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Modern industrial and petroleum-based agriculture is absurdly wasteful. For every calorie of energy the modern agricultural system produces, 13 calories were spent growing it and distributing it ( https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/food/us-food-system-factsheet - this data is somewhat old but if you have better I'd love to see it ). Historical farming methods tended to have ratios like 1:5-10 as opposed to 13:1, but nobody really notices that we're technically massively less efficient at turning energy into food due to the abundance of energy provided by fossil fuels. We're currently expending those fossil fuels at breakneck speeds, and in many cases using farming methods that contribute to environmental degradation and loss of soil quality as well. It'd be dishonest to just shove those costs into the energy equation, but I think there's a real and serious issue there that a lot of people have spent a lot of time talking about.
Industrial agriculture is actually a tremendously bad deal when you look at the level of raw energy we put into the system and what we get out of it when compared to other options, and food wastage is made worse because the costs of that waste are magnified by the sheer inefficiency of the system that produced it. Sure, an apple you throw away because it had a worm in it or went off isn't that big of a deal, but when that apple was produced by the modern day industrial system of agriculture you're wasting a lot more energy than you were in the past.
Finally, a lot of food is wasted for reasons that a lot of people don't like (corporate profitability, aesthetics, etc). I believe you live in Australia - if you're interested in learning more on that particular aspect, I recommend checking out The War on Waste https://iview.abc.net.au/video/DO1624H001S00
(edited solely for spacing/readability)
I don't really see the problem here. Like, why is the energy input/output ratio the relevant metric? Obviously modern agriculture is going to involve more energy usage since we now have tractors and stuff and we didn't use to. But that's also why we are now able to feed 8 billion people. Energy is there to be used - and what's a better use for it than feeding the world?
I don't believe there is another viable option to "industrial agriculture" when it comes to producing the amount of food we need. And if your problem is that it uses natural biofuels, I don't agree, but that's an argument for getting the required energy from other sources rather than for scrapping all the combine harvesters.
Sustainability is the biggest one. Energy is one of the most fundamental building blocks of human society and existence, and the way we spend and manage it is extremely important. To use a financial metaphor, spending more than you earn is not usually considered a solid strategy for improving your financial conditions for the future. Our current farming habits are spending accumulated energy rather than helping to collect it, and this is a deadly serious concern over the long term. Of course, it isn't the only issue - modern industrial farming practices are bad for the soil and planet in a huge number of ways. Some of them are more local, like the decline in soil quality and damage caused by excessive pesticide usage. Some of them are bigger issues which only show up as problems later on - like the excessive usage of antibiotics used to help animals grow, which are currently contributing to the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. These problems are all solvable, yes, but solving problems takes time, energy and attention.
Yes, and there's nothing wrong with tractors existing. But as has been pointed out, they're not really the biggest contributor to these issues.
And this is actually a big fucking problem now that we're spending energy to create food rather than generating it. Currently, we're only able to support that number of people by drawing down on a limited resource which does not renew itself on any timescale relevant to human lives (it takes a long time to make fossil fuels!). On a societal level, the discovery and utilisation of fossil fuels was the equivalent of a massive lottery win - a huge, one-off windfall of useful, usable energy. If you're incredibly rich, you can afford to spend far more than you make - for a while. But when you get a whole bunch of dependents reliant upon those resources, what happens when you run out?
There's a very glib saying associated with sustainability practices - "What cannot be sustained, won't be." Right now, the population we have is unsustainable, only made possible because we are drawing down on the fossil-fuels that were formed over millions of years. Those fossil fuels won't last forever, and we currently have no adequate replacement for them when they become uneconomical to extract (people tend to get the easiest-to-extract resources first, leaving the harder-to-utilise ones for later). We haven't just got an unsustainable system of food production, our system of food production produces negative externalities and degrades the environment in ways that will make future agriculture more difficult.
Building AGI(unless you're Big Yud). Setting up sustainable and renewable power sources. Leaving a useful inheritance for those who come after us. Space exploration. Scientific research. Sustaining industrial civilisation over a longer timescale, giving us more potential opportunities to find useful things and giving us more time for technological (and cultural) development. Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that we need to keep human numbers down in total, but that our current population bump should have been stretched out through time so that the growth could happen in a more sustainable and enduring way.
You're correct! There isn't another viable alternative to industrial agriculture, and there isn't a way to produce the amount of food we need. This doesn't mean that Demeter is going to descend from the sky in a cloud of smoke and give us a sustainable, energy-positive farming method that doesn't require fossil fuels. It means that people are going to needlessly, pointlessly starve to death when more prudent management of our natural resources could have let them live longer and more satisfying lives. You don't need a crystal ball to predict what happens when a population outgrows the carrying capacity of their environment - you can see it happen all the time in nature, and it isn't particularly pleasant to go through.
The malthusian long term could be 5 billion years. All those problems were supposed to be insurmountable centuries ago, but the carrying capacity of the earth has only grown exponentially. Tech beats nominally diminishing resources every time. The EROIE of the past was irrelevant, they had no idea what a lump of coal, a vial of kerosene, a handful of uranium ore, could do.
My reply to concerns like this has been consistent over time - where's the energy source that powers modern industrial civilisation once we run out of fossil fuels? Renewables and environmentally friendly forms of energy generation, as nice as they are, can't do it. Nuclear fusion has been 20 years away from being economical for the past 60 years, and there isn't a single nuclear power plant generating power at a profit without substantial government assistance anywhere in the world. You're right that the EROEI of the past isn't really relevant here, but the reason why it is brought up is in contrast to the negative EROEI of the present. Previously, making food meant that there was more net energy available to humans - now it means that there is less. We're eating the civilizational seed corn already. When the fundamental basis of your society is energy positive, your society is substantially more sustainable. We're currently consuming our savings faster than we can earn, and just hoping that we find a payday that can prop us up longer. There's no guarantee that that payday will ever arrive.
If you actually go and look at history, you are not going to see a slow but exponential ramp up towards progress and complexity. You'll see a series of rises followed by falls - the progress of science did actually go into reverse at multiple points in history, and we're looking at the sort of trends and conditions that very reliably precede moments like that. Earth's true carrying capacity is unknowable and constant, but if you're judging based on what humans can do, we have actually gone backwards several times (Bronze-age collapse, collapse of Rome, etc).
Not only can they do it, but solar or nuclear could do it all alone if everything else vanished. Not that it's going to be necessary. What is your basis for saying this? Is it some flimsy extrapolation like: 'Based on current consumption , If we go 100%, we'll run out of some rare mineral in 2 years, or landfill space to put old windblades'.
That's due to safety regulations. If we went back to good old rugged soviet standards, it would be dirt cheap.
Payday comes every month like clockwork. The proven reserves of oil keep increasing, to say nothing of the stuff we haven't learned to harness yet.
Does it bother you that you could have said the same thing every year since at least the industrial revolution, and be wrong every time?
Solar can't do it - solar power is great and you can do a lot with it, but solar energy is not capable of replacing conventional fossil fuels without substantial decreases in energy consumption. You can work this out by looking at how much energy society spends, and then seeing how much space you'd have to fill up with solar panels in order to supply it (the answer is "too much").
Why haven't China or Russia started mass producing nuclear powerplants then? The Chinese give absolutely zero shits about safety/not cutting corners, and yet they continue to use fossil fuels rather than nuclear power, despite the massive geopolitical gains that would be associated with no longer being reliant on fossil fuels. The "safety regulations" conspiracy that somehow covers the entire globe and lets Greta Thunberg dictate energy policy to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping strikes me as substantially less realistic than current nuclear power technology being largely unprofitable.
Global oil and gas discoveries hit their lowest level for 75 years in 2021. They've since gone up, but 77% of recent oil discoveries have been off-shore (harder to access, more energy investment required to extract). Proven reserves of oil are increasing, but they're not increasing as quickly as consumption is, and that's going to be a problem when those two lines intersect. The stuff we haven't learned to harness yet... we haven't learned to harness yet, so there's no point talking about it. I don't get to claim my financial problems don't exist because the zero point energy in my completely empty wallet would be extremely valuable if I sold it.
No? Hubbert was wrong about the actual peak of conventional oil volume, but he was very close on the timing. Similarly, the world has been tracking the World3 model from the Limits to Growth study fairly well, and that predicts a halt to global GDP growth sometime in the next two decades. If you've got a convincing refutation of that model and the predictions it is making I'd love to read it.
The answer is 10 000-20 000 sq miles(for electricity in the US), which is the size of lake erie. For all the energy in the entire world, it's going to be a small fraction of the sahara.
They are vastly expanding their nuclear capacity as we speak. .
In 1939 the department of the interior projected that oil would last only 13 more years, and again in 1951 it was projected that oil would run out 13 years later. In Limits to growth (1972), Gold was supposed to run out in 1981, silver and mercury 1985, zinc 1990, oil before 1992. In 1992 they published the revised ‘beyond the limits’, where they pushed it all back a few years, as they always do. And 30 years later they’re still doing the same thing, like a broken record – oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now… oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now… oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now.
That figure, I think, comes from this report that was linked in your link. Having skimmed it, I can't tell the exact methodology they use, but it seems they take some sort of weighted average of the area/energy/year of the various solar plants in the US and use some basic modeling as it extrapolates up. I see no mention of transmission losses or of attempting to model the geographical and grid locations the next solar plants would actually be built to reach the power production that actually does power all USA households.
Locations aren't fungible in power plants due in part to transmission losses (among other factors), and obviously this is even moreso for solar plants because location directly affects how much sunlight is received and also the weather which is affected by the location. As such, any sort of meaningful estimate of solar plant area we need to power all USA households is necessarily going to involve modeling specific plants in specific locations to match the load that's being drawn at various locations without negatively affecting the grid with congestion and such. Whatever modeling that's being done in that paper doesn't seem to come anywhere near that.
Solar and nuclear together, perhaps those two techs could be all we need for our energy needs; I'd say nuclear would be holding up 99% of the burden in that case, though.
That's before getting into the massive battery (and other energy storage) build up that would happen to account for solar's intermittent uptime if we were to go full 100% solar.
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