Energy, population, and production

could we live more slowly?

I often read words to the effect that we can’t reduce the speed and scale of our economies, physically cannot to it, without drastic die-offs.

The theory is that no low energy system could possibly produce enough food for a population above 8 billion, that since our current system runs on diesel fuel and Haber-Bosch ammonia and more or less feeds all of us (with constant moving shortages and famines), we therefore could not feed ourselves otherwise, so the day Haber-Bosch dies so do half of us.

This belief is verbally justified, believed to be proven, by pointing at the slopes of energy throughput and population growth. They’re parallel, therefore related by cause and effect. The increasing energy has resulted in increasing available food calories which has resulted in larger populations. Ipso facto

I will grant you that the paths are parallel. I will not grant that there is a cause and effect relationship in which the increasing energy throughput was a necessary input into either total food growth or population growth. Aside from pointing out the concurrence, no attempt is made to prove linkage.

Everyone knows and it can be easily seen and proven that huge amounts of the energy increases did not go into food production. We invented cars. We invented jet planes. We invented rubber duckies and cell phones. We can’t eat any of them.

Haber-Bosch has allowed us to continue to obtain large yields from dying and departing topsoil. I don’t believe that it has been to our benefit. We know other ways to replace and fix nitrogen, many of which don’t require any fossil or concentrated energy at all.

Of what we produce in barren lands drugged with Haber-Bosch, huge amounts are used in ways other than to feed the 8 billion, with enough spare nitrogen left over to create vast dead zones offshore from almost every major river on Earth.

We know that our meat industrial protein production system is horribly out of balance to the ecosystem and to our nutritional needs. Most of America is obese and sickly, and there is no reasonable dispute that our diets contribute mightily to that.

Instead of having a conversation about rational meat and food production and consumption, everybody chooses up sides and demands that the other side either (a) never eat another bite of meat, or (b) accept a McDonald’s on every street corner and two burgers in every meal.

Meanwhile, when I suggest that we de-energize our food production system both sides look aghast at me and say, “Which four billion do you want to kill?”

If we needed grain calories to feed humans, the best place to find them would be in trucks going to feedlots, hog factories, and chicken factories. And to '“biofuel” factories. But we don’t need grain calories to feed to humans. Instead we demand grain calories to feed to cows, hogs, chickens, cars, tractors, trucks, and airplanes.

There is not enough room in this essay to fully express what a toxic and wasteful fiction industrial “biofuel” is.

Real biofuel. Photo by Gloria McFadden

If we parked all the cars, tractors, trucks, and airplanes, if we fed all the cows on grass, all the hogs on the acorns in the back yard and the garbage from the kitchen, fed all the chickens on the bugs in the cowshit and horseshit, we could save hundreds of billions of BTUs every year, free up hundreds of thousands of acres of cornfield, and probably feed all 8 billion plus humans more nourishing diets than at least two billion of us are living on now. And just as a side benefit this change would totally eliminate the “need” for industrial agriculture’s herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and antibiotics, none of which we should be applying to Earth anyway. We know that most of them aren’t good for us, one at a time, and we’ve got no clue what all of them put together do. We do know that they kill bees, bugs, and birds.

I’ll give you a hint: something has made such a high percentage of the American population insane that we have a President who shits his pants on national TV and talks gibberish.

Exactly none of the energy used to ship various useful and useless products both ways across every ocean on Earth, exactly none of the energy keeping airplanes aloft, exactly none of the energy spent making portland cement and concrete, none of the energy used in Aggregating Insanity (AI), none of the energy in most of industrial life, provides one single calorie to keep the 8 plus billion alive.

Therefore we do not need to expend any of that energy to feed our current population without die-off

And what about the 8 billion themselves? Don’t we read every day about the inherent overshoot of our 8 billion?

Yes, we do. The 8 billion may well be a problem. But today, right now, we’re all here. My question is, today, in spite of all 8 billion, what could we do to reduce the adverse outcomes? Without adversely affecting the 8 billion?

We could de-energize. I have essays explaining specifically possible, plannable ways to do so, and when I write those I get, as a response, “It takes all this energy to feed the 8 billion.”

No it doesn’t. This essay clearly and specifically explains energy uses we could reduce without affecting our food, and other energy uses which, by reducing, we could literally immediately improve our diets and dietary health.

It if ever came to pass that a significant numeric majority of all the peoples of the industrial world wanted to, we could reduce our emissions. Yes, life would change. No, nobody has to starve. Nobody has to lose their homes. If we played our cards right we could wind up with more people in homes and fewer living in trash heaps under bridges. If we wanted to.

It is important to never forget: The reason we are killing our ecosystems and our futures is not because we must. It is because we choose to.