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Fuel Costs and Food Prices: A Quadruple Whammy
It was inevitable. Peak oil. We're now on the downward slope of world oil production and there is no reversing the trend towards higher and higher oil prices. Some minor corrections downwards may occur, but get ready for regular $100, $200 and even higher per barrel prices. It's simple supply and demand. A world that is fast approaching 7 billion souls is a VERY oil-thirsty world. We're not just dependent, nay, HOPELESSLY ADDICTED to oil. We're addicted to CHEAP oil. And we're finally beginning to suffer for it. Here are four reasons higher oil prices will lead to higher food prices, worldwide: The Higher Cost of Fertilizer Decades ago, we traveled past the point of no return, where the world's arable land could support the world's human population without petrochemical fertilizers. If we yanked the entire supply of fertilizer from use, some 2 billion humans would starve to death. That's almost a THIRD of the world, completely dependent on that fertilizer technology for their continued existence. Double or triple the price of fertilizer, and the added cost eats it's way into the cost of food. Pretty basic. The Higher Cost of Transport With a few third world exceptions, we humans no longer eat what we grow locally. Food is produced hundreds of miles, thousands of miles, even whole continents away, and then shipped where the demand is highest. All using boats, planes, trucks and trains that consume - you guessed it - more oil. The Packaging How many humans buy their food in bulk? How many bring their own containers to their place of food purchase and re-use those containers over and over to transport and store the food they buy? The short answer is, statistically - NONE! Food is packaged for shipment, display and marketing purposes worldwide. A LOT of that packaging is petroleum-based. When oil prices rise, so does the packaging costs (in fact, including the renewable packaging such as cardboard and paper, due to IT'S oil component). There goes more increase in the cost of food. The Rush to Alternative Fuels This one is much more long term, but it's a monster: when crops are removed from food production in order to produce cleaner-burning non-fossil fuels so as to reduce dependencies on foreign oil imports and/or give the biosphere a much-needed kick in the right direction, guess what suffers? The cost of food. Every acre or hectare re-deployed from food production into renewable energy adds to the mounting pressure on world food prices, by suppressing production. SOLUTIONS The gauntlet we get to run if we are to EVER wind our way out of this mess is a brutal and painful one. I break it down into three categories: The Bandaids These run the gamut from one of those round spot bandaids to full body casts. They include promising, yet painfully slow migrations to wind, solar, wave, geothermal, biomass (such as trash conversion - non-food chain technologies) as well as radically changing our wasteful and extravagant uses of energy (SUVs, jet fuel, 100-mile commutes to work, transporting a veggie 20,000 miles comes to mind) Vegans would argue we could feed more people if we all swore off meat and poultry. Well, guess what? The land, beleaguered by nearly 7 billion humans, is just too worn-out to do the job. And it's getting worse every year. The Vaporware Building new nuclear power plants. Sounds great! No fossil fuels expended. CLEAN energy, right? Hardly. Virtually ALL future energy solutions must carry the lifetime future cost of their use including their opportunity cost (hydro power is a classic here) in order for us to evaluate their usefulness. When you add the potential risks of spent nuclear fuel storage and their chances of causing damage to future generations, 50, 100, even 1000 years into the future, the total cost of nuclear is absurd. Perhaps one day, nuclear fusion will make a dramatic entrance on the scene. But that's 25 if not 100 years away. There won't be but 100 million humans left at that point, if that many. We don't have time for vaporware. The 800 Pound Gorilla It's the subject of books and treatises dating back into antiquity. It's the PRIMARY reason we're in the mess we're in. And it's the LEAST discussed. It's almost taboo. And that taboo is worldwide. It's human breeding. We have entire world religions (Mormons, Catholicism, Islam, for example) that are upside down on this subject. Their religious leadership is still living in the fantasy world of the pre-industrial, agricultural era when it truly made sense to produce large families. Heck, if the bible says "go forth and multiply", you better darn well do it! Right? Even at the expense of every beast on the planet, including humans. But it's much, much more than immovable, intractable, obsolete religious thinking. It's the whole modern, civilized world preoccupation with the G. word. (No, I don't mean Google). GROWTH. The human race has been sold a bill of goods - that if something (a tree, a person, a business, an organization, a country, a society) isn't growing - ie. getting larger, then it must be dying. We've certainly figured out how to grow, all right. We're growing so fast, we're exterminating species that have been around this planet for orders of magnitude longer than we have. And it's happening much much faster than any of the last 6 major extinction events. If we play our cards right, we'll set a record that breaks the "Great Dying" event that took place a quarter of a billion years ago before the dinosaurs, when 95% of every living thing on the planet disappeared. After all, 7 IS a magical number, right? Perhaps Jurassic Park will rise from the ashes in another 10 to 20 million years!
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