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Peak Oil: Keep Off the Grass
Luke Burgess, The End of Cheap Oil
Chew on this — roughly 580,000,000 gallons of gas is used in lawn mowers annually!
That’s an average of over 1.5 million gallons a day spent on just keeping grass short. And really, that’s just the beginning of how much petro is used on lawn care.
Homeowners in the U.S. spend over $25 BILLION a year on lawn care products, like pesticides and fertilizers, most of which are petroleum-based.
Now, according to the latest EIA statistics, the world produces only 74,000 barrels of spare oil. And with oil demand growth in China and India accelerating at their fastest rate ever, we can expect demand to outstrip supply soon.
So with crude prices set to continue increasing, we’re bound to see a sharp price increase in pesticides and fertilizers and probably many more unkempt yards.
(18 July 2006)
These figures come from Redesigning the American Lawn by F. Herbert Bormann et al, Yale University Press, 1993 — so they may be higher now. Time perhaps for ‘food not lawns.’ The photo on the left is my friend’s highly productive food garden front yard which also looks good and gets pleasant comments from the neighbours. The circles have a functional aspect, allowing a size-matched lightweight dome containing chickens to be moved around the garden, providing crop clean up, weed control, natural fertilizer and of course eggs. While it may be seen as a bit radical at first in most neighborhoods, such things will be increasingly accepted as the money spent on lawn and food become to be seen more and more as unsupportable waste, as prices continue to rise post-peak.
-AF
How the Energy Crisis Will Help My Diet
Glenn Morton, The Oil Drum
Like many Americans I am a bit overweight and this is true even after living a year in China eating indigenous food and shedding 15% of my body mass. Coming back to the fattest city in the land of the big helping, I am concerned about regaining that weight given the fact that Americans eat 920 kg of food annually (3,800 kcal per person per day). But never fear, the energy crisis will eventually help me maintain my desired weight. Many are going to wonder what does the energy crisis have to do with being fat. Well, the modern agricultural system is nothing but a system which turns petroleum and natural gas into food. Thirteen kilocalories of energy is used to produce each kilocalorie of food we eat.
When energy becomes scarce, the quantity of food will decline.
The first place to look at this is in fertilizer. Nitrogen fertilizers are made using lots of energy. In the US it is natural gas which is used but in China it is coal. The manufacture of nitrogen fertilizer uses 1% of the world’s energy supply. And this one percent feeds us. There is a direct correlation between fertilizer price and natural gas price in the US.
(18 July 2006)
Glenn does the maths on turning corn into nitrogen fertilizer to prove that it wouldn’t work — but that’s such a crazy idea I’m not sure I would have bothered. Glenn is an oil geologist and was one of the first people to raise the alarm about the state of the world’s largest oil field, Ghawar.
-AF
Kuwait To Clarify Its Oil Reserves Within Days
Dow Jones, Easy Bourse
Kuwait’s new Oil Minister Sheikh Ali Al Jarah Al Sabah said in his first public statement Tuesday that the country would clarify its actual oil reserves, following a report that they stood at less than half the claimed volume.
In a statement published on the Kuwait Oil Ministry’s Web site, Sheikh Ali said he had “undertaken to clarify the truth and volume of Kuwaiti oil reserves” for lawmakers and ministers over the next few days.
Kuwait publicly boasts 100 billion barrels of oil reserves but a report some months ago by Petroleum Intelligence Weekly said internal Kuwaiti records suggested the volume was only 48 billion barrels.
(18 July 2006)
Peak oil not piquing the interest of CVRD board
Don Maroc, News Leader & Pictorial (British Columbia)
A motion put forward at the Cowichan Valley Regional District board meeting last week, “That staff prepare a report regarding ‘Global Peak Oil’ as it pertains to the CVRD and local government issues and solutions …” ran into vituperative, scornful, disparaging comments from nearly all of the regional directors.
The substance of the motion, the looming fossil fuel crisis and its corollary global climate change, barely got through to most directors. Instead they followed administrator Frank Raimondo’s jocular but serious threat to forbid any staff members from attending meetings of the CVRD’s roundtable on the environment. Purportedly the staff have no time to spend gathering information and writing reports on such a distant topic. Instead they spend their time turning out 50-page documents covering huge development proposals in Mill Bay, Cowichan Bay, Youbou, and Paldi.
North Cowichan Councillor Glen Ridgway voiced the feelings of many when he laughingly explained that even if there is a crisis, and he wasn’t too sure about that, there is absolutely nothing we can do locally that would address the problem. Ridgway is a lawyer so he ought to know.
When the vote came it was 13 to 1 or 12 to 2 against the motion. It all happened so fast it was hard to tell…
(19 July 2006)
Perhaps the CWRD board could take a lesson from the Indiana legislature, which in 1897 almost approved a bill to declare that pi would henceforth be equal to a more convenient number:
“Since the rule in present use [presumably pi equals 3.14159…] fails to work …, it should be discarded as wholly wanting and misleading in the practical applications,” the bill declared. Instead, mathematically inclined Hoosiers could take their pick among [several different values: 3.2, 4, or 3.23]
– Straight Dope
In the words of the late physicist Richard Feynmann:
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, because nature cannot be fooled.
-BA
