Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
High crude oil prices may have galvanized bio-diesel production, but some questions are now being asked in industry circles about the ethics of using a limited edible resource to meet the world’s energy needs, said an influential edible oils industry analyst.
A major international conference on “Food Security in an Energy-Scarce World” is planned for June 23-25 in Dublin, Ireland. The conference will seek to answer the question: “How can the world’s population be fed without the extensive use of fossil fuels in the production, processing and distribution of food?” [updated article with full conference details]
Imagine you’re standing in the produce section of your local grocery faced with a variety of apples. You want to make the best choice, for the good of your family, farm workers and the environment. Do you buy the organic Galas shipped from across the country or the Granny Smiths grown conventionally but locally?
I gave my first talk on peak oil in this room a little over two years ago. Like many people, when I first learned about it, I was very upset. I noted in my talk then that the problem looked serious and no one had any idea what to do. An Antioch attending said, “you should go to Cuba. They’ve already solved the problem.”
…as we get hungry we will be motivated as never before to protect soil fertility and water reserves, and learn to feed ourselves without using fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides. Organic and sustainable farming will no longer be trendy. We will feed ourselves according to our ability to replicate the soil food web’s systems of nutrient and carbon cycling and nature’s biodiversity, and to learn from long-surviving species.
Although the United States has long consumed the lion’s share of the world’s resources, this situation is changing fast as the Chinese economy surges ahead, overtaking the United States in the consumption of one resource after another.
The debate over sustainable agriculture has gone beyond the health and environmental benefits that it could bring in place of conventional industrial agriculture. For one thing, conventional industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on oil, which is running out. [Considers both climate change and Peak Oil]
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reviews Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, by Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute.
The United States Drug Enforcement Administration recently abandoned, without comment, its three-year effort to ban commercial foods made from or containing nonpsychoactive industrial hemp seed and hemp oil.
Journal paper quantifying the degree of
non-renewability of a major biofuel: ethanol produced from industrially-grown corn. Extensive work seriously challenging the right of this process to renewable status, on net energy, soil depletion, and government subidy-dependence grounds.
An excellent practical guide to the techniques of using vegetable oil as a transportation fuel which acknowledges also some of this approach’s large scale limitations.
Industrial agriculture of annual crops may be the most destructive technology on the planet. “Woody agriculture” of perennial nuts may be part of the solution.
