Abbreviated from Empty Plates Tomorrow

(Over)confidence in technology

“The facts about our energy resources are sobering. The rapidity with which we are finding ways of spending that energy, often without realizing it, is shocking. The problems attendant in tapping unused reservoirs of energy are discouraging. Just the same, no one should say that man’s standard of living is likely to toboggan for lack of energy – cheap energy. This optimism comes not from a blind faith in the scientist and engineer but, instead, from an infinite confidence, supported by a long record of the past, that man’s ingenuity is equal to the task.”

– Charles A Scarlott, writing in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, published in 1956.[i]

This quotation from Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth reflects the confidence in technology that characterised the middle years of the twentieth century. Charles Scarlott was, at the time, manager of technical information services in the public relations department of the Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California. From the perspective of the first decade of the 21^st century, the words ‘information services’ and ‘public relations’ themselves sound warning bells. Mr Scarlott was very well aware of rapidly rising energy use, even back in the 1950s, but trusted to the human mind to invent new, cheap and plentiful forms of energy, and policymakers by and large accepted this rosy vision.

It hasn’t happened yet.

Petroleum, gas and coal are organic products of past aeons.[ii] Petroleum is a mix of hydrocarbons*, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and other chemical elements, originally organic matter – phytoplankton and zooplankton – that has been transformed by bacteria, by heat and by pressure, over millions of years. Natural gas is predominately methane, mixed with ethane, butane and propane. Methane, CH₄, is a by-product of rotting vegetation. Butane and propane are more complex gases than methane, but like methane are alkanes, the ‘paraffin’ group of hydrocarbons. Coal, a solid hydrocarbon in gradations from lignite at 70 to 80 per cent carbon to anthracite at over 90 per cent carbon, is compressed ancient former living matter, typically large ferny plants.

Hydrocarbons drove the explosion in agricultural productivity in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Natural gas is the chief feedstock for nitrogen fertiliser manufacture. Irrigation, pesticide production and mechanised cultivation are fuelled by oil. Lavish use of hydrocarbons gives the illusion of limitless potential growth in food production, an illusion that permeates all forms of economic activity.

Yet the energy that powers non-essential ventures, such as extravagant leisure complexes, will soon be needed for more basic survival purposes, notably food production. An indoor ski centre in the oil state of Dubai opened in December 2005. It is 85 metres high, covers 22,500 square metres, and has five slopes, the longest 400 metres with a 60-metre fall. The temperature inside is –1 to –2 degrees C (28 to 30 degrees F) all the time, when outside it may be over 50 degrees C (more than 120 degrees F). The annual electricity consumption will be staggering. The SkiDubai dome, owned by the Majid Al Futtaim Group, is at the extreme end of energy-hungry leisure and tourism ventures that have no purpose other than entertainment – perhaps a valid undertaking from the perspective of the individual company, but dubious in the context of uncertain world energy supplies.

Losing the land

Energy-guzzling agriculture degrades whole environments. In the USA, the world’s most careless energy consumer, these are some of the consequences:

● On the central prairies, topsoil is eroding 30 times faster than natural processes can create it.

● The cropland acreage declines by around three million acres a year. Two million areas are lost to waterlogging, erosion and pollution. A million acres more succumb to roads, suburbs, shopping malls, and industrial developments.[iii] Three million acres is 4,688 square miles, 0.13 per cent of the whole land area of the United States, lost each year. That is an area three-fifths the size of Wales, or larger than the whole of Gambia or Jamaica.

● Irrigation for agriculture (often using electric or diesel-powered pumps[iv]) is depleting aquifers. Several vital aquifers in the USA’s southern states may be useless by the mid 21^st century.

By the mid 1990s, the food eaten by the typical American every year had devoured the equivalent of 400 gallons of oil[v] on the way to the plate or take-away carton. Food production in the USA uses up about 10 times more energy than is contained in the final product. Before the industrial revolution, food depended on the sunlight, which made plants grow to feed people directly, or indirectly via other species of animals feeding on the plants. People increased the productivity of plants and animals by selective breeding, and by organised cultivation and animal husbandry, and they spread animal waste, in the form of farmyard manure, to improve the soil. Farming this way was labour-intensive. One person’s direct labour might yield sufficient food to feed three or four other people, but one person could not feed a village, let alone a small town — until fossil fuels formed a temporary, one-time-only army.

Britain’s gas habit

Energy consumption in the UK is still rising, and in 2004 was 6.4 per cent more than in 1995: 235.6 million tonnes of oil equivalent* compared with 221.5 million. Natural gas fired the increase, usage rising from 32.4 per cent of total consumption in 1995, to 41.5 per cent in 2004. Natural gas is of course finite, despite its reassuring name. Renewable fuels contributed only a tiny amount, 0.2 per cent – the same as in 1995.[vi]

Energy consumption in the UK, 1995 and 2004

Percentage of inland energy consumption, primary fuel input, not seasonally adjusted.

Source: Calculated from table 1.2 in Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2005, from the Department of Trade and Industry.

About a third of Britain’s energy supply is converted into electricity. Most electricity in the UK is generated in power stations fuelled by coal or natural gas. Forty per cent of electricity TWh (terawatt[vii] hours) are fuelled by natural gas, coal generates another 33 per cent, and nuclear energy about a quarter. Just one per cent of British electricity is from renewable hydro power, and the amount of hydro power generated has actually fallen since 1980. The UK’s national grid infrastructure is at the end of its planned 40-year life. Many power stations are inefficient, and the nuclear plants are nearing the end of their lives. The margin between production capacity and peak demand has become wafer thin.

By 2020 electricity supply could be 40 per cent below the peak demand experienced in the early 21^st century, a gap of some 2,000 megawatts* (MW).[viii] London and the South East already produce only about half of the electricity the two regions consume, and are dependent on the national grid transferring supply from other regions. By 2023, only three per cent of the UK’s electricity – at 2005 consumption levels — will come from nuclear power, unless there is a major new building programme. Coal deposits could, if used wisely, help the switch from an oil- and gas-dependent economy to a more sustainable future, but of course Mrs Thatcher’s governments, from 1979 to 1990, closed most of the mines.

The UK became a net importer of gas in 2004. New Labour, waking up too late to the decline in natural gas output from the North Sea, saw two ways to salvation: the construction of storage terminals for imported gas, and a new generation of nuclear power stations. A gas terminal on Kent’s Isle of Grain came into use in 2005, and in 2006 storage tanks for liquefied natural gas were under construction at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire. The capacity of the pipelines carrying gas from Norway and via Belgium was being enlarged.

The Department of Trade and Industry’s energy review, launched late in January 2006, was on the face of it an opportunity for a searching public debate on the energy choices ahead. Even while the review was in progress, though, Tony Blair was dropping hints that the government had already decided to build a new generation of nuclear power stations. The previous policy was for both nuclear and coal-generated electricity to be well on the way out by 2020, to be replaced mainly by gas and to a lesser extent by oil. This strange plan took no account of the reality that fossil fuels are finite.[ix]

Energy companies everywhere are desperately searching for more oil, more gas. The nations that have large proven reserves are flashpoints for future conflicts that could interrupt the global food trade, and increase hunger.

The British countryside is in danger of becoming split between two extremes: industrial agriculure and protected ‘parkland’. Planning laws perpetuate the division, by rigorous zoning of  ‘permitted development’ away from rural areas and the small villages within them, unless of course development is undertaken by very large businesses that can sway the views of  local authority planning committees, whose job it is to ensure compliance with planning laws. One planning objective is to preserve the look of the countryside, to prevent it changing to meet new challenges.

We are going to need a new smallholder movement to repopulate the countryside, produce food in sustainable ways, and generate custom for all sorts of skilled craft enterprises, as inevitable consequences of Peak Oil. Yet the planners put no end of barriers in the way of people keen to experience and demonstrate low-energy lifestyles. We only need to look at the determination of planners in Shropshire, England, to close down Karuna, a permaculture project that offers training in sustainable food production and low-energy lifestyles.  Permaculture refers to sustainable food production in accordance with the natural local ecology:  see www.karuna.org.uk for a dossier on Karuna’s long-running battle with the planners who see no value in a permaculture settlement, only a visual intrusion into lovely leafy countryside.

On the other side of England, in Lincolnshire, there is a planning application for a huge agribusiness development that may well be given permission, although it would be far more visually intrusive than Karuna. North Kesteven Council is mulling over application no. 09/1040/FUL, for a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) on 19 acres at Nocton Heath. On those 19 acres there would be between 8,000 and 9,000 cattle, a density of up to 474 to each acre. They would be inside, of course, their food would be transported to them, and the ‘farm’ would include a staff dormitory  — who wants to sleep in a dormitory? — as well as five houses for farm workers.

The application, from Nocton Dairies Ltd, is dated December 17th 2009. The men steering Nocton Dairies (www.noctondairies.co.uk) are Peter Willes, of Parkham Farms in Devon, David Barnes, who manages a dairy unit that Mr Willes has in Clitheroe, Lancashire, and Robert Howard, an arable farmer.

North Kesteven Council aims to decide on the application by April 12th 2010, and has set a deadline of May 3rd. The fact that the development would create over 80 jobs almost immediately is an important consideration for the planners.

The dairy unit would have eight buildings for cattle housing, two maternity/hospital buildings, two milking parlours, holding areas, a feed store, a lagoon for excrement, an anaerobic digestion unit, weighbridge, staff dormitory, five dwellings for workers, internal roads and paths, and a new vehicular access to the B1188. It would be a very large factory development.

By May 3rd, we will know if this mega dairy is to be constructed. If the planners say ‘yes’, they will be reinforcing the double standards that reject small, sustainable, low-cost ventures but accept wasteful and unnatural but very expensive ones. Money talks.

Surely we need to campaign to change planning laws, so that they favour development which is small-scale, local, and environmentally aware?

To comment on Nocton Dairies’ application, go to http://planningonline.n-kesteven.gov.uk.

‘Empty Plates Tomorrow’ has a chapter called ‘False Dawns’ in which I wrote about dubious magic solutions to energy and food scarcity such as the hydrogen economy, nuclear fission and fusion, abiogenic oil, carbon storage, and genetic modification of agricultural crops. The section on genetic modification is headed ‘Genetic modification benefits big business, not small farmers’.

The alarming concentration of power over seed supplies, which worried me when I wrote the chapter, is portrayed in detail in ‘Seeds of Destruction’*, by F William Engdahl. ‘Seeds of Destruction’ catalogues the capture of world seed breeding by corporations, principally Syngenta, Dow, DuPont and, the most powerful of all, Monsanto.

Monsanto is the world’s dominant supplier of genetically modified seed. The seeds are ‘modified’ to improve Monsanto’s income stream, because the farmers purchasing them are contractually prohibited from saving any to re-use in a future planting. Many GM seeds are engineered to tolerate specific agrochemicals, such as Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. GM seeds are at the base of a corporate-controlled column that extends through cultivation technologies to the  sale, processing, manufacture and distribution of the crops farmers grow. In a further twist of the screw, the technology now exists to engineer seeds that self-destruct after a single use: they are sterile or terminator seeds.

Around three-quarters of the world’s farmers save their own seed for use the following year, a practice that terminator seeds would halt, forcing those farmers to buy fresh supplies every year. Generally, farmers’ own saved seeds come from plants well adapted to their local environments. The mega breeders like Monsanto are, for commercial reasons, concerned more with their seeds’ suitability for their own agrochemicals than with their fitness for local conditions.

Corporate control of seed production became far simpler after 1994, when the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade  (GATT) created the World Trade Organisation. One of the early outcomes was the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which allowed corporations to patent plant and animal life forms. The rush to patent genes, and gene combinations, began. F William Engdahl comments (‘Seeds of Destruction p.221) that:

“The WTO marked a step for the globalization of world agriculture, under terms defined by US agribusiness. WTO rules would open the legal and political path to the creation of a global ‘market’ in food commodities similar to that created by the oil cartel under the Rockefeller Standard Oil group a century before. Never before the advent of agribusiness had agriculture crops been viewed as a pure commodity with a global market price. Crops had always been local along with their markets, the basis of human existence and of national economic security.”

The US administrations in the 1990s — under George Bush senior and then Bill Clinton — backed the WTO’s constant pressures on nations to open up their markets for free trade that benefited corporations first and foremost, as they expanded and policed procurement and supply chains. George Bush senior decreed that genetically engineered or modified plants are “substantially equivalent” to their non-engineered counterparts and therefore do not require any special regulation. The WTO adopted this ruling as a binding Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (Engdahl p.221), which commands that food standards and measures aimed at protecting people from pests or animals can be potentially used as a deliberate barrier to trade . This meant that governments could not ban genetically modified foods because that would be a deliberate barrier to trade. Furthermore, even the labelling of crops and foods as genetically modified was outlawed as a ‘technical barrier to trade’ (Engdahl p.222).

Engdahl summarises the issue thus: “The doctrine of the WTO was simple: free trade — on terms defined by giant private agribusiness conglomerates — was to reign supreme above nation states and above the concern for human or animal health and safety. ‘Free market uber Alles’ was the motto”. (p.224)

GM crops have other potential uses apart from making profits for the organisations holding patents on them. The US government holds the patent for terminator gene technology, jointly with a major cotton-breeding company called Delta & Pine Land, which Monsanto acquired in 2006. It doesn’t require much imagination to see how terminator technology could be incorporated in covert operations to destabilise a regime. Engdahl includes a quote (p.xiv) from Henry Kissinger, secretary of state to US presidents Richard Nixon and then  Gerald Ford. The quote is  “Control the oil and you control nations. Control the food and you control the people”.

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* ‘Seeds of Destruction’, by F William Engdahl, was published in 2007 by Global Research of Montreal, Canada. The ISBN is 978-0-9737147-2-2.

Governments faced with food shortages at home have been slapping on export restrictions. Export taxes in Argentina have so angered farmers that they have gone on strike. We know that populations are rising and the availability of fertile land is falling. China, already a major food importer, faces so many environmental disasters that it will be forced to accelerate foreign food purchases. Chinese companies are scouting for agricultural land in South America and Africa to grow soyabeans, edible oils, vegetables, bananas and other food crops for export back to China, where food prices in the first quarter of 2008 were 25% higher than a year earlier. (more…)