Comment Re:Great, it only takes a gallon of fossil fuel... (Score 1) 839
No. I casually picked up this issue of Harper's the other day and it scared the bejeezus out of me.
Yeah, some amount of fossil fuels are needed to run harvesters and tractors and shipping trucks and whatnot, but the thrust of the Harper's article was that corn contains a certain amount of potential energy, and while some of that comes from the sun, the bulk comes from fertilizer needed to grow corn in soil that has been depleted by decades of farming. This fertilizer comes from fossil fuels.
If someone wants, they can compare the number of calories in a bushel of corn to the amount of sun energy striking a hundredth of an acre over a growing season to get an absolute lower bound on the amount of energy that's coming from fossil fuels. Those numbers are out there. Could be interesting.
It makes sense to pour oil into cornfields because we can't (yet) drink bubblin' crude. It doesn't make sense to convert crude to other formats if we don't have to. It really doesn't make sense if the amount of usable energy we get at the end is less than the amount of energy outside of the crude that we use to convert the crude. That would mean that we burned up all the crude converting it to something else!
The other thing is that this means that when we run out of fossil fuels, not only will electricity production, the shipping industry, personal transportation, and plastic production all collapse, but so will the farming industry. Plastic and farming have the advantage that they still make sense even given a net energy loss, but the disadvantage that there's (as yet) no substitute for oil in their production methods.
Yeah, some amount of fossil fuels are needed to run harvesters and tractors and shipping trucks and whatnot, but the thrust of the Harper's article was that corn contains a certain amount of potential energy, and while some of that comes from the sun, the bulk comes from fertilizer needed to grow corn in soil that has been depleted by decades of farming. This fertilizer comes from fossil fuels.
If someone wants, they can compare the number of calories in a bushel of corn to the amount of sun energy striking a hundredth of an acre over a growing season to get an absolute lower bound on the amount of energy that's coming from fossil fuels. Those numbers are out there. Could be interesting.
It makes sense to pour oil into cornfields because we can't (yet) drink bubblin' crude. It doesn't make sense to convert crude to other formats if we don't have to. It really doesn't make sense if the amount of usable energy we get at the end is less than the amount of energy outside of the crude that we use to convert the crude. That would mean that we burned up all the crude converting it to something else!
The other thing is that this means that when we run out of fossil fuels, not only will electricity production, the shipping industry, personal transportation, and plastic production all collapse, but so will the farming industry. Plastic and farming have the advantage that they still make sense even given a net energy loss, but the disadvantage that there's (as yet) no substitute for oil in their production methods.
