I have made the point on this blog before that depletion of fossil fuels is scary, in part, because we need fuel to grow, process and transport food. I promised that I would write a post on this topic but I have been pre-occupied with planting switchgrass and harvesting canola.
I’ve started working on this post though! Here is what I have so far.
I have constructed the following flow-chart as a way of diagrammatically expressing where fuel is utilized in the food-production chain. What should be apparent is that even this simplistic account of food production shows that trying to quantify fuel use in such a system is extremely hard. This is because fuel (and more broadly, energy) is needed in all steps of the process and the quantities used are dependent on multiple variable factors. In the end, we may not have adequate data and it will become necessary to make assumptions.
Dr David Pimentel, whom I think belongs to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, rose to prominence a few years back when he wrote a paper stating that all biofuels provide less energy than is required to grow them. The reason there is controversy regarding this is that other work says exactly the opposite. I think part of the reason for these differing opinions is that people are making different assumptions about energy use.
I’ve started working on this post though! Here is what I have so far.
I have constructed the following flow-chart as a way of diagrammatically expressing where fuel is utilized in the food-production chain. What should be apparent is that even this simplistic account of food production shows that trying to quantify fuel use in such a system is extremely hard. This is because fuel (and more broadly, energy) is needed in all steps of the process and the quantities used are dependent on multiple variable factors. In the end, we may not have adequate data and it will become necessary to make assumptions.
Dr David Pimentel, whom I think belongs to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, rose to prominence a few years back when he wrote a paper stating that all biofuels provide less energy than is required to grow them. The reason there is controversy regarding this is that other work says exactly the opposite. I think part of the reason for these differing opinions is that people are making different assumptions about energy use.
The good news is that various papers, extension services and statistics resources do provide some information about fuel use in the food production stream. The following PDF extract gives an example of this. So when I get some time I will work through these and try to estimate whether we are all going to starve.
