Published on Tuesday, December 2, 2003 by the Guardian/UK

The World is Running out of Oil - So why do Politicians Refuse to Talk About It?

by George Monbiot

All oil production follows a bell curve, whether in an individual field or on the planet as a whole. On the upslope of the curve production costs are significantly lower than on the downslope when extra effort (expense) is required to extract oil from reservoirs that are emptying out.

Put simply: oil is abundant and cheap on the upslope, scarce and expensive on the downslope.

For the past 150 years, we have been moving up the upslope of the global oil production curve. "Peak Oil" is the industry term for the top of the curve. It's often referred to as "Hubbert's Peak" a reference to King Hubbert, the geologist who discovered that oil production follows a bell curve.

Once we pass the peak, we will go down the very steep downslope. The further we go down the slope, the more it costs to produce oil, and its cousin, natural gas.

In practical terms, this means that if 2000 was the year of Peak Oil, worldwide oil production in the year 2020 will be the same as it was in 1980. However, the world's population in 2020 will be both much larger (approximately twice as big) and much more industrialized than it was in 1980. Consequently, worldwide demand for oil will outpace the worldwide production of oil by a significant margin.

The more demand for oil exceeds production of oil, the higher the price goes.

Ultimately, the question is not "When will we run out of oil?" but rather, "When will we run out of cheap oil?"

The most wildly optimistic estimates indicate 2020 will be the year in which worldwide oil production peaks. Generally, these estimates come from the government.

A more realistic estimate is between the year 2004-2010. Unfortunately, we won't know that we hit the peak until 3-4 years after we actually hit it. Even on the upslope of the curve, oil production varies a bit from year to year. It is possible that the year 2000 was the year of peak oil production, as production has dipped every year since.

If Mr. Thompson is that frank in an article posted on the Exxon Mobil webpage, you have to wonder what he says behind closed days when he talks about oil depletion. (note - if you read the link, read it in the context of what Matthew Simmons says - see below)

Even the Saudis are aware of the situation. They have a saying that goes, "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel."

Almost every current human endeavor from transportation, to manufacturing, to electricity to plastics, and especially food and water production is inextricably intertwined with oil and natural gas supplies.

Commercial food production is oil powered. Most pesticides are petroleum (oil) based, and all commercial fertilizers are ammonia based. Ammonia is produced from natural gas.

Oil based agriculture is primarily responsible for the world's population exploding from 1 billion at the middle of the 19th century to 6.3 billion at the turn of the 21st.

Oil allowed for farming implements such as tractors, food storage systems such as refrigerators, and food transport systems such as trucks.

As oil production went up, so did food production. As food production went up, so did the population. As the population went up, the demand for food went up, which increased the demand for oil.

Within a few years of Peak Oil occurring, the price of food will skyrocket because of the cost of fertilizer will soar. The cost of storing (electricity) and transporting (gasoline) the food that is produced will also soar.

Inexpensive oil is also needed to construct and maintain the massive infrastructure that delivers our fresh water.

Oil is largely responsible for the advances in medicine that have been made in the last 150 years. Oil allowed for the mass production of pharmaceutical drugs, and the development of health care infrastructure such as hospitals, ambulances, roads, etc . . .

Oil is required for a lot more than just food, water, medicine, and transportation. It is also required for nearly every consumer item, sewage disposal, garbage disposal, street/park maintenance, hospitals & health systems, police, fire services, and national defense.

Thus, the aftermath of Peak Oil will extend far beyond how much you will pay for gas. Simply stated, you can expect: war, starvation, economic collapse, possibly even the extinction of Homo sapiens.

This is known as the post-oil "die-off". The term "die-off" captures perfectly the nightmare that is at our doorstep.

That estimate comes from biologists who have studied what happens to every species when it exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment in one life giving aspect or another.

For instance, bacteria in a petri dish will grow exponentially until they run out of resources, at which point their population will crash. Only one generation prior to the crash, the bacteria will have used up half the resources available to them. To the bacteria, there will be no hint of a problem until they starve to death.

But humans are smarter than bacteria, right? You would think so, but the evidence indicates otherwise:

The first commercial oil well was drilled in 1859. At that time, the world's population was about 1.5 billion. Less than 150 years later, our population has exploded to 6.3 billion. In that time, we have used up half the world's recoverable oil. Of the half that's left, most will be very expensive to extract . If the experts are correct, we are less than one generation away from a crash. Yet to most of us, there appears to be no hint of a problem.

We need not look solely to the petri dish to predict what will happen to the planet. We can look to our own history.

Then suddenly in 1845, a parasitic fungus turned the potatoes into sticky, inedible, mucous globs. Within a generation the country was devastated, more than half the population died or emigrated, and those who remained were reduced to a poverty that diminished only a century later.

In some ways, planet Earth's future is likely to be worse than Ireland's past. The severity of the potato famine was offset by the fact that many of the Irish could emigrate to the land of plenty: America. This allowed those who remained to make the most of what little resources were left.

Unlike the Irish, we have nowhere else to go. But we do have lots of WMD's to toss at each other.

Oh, by the way: you want to know what the bacteria do as their population crashes?

They eat each other.

Perhaps the following explanation, while a bit over simplified, will help to illustrate the situation:

As explained above, oil production follows a bell curve. Thus, if the year 2000 was the year of peak production, then oil production in the year 2025 will be about the same as it was in the year 1975.

The population in the year 2025 is projected to be roughly 8 billion. The population in 1975 was roughly 4 billion.

Since oil production essentially equals food production, this means that we will have 8 billion people on the planet but only enough food for 4 billion or less, since even in 1975 we were unable to feed everybody.

Now think about it this way: say you, me, and 6 other people were locked in a room, with only enough food and water for 4 of us. At least 4 of us will die from starvation. Another one or two will likely die as we all fight each other for what little food we have.

That's what will happen if we are fighting with just our fists. Give each of us weapons, and you can imagine what that room will look like when were done with each other.

If you're asking, "What about switching to renewable energy to keep the food production up?" - just keep reading - we'll get to that on page two.

For the sake of brevity, here is what just two highly credible individuals have to say about Peak Oil. As you can see, this is not the typical "end of the world" crowd:

In his just-released book, Out of Gas: The End of Oil, Dr. Goodstein argues forcefully that the worldwide production of oil will peak soon, possibly within this decade. That will be followed by declining availability of fossil fuels that could plunge the world into global conflicts as nations struggle to capture their piece of a shrinking pie.

When asked if there is a solution, Simmons responded:

Cheney ended on an alarming note, "That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day."

This is equivalent to more than six Saudi Arabia's of today's size.

According to a report commissioned by Cheney from the US Council on Foreign Relations and released in April 2001:

In 1980, Jimmy Carter told the American public that we needed to prepare in 1980 for the end of the oil age in 2005.

More recently, Michael Moore dedicated an entire chapter "Oils Well That Ends Well" in his book Dude, Where's My Country? to the end of the oil age and subsequent die off.

If you'd like to use history as a guide, I feel the following timeline is a reasonable approximation of what to expect in developed nations such as the United States:

1-5 years post-peak: Major recession comparable to those experienced during the artificially created oil shortages of the 1970's.

5-15 years post-peak: Recession worsens into a second Great Depression.

15-25 years post-peak: Society begins to collapse. Conditions in the United States begin to resemble those in the modern day former U.S.S.R.

25-50 years post-peak: Societal collapse worsens. Conditions in the United States begin to resemble those in modern day Iraq: electrical grid collapse, clean water shortages, super high unemployment, military police state. Many localities begin to resemble modern day third world countries such as Liberia.

50-100 years post-peak: Society begins to stabilize, albeit in a form drastically different than anything most of us have imagined.

Yes. As stated above, we won't know we have hit the Peak until a few years after we hit it. Global oil production has dipped every year since 2000, so it is quite possible we've hit the peak.

Ample evidence exists that we are in the first stages of the Oil Crash. As of 12/03 the "adjusted" unemployment, which has been squeezed out of as much meaning as conceivably possible, still hovers in the 6% range. However, if you factor in the quality of employment, then the real numbers are closer to 12%-15%.

The rolling blackouts experienced in California during Fall 2000, the massive East Coast blackout of August, 2003 and the various other massive blackouts that occurred throughout the world during late summer of 2003, are simply a sign of things to come.

As further evidence of the production peak, Deffeyes noted that since 2000, there has been a 30% drop in stock values, interest rate cuts have not helped, 2.5 million have become unemployed and the employed have been unable to retire, budget surpluses have vanished, the middle class has vanished, and the World Trade Center has vanished.

That article is most likely citing the U.S. government agency such as the United States Geological Survey or the Energy Information Agency (EIA). While USGS and EIA reports on past production are largely reliable, their predictions for the future are largely propaganda.

They admit this themselves. For instance, after recently revising oil supply projections upward, the EIA stated:

In other words, they predict how much they think we're going to use, and then tell us, "Guess what, nothing to worry about - that is how much we've got!"

In 1973, OPEC stopped selling oil to the United States in protest of American support of Israel in the Yom Kippur or Ramadan War. This coincided with the peaking of U.S. domestic oil production. Without a supply of cheap energy, the US economy went into deep recession.

In the 1970's there were other 'swing' oil producers like Venezuela who could step in to fill the supply gap. Once worldwide oil production peaks (if it hasn't already), there won't be any swing producers to fill in the gap.

The oil shocks of the 1970's were like the tremors before an earthquake. The coming crisis is driven by resource constraints, not politics - although of course politics do enter into it.

It is not a temporary interruption but the onset of a permanent new condition. The warning signals have been flying for a long time. They have been plain to see, but the world turned a blind eye, and failed to read the message.

In the future, comparing the oil shortages of the 1970's to the Oil Crash of 2005-2050 will be akin to comparing a fender bender to a head-on collision.

Unfortunately, the Club of Rome turned out to be correct.

(scroll down to "Simmons")

What's different is that this is the real thing. It isn't a fire drill. It isn't paranoid hysteria. It is the real deal.

Peak Oil isn't "Y2K Reloaded." In contrast to Peak Oil, Y2K was an "if", not a "when". We know that Peak Oil is going to happen. The only question is at what point between 2004-2010 it will occur, if it hasn't occurred already.

Y2K was "announced" in the early to mid 1990's, a full 5 - 10 years before the problem was to occur. Peak Oil will occur within 1 - 5 years, and we have made no preparations to deal with it. The preparations necessary to deal with the Oil Crash will require a complete overhaul of every aspect of our civilization. This is much more complex than fixing a computer bug.

Furthermore, oil is more fundamental to our existence than anything else, even computers. Had the Y2K predictions come true, our civilization would have been knocked back to 1965. With time, we would have recovered.

When the Oil Crash comes, our civilization is going to get knocked back to 1765. We will not recover, as there is no economically available oil left to discover that would help us recover.

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Unfortunately, the ability of these alternatives to replace fossil fuels is based more in myth than in reality.

Fossil fuels account for more than 85% of our current global energy supply. None of the traditional alternatives to oil can supply anywhere near this much energy, let alone the amount we will need in the future as our population continues to grow and industrialize.

Let's briefly examine the various shortcomings of the more popular oil alternatives:

Natural Gas currently supplies 20% of global energy supply. It is not a sufficient replacement for fossil fuels for the following reasons:

1. Gas itself will start running out from 2020 on. Demand for natural gas in North America is already outstripping supply, especially as power utilities take the remaining gas to generate electricity.

2. Gas is not suited for existing jet aircraft, ships, vehicles, and equipment for agriculture and other products.

3. Conversion consumes large amounts of energy as well as money.

4. Natural gas also does not provide the huge array of chemical by-products that we depend on oil for.

Hydro-Electric power currently supplies 2.3% of global energy supply. It is not a sufficient replacement for fossil fuels for the following reasons:

1. It is unsuitable for aircrafts and the present 800 million existing vehicles.

2. It cannot be adapted to produce pesticides, fertilizer, or plastics.

Solar power currently supplies .006% of global energy supply. As a replacement for fossil fuels, it suffers from several deficiencies:

1. Energy from solar power varies constantly with weather or day/night.

2. Not practical for transportation needs. While a handful of small, experimental, solar powered vehicles have been built, solar power is unsuited for planes, boats, cars, tanks, etc. . .

3. Solar cannot be adapted to produce pesticides, fertilizer, or plastics.

4. Solar is susceptible to the effects of global climate change.

A typical solar water panel array can deliver 50% to 85% of a home’s hot water though. Using some of our precious remaining crude oil as fuel for manufacturing solar equipment may be wise.

Wind power accounts for .07% of global energy supply. As a replacement for fossil fuels, its problems are:

1. As with solar, energy from wind varies greatly with weather, and is not portable or storable like oil and gas.

2. Wind cannot be adapted to produce pesticides, fertilizer or plastics.

3. Like solar, wind is susceptible to the effects of global climate change.

Hydrogen accounts for 0.01% of global energy. It is not a true replacement for fossil fuels for the following reasons:

1. Hydrogen is currently manufactured from methane gas. It takes more energy to create it than the hydrogen actually provides. It is therefore an energy "carrier" not a source.

2. Liquid hydrogen occupies four to eleven times the bulk of equivalent gasoline or diesel.

3. Existing vehicles and aircraft and existing distribution systems are not suited to it.

4. Hydrogen cannot be used to manufacture plastics or fertilizer.

He stated that fuel cell vehicles would never amount to significant market share. Hydrogen was ruled out as a solution because of intensive costs of production, inherent energy inefficiencies, lack of infrastructure, and practical difficulties such as the extreme cost and difficulty of storage.

Nuclear is currently being abandoned globally. Its ability to soften the oil crash is very problematic due to several factors:

1. Possibility of accidents and terrorism.

2. Cost: one reactor costs about 3 billion dollars, and requires massive amounts of oil to construct.

3. Number of reactors needed: 800-1000 for the U.S. alone.

4. Not directly suited for transportation or agriculture.

5. Uranium requires energy from oil from in order to be mined.

6. All abandoned reactors are radioactive for decades or millennia.

7. Even if we were to overlook these problems, nuclear power is only a short-term solution. Uranium, too, has a Hubbert's peak, and the current known reserves can supply the earth's energy needs for only 25 years at best.

Coal accounts for 24% of current global energy supply. As a replacement for oil, it is unsuitable due to the following reasons:

1. It is 50% to 200% heavier than oil per energy unit.

2. Substituting coal for oil would require expansion of coal mining, leading to land ruin and increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

3. In contrast to oil and gas fuels, fine-tuning the rate at which coal burns is difficult. It is therefore used in power stations to make electricity, wasting half of its energy content.

4. Coal mining operations run on oil fuels as do coal-mining machinery and transportation.

5. Pollution is also a major problem. A single coal-fired station can produce a million tons of solid waste each year. Burning coal in homes pollutes air with acrid smog containing acid gases and particles. Finally, liquid fuels from coal are very inefficient, and huge amounts of water required.

These non-conventional sources currently account for 6% of US gas supply. Each of these alternatives would require a huge investment in research and infrastructure to exploit them, plus large amounts of now-expiring oil, before they could be brought online.

For example, in Canada about 200 thousand barrels a day are being produced in Alberta of non-conventional oil, but it takes about 2 barrels of oil in energy investment to produce 3 barrels of oil equivalent from those resources. Additionally, the environmental costs are horrendous and the process uses a tremendous amount of fresh water and also natural gas, both of which are in limited supply.

The major problem with non-conventional oil is that they cannot be exploited before the oil shocks cripple attempts to bring them on line, and the rate of extraction is far too slow to meet the huge global energy demand.

Ethanol production survives by the grace of a subsidy by the U.S. government from taxpayer dollars. Continuing the production of ethanol is purely a device for buying the Midwest U.S. farm vote, and may also be related to the fact that the company which makes 60% of U.S. ethanol is also one of the largest contributors of campaign money to the Congress – a distressing example of politics overriding logic.

Some enterprising individuals have converted their vehicles to run on vegetable oil discarded by fast food restaurants. I encourage everybody to consider doing this. However, it is not a "magic bullet" to our problem as there is simply not enough vegetable oil in the world to power more than a relatively small number of vehicles.

My response:

1. See the above question on why ethanol isn't a true substitute for oil.

2. See the above question on why hydrogen isn't a true substitute for oil.

3. Ask yourself: How long would it take for this prototype to being implemented on a wide scale? How much would that cost? Can it be used to fuel airplanes, tanks, cargo ships, large trucks, construction equipment, manufacturing plants? Can it be used to produce fertilizer or plastics?

I think you know the answers.

Like all other forms of alternative energy, we have run out of time to implement it before the crash. Currently, only one thermal depolymerization plant is operational. Thousands of such plants would need to come online before this technology would make even a small difference in our situation.

Furthermore, whatever comes out of the process must carry less useful energy than what went into the process, as required by the laws of thermodynamics. Finally, most of the waste input (such as plastics and tires) requires high grade oil to make in the first place.

The biggest problem with thermal depolymerization is that it is being advertised as a means to maintain business as usual. Such advertising promotes further consumption, provides us with a dangerously false sense of security, and encourages us to continue thinking that we don't need to make this issue a priority.

While I am about the world's biggest advocate for "New Energy" technologies such as Cold Fusion, and Zero Point, my optimism about their ability to help us cope with oil depletion is guarded.

While New Energy has some extremely exciting possibilities, the unfortunate realty is that as I write this, we get absolutely zero percent of our energy from these sources, and we have no functional prototypes.

So are these alternatives useless?

No, not at all. Whatever civilization emerges after the crash will likely derive a good deal of their energy from these technologies.

While traditional alternatives such as solar and wind are certainly worth investing in, they are in no way the magic bullets they are so often advertised as.

The following is an excerpt from Professor Richard Heinberg's book, The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Civilizations, in which he explains why the notion that "All we have to do is switch to solar, wind., etc . . ." is delusional in its' simplicity:

Furthermore, market indicators will likely come too late for us to implement whatever alternatives we have available. Once the price of oil gets high enough that people begin to seriously consider alternatives, those alternatives will become too expensive to implement on a wide scale. Reason: Oil is required to develop, manufacture, transport and implement oil alternatives such as solar panels, biomass, windmills, and particularly nuclear power plants, which require massive amounts of oil to construct and maintain.

There are many examples in history where a resource shortage spurned the development of alternative resources. Oil, however, is not just any resource. In our current world, it is the precondition for all other resources, including alternative ones.

Right now, a barrel of oil costs $30. It would cost between $100-$250 to get the amount of energy in that barrel of oil from renewable sources.

This means that an energy company won't be motivated to aggressively pursue renewable energy until the cost of oil double, triples, or quadruples.

At that point, our economy will be close to devastated. Our ability to implement renewables will be completely crippled.

In pragmatic terms, this means that if you want your home powered by solar panels or windmills, you had better do it soon. If you don't have these alternatives in place when the lights go out, they're going to stay out.

Expecting the oil companies to save you from the oil crash is about as wise as expecting the tobacco companies to save you from lung cancer.

As explained above, corporate officers are bound by law to do what is in the best interests of the corporation, so long as their actions are legal. Their legal obligation is to make money for the company, not to save the world.

None of the currently available alternatives have anywhere near the profit margin that oil does. Thus, even if an oil executive wanted to "do the right thing" and pursue oil alternatives, it is illegal for her to do so if it is not in the best interests of the company.

Expecting the oil companies, the government, or anybody else to solve this problem for us is simply suicidal. You, me, and every other "regular person" needs to be actively engaged in addressing this issue if there is to be any hope for humanity.

Absolutely, we will adapt. Part of that adaptation process will include most of us dying if we don't take massive action right now.

The human spirit is capable of some miraculous things. We need a miracle right now, so the human spirit had better get its' ass in gear, pronto.

Unfortunately, there is no law that says when humanity adapts to a resource shortage, everybody gets to survive. Think of any mass tragedy connected to resources such as oil, land, food, labor (slaves) buffalo, etc. . The societies affected usually survive, but in a drastically different and often unrecognizable form.

Yes, and lots of cheap oil has been the father of invention for the past 150 years. No invention has been mass produced without it.

How would you mass produce that invention without cheap oil?

How would you distribute that resource without cheap oil?

Is there any infrastructure currently in place to handle this currently nonexistent invention or discovery?

What is the profit margin? Is there a profit margin? Will the implementation of this invention or discovery destroy the automotive, energy, transportation or agribusiness industries? Would this invention or discovery be bad for Wall Street? How much of a shock to the Stock Market would it cause?

How long before it can be brought online on a society wide level?

Could it be implemented before billions of people die? Or would it be implemented only after that ghastly horror has motivated us to implement it?

How much oil would it take to develop it? To manufacture it? To transport it? To install it?

Can our current infrastructure be retrofitted for this yet unknown invention or discovery?

How would vested interests react?

Have you considered the fact that the multi-trillion dollar energy industry has been investing ungodly sums to this end with no success?

Have you considered that without cheap oil, none of our current technology could have been produced on more than a prototype or experimental scale?

These are questions you have to ask yourself before you stake your life on something that doesn't even exist yet.

Keep in mind that we often don't find solutions to serious problems. Or we find them only after many people have died. For instance, despite all of our technology, money and ingenuity, we have no cure for AIDS,Cancer, Diabetes, or even the common cold.

If you were diagnosed with a life threatening disease, would you take it upon yourself to prepare, or would you dismiss the diagnosis with "Oh, somebody will find a cure in the next couple of years before my condition gets really bad."

You need to take the issue of oil depletion personally and seriously if you want to live.

It may come as no surprise to you that our leaders are doing more to exacerbate the problem then they are to solve it. Rather then developing a reasonable plan for handling the coming Oil Crash, our leaders have decided to make a last ditch grab for what little cheap oil is available by stealing it from the nations that have it. With control over the world's dwindling supplies of cheap oil, they will have the ability to choose who lives and who dies.

The dynamics of our electoral system prevents our elected leaders from developing any other plan. In order to cope with the coming crisis, we are going to have to drastically reduce our consumption levels. This means less driving, less fast food, less consumer items, etc. . .

Most of our leaders are either former executives from the energy, transportation, or agribusiness industries, or they receive huge contributions from these industries. These are the exact industries that would be hurt by an effective conservation campaign. Consequently, expecting the government to launch such a campaign is futile. We're going to have to do it ourselves.

Keep in mind that when we asked for solutions to terrorism, all we got wasa color coded chart, a roll of duct tape, and a video of a bearded, homeless guy getting a free dental exam as solutions to terrorism.

In other words, we really are on our own.

If you're looking for a scapegoat, I don't think you will find it by looking to the usual suspects.

If you think the political left is at fault, and favor a more conservative solution, the result will be an exacerbation of what we've seen the past few years: more war, and less rights.

If you think the political right is at fault, and favor a more "leftist" solution, the result will likely be the similar to that seen during the Russian and Cuban revolutions: more war, and less rights.

Many of George W. Bush's energy policies are likely making the situation worse. At the same time, his administration has invested far more money into the development of renewable energy than Clinton ever did. While some of you may disagree with Bush's policies, he is certainly not ignoring the issue as Clinton did.

At this point, finger pointing will do us about as much good as a circular firing squad.

There are a couple of reasons why you haven't heard more:

1. 75% of the media (all newspapers, television and radio stations) are owned by 5 companies. Each of these companies is heavily invested in the energy, transportation, or agribusiness industries. If they were to publicly announce the truth about Peak Oil, investment in the stock market would dry up, the economy would plunge, chaos would ensue, and the whole deck of cards would come crashing down before our leaders and corporate elite have a chance to secure their own well-being.

2. The ramifications of Peak Oil are so serious that it is hard for anybody, including journalists and politicians, to accept it. Nobody wants to be called a "doomsayer." As Jimmy Carter found out in 1980, making the end of age of oil an issue is political suicide.

3. The average American may not be emotionally prepared to deal with Peak Oil. Peak Oil is a literal death sentence to much of our population as well as a figurative death sentence to the energy intensive American way of life. When faced with such news, most people choose to "kill the messenger."

When the cost of food soars, the only way to control the population will be through the institution of a fascist style police state. The Patriot Acts and related legislation are the foundation of that state.

In the context of Peak Oil, the wars in the Middle East are not wars of greed. Rather, they are wars of survival. Given our current infrastructure, that oil is necessary to keep our food and water supply running.

You can expect the U.S. to invade other oil rich nations such asSyria, Iran and Saudi Arabia within the next 2-5 years. As you watch the news, you can already notice the hints are being dropped. "Iran has WMD" or "Syria isn't cooperating in the war on terror" or "Saudi Arabia is funding terrorism". "The war on terror will last for decades." The stage is being set so that the American public will accept these future invasions.

World War III

Similarly, Canada is required by NAFTA to sell 60% of its natural gas to the U.S. When Canada begins to experience the energy shortage, they may seek to change the terms of that law. The U.S.

is unlikely to allow them to do so.

Why the big military build-up? The Russians (rightfully so) fear that the U.S. is trying to muscle in on the oil located in the Caspian sea.

Oh yeah, them too.

Essentially, every young man has been earmarked as a solider for future oil wars.

As things stand now, absolutely not.

I know the feeling.

From their perspective, there is no tomorrow.

We're going back to the Moon and onto Mars for four reasons:

Helium 3 sounds great, until you find out that a nuclear fusion reactor is needed for it to be of any use. Even after 40 years of research and billions of dollars spent, nobody has been able to build such a reactor.

Even if scientists solved the fusion problem, the the economics of extracting and transporting Helium 3 from the moon are particularly problematic. According to Jim Benson, chairman of SpaceDev in Poway, California, "it would be economically unfeasible . . you'd have to strip-mine large surfaces of the moon"

The fact that the Bush Administration is pursuing such an unviable source of fuel underscores how desperate the situation is getting.

Just wanted to see if you were paying attention.

Let's look at what has happened to the U.S. in just the last four years:

World Trade Center destroyed, budget surplus vanished, dysfunctional health care, honest elections gone, 2.5 million jobs lost, social security close to gone, government oversight of big business gone, weakened infrastructure, shrinking middle class, undermined civil liberties, tainted food supply.

On a symbolic level, the fact that the Statue of Liberty is now closed (due to budgetary constraints) tells you all you really need to know about the direction we're heading.

We won't be the first superpower to collapse. This is what happens when any civilization overshoots its resource base. It isn't a new thing. Over the course of history, the collapse of civilizations has been as inevitable as death and taxes. Any good book on the fall of the Roman Empire will give you a case of deja vu next time you watch the evening news.

Those of us lucky enough to live in the United States are like the cool kids who got invited to the big party. Unfortunately, the party's over

When the implications of Peak Oil hit me, I was pretty scared. I felt as though my whole future had just been drop kicked in one fell swoop. It took me a couple of days for the initial feeling of semi-panic to wear off.

The only way we are going to effectively cope with the end of the oil age is effectively cope with our fear and how we view what is to come.

According to author Tony Robbins, fear carries a message:

The solution to fear, Robbins writes, is:

Personally, I have come to believe that our external reality is essentially a mirror of our internal reality. If you walk around vibrating fear, you will attract external circumstances that exacerbate your fear. We tend to get what we rehearse. For this reason, it is of paramount importance that we strive for states of consciousness more productive than fear.

Most of us in consumer based countries like the U.S. are actually very nice people. In our hearts, we really do believe in ideals such as equality, brotherhood, and justice. We would never abuse, mistreat, or kill somebody just to get something of theirs. However, to support our oil based consumer lifestyle, our government goes out and does these things for us.

If the average American could feel the suffering that went into producing every piece of plastic in their home, every gallon of oil in their gas tank, and every piece of food on their dinner table, they would likely be sick to their stomach and would be willing to do whatever it takes to change things.

Peak Oil will force us to change things. Peak Oil does mean that the end of the world as we know it is at our doorstep. It also means that we have a chance to create a new world in which humanity lives in harmony with itself and the earth. Such a lifestyle is no longer simply "the right thing to do." It is now a necessity if we wish to survive as a species.

In The Truth about the War and Oil: The Coming Global Energy Crisis, author Stephen Hamilton Bergin takes an optimistic line that a better world will rise out the ashes.

According to Bergin, some kind of crisis is almost to be welcomed to dispose of worthless government and kleptocratic management, leading to some form of a new better life for the survivors.

In this regard, the experiences of former slaves following the collapse of slavery may hold some insight for us. When the system collapsed, many former slaves experienced considerable anxiety. After all, the plantation system was all that they had known, and all that their parents, grandparents and so forth had known. Many wandered nervously: What was going to replace the plantation system? How would they get their food? For whom would they work? Did they have the skills to survive in this new way of life? What would happen to their families?

You may find yourself asking these same questions in regards to what life after the oil crash will be like. The fact that we find ourselves in a situation analogous to that of slaves on the verge of freedom is not all that surprising. While we are not bonded by chains of iron, most of us are bonded by the chains of a debt-based, oil fueled civilization. The collapse of this civilization may provide us with a chance for true freedom.

The following list is by no means exhaustive. These are just some simple steps you can begin taking immediately.

(Listed in no particular order)

1. Educate yourself about Peak Oil and its ramifications. Read through the sites linked to in this site. Consider obtaining copies of books such The Party's Over: War, Oil, and the Fate of Industrial Civilizations by Richard Heinberg.

2. Educate others. If you're not sure how to go about doing so, consider forwarding them this site.

3. Seek out like minded folks. If you're not sure where to start, you may want to join the Yahoo group "Running on Empty 2." When I first learned about Peak Oil, that was the first place I went. I found the members of the group very friendly, helpful and patient with "newbies."

4. Perform Google searches for Peak Oil whenever you get the chance. As more people search for "Peak Oil", the folks at Google will take notice. This may result in increased mainstream media coverage.

5. Adopt a vegetarian/ vegan diet, or at least reduce your meat consumption as much as you can.

6. Start using your bicycle or public transportation instead of your car, whenever possible.

7. Limit your purchase of consumer items to those that you really need .

8. Reduce your use of electricity as much as possible. Consider investing in items such solar powered lanterns, battery chargers, radios, hot water heaters, laptop chargers, bicycled powered generators etc.

9. Consider converting your vehicle to Biodiesal.

10. Consider taking an organic farming class or joining a local food co-op.

11. Begin learning basic emergency medical procedures.

12. Investigate alternative forms of health care such as bioenergetic healing, self hypnosis etc. . .

13. Reduce your debt load as much as possible.

14. Begin thinking how you are going to survive through blackouts, food/water shortages and economic breakdowns.

15. If you own your home, start conducting research about installing solar panels or windmills.

Peak Oil is going to happen. People are going to die. We have waited way too long to have any chance at stopping it altogether.

We may be able to minimize the amount of suffering while maximizing the chances of building a successful post-oil civilization if we implement appropriate public policies such as:

The primary cause of the looming energy crisis is the fact that the world has more people than can be supported in a steady state renewable energy environment. The obvious solution is to reduce the world's population in the most civilized way possible.

According to Dale Alan Pfeifer:

In other words, if we do not reduce our population in an intelligent way, Mother Nature will do the job for us. We can do it ourselves if we take measures to:

1. Empower women to control the reproductive capacity of their bodies.

2. Inform people of the true nature and scope of the crisis. Many will voluntarily refrain from having children if they are aware of our situation.

3. Find practical, humane, and just solutions to immigration. In the US, the overwhelming majority of our population growth is projected to come from immigration. While this may have benefits from either economic or humanitarian perspectives, it will be disastrous from an ecological standpoint.

Conservation may not be popular, but without it, we have no hope of effectively coping with the coming oil shortages. Conservation measures should include measures to:

1. Eliminate tax reductions for SUV's

2. Pass legislation mandating higher fuel-efficiency standards

3. Finance a national program to promote the use of carpools, public transportation and bicycle riding.

4. Reduce subsidies for agribusiness while simultaneously supporting local , community based agriculture programs

5. Support the troops by informing people that our troops are dying primarily to support our oil based, consumer lifestyle. Slogans such "Save our troops by riding your bikes" or "Ride alone and you ride with Osama" could make it patriotic to conserve.

5. Replace ineffective drug war programs like "DARE" with programs that promote conservation and sustainable living.

If we do not take immediate, massive and sustained action to switch to renewable energy then civilization faces the sharpest and perhaps most violent dislocation in recent history.

There are a number of ways to do this:

1. Finance a "Manhattan" or "Apollo" style project to accelerate the development of renewable energy.

2. Give tax breaks to homeowners who install solar panels, wind mills, or similar systems.

3. Finance public transportation to a far greater degree than it currently is financed.

On local levels, quite possibly. Some communities have already begun instituting small scale, community based measures to ensure sustainability.

On the state or national levels? Absolutely not. As explained previously, the industries that now control our government are the same industries that would be hurt by such a mobilization.

That means we are going to have to do it ourselves.

So figure out what you can do and get to it.

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The principles of neighbourhood and subsistence will be disparaged by the globalists as "protectionism" - and that is exactly what it is. It is a protectionism that is just and sound, because it protects local producers and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local consumers. And the idea that local needs should be met first and only surpluses exported does not imply any prejudice against charity toward people in other places or trade with them. The principle of neighbourhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. And the principle of subsistence is in fact the best guarantee of giveable or marketable surpluses. This kind of protection is not "isolationism".

This following article is also worth a read...

From the February 2004 issue of Harper's Monthly

By Richard Manning

Richard Manning is the author of Against the Grain: How AgricultureHas Hijacked Civilization,

 to be published this month by North Point Press.

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.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet's "primary productivity." There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others. Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. "We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population," Kennan wrote. "In this situation, we cannot fait to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction."

"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.

As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts - the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since. Domestication was also a radical change in the distribution of wealth within the plant world. Plants can spend their solar income in several ways. The dominant and prudent strategy is to allocate most of it to building roots, stem, bark - a conservative portfolio of investments that allows the plant to better gather energy and survive the downturn years. Further, by living in diverse stands (a given chunk of native prairiecontains maybe 200 species of plants), these perennials provide services for one another, such as retaining water, protecting one another from wind, and fixing free nitrogen from the air to use as fertilizer.

Diversity allows a system to "sponsor its own fertility," to use visionary agronomist Wes Jackson's phrase. This is the plant world's norm. There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow in patches of a single species and store almost all of their income as seed, a tight bundle of carbohydrates easily exploited by seed eaters such as ourselves. Under normal circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea for a plant. But not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic eruptions. Such catastrophes strip established plant communities and create opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed bearers. It is no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the globe, it always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have, that this is because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly this is not true. They needed the power of flooding, which scoured landscapes and stripped out competitors. Nor is it an accident, I think, that agriculture arose independently and simultaneously around the globe just as the last ice age ended, a time of enormous upheaval when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes to create tidal waves of erosion. It was a time of catastrophe. Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modem American farm. Iowa's fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year. Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a "postage stamp" remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers' accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress.

When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter.

The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank. A farm field appropriates that energy, puts it into seeds we can cat. Much of the energy moves from the earth to the rings of fat around our necks and waists. And much of the energy is simply wasted, a trail of dollars billowing from the burglar's satchel.

I've already mentioned that we humans take 40 percent of the globe's primary productivity every year. You might have assumed we and our livestock eat our way through that volume, but this is not the case. Part of that total - almost a third of it - is the potential plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or when tropical rain forests are cut for grazing or when plows destroy the deep mat of prairie roots that held the whole business together, triggering erosion. 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 cat. 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.

Six thousand years before sodbusters broke up Iowa, their Caucasian blood ancestors broke up the Hungarian plain, an area just northwest of the Caucasus Mountains. Archaeologists call this tribe the LBK, short for linearbandkeramik, the German word that describes the distinctive pottery remnants that mark their occupation of Europe. Anthropologists call them the wheat-beef people, a name that better connects those ancients along the Danube to my fellow Montanans on the Upper Missouri River. These proto-Europeans had a full set of domesticated plants and animals, but wheat and beef dominated. All the domesticates came from an area along what is now the Iraq-Syria-Turkey border at the edges of the Zagros Mountains. This is the center of domestication for the Western world's main crops and livestock, ground zero of catastrophic agriculture.

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 andmoving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major "corrective" famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period. The incidence, however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an influx of new food to Europe. The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French, Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant mortality rate - all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.

The precolonial famines of Europe raised the question: What would happen when the planet's supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer. In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.

The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain - wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased "efficiency" of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet. For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world's most severe poverty. The experience in population control in the developing world is by now clear: It is not that people make more people so much as it is that they make more poor people. In the forty-year period beginning about 1960, the world's population doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3 billion to the world's poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised that grain contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position. Discussion of these, the most poor, however, is largely irrelevant to the American situation. We say we have poor people here, but almost no one in this country lives on less than one dollar a day, the global benchmark for poverty. It marks off a class of about 1.3 billion people, the hard core of the larger group of 2 billion chronically malnourished people - that is, one third of humanity. We may forget about them, as most Americans do. 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.

Fertilizer makes a pretty fine bomb right off the shelf, a chemistry lesson Timothy McVeigh taught at Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995 - not a small matter, in that the green revolution has made nitrogen fertilizers ubiquitous in some of the more violent and desperate comers of the world. Still, there is more to contemplate in nitrogen's less sensational chemistry. The chemophobia of modem times excludes fear of the simple elements of chemistry's periodic table. We circulate petitions, hold hearings, launch websites, and buy and sell legislators in regard to polysyllabic organic compounds - polychlorinated biphenyls, polyvinyls, DDT, 2-4d, that sort of thing - not simple carbon or nitrogen. Not that agriculture's use of the more ornate chemistry is benign - an infant born in a rural, wheat-producing county in the United States has about twice the chance of suffering birth defects as one born in a rural place that doesn't produce wheat, an effect researchers blame on chlorophenoxy herbicides. Focusing on pesticide pollution, though, misses the worst of the pollutants. Forget the polysyllabic organics. It is nitrogen - the wellspring of fertility relied upon by every Eden-obsessed backyard gardener and suburban groundskeeper - that we should fear most.

Those who model our planet as an organism do so on the basis that the earth appears to breathe - it thrives by converting a short list of basic elements from one compound into the next, just as our own bodies cycle oxygen into carbon dioxide and plants cycle carbon dioxide into oxygen. In fact, two of the planet's most fundamental humors are oxygen and carbon dioxide. Another is nitrogen. Nitrogen can be released from its "fixed" state as a solid in the soil by natural processes that allow it to circulate freely in the atmosphere. This also can be done artificially. Indeed, humans now contribute more nitrogen to the nitrogen cycle than the planet itself does. That is, humans have doubled the amount of nitrogen in play. This has led to an imbalance. It is easier to create nitrogen fertilizer than it is to apply it evenly to fields. When farmers dump nitrogen on a crop, much is wasted. It runs into the water and soil, where it either reacts chemically with its surroundings to form new compounds or flows off to fertilize something else, somewhere else. That chemical reaction, called acidification, is noxious and contributes significantly to acid rain. One of the compounds produced by acidification is nitrous oxide, which aggravates the greenhouse effect. Green growing things normally offset global warming by sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on farm fields plus methane from decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre, like every acre of Los Angeles freeway, a net contributor to global warming. Fertilization is equally worrisome. Rainfall and irrigation water inevitably washes the nitrogen from fields to creeks and streams, which flows into rivers, which floods into the ocean. This explains why the Mississippi River, which drains the nation's Corn Belt, is an environmental catastrophe. The nitrogen fertilizes artificially large blooms of algae that in growing suck all the oxygen from the water, a condition biologists call anoxia, which means "oxygen-depleted." Here there's no need to calculate long-term effects, because life in such places has no long term: everything dies immediately.

The Mississippi River's heavily fertilized effluvia has created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey. America's biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can't eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can't eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don't. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it's about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food.

About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled "processed," meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America's poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food. It began with the industrialization of Victorian England. The empire was then flush with sugar from plantations in the colonies. Meantime the cities were flush with factory workers. There was no good way to feed them. And thus was born the afternoon tea break, the tea consisting primarily of warm water and sugar. If the workers were well off, they could also afford bread with heavily sugared jam - sugar-powered industrialization. There was a 500 percent increase in per capita sugar consumption in Britain between 1860 and 1890, around the time when the life expectancy of a male factory worker was seventeen years. By the end of the century the average Brit was getting about one sixth of his total nutrition from sugar, exactly the same percentage Americans get today - double what nutritionists recommend.

There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The rinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap. It appears, however, that the corn cycle is about to come full circle. If a bipartisan coalition of farm-state lawmakers has their way - and it appears they will - we will soon buy gasoline containing twice as much fuel alcohol as it does now. Fuel alcohol already ranks second as a use for processed corn in the United States, just behind corn sweeteners. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA calls this a bargain, because gasohol is a "clean fuel." This claim to cleanness is in dispute at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. Nor does this claim cover clean conscience; some still might be unsettled knowing that our SUVs' demands for fuel compete with the poor's demand for grain. Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot gives the diner all that carrot's energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other inedibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten. As a rough rule of thumb, that factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain, which is why some fish, such as tuna, can be a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator, meaning it not only doesn't eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat other fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred times, more like a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant. This is fine as far as it goes, but the vegetarian's case can break down on some details. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99 percent of wildlife's habitat, as farming has done in Iowa, is a kindness. In rural Michigan, for example, the potato farmers have a peculiar tactic for dealing with the predations of whitetail deer. They gut-shoot them with small-bore rifles, in hopes the deer will limp off to the woods and die where they won't stink up the potato fields.

Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the energy argument by eating processed food, with its ten calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced. The question, then, is: Does eating processed food such as soy burger or soy milk cancel the energy benefits of vegetarianism, which is to say, can I eat my lamb chops in peace? Maybe. If I've done my due diligence, I will have found out that the particular lamb I am eating was both local and grass-fed, two factors that of course greatly reduce the embedded energy in a meal. I know of ranches here in Montana, for instance, where sheep eat native grass under closely controlled circumstances - no farming, no plows, no corn, no nitrogen. Assets have not been stripped. I can't eat the grass directly. This can go on. There are little niches like this in the system. Each person's individual charge is to find such niches. Chances are, though, any meat eater will come out on the short end of this argument, especially in the United States. Take the case of beef. Cattle are grazers, so in theory could live like the grass-fed lamb. Some cattle cultures - those of South America and Mexico, for example - have perfected wonderful cuisines based on grass-fed beef. This is not our habit in the United States, and it is simply a matter of habit. Eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders. The manure is rich in nitrogen and once provided a farm's fertilizer. The feedlots, however, are now far removed from farm fields, so it is simply not "efficient" to haul it to cornfields. It is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork. Still, these livestock do something we can't. They convert grain's carbohydrates to high-quality protein. All well and good, except that per capita protein production in the United States is about double what an average adult needs per day. Excess cannot be stored as protein in the human body but is simply converted to fat. This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black mass remake of the loaves-and-fishesmiracle.Prairie's productivity is lost for grain, grain's productivity is lost in livestock, livestock's protein is lost to human fat - all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat. This explains why the energy expert David Pimentel is so worried that the rest of the world will adopt America's methods. He should be, because the rest of the world is. Mexico now feeds 45 percent of its grain to livestock, up from 5 percent in 1960. Egypt went from 3 percent to 31 percent in the same period, and China, with a sixth of the world's population, has gone from 8 percent to 26 percent. All of these places have poor people who could use the grain, but they can't afford it. I live among elk and have learned to respect them. One moonlit night during the dead of last winter, I looked out my bedroom window to see about twenty of them grazing a plot of grass the size of a living room. Just that small patch among acres of other species of native prairie grass. Why that species and only that species of grass that night in the worst of winter when the threat to their survival was the greatest? What magic nutrient did this species alone contain? What does a wild animal know that we don't? I think we need this knowledge. Food is politics. That being the case, I voted twice in 2002. The day after Election Day, in a truly dismal mood, I climbed the mountain behind my house and found a small herd of elk grazing native grasses in the morning sunlight. My respect for these creatures over the years has become great enough that on that morning I did not hesitate but went straight to my job, which was to rack a shell and drop one cow elk, my household's annual protein supply. I voted with my weapon of choice - an act not all that uncommon in this world, largely, I think, as a result of the way we grow food. I can see why it is catching on. Such a vote has a certain satisfying heft and finality about it. My particular bit of violence, though, is more satisfying, I think, than the rest of the globe's ordinary political mayhem. I used a rifle to opt out of an insane system. I killed, but then so did you when you bought that package of burger, even when you bought that package of tofu burger. I killed, then the rest of those elk went on, as did the grasses, the birds, the trees, the coyotes, mountain lions, and bugs, the fundamental productivity of an intact natural system, all of it went on.