Here we go again

how a species commits suicide

Does anybody remember when Covid landed? It wasn’t Covid yet. It was a “ novel coronavirus.” It was in China. It was on jet planes. Pretty soon major hospitals had refrigerator trucks parked out back for all the corpses. I lost a good friend to it. I suppose many people did.

Besides the refrigerated trucks, the global supply chain fell on its ass. It turned out that some woman had fed some specific lie to some specific critical point, but with her or without her, lots of things became unavailable. Toilet paper, for one. People were panic buying toilet paper, which, in a country as full of shit as this one, seems appropriate.

I suppose not very many currently living Americans remember the oil scare of 1973, the Arab Oil Embargo. Similar to today, the 1973 OPEC embargo was an outcome of a war between Israel and oil producing states in the Persian Gulf region. As a result of that war, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries cut off or reduced exports to nations which had assisted Israel in that war, resulting in (among other things) a nationwide 55 mph speed limit to reduce fuel demand.

We had another one in 1978, after the people of Iran threw out the US-installed dictatorship and replaced it with a rabid theocracy. During that oil shortage I was earning my living on the road, out of my own truck, hauling tools, materials, and a large box of technical manuals from job to job each day. As a result of my way of living I had to fill up my truck every day. At the peak of the crisis that meant that I spent at least an hour, and often two hours, every day in line to buy fuel. At that time I was driving a Datsun pickup truck, the company that would eventually become Nissan, and my truck had the gas filler on the right, or passenger, or wrong side.

This meant that I had to back through the gas lines, in order to present my fuel tank filler spout to the gas pump when I got there. This alone would often infuriate my fellow Americans, who weren’t a lot smarter then than they are now and were sure that, because I was backing through the line, I was somehow cheating, gaining some invisible advantage.

I recall it well. I hated it.

We’re not there yet. So far we’re pretending that we’re hunky dory. We are, after all, Americans, and Exceptional, and have Lots Of Gas and a president with the intellect of a banana slug. I can’t tell you what tomorrow is going to bring. I have read that the End is Near, and last night I read that the brilliant mad king is going to make us all rich because we have So Much Petroleum.

What I can tell you for sure is that one day the gas pumps are going to all run dry. It might be because of this war, or it might be because of the next one. It might be because of a pandemic as virulent as Covid and as deadly as smallpox. It might simply be because we’ve pumped all the readily available oil out of the ground, and the simple math that it takes two barrels of oil to raise one barrel means that the game is over. I don’t know, and nobody else knows either.

We know that it’s coming, though. We’re pretty sure that it’s coming soon. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of poison to squeeze the oil out of shale beds, but once the energy and the poison are applied it doesn’t take much time. If I don’t miss my guess His Madnesty is going to sell as much of “our” shale oil as he can to the highest bidder as fast as he can, and the American commuter and his sacred large car can go hang, but I admit that’s a guess.

Just for laughs, let’s say that we dodge this bullet. Let’s say that American business as usual makes this leap and our billionaires go on selling Haber-Bosch nitrogen to burn the life off 55% of the land in the United States for the purpose of producing corn and soybeans to feed to livestock, cars, and trucks, as well as fertilizing lesser acreages to produce such food as we don’t import by diesel ship and jet plane. Let’s say suckers go on demanding and getting wind turbines and solar panels, go on building concrete roads and lithium batteries, go on building electric cars, gasoline cars and pickups, and diesel semi trailer trucks.

Let’s say the global supply chain staggers back to its feet and goes on globally supplying all that our little hearts can desire.

Then what? Then, when the final outage comes, do we all pretend we’re surprised? To we all read tens of thousand of essays about how we can’t feed the eight or nine or ten or seven or six billion people we have by then without the monster tractors, the Haber-Bosch, the diesel fuel and the kerosene?

I understand - we have proven beyond any trace of debate - that we’re too stupid to dodge the bullet of global heat accumulation. We’re too stupid to dodge the bullet of sea level rise, too stupid to dodge the bullet of Category New Numbers hurricanes, of tornadoes wider than a medium sized city, of rainstorms capable of washing away all the highways in whole counties, maybe soon whole states. We’ve seen all that. Nobody in the developed world would change anything about their lives to avoid the ever worsening ecosystem collapse going on around us every day.

But are we really so stupid we won’t even localize food production after watching the global supply chain fall flat on its face and kick its feet in the air over and over, faster and faster, year after year?

Are we really too stupid to figure out other ways to produce food besides high tillage, dead soil, and Haber-Bosch nitrogen?

I realize that’s how we do it now. There’s no indication that’s the only way we can do it. We’ve got 8 billion people available to do work. We leave millions to billions of them in developed countries sleeping on sidewalks and under bridges and claim we can’t work the land without 900 horsepower tractors. This is utter madness.

Of the ones who do have jobs, so far, until the AI replaces all of them, well over half are doing bullshit jobs, meaningless paper pushers, keyboard peckers, bored people wandering up and down the aisles of big box stores looking for somebody to help or someplace to hide.

It takes skill to grow food, but there are some who know. They could teach others. It would be worth a lot more to our future than building more chips.

Personally I do much of my work with a donkey, or two, or even three. People tell me every day that we can’t afford the land to grow donkeys hay. Each and every day tens of thousands of acres of farmland gets paved over for parking lots, for strip malls, for tattoo parlors and massage parlors. Nobody says, “But how can we feed the billions?”

We can afford grass for golf courses, for suburban yards, for highway median strips, but we can’t afford grass to power our work.

Talking about having to keep on doing like we are doing so we can feed the billions is an insult. We can’t keep on doing like we’re doing. We keep getting shown how it goes down, then when we dodge that bullet we go on pretending we can keep up like we are today.

We can’t. Renoobles won’t do it. Oil won’t do it. Liquified natural gas won’t do it. Nuclear power won’t do it. Electrify everything won’t do it. The more we electrify the more diesel fuel we burn AND WE KNOW IT.

We have the records.

There is no discussion of finding ways to live without all this energy. We did it for over a quarter of a million years. Yes, there are more of us now.

That’s more hands available to do the work. If 350 million humans could work enough land to feed 350 million humans, there’s no reason 8 billion humans can’t work enough land to feed 8 billion humans. If we left out the acreage we’re working to feed cars and trucks, cattle and hogs and chickens, if we freed up the acreage we’re covering with roads, parking lots, strip malls, airports, and junkyards, we’d have more to work with to feed ourselves.

We won’t even discuss it. I’ve read easily a hundred essays since His Madnesty slammed the door on the Strait of Hormuz about how we can’t feed ourselves without Haber Bosch. I don’t believe we couldn’t, but I fully believe that if we go on relying on it until the day it goes away we won’t have any land healthy enough to feed us without it. I fully believe that if the only way we work a field is with a 900 horsepower tractor, the day the diesel fuel goes away we won’t be able to work a field. We won’t have the tools and we won’t have the knowledge.

We could feed ourselves with permaculture, but we can’t do it if we don’t start until all the dead industrial fields starve to death without their HB nitrogen.

Forty-one years ago I bought a 40 acre farm. Ten acres of that farm had been industrial corn every year since World War II. When I took over that land and didn’t inject anhydrous ammonia into it it literally would not grow one single weed per square yard of land. Ten acres of bare lifeless clay.

Within 5 years I had it growing a full coverage of Korean lespedeza, a low productivity, acid tolerant, annual legume. Every year that legume died all its roots turned into life in the land. In another four years I got enough oats to grow on it to be worth hand harvesting grain and feeding to my horses. I returned the straw to the land.

Today it’s a forest.

If we don’t start until the Haber Bosch runs out, lots of us will be dead before the land struggles back to its feet.

Maybe all of us.

Maybe it’s just as well, but we could at least try.

It doesn’t look that likely from here.