Balabhadra's "How

Green Is Your Tractor?"

 

I can send the whole article to anyone who is interested.

 

ys

hkdd

 

**********************

 

Harpers Magazine Feb 2004

Richard Manning

 

THE OIL WE EAT

 

Following the food chain back to Iraq

 

 

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten

crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.

--Balzac

 

The journalist's rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not

really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice

president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll

follow the energy.

 

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don't get

something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The

scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As

James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only

so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to

light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less

of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This

is the first law of thermodynamics.

 

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All

animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food

chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight

into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all

animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel.

There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative

to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as

sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

 

&"The day is not far off," Kennan concluded, "when we are going to have

to deal in straight power concepts."

 

If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field

somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry.

Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary

productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn

consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years

since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained

undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in

uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the

plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world.

Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of

true wealth--sun energy--to be found on the planet.

 

& The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland

prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most

technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it's mostly a form

of grass and grass roots that humans can't eat. So we replace the

prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed

most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content

to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely were more bison

produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef

farming raises in the same area today. Our ancestors found it preferable

to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move on.

 

Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again

with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual

primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts,

built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons

of fossil energy to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre

of eroded land--in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years' worth of

ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else. Even as

the earth beneath Iowa shrinks, it is being globalized.

 

& Plato wrote of his country's farmlands:

What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a

sick man. ...Formerly, many of the mountains were arable, The plains

that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once

covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food

for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not

lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The

soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the

water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams

everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were

springs attest that our description of the land is true.

 

Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his

country's soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that

pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By

the fifth century, though, wheat's strategy of depleting and moving on

ran up against the Atlantic Ocean.

 

 

& More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which

added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for

tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen

fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for

other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands

that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries

across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.

 

The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure

oil, not food. There's a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of

arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at

least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the

United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of

fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked

closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the

problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food

there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot

less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the

1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we

spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only

ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the

Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

 

David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has

estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats,

humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just

over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of

being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it

ten years&.

[Guest guest]

Hari Bol,

 

PAMHO. AGTSP.

 

There is a book entitled SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL by a world class economist

named shumaker(spelling). Its been many years since I read it. However,

the first 4 or 5 chapters are about fossil fuels as a non renewable

resource. The chapter after fossil fuels is about nuclear energy and the

dangers of nuclear fuel. He also sites a Bhuddist axiom which runs along

these lines. The success of the village is demonstrated in the percentage

of sustainable goods that come from outside of the village. The larger the

percentage that come from outside the lower the percentage of success for

the village.

 

Could you please send me a copy of the whole article. Thanks.

 

 

 

Visit us at: www.iscowp.org

 

 

> [Original Message]

> Noma Petroff <npetroff (AT) bowdoin (DOT) edu>

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> 2/28/2004 6:40:03 PM

> Re: Article in Harper's on Energy Usage - Richard Manning

>

> Rupanuga (das) TKG (Dallas, TX - US) wrote:

>

> >Some interesting points are made by one Richard Manning, in his article,

> >"The Oil We Eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq," appearing in the

> >February, 2004, issue of Harper's Magazine.

> >

>

> Here are more excerpts from this. He's like a Casandra, futily

> prophecying dangers to a country that cannot hear.

>

> Naturally, I can't help wondering if Manning ever read our BTG articles,

> like "How Long Can Modern Agriculture Feed Us?" and Balabhadra's "How

> Green Is Your Tractor?"

>

> I can send the whole article to anyone who is interested.

>

> ys

> hkdd

>

> **********************

>

> Harpers Magazine Feb 2004

> Richard Manning

>

> THE OIL WE EAT

>

> Following the food chain back to Iraq

>

>

> The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten

> crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.

> --Balzac

>

> The journalist's rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not

> really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice

> president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll

> follow the energy.

>

> We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don't get

> something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The

> scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As

> James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only

> so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to

> light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less

> of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This

> is the first law of thermodynamics.

>

> Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All

> animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food

> chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight

> into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all

> animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel.

> There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative

> to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as

> sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

>

> &"The day is not far off," Kennan concluded, "when we are going to have

> to deal in straight power concepts."

>

> If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field

> somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry.

> Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary

> productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn

> consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years

> since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained

> undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in

> uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the

> plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world.

> Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of

> true wealth--sun energy--to be found on the planet.

>

> & The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland

> prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most

> technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it's mostly a form

> of grass and grass roots that humans can't eat. So we replace the

> prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed

> most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content

> to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely were more bison

> produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef

> farming raises in the same area today. Our ancestors found it preferable

> to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move on.

>

> Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again

> with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual

> primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts,

> built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons

> of fossil energy to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre

> of eroded land--in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years' worth of

> ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else. Even as

> the earth beneath Iowa shrinks, it is being globalized.

>

> & Plato wrote of his country's farmlands:

> What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a

> sick man. ...Formerly, many of the mountains were arable, The plains

> that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once

> covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food

> for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not

> lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The

> soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the

> water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams

> everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were

> springs attest that our description of the land is true.

>

> Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his

> country's soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that

> pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By

> the fifth century, though, wheat's strategy of depleting and moving on

> ran up against the Atlantic Ocean.

>

>

> & More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which

> added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for

> tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen

> fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for

> other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands

> that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries

> across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.

>

> The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure

> oil, not food. There's a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of

> arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at

> least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the

> United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of

> fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked

> closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the

> problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food

> there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot

> less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the

> 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we

> spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only

> ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the

> Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

>

> David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has

> estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats,

> humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just

> over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of

> being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it

> ten years&.

>

>

>

[Guest guest]

>

> There is a book entitled SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL by a world class economist

> named shumaker(spelling).

 

Schumacher, I believe.