[FRIAM] My biggest complaint about ethanol as automobile fuel
Bill Eldridge
dcbill at volny.cz
Wed Aug 16 15:45:01 EDT 2006
Douglas Roberts wrote:
> Well, perhaps I'm completely wrong, and there is always going to be
> the ability to produce plenty of food for our exponentially growing
> world population.
Perhaps not an exponential population growth rate (those spikes and dips
in the 1950's and 1960's probably had a lot to do with Chairman Mao -
"the total population of China increased 57% to 700 million [in 1976],
from the constant 400 million mark during the span between the Opium War
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_War> and the Chinese Civil War"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War>
as well as the 1959-1962 deaths from the "Great Leap Forward"
<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/World_population_increase_history.svg>
> But I don't believe it. On a related topic, let's hear how we're
> going to address this issue:
>
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060816/wl_nm/environment_water_dc_2
>
I did note that water was a greater worry in this area than availability
of land.
Sorry to switch subjects, but from Steve Boyan:
In 1990, when I first read that 10 people could be fed with the
grain that you would feed a cow that would be turned into food for
one person, I was impressed. But I was not moved. The reason: If 10
people would be fed because I gave up meat, I'd give it up. But, I
thought, if I give up meat, it won't have that impact: it probably
won't have any impact on anything at all, except me.
I was wrong. If I had known that for every pound of beef I did not
eat, I would save anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 gallons of water, I
would have been moved.
...John Robbins points out that in the 1980s and 1990s, to conserve
water, most of us went to low-flow showerheads. If you take a daily
seven-minute shower, he says, and you have a 2-gallon-per-minute
low-flow showerhead, you use about 100 gallons of water per week, or
5,200 gallons of water per year. If you had used the old-fashioned
3-gallon-per-minute showerhead, I calculate you would have used
7,644 gallons of water per year. So by going low flow, you saved
almost 2,500 gallons of water per year. Wonderful. But by giving up
one pound of beef that year, you'd save maybe double that.
(I'm not sure I absolutely believe these astronomical water figures, but
I do believe they're high)
> Perhaps, as the new director of Los Alamos National Laboratory has
> claimed, wonders will be worked through the implementation of
> miraculous improvements in efficiency.
Please note that the efficiency gains below are for the most part
without the relatively recent genetically modified grains,
which as one focus includes improved plant usage of water.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge proponent of exponentiation, at least
> when it comes to the compound interest law. Not, however, when it
> involves populations breeding beyond the food supply's ability to sustain.
>
> --Doug
>
> On 8/16/06, *Bill Eldridge* <dcbill at volny.cz <mailto:dcbill at volny.cz>>
> wrote:
>
>
> Malthus sighting reported, airport lounge, talking to Elvis.
>
> 1) Food shortages currently have much more to do with barriers to
> transportation, including wars and corrupt governments, as well as
> breakdowns of markets - inability to trade profitably for various
> reasons.
>
> 2) Land availability isn't really a problem - efficiency in
> agriculture, including
> genetically modified plants improves crop yield and sustainability,
> while there are still vast areas of land open to cultivation.
> Water supply
> is a more pressing problem, however, as is the oil required to
> take care
> of growing these plants. Where the race is for improving land and
> desert
> reclamation, water desalinization, faster growing crops, ocean-based
> crops, etc. I would guess that we'll manage the race on this front,
> aside from the oil issue.
>
> 3) As a vegetarian, I can complain that all these crops go to feed
> a cow as
> the "middle man" on the way to a steak dinner - as inefficient as
> growing crops
> for a tank of gas. However, we have to be a little historic -
> nature was
> converting crops and biomatter into oil for millions of years just
> for our
> spoiled little selves to exhaust, so just because we now get to
> see the process
> accelerated doesn't make it less moral. After all, a number of now
> extinct
> dinosaurs could have used those veggie burgers if they hadn't been
> turned into our oil.
>
> 4) While I'm not impressed with ethanol as a fuel replacement, it
> does 2 important
> things. First, it focuses us on vastly improving agricultural
> efficiency, which means
> as a side-effect we're liable to get some cheaper foods where cost
> of food really
> is a problem (okay, it also exacerbates water problems. Sigh).
> Secondly, it's at least
> a step towards getting us away from the oil-only paradigm, and
> hopefully that means
> other steps will follow. This includes moving past the Middle
> East-dominated energy
> cartel as a political issue, as well as opening up the positive
> Pandora's Box of once you
> start taking alternative fuels as serious, economically sound
> options, versus the ridiculous
> naysaying of the 2000 election, then there's less market
> resistance to actually deploying
> these solutions.
>
> So I guess I feel at this point that any movement is better than
> none, and that it's peripheral
> to the starvation issue despite seeming closely related.
>
> Cheers,
> Bill
>
>
>
> Douglas Roberts wrote:
> At some point in time it will be possible to divide all the the
> bodies in the world by all the food in the world, and discover
> that there is not enough to go around, political boundaries
> notwithstanding. I don't know when that particular point in time
> will arrive, but I am convinced that in the absence a large
> population die-off (as compared to the current exponential global
> population growth that we are witnessing), arriving sooner or
> later at that point in time is a certainty.
>
> Given that, trading off a full year's worth of food for one person
> for a f*cking tank of gas galls me.
>
> --Doug
>
> On 8/16/06, *Martin C. Martin* <martin at martincmartin.com
> <mailto:martin at martincmartin.com>> wrote:
>
> Aren't the main causes of hunger political rather than supply or
> technological? I think we have the technology and resources
> to feed the
> world population many times over. The poorest countries seem
> to be run
> by despots that use food as a weapon. Although, I'm not sure how
> tightening supply and creating new markets would help/hurt things.
>
> - Martin
>
> Douglas Roberts wrote:
> > It is nicely described here:
> >
> > http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/08/21/8383659/index.htm
> >
> > --Doug
> >
> > --
> > Doug Roberts, RTI International
> > droberts at rti.org <mailto:droberts at rti.org>
> <mailto:droberts at rti.org <mailto:droberts at rti.org>>
> > doug at parrot-farm.net <mailto:doug at parrot-farm.net>
> <mailto:doug at parrot-farm.net <mailto:doug at parrot-farm.net>>
> > 505-455-7333 - Office
> > 505-670-8195 - Cell
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
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>
> --
> Doug Roberts, RTI International
> droberts at rti.org <mailto:droberts at rti.org>
> doug at parrot-farm.net <mailto:doug at parrot-farm.net>
> 505-455-7333 - Office
> 505-670-8195 - Cell
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
> http://www.friam.org
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>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
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>
>
>
> --
> Doug Roberts, RTI International
> droberts at rti.org <mailto:droberts at rti.org>
> doug at parrot-farm.net <mailto:doug at parrot-farm.net>
> 505-455-7333 - Office
> 505-670-8195 - Cell
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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