grim meatoil future

[hep]

Michael Pollan's excellent Omnivore's Dilemma, ISBN-13 978-1594200823, features an anecdote about the Mayans early on in the first chapter. The Maya word that referred to themselves and their civilization was "corn walker," and often you hear Chicanos and other Mexican indigenous peoples using that term on themselves even today. But Pollan points

Comments

[testing4l]

Solve this problem: Your entire food manufacturing industry is structured on an energy loss.

Incomplete premise. The entire universe is structured on energy loss. Consider, for example, the heat death of the universe

Solve for x, where x = the magic solution to end world hunger, obesity, the oil crisis and save the environment.

The Earth only gets as much as energy as the sun puts out. If those on Earth use more energy than the sun puts out, then there is an energy problem. Plants depend on the nitrogen cycle and there has been no shortage of people able to grow plants. In fact, considering the Green Revolution, quite the opposite.

At this point, it's worth noting that world hunger is a problem of distribution, not supply.

I still remain unconvinced about global warming. The evidence is thinly corroborated and not infrequently contradictory.

The oil crisis is so....1970s. It's overplayed quite a bit by a lot of people with biases. Check your sources and you'll find that the United States is the 10th largest producer.

Assume the worst -- that all oil production stops suddenly -- the United States has enough oil to last a year and a half on current rates. That's not even including rations!

Moreover, lots of smart people are doing lots of good work to transition to other means -- well ahead of any crisis.

nitrogen is not as easy to fix and is more scare than carbon in the atmosphere.

Trivially false -- even counting all compounds containing carbon, we have several orders of magnitude more N than C in the atmosphere.

Work backwards from a single calorie of grain-fed beef and you're burning maybe 100 calories of fossil fuels.

And in doing no work at all, the sun provides much more energy than that which is absorbed by our atmosphere and crops.

If you're going to suggest that there's an energy shortage, then you may want to check your facts -- the United States produces about 300 terawatts more than it uses. We export the remainder elsewhere.

I know some pretty smart people.

I do too. I'm sorry that some of them fall for this sort of thing.

[jtzapp]

Indeed. It should also be said that plants do not fix nitrogen at all, the prokaryotes in the soil and the root nodules of especially legumes do all the work. It's therefore disingenuous to compare the rates of fixation.