If you don’t have 7 minutes to spare, here are the important points he covered. Bold mine.
Who says the world has an overpopulation problem? I don’t buy that.
There has been a huge argument for years between the economists and the biologists. The biologists contend that we will breed until we exhaust the resources of the planet. The economists counter with the argument that we are pretty damn smart and we can figure out how to do more with less. I agree with the economists.
Projections are that the population will peak at around 9 or 10 billion sometime around the middle of the 21st century, then our population will start to decline pretty precipitously. With our technological progress, we can handle that without too much of a problem. We can certainly grow enough food to do it.
We are certainly going to squeeze out a lot of other animals, especially the large predators and mammals as large as ourselves. But that is just the price we have to pay.
The dangers of CO2 are somewhat overstated and there is some decent evidence for that too. But it’s hard to sort it out because most of the climate change argument is predicated on an underlying philosophy such that if you’re an anti-capitalist you believe we are going to burn up the planet. And that’s just not helpful because I cannot tell if your science is right or if you’re just anti-Western and anti-capitalist.
We are fishing out the oceans but if we left them alone they would come back in about 15 years. And we are capable of doing that.
He doesn’t believe biologists on anything, he takes the word of the economists instead. He thinks the climate change debate is being controlled by people who hate capitalism. And he believes that all our environmental problems can be saved by more people and human ingenuity.
Basically, he agrees with the late economist Julian Simon that humans are the ultimate resource and their brains can and will solve all environmental problems.
Peterson is kind of a latter-day phenomenon. He has been on most of the late night talk shows including Bill Maher’s show. He says he is a conservative Christian. He said, on another video I watched, that if he could have voted he would have voted for Trump. But he is Canadian and cannot vote in the US.
Seems to me that most people hope he is right- even most ‘progressives’ and scientists. Easier to hope he is right than to acknowledge the painful reality and make huge changes- such as not having children, not traveling in airplanes, eating far down the food chain, etc.
The delusion is more comfortable.
Allows Elon Musk to rationalize space colonization- ‘we can figure it out’
We definitely won’t stop breeding because we are too smart. But we might stop if we can enjoy sex without pregnancy. As far as i know, the Republicans are the only political party worldwide seriously against contraceptives.
Fool?! Nah, he is a monumental fucking idiot of highest order. As are all religious conservatives. Unfortunately they have managed a coup d’etat in the US. Between the POTUS who is the liar in chief. Then his vice Pence and how they are managing to control the supreme court. Forget liberal secular democracy we are under theo fascism. They don’t believe in evolution and the only species that matter is humans.
Maybe they got their ideas from watching Married with Children.
Guys/Gals….. Yes J P is an idiot. So is Trump. But you can see why they have risen in credibility.
Go ahead and laugh, but I think the final straw was the bathroom debate. You know, when self-declared identity folks decide what bathroom they will use, and school districts said okay. Then, the parents had visions of their daughters sharing bathrooms at parks, etc. Added on to social justice warriors telling people what to think, it just became too much. Sometimes change is too fast for many people to handle. I know it is for me.
Myself, I am just sick of it all. When the Pride Parades come on tv and I see guys in hot pants and make-up shaking their booty, and the anger directed at politicians who do not particpate..I just sigh. I don’t care what people do in their bedrooms or who they do it with. I don’t care who people love or what their beliefs are. Just don’t beat me over the head with it. keep it at home.
I believe that is the basis for people listening to the reactionaries. I don’t listen to them and don’t plan to. I’m too busy building and reading about energy. 🙂
regards
Haha you aren’t there anyway. You’re sitting at home watching TV. Change the channel if you don’t like the show.
agreed Paulo.
tolerance is one thing, but forcing average folks to confront ‘sexual freedom’ is another
Guess what?! There is a parade in Key West for average people! You don’t even have to be gay to be there and have fun!
And no one is forcing anyone to be here! These people are fathers, mothers, daughters, brothers, and sisters of someone. They work in all fields, they are tax paying citizens who have human rights and they are allowed to pursue happiness and party just like every one else. You don’t want to socialize with them, well they probably don’t want to socialize with you either.
.
True enough, and I do change the channel. I also used to work in the school system and couldn’t avoid the PC stuff. That, you cannot walk away from as the bandwagon will crush and maim.
People seem to lack spirituality these days. Substituting in hedonism and gender identity doesn’t nseem to be cutting it though.
Take care.
I had what I consider an epiphany over the last 24 hours. I can’t remember what exactly triggered it or whether I had heard it expressed before. I just remember think that if I was in trouble, I would much rather my fate be decided by an arbiter who makes their decisions based on a deep sense of fairness and justice, basic human principles of right and wrong, than one who is making their decisions based on their belief in a particular deity.
I may have had the thought after reading or watching something about Trumps supreme court pick.
People seem to lack spirituality these days. Substituting in hedonism and gender identity doesn’t nseem to be cutting it though.
So you think this is a choice? That people decide to be outcasts from large parts of society for fun, or because they’re bored? That they risk the inherent dangers – of disease, of physical attack, of reduced job prospects, of denying their very humanity through being closeted- for kicks?
That believing will make it better?
+1
The weirdest PC stuff in America is worshiping the military and veterans.
And clergy….and god.
But wait–collapse called off. Carrying capacity a myth:
Another garbage article discussing carrying capacity (of humans) without reference to how other animal and fish species will cope. Why not talk about carrying capacity for cattle? Our planet is currently in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals with literally dozens going extinct every day. This will only accelerate as we add another couple billion not very smart humans to the planet.
Such articles as this never mention what is happening to the planet. They never mention massive pollution, expanding deserts, falling water tables, species extinction, rivers running dry, lakes drying up, oceans dying, or any of the other problems that just keep getting worse, never better. They almost always concentrate on food production or how many people can fit into the state of Texas.
In fact, we have been engineering our environments to more productively serve human needs for tens of millennia. We cleared forests for grasslands and agriculture. We selected and bred plants and animals that were more nutritious, fertile and abundant. It took six times as much farmland to feed a single person 9,000 years ago, at the dawn of the Neolithic revolution, than it does today, even as almost all of us eat much richer diets.
And that is the goddamn problem. We have figured out how to feed more people and keep them alive longer thus enabling the population explosion. And it is more and more people that are destroying the earth. Why can’t stupid economists see that problem?
Anyone who believes in infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman of an economist.
Kenneth Boulding
I love this argument:
“For decades, each increment of economic growth in developed economies has brought lower resource and energy use than the last. That’s because demand for material goods and services saturates.”
No, stupid it’s because they got sick of the high wages, pollution and hassle and sent the manufacturing to poor countries.
Precisely!
I hear he’s really popular with incels aka dudes who can’t get laid
I’m watching this now, in stunned amazement: he is either a lunatic or like the boy who says the emperor isn’t wearing any clothing. I’m leaning toward the former, given the contents, which I’ve never heard put this way before. But I’m open-minded.
Anyone care to comment on the contents of this video?
He is a crank as far as I am concerned, because planet earth has shrugged off just about everything thrown at it since the day it was formed. Humans are but a flea on the back of an elephant roaming through the incredibly vast continents. I expect your initial reaction is what most any other rational person viewing the video would think first also.
An elephant shrugging off a flea might be not far off extinction for that flea unless it can find something else to feed on, which would agree with the main premise of the talk, so shall we put you down as broadly in agreement? Yours is similar to the Gaia argument – human induced climate change is annoying mother earth so she just gets rid of the cause: humans; wait a few million years and the itch has gone and the scratch healed over.
The only thing I am in agreement with is that scientists have continually altered their lectures in response to what those who fund the grants are wanting to hear. In the 70’s the science was all about how a new ice age was on the way, then in the the 80’s the science transitioned to being all about acid rain, then in the 90’s to global warming, then in the 2000’s to climate change, and now in the 2010’s to catastrophic extinction. You tell me how people who change what they panic about once every decade aren’t supposed to be looked at as cranks?
That’s nice Billy. Now go back to Faux News and Hate Radio to learn more about the world.
The only thing I am in agreement with is that scientists have continually altered their lectures in response to what those who fund the grants are wanting to hear.
Could you please cite for us the last ten scientific peer reviewed papers you have actually read. Doesn’t even have to be climate science related. Which science lectures have you attended in person or at the very least watched on line in the last two months? Again it doesn’t have to be climate science related.
Perhaps Bill Franti would find science more acceptable and interesting if ‘it’ had maintained concern about the coming ice age, if indeed it ever did, and had ignored acid rain, global warming, and anything else he doesn’t like to hear addressed. Perhaps Bill would rather go the Dr. and have a hole drilled in his head to let the evil spirits out when he one day has a stroke.
I’d suggest reading Six Degrees by Mark Lynas and Under a Green Sky by Peter Ward. Not many large bodied life forms will survive 5°C warming, and it’s possible that once we get above 2 or 3 then there will be no way to prevent getting to 5 or higher because of the release of non-fossil fuel greenhouse gases (e.g. from permafrost or southern ocean out gassing). At the moment it may not be possible to stop below 2 or 3 because of the lags in the system (physical and human) and tipping points concerned with the Arctic and global circulation patterns. If the warmth and changing circulation patterns (which could come from a trip to a new steady state warm – i.e. equable climate – earth) eventually cause the seas to become anoxic then hydrogen sulphide will wipe out almost everything.
All that could take a lot of time, but I think his argument is that action is needed now (I’d say a few years ago) to prevent it. And if we can’t prevent it we should at least hold to account those responsible – we are, after all a very strongly reciprocal species, and are prepared to undergo a lot of hardship just to get even.
It isn’t like the emperor’s new clothes because scientists have been putting up their equivalent of flashing neon signs (i.e. peer reviewed papers) saying the same thing, for many years now.
Anyone care to comment on the contents of this video?
Yes, I will!
His point is, that based on a reasonable understanding of the scientific literature we are already locked in to a global average temperature increase above the 2° C mark. He comes to this conclusion using simple arithmetic.
Then he goes further with elementary logic and concludes, again based on currently available scientific research, that there are numerous tipping points and feedback loops that come into play at that point which will in all likelihood raise global average temperatures past the 3.5° to 4° C mark which puts into play even more tipping points and feedback loops.
In which case, again based on readily available scientific research from the fields (pun intended) of plant physiology, global grain production is heavily impacted. Thus leading to massive food shortages. Etc…
He concludes that not only is this circumstance a bad thing it constitutes an unprecedented global emergency.
He then goes on to say that it is our duty as citizens of the world to rise up against the forces behind this unprecedented evil which he equates with the likes of Nazi Germany.
Based on his consistency principle rational sane people should rise up against such evil because it is our moral duty to do so.
He also mentions social science research, which while not having a ready link to at the moment, I have read and it holds water! It requires only about 3 to 5% of the population to get involved in active resistance to governments to engender social change.
So I conclude that the professor is a rational man and the lunatics are the the ones currently in charge of the asylum.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results!
Albert Einstein
Thanks. This is very cogent.
Fred gave a great summary.
Even if the planet only moves to a 6C rise instead of the 12C maximum, there will be very little difference for most life on earth.
The fact is that even ignoring global warming completely, we are on a path to destruction and failure. Continued growth of the current paradigm leads to catastrophe without temperature rise.
Once we realized that we are also creating a permanent catastrophe for all future generations of all species on this planet due to our activities also causing global warming, we are in a complete moral and ethical situation with only one clear response. This response has not been attended yet with any vigor.
Synapsid —
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER EARTH’S YOUNGEST BANDED IRON FORMATION IN WESTERN CHINA
The banded iron formation, located in western China, has been conclusively dated as Cambrian in age. Approximately 527 million years old, this formation is young by comparison to the majority of discoveries to date. The deposition of banded iron formations, which began approximately 3.8 billion years ago, had long been thought to terminate before the beginning of the Cambrian Period at 540 million years ago.
Yes, I saw that this morning. Thanks. My first thought on reading it was “the Black Sea”.
Four thousand feet deep and average E-W length 730 miles, and it’s been accumulating sediment for tens of millions of years in anoxic–indeed, by definition euxinic–conditions below, if memory serves, the top 100 feet or so. It might serve as the only current example of something like the kind of basin that could eventually produce a banded-iron sequence under an oxygenated atmosphere.
My second thought was “Time for more port.”
This Cambrian BIF is an interesting mirror reversal of the various records of restricted oxygen-containing settings during the Precambrian when Earth’s atmosphere lacked free oxygen. I keep thinking there’s a great field trip there but I’ve never been able to secure the funding.
Port: 1200 calories per bottle.
Wine: 500
Just sayin’.
PS At least you’re not on Baileys. 2400.
JN2,
Good port…er…point. I take about six days per bottle of fine Tawny, about two thirds of a white-wine glass each afternoon. Walk three to six miles each morning so it helps to have something to come home to.
Wine, now: I was living in the Bay Area the year California wines won the blind tasting against French wines, and wine and things wine and how to serve and tastings and tours and, and… I learned a lot about wine, especially good wines, and after about three years of that I was in a position to say that I don’t like wine. Well, champagne is OK.
Once I was treated to a glass of a Rothschild cabernet in the restaurant of Portland’s premier hotel, and I thought that yeah, that was pretty good. It was selling retail at the time (1990) for $80 a bottle; who knows what the equivalent would be today. But I wasn’t thrilled.
A Kopke 10-year Tawny, now–that’s the goods.
Time for…
I still live here in the “wine country” and after 40 years I think wine is OK with a meal. I do prefer a good beer and we now have a lot of nifty brewpubs to sit in and talk about politics.
A pox on mass produced beers, light beers and flavored beers.
I suspect only the Germans really understand beer.
I am less than crazy about beer (or wine) but do drink the odd local ‘craft’ beer in town and will have wine, too, if you feed me some good cheese and/or crusty French bread (with pate) with it.
The best beer I’ve ever had might have been a German one or from somewhere from Eastern Europe.
Stubbes (German?) Chocolate in Ottawa makes (or made) a sensational beer chocolate truffle which was my favorite of the favored dark chocolate truffles. Maybe I should have asked what the beer was… Perhaps it’s not too late…
I wonder how the Annapolis Valley here in Nova Scotia fares where wine is concerned.
Give me an available and affordable port recommendation and I’ll give it a try.
Caelan MacIntyre,
My preferred port is Kopke Fine Tawny. I used to order it in through the local supermarket and a wine shop downtown until the supermarket just started stocking it to ease up on the paperwork. I don’t know what that would be like in Nova Scotia, beautiful place though it be.
The other port that I drink is Warre’s Heritage Ruby Porto, which I bought by mistake once and found I like. (Tawnies are aged in wood, rubies aren’t.) Both the Kopke and the Warre’s sell for about $15 a bottle here in western Washington state.
Those who drink wine don’t, in my experience, like port. Ports have higher alcohol (19% for port while a burgundy is about 13%) and are said to be sweeter but I’ve no way to compare–there certainly are dessert ports just as there are dessert wines, and white ports are said to be dry but I’ve never tried one. You might try a dry Madeira, not a port but another fortified wine, or a Fino sherry if you really want to experiment.
Good, thanks. I’ll give one of your ports a shot, see what I think, and report back.
Western Washington State… On my halfway pit-stop from Vancouver on the way to Mount Baker for some hikes and swims, I used to drop into Bellingham for a couple of cold premixed drinks for the trip. Pleasant memories.
Caelan MacIntyre,
That’s great country. So’s the geology: a stack of thrust plates with an active volcano on top; who could ask for more?
Yep.
I drink wine:port in a 2:1 ratio. I would drink more port if it had less calories! Here in the UK, Lidl (German discounter) has an excellent ruby port (Armilar) for $8.50…
JN2,
I’ll look into Armilar, and thanks for the tip. I hadn’t heard of that house.
Far-right Bay Area figure Kyle ‘Based Stickman’ Chapman posts bail in Texas for assault charge
First, I am not an apologist for anyone. I think Jordan Peterson has some good ideas but I don’t worship anyone, especially in today’s world.
But I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand the argument that world population isn’t a problem, just yet. Birth rates have fallen. Most of the people in third world countries don’t use much resources.
However! I will admit that eventually it will be a problem, once population runs into peak resource. Who knows when that is, I give it another few decades at best. But then, suddenly the situation will turn, and we will reach peak population and on the other side everybody will be complaining of a lack of workers to keep this thing running.
So the problematic moment may not actually last long, if you catch my drift. It may resolve itself fairly quickly, but only by the system breaking apart into less complex structures.
But I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand the argument that world population isn’t a problem, just yet. Birth rates have fallen. Most of the people in third world countries don’t use much resources.
You can believe whatever you want but actual scientific research tells us you are either in denial or ignorant of reality. We are currently adding 83 million people to the planet every year and the planet is already deep in overshoot.
World Footprint The world’s ecological deficit is referred to as global ecological overshoot. Since the 1970s, humanity has been in ecological overshoot, with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year. Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.7 Earths to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year. We use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate through overfishing, overharvesting forests, and emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than forests can sequester.
“Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.7 Earths to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste.”
The current strategic status of humanity is the military equivalent of being overrun at all strategic points and we can only hold the “less valuable” ground. Usually that does not end well and retreat is the only option to save at least some.
Do we have the sense, the focus, the courage to retreat in the face of overwhelming odds? Sound as if now is/was the time.
Or will this time be remembered as the time that were?
But I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand the argument that world population isn’t a problem, just yet.
I’ve heard many versions of this argument:
The British Isles aren’t over-populated: Just look at all the open land in Scotland.
Birth rates are falling, not rising.
Resources keep growing to meet rising demand.
OK. So when exactly do we know the earth is over-populated? When people begin starving? When crisis hits?
By then, it’s too late. The time to ameliorate the problem is in advance of it, not when TSHTF.
It’s analogous to my orchard: Pesticides are used as prophylactics. I must spray in advance of scab spore release and insect infestation. If I wait until the damage manifests, it’s too goddamn late to do anything about it.
In the end, continuing to fight nature will result in our demise. Let that be your guide.
Who knew the day this thread was started (June 11) was “World Population Day”?
Jamaica women are being encouraged to make use of contraceptives that are available to the public as they plan their families and empower themselves.
The National Family Planning Board made the appeal as it observes today’s commemoration of World Population Day under the theme ‘Family Planning is a Human Right’.
The agency’s executive director Lovette Byfield said the government has made a variety of contraceptive methods available to Jamaican women at an affordable cost but said that these means are underutilised.
“Having a child is usually a happy time, but unfortunately, too many children in Jamaica are born into families that did not plan for them. We have been working assiduously over the years to provide family planning services to women of reproductive age from all walks of life, yet still, many of our women are not taking advantage due to issues such as low negotiation skills, unwillingness of the partner and low contraceptive knowledge plagued by various myths,” said Byfield in a statement.
Herein lies the problem. As Ron wrote in his lead post, far too many people think an expanding human population is a good thing. In my neck of the woods, talk of overpopulation seems almost taboo. It seems no one wants to blame uncontrolled expansion of the population (overpopulation) to any of the problems we face. In my neck of the woods social problems such as a under stress, underfunded school system, a similarly challenge health care system, high unemployment and high crime rates could easily be blamed on the propensity of folks, especially those who can least afford it to have kids, sometimes lots of them.
There is a debate raging in my country that, has been getting a fair amount of coverage in the same newspaper that published the article above, about decriminalizing abortion, if even under limited circumstances. As is to be expected, religious circles staunchly oppose the idea and there are lots of what I consider idiotic ideas floating around on the subject , including for example that, contraception is a plot to “wipe out black people”. (The Jamaican population over 90% of African decent with 7.3 percent mixed ethnicities (African + other), 1.3 percent East Indian, 0.2 percent white, 0.2 percent Chinese, and 0.1 percent other ethnicities). A 56 year old, childless adult like myself is a real rarity but, hey, I’ve been successful at playing my part in not contributing to the world population so far. I must say though, that I often get very strange looks when I tell people that I have no offspring!
Which brings to another thing I’ve thought about at times. It would appear that thinking too much about population control in terms of ones own family planning choice is not a successful short term evolutionary strategy. To expand on this , some of the most intelligent women I know are childless while most of my high school and college friends and acquaintances have reasonably small families (two or three children) but, college educated people only make up about 14% of the Jamaican population (85% of collage graduates emigrate). I will never forget a television news broadcast a few years ago featuring protests by construction workers at the site of a new hotel. This dude proclaims that his salary is not enough to cover the needs of his thirteen children! So an unskilled laborer has 13 kids (undoubtedly with more than one partner) while a college educated couple has 2!
Another example is the sister of a young woman I met about a year and a half ago. The woman I met is in her mid twenties and has one four year old boy. Her older sister has four children, a boy in his mid teens and three girls, the youngest one being about three years old. The older sister is pregnant again, so it seems she is “popping one out” about every four or five years! The father of the first two is deceased and the fathers of the other two contribute nothing to their upbringing, the father of the unborn child is an unemployed young man. This woman was given a tiny (15 ft. x 15 ft.), two bedroom house by Food for the Poor in collaboration with a wealthy couple from the US and to my knowledge has never held a job. I don’t know if she managed to finish high school before getting pregnant the first time.
There are many more examples too numerous to mention but, it would appear to me that it is the people least able to control their sexual impulses that are “inheriting the earth”. It seems that we are witnessing a planet full of increasingly thoughtless people rather than one with an increasing proportion of smart, thinking people. We are well and truly f#%@*d.
Yea you hit the nail on the head, especially in your last paragraph. Humanity is breeding intelligence out of the population.
Hoisted by our own petard.
If intelligence is mostly an inherited trait and the smart ones are reducing their fertility rate voluntarily or making it zero, the result is obvious.
If concern for the planet is a learned trait bolstered by family action and those who are concerned have few children to teach, the result is less people who are truly concerned and less chances for those to find a similar partner.
Self eradication during a battle is not helpful.
About 65 years ago I told my dad I thought it was strange that rich people had fewer children than poor people. He replied that it had always been that way.
The disadvantaged are just as likely to have “useful” children as the talented. There is much evidence to support that. Who ever heard of Einstein’s parents, or Thomas Edison’s?
Worry more about Supreme Court appointees.
Hmmm, seems Edison’s mother homeschooled him using advanced science texts of the time. You saying she was stupid? I can inform some of the descendants of Edison of your reply.
Einstein’s father was an electrical engineer.
Apparently I wasn’t clear. I never said Edison’s mother was stupid. I only said his parents, or Einstein’s weren’t ever “heard of”.
the point was only that great people quite often arise from obscurity and assuming that because the rich and famous, or the well educated, are having fewer children that there is a danger of dumbing down the population. Neither of my parents graduated from high school. My father never went to high school, dropping out at the end of the 8th grade. I have a MS in engineering.
I’ve never heard of any of Edison’s decendents either. Perhaps you could introduce some of them to Malala Yousafzai, Barack Obama and Angela Merkle some folks who were born in obscurity. They seemed to have made their way to usefulness.
I never assume that uneducated, obscure people have any less inherent talent than those who have demonstrated success.
You are explaining exactly why education concerning population growth is very long overdue. Creating the optimum number of people that can be properly educated and employed with a certain minimum level of intensity and focus on each individual, would lead to a society where each individual has the potential to live a free, comfortable, productive existence. Instead we now have the opposite when we praise population growth above all else.
Here is a series of carbon maps delineating our world according to Background, Responsibility and Vulnerability.
Below is a People at Risk Map Country sizes show the number of people injured, left homeless, displaced or requiring emergency assistance due to floods, droughts or extreme temperatures in a typical year. Climate change is expected to exacerbate many of these threats.
note- S. Korea imports 87% of net energy as of 2015
Good, now they can finally face themselves and figure out who they are. Will be disconcerting but getting a little peace can be a great reward.
“You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.”
— Nikola Tesla
What you mean “may live to see”, the worst was developed before I was born.
Way way off oil topics but interesting…at least it was for me.
Yesterday, I was on my way to pick up son at Comox airport. I live 1 hour west of Campbell River which is also 1.5 hours west of Comox. I went through an RCMP roadblock with regular officers, commercial inspectors, fish and game, fisheries…the whole enchilada about 1/2 way to town. They were checking for impaired drivers and tourists with too many fish, (there are some real tourista hogs who can up salmon and take it home). No problems, although I naturally have that instant guilt thing going and a bit of anger rising up, “What is this, a Police State”? But, if you get snarky they get serious and all of a sudden a cracked windshield gets noticed, etc. So I am polite and pleased enough if they pull some impaired people off the road. It’s all a polite Canadian kind of thing, yes sirs and no sirs, have a great day, and a few thank yous, while I drive off thinking pretty loud, “What is this, a fucking Police State”!
Anyway, I stopped to visit father-in-law at hospital and while there noticed my wallet was missing. I won’t go into the details but holy shit, Batman. I tore the car apart and checked the seats, behind, everywhere. Checked at the hospital desk. Drove back to in laws house, checked there, and then back to hospital. Phoned business at other stops made. It was a nightmare. This is the point….I realized that without the stuff in my wallet I was totally screwed. license and money of course, but health card, gun possesion card, other licenses and certifications, bank card…new credit card, even my freaking costco and library card would have to be replaced. And I still had to drive to the damn airport after having gone through one checkpoint. It was my sons car with cruise control so I set it for 1 mile over and gingerly went through every known speed trap. Pissed off? irritated? resigned? Outwardly calm and laughing about it, but the whole gamut of negative emotions were just under the surface.
Turned out the wallet was found at the hospital and security had it. Not one red cent was missing and not one card was disturbed. I picked it up on the way home.
The other point: I am a cash payer kind of guy and live on the fringes with a pretty low down profile….or so I thought. Until I lost my wallet. We might live on Waldens Pond (a river actually), but try losing your wallet and maintain serenity. Hah.
Yes sir, this comment makes me feel a lot better. That I’m not the only idiot who loses his wallet and freaks out. It seems like I do it at least once a month. Good thing my heads attached.
BTW, that’s why god created cruse control, Thank you sir
Interesting example of we can be cruising along in our pleasant country and lives, and not realize how quickly you can find yourself on the outside looking in. Especially when there is a police state.
I had read a story of how quickly a Jewish family in Germany in the 1930’s went from normal life, to prisoner in their own neighborhood, to prisoner on a cattle train, as an example.
I had the same response to Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It was the opening chapters that I found so unnerving, how quickly everything changed (e.g., bank account frozen, job ended, news blacked out). And she wrote before everything went digital.
I agree, a masterpiece.
Kinda looking like the US is heading strongly in that direction.
Bank accounts have been getting frozen for many years. They may not be able to jail people directly for owing money, but they find their ways to make them completely destitute and end up “defying” the court.
The US would not renew my passport, and I was in Colombia.
I took a plane to a offshore possession of Colombia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andrés_(island)) and suck it up and flew into Costa Rica with a expired passport, which wasn’t caught at customs.
So, what do you do with a expired passport, a car, and a freaking out travel companion?
Bending the curve.
Just moving vehicles from 25 mpg to 35 mpg would save close to 7 million barrels of gasoline per day.
Going to 50 mpg would save 11 million barrels per day.
This could already have been done.
Increasing passenger load could cut the demand by up to half.
Changing habits could cut the demand by 20 to 30 percent.
No BEV involved.
So is peak oil a real problem or is the real problem the lack of planning and government intervention (short term profit versus long term survival)?
Since only a little more than 1 person per 7 owns a car, the market is not saturated. Possibly there are more passengers than is suspected and alternative transport is used quite a lot. Maybe westerners could be a bit more practical?
So what do you think the pmpg of that motorcycle could be?
I’m hoping that he is giving a ride to a few of his neighbors kids and those are not all his own. On the other hand if that were an electric motorcycle powered by solar power and everyone in his circumstance was afforded a means to switch to non fossil fuel powered transport humanity might make some real progress in the right direction.
If we could convince the Koch bros. that it is their moral obligation to give up 90 percent of their wealth and give an electric scooter to everyone in say India there might be some hope for the planet. Trust me, the Kochs would not have to endure any hardships if they had to live on only 10% of their current wealth.
On the other hand if they don’t see the light then we might have to charge them with crimes against humanity, take them to a tribunal in Nuremberg and they will be given a fair trail, convicted, sentenced to death and summarily executed!
Cheers!
Don’t forget to include the free solar panels and battery storage so they can charge their EV’s.
Really? Death threats are allowed in the comment sections now?
While my statement of conviction and consequent sentencing to death was hyperbole there is indeed precedent for such action.
The same was done to the Nazis at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity and the atrocities they committed during World War II! It wasn’t a death threat then and it isn’t now!
It is called justice!
It is part of international law and legal process. What the Kochs and others have knowingly done and continue to do is evil and definitely crosses into territory that constitutes criminal behavior against humanity. Millions if not billions of humans will die because of their actions! And that is science based not hyperbole.
Go study some science, history and international law.
Millions are dying each year from air, water and soil pollution right now!
Lesson to be learned: Action is often only taken against murdering polluters when it is extremely obvious, often not even then. The people appear to be mostly captives of the production system.
China doesn’t have a chance of survival, and I have family on the mainland.
Sounds right. Get them out if you can. My friend and his family escaped a few years ago, living the good life now here in the American Dream.
Shall we take a peak?
Heatwave sees record high temperatures around world this week
From Europe to Africa, extreme and widespread heat raises climate concerns in hottest La Niña year to date on record
“He can stick his submarine where it hurts. It just had absolutely no chance of working. It wouldn’t have made the first 50 meters into the cave… Just a PR stunt…”
“The solution for both climate and food sovereignty is to dismantle the global industrial agri-food system (which we call the ‘industrial food chain’) and for governments to give more space to the already growing and resilient ‘peasant food web’ – the interlinked network of small-scale farmers, livestock-keepers, pastoralists, hunters and gatherers, fishers and urban producers who, our research shows, already feed most of the world…
The industrial food chain is using at least 75 per cent of the world’s agricultural land and most of agriculture’s fossil fuel and freshwater resources to feed barely 30 per cent of the world’s population. Conversely, more than 500 million peasant farms around the world are using less than 25 per cent of the land – and almost no fossil fuels or chemicals – to feed 70 per cent of humanity.
Aside from burning vast quantities of fossil carbon, industry is also wasting money that could be directed to supporting equitable agroecological production while still lowering food prices for the world’s marginalized consumers.
The statistics are staggering. Consumers pay $7.5 trillion each year for industrially produced food. But between a third and half of this production is wasted along the way to the consumer or at the table…”
There just has to be something wrong with those stats. I think they are assuming all, or at least most farms, are peasant farms that don’t use tractors or chemical fertilizer.
Intensification: increase the yield output (i.e. kilograms of crop produced per unit area of land). This is typically achieved through a combination of chemical inputs (such as fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides); improved water use (e.g. irrigation); mechanization and improved farming practices; and the use of higher-yielding crop strains or seeds.
Snip From 1961 to 2014, global cereal production has increased by 280 percent. If we compare this increase to that of total population (which increased by only 136 percent over the same period), we see that global cereal production has grown at a much faster rate than the population. Cereal production per person has increased despite a growing population.
Borlaug (b. 1914) was hired in 1944 to run a wheat-research program established by the Rockefeller Foundation and the government of Mexico in an effort to make that country self-sufficient in the production and distribution of cereal grains. Borlaug’s team developed varieties of wheat that grew well in various climatic conditions and benefited from heavy doses of chemical fertilizer, more so than the traditional plant varieties. Wheat yield per acre rose fourfold from 1944 to 1970. Mexico, which had previously had to import wheat, became a self-sufficient cereal-grain producer by 1956.
From your link: The industrial food chain is using at least 75 per cent of the world’s agricultural land and most of agriculture’s fossil fuel and freshwater resources to feed barely 30 per cent of the world’s population.
This is what the Green Revolution gave us?
Conversely, more than 500 million peasant farms around the world are using less than 25 per cent of the land – and almost no fossil fuels or chemicals – to feed 70 per cent of humanity.
And here is where they used almost no fossil fuels, chemicals or chemical fertilizer? This is where the Green Revolution had no effect whatsoever? In the early 60s, it was predicted that there would be worldwide famine by 1975. But the Green Revolution started to have its dramatic effect, enabling the population to more than double. Instead of famine, we had a population explosion.
I know you saw it on the internet Caelan, so it has to be true. But I don’t believe a goddamn word of it. There just has to be something wrong with those stats and that article.
Yair,
Dunno Ron. I haven’t tracked developments for a while but when I read all this bullshit about how big is better and how Bourlag’s Green Revolution and John Deere will feed the world I suggest to folks they do a bit of research into rice.
Rice used to be the staple food of over half the worlds population and, back when I was sloshing around in rice paddies, the size of the average rice farm (despite broadacre production in the US and Australia) was just over an acre.
These ratios may have changed but, the fact remains, that although chemical inputs have risen and better varieties introduced, rice a most laborious crop, is still produced at an artisanal level and it would be impossible to produce the volume required by any other means.
This is true of all crops. They can (and will again) be grown on a small sustainable scale. In Australia the seasonal vegetable requirements of any given town or city could be grown within fifty kilometers of the CBD.
I am old enough to have driven one of ten or a dozen fifty horsepower tractors in staggered formation Sundercutting a three thousand acre paddock and content that those days, with a vibrant community living off the land, were far more sustainable than the present sterile system where people are displaced by machinery. . . completely unsustainable in the long term.
They can (and will again) be grown on a small sustainable scale. In Australia the seasonal vegetable requirements of any given town or city could be grown within fifty kilometers of the CBD.
Yeah, but “Houston, we have a problem!”
New research has calculated that nearly 33% of the world’s adequate or high-quality food-producing land has been lost at a rate that far outstrips the pace of natural processes to replace diminished soil.
The University of Sheffield’s Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, which undertook the study by analysing various pieces of research published over the past decade, said the loss was “catastrophic” and the trend close to being irretrievable without major changes to agricultural practices.
The continual ploughing of fields, combined with heavy use of fertilizers, has degraded soils across the world, the research found, with erosion occurring at a pace of up to 100 times greater than the rate of soil formation. It takes around 500 years for just 2.5cm of topsoil to be created amid unimpeded ecological changes.
And, “Houston, we have another problem!” Too Many people!
Global wildlife populations could drop two-thirds by 2020 as human demand continues to exceed the planet’s capacity
Oakland, California, USA—The overexploitation of ecological resources by humanity is directly contributing to the 67 percent plunge in wild vertebrate populations scientists forecast for the 50-year period ending in 2020, according to WWF’s Living Planet Report 2016.
The top threats to species identified in the report are directly linked to human activities, including habitat loss, degradation, and overexploitation of wildlife. According to Global Footprint Network, humanity is currently using the resources of 1.6 planets to provide the goods and services we demand each year while we only have one Earth.
Under a business-as-usual path for the underlying drivers of resource consumption, increasing human demand on the Earth’s ecosystems is projected to exceed their regenerative capacity by about 75 percent by 2020, according to Global Footprint Network, which has collaborated with WWF on the biennial Living Planet Report since 2000.
Humans seem to think they can survive on this planet even if they eliminate the rest of the biosphere. I think they are in for a rather rude surprise.
“Houston, we now have a very very very long list of problems…”
Yair,
Bit of small scale rice farming on this vid . . . note the walk behind tractors which in some places/systems can take the place of buffalo.
For those that are interested, that style of horizontal hopper cooled diesel made by Kubota and countless Chinese manufacturers are known as buffalo engines and are endemic to southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Set at fifteen hundred RPM and with basic maintenance they will last for many thousands of hours . . . we had one on a genset that had over fifty thousand on it when I sold it.
I’ve farmed a 2-acre CSA and orchard for ten years now. It’s not “peasant” farming. If we didn’t use “chemicals,” we would grow only weeds and insects. As it is, it’s a back-breaking pain in the ass. But it keeps me at home at a part-time job when I’m not teaching. It’s pocket money.
The idea that 7.6 billion people are going to be fed by “peasants” is a motherfucking crock of shit.
The idea that 7.6 billion people are going to be fed by “peasants” is a motherfucking crock of shit.
I agree. In fact, I think Caelan’s entire article is a motherfucking crock of shit. If one has a deeply held ideology it can make them create their very own “alternative facts”.
Yeah, but if you applied permaculture techniques to grow plants to feed insects like grasshoppers and then everyone could eat grasshopper protein instead of eating cows, chickens and pigs… Ah, never mind! Peasant farmers feeding the planet is still a motherfucking crock of shit.
I get that you guys think this is a crock. Not arguing with that (yet…?). But does that mean you each believe that his statement below is false?
“The industrial food chain is using at least 75 per cent of the world’s agricultural land and most of agriculture’s fossil fuel and freshwater resources to feed barely 30 per cent of the world’s population. Conversely, more than 500 million peasant farms around the world are using less than 25 per cent of the land – and almost no fossil fuels or chemicals – to feed 70 per cent of humanity.”
Also, very minor point. When these folks use the term “peasant” I believe that they are describing a type of farm economy. This differs somewhat from what most westerner’s mean when they use the same term. They are usually studying rural politics and development.
Related fields-of-study are agrarianism, family economy, folk culture. There are overlaps with Shumacher’s intermediate technology, reskilling, permaculture, etc.
Conversely, more than 500 million peasant farms around the world are using less than 25 per cent of the land – and almost no fossil fuels or chemicals – to feed 70 per cent of humanity.”
To claim that 25% of the land, and almost no fossil fuels or chemicals are feeding 70 percent of humanity is pure bullshit. It is not just bullshit, it is bullshit piled up on top of bullshit. No one is allowed to make such a statement without showing the worldwide study that supports such a claim. If you can cite that study, post the link to that study, then I will gladly review it. But I do not believe it exists. But I will gladly apologize and admit my error if you can cite your legitimate source.
You are entitled to your opinion Mr/Ms Aspera, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
The source of all this nonsense is:
The road to food sovereignty 1. Peasants are the main or sole food providers to more than 70% of the world’s people,1 and peasants produce this food with less (often much less) than 25% of the resources – including land, water, fossil fuels – used to get all of the world’s food to the table. 2. The Industrial Food Chain uses at least 75% of the world’s agricultural resources and is a major source of GHG emissions, but provides food to less than 30% of the world’s people.2
I read note 2 of this publication and it does not support the claim that they say it does. They just suggest what they think note 2 says:
“2: Who produces the most food? 16. Leah Samberg et al, “Subnational distribution of average farm size and smallholder contributions to global food production,” Environmental Research Letters, 20 November 2016. 17. FAO, “Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture,” SPFS, DOC 27.8 Revision 2, Volume III, 2001, p. 25. 18. UNCHS, “ The State of the World’s Cities 2001,” UN Centre for Human Settlements, Ch. 3, p. 72-73. 19. Peter Fellows and Martin Hilmi, “Selling Street and Snack Foods,” Diversification Booklet no. 18, Rural Infrastructure and Agro-Industries Division, FAO, Rome, 2011. 20. The contribution small-scale fisheries make to global fish catches is subject to debate because there is a lack of good reporting, and no consensus on the definition of artisanal fisheries. In the information gathered, we conservatively estimate that a minimum of 25% of the global catch (in weight) can be attributed to small-scale fisheries, but this share could be as high as 50% as FAO’s study suggests. FAO, Voluntary Guideline for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication, Rome, 2015. Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller, “Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining,” Nature Communications 7, Article number: 10244, 19 January 2016. Telephone Conversation with Dirk Zeller, UBC Professor and Senior Researcher and Project manager of the Sea Around Us, February 2016. (http://www.seaaroundus.org) 21. 23% (in energy content) of the food produced for human consumption is traded internationally, 80% of which is for 15 products: wheat, soybean, palm oil, maize, sugar, rape and mustard seed and oil, rice, soybean oil, pig meat, sunflower seed oil, barley, cocoa beans, oil crops, poultry meat. See Jennifer Clapp, “Food self-sufficiency and international trade: a false dichotomy?” The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets In Depth 201516, Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), 2016, p. 6. See also, Fader et al. “Spatial decoupling of agricultural production and consumption: quantifying dependences of countries on food imports due to domestic land and water constraints,” Environmental Research Letters, March 2013, p. 15. 22. ETC Group, Who Will Feed Us? Questions about the food and climate crises, ETC Communique 102,
2009. Available online at http://www.etcgroup.org/ content/who-will-feed-us ETC Group, Who Will Feed Us? The Industrial Food Chain or the Peasant Food Web?, Booklet, 2014. Available online at http://www.etcgroup.org/ content/who-will-feed-us-0 23. The confusion over figures arises for a number of legitimate reasons: (1) researchers focus on crops and under-emphasize fishing, hunting and gathering and urban production; (2) researchers consider only the major food crops, ignoring other essential and nutritious crops that cover less land area and/or have little commercial value; (3) there is confusion in determining the amount of land that may be held by peasants. A peasant family may have 10 ha on a semi-arid hillside or 2 ha on better soils and slopes; (4) researchers tend to underestimate the food that is wasted or overconsumed by the Chain”
There is no support in the above study, or whatever the fuck it is, for their claim. Note 2, the source of their claim, says absolutely nothing about chemicals, chemical fertilizer, or fossil fuel. They just made that shit up. End of story.
Ron, I don’t know what I said that provoked such a response. I don’t think I expressed an opinion of my own, nor did I give any facts, mine or anyone’s (except trying to explain how the word “peasant” can be misunderstood in how its used in the academic literature). If I came across as doing so, that’s my mistake in writing poorly. But I did think that I was entitled to ask a question of you guys. And you did give me your answer, so thanks.
I AM looking for facts (not opinions). I’m collecting empirical, peer-reviewed evidence on various sides of this issue. And don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not claiming the original source is that sort of evidence. I am trying to find evidence that counters the extreme and polar-opposite claims I keep running into. And, probably like you, I’m not much impressed with publications that have cartoon-like images on the cover (i.e., “The road to food sovereignty”). I’m still looking.
[ I was going to try for some humor in this reply, say something like “based on your response, I’ll put you down as undecided.” But I’ll wait for the heat to subside.]
Ron: “I read note 2 of this publication and it does not support the claim that they say it does. They just suggest what they think note 2 says:”
Incoherent. “They [the authors] just suggest what THEY [themselves?] THINK [they wrote it, and they don’t know?] note 2 says”.
But apart from micro-critique, the reality is that the etcgroup.org document is quite well-referenced with numerous citations to authoritative sources, and any serious attempt to analyze it will take a bit of time, digging out the references, reading and evaluating. It will take many hours.
Hey Alan, note 2 was a copy and paste. You cannot possibly misquote a copy and paste. Note 2, says absolutely nothing about chemicals, chemical fertilizer, or fossil fuel. End of story.
Your words, Ron, which I quoted, were not a copy and paste. They were your words.
But apart from micro-critique, the reality is that the etcgroup.org document is quite well-referenced with numerous citations to authoritative sources, and any serious attempt to analyze it will take a bit of time, digging out the references, reading and evaluating. It will take many hours.
No, I really don’t think it will take all that long. Just bring up each document and do a search on each: “fossil fuel”, then “chemicals” then “chemical fertilizer”.
It should not take more than a minute or two with each document.
Michael B’s Poison
“I’ve farmed a 2-acre CSA and orchard for ten years now… As it is, it’s a back-breaking pain in the ass.” ~ Michael B
“It’s not ‘peasant’ farming.” ~ Michael B
Indeed, it sounds more like self-inflicted ass-backward work and closer to industrial agro, complete with poison and monoculture.
“If we didn’t use ‘chemicals’, we would grow only weeds and insects.” ~ Michael B
Weeds are plants and many are edible, healthy and, along with insects, form part of a vital ecosystem– excluding your orchard apparently.
Fruit trees and all other trees, etc., can grow without you or your poisons, Michael, and they’ve been doing so long before we as a species arrived on the scene.
Also are some people, including on this blog, commenting with some concern about our planet losing insects (and the wildlife that depend on them), due in part to such things as pesticides, monocrops and general agricultural practices?
“The idea that 7.6 billion people are going to be fed by ‘peasants’ is a motherfucking crock of shit.” ~ Michael B
And our current way-of-‘life’, which includes your agro, looks like it’s taking down the planet and us with it…
Caelean have you grown any food? What? Do you have any basis in reality for your pronouncements on growing food? Forgive the presumption, but it comes across as wishful thinking rather than based on experience.
Am I wrong?
Irrelevant to the issue, which you are turning personal (and that is a distraction), and since people are obviously growing their own food all around the planet. Just look at others who have been doing so if you wish and are not just keyboard warrioring, and try things yourself and report back to boot. In fact, if you want to make it personal, I dare you. Oh and, if you want to call me on it, you will have to change your name to your real one rather than hide in the shadows behind the relative comfort of your screen.
Also, not everyone is going to do things as well as others. It’s a learning process. So, you want to take this personally, then consider that I have just thrown down the gauntlet for you right here in public so to speak. Let’s have a go.
At least proclaim that you have grown mint or perhaps petunias, or maybe raised a guinea pig, or something for the readers get confidence in your agricultural expertise from.
Ah yes, I thought so…
The irony of you under the veil of anonymity recommending that I proclaim something about myself (to mention nothing of your ad-hominem form of logical fallacy) is laughable.
No surprise there of course.
Nevertheless, I’m happy to indulge you, but since my own ‘agricultural expertise’ is irrelevant to the issue, and since you are making the request regardless, then the onus is on you to offer something of your own ‘agricultural expertise’ first, along with your real name (and ideally a place online where we can get a sense of you/your expertise) as a gesture of good faith/will, and to get the ball rolling.
I won’t hold my breath. ‘u’
Caelan, dear boy. You try eating Colorado potato beetles, Japanese beetles, saw flies, codling moths, plum curculios, apple maggot flies, banded cutworms, round-headed borers, tomato hornworms, squash borers, cucumber beetles, European corn borers, scab fungus, fire blight, powdery mildew, late blight, sooty blotch. Get back to me and let me know how yummy they are.
And, oh yeah–let me know what happened to the fucking crops you grew them on.
“Weeds are plants and many are edible, healthy and, along with insects, form part of a vital ecosystem– excluding your orchard apparently. ”
Guess what? I love eating dandelions, lambs quarters, smart weed, wood sorrel, etc.
But you try taking them to a goddamn farmers market and selling them.
And nature contains poisons like you would not believe.
There is no question that modern agriculture is destroying habitat, changing the climate, and only increasing the population. It’s a tragedy, but that’s the way it is, and it is that way because it got that way.
Somewhat moot points from your ostensible ‘prefab/commodified’ monoculture, Michael B. There are differences between natural poisons and human-made and many diseases and bugs, etc., seem to love a whole lot of similar plants all conveniently lined up for them.
Your responses thus far give me a sense of less surprise that you would find what you are doing hard work. This boy over here suggests you may be making your work harder than it needs to be. From a systemic/global/species perspective, no surprise there either.
Glad you like the so-called weeds. We might want and have to get used to them, maybe along with some bugs. A votre sante.
“The truth is that most farmers do a pretty crappy job when it comes to sustainability. The common counterargument is that they can’t afford to be sustainable, but it’s usually bullshit. The real problems are that they don’t know how to run their business very well, and are given the wrong incentives.” ~ alimbiquated
+1
One handy way to avoid using poisons is to growth things in a greenhouse. The Dutch do this. IF you grow indoors, you are less likely to have problems with weeds, insects or fungus, because they can’t get at your crop very well. And if they do, the controlled environment allows you to combat them more easily, for example by introducing parasites.
The truth is that most farmers do a pretty crappy job when it comes to sustainability. The common counterargument is that they can’t afford to be sustainable, but it’s usually bullshit. The real problems are that they don’t know how to run their business very well, and are given the wrong incentives.
“The argument for the Green Revolution was that India’s people were starving, and if they could grow more food, the problem could be solved. Historians like Amartya Sen point out however, that famine in India was not for the absence of food, but rather the inability of people to acquire food. During the later half of the nineteenth century, several severe famines struck India. The colonial government initiated the Famine Commission in 1880 to investigate the problem and find a solution to change conditions. Surprisingly, the commission found that every province was actually experiencing a surplus of food. The problem was not with under-production at all; the people were just unable to afford the food that was being produced around them. These surpluses mean that India was in fact capable of feeding itself before industrial agriculture was introduced (Newman 2007)…
In 2001, India had an epidemic of deaths due to starvation in more than a dozen states. This was the first time this had happened since the 1960’s. In that same year, India had such a surplus of grains the government proposed dumping a significant portion of it into the sea to make room for the next year’s harvest (Newman 2007). It is clear that the time has come for a plan for social development rather than a strategy for abundance.“
Calean, I do not have a problem with anything in that report. In fact, I think it is spot on. In all past famines in India, it has been the case where much food was produced but bureaucrats mishandled everything.
However, the current situation in India is entirely different. Farmers are going broke because of falling water tables and climate change. About 17,000 farmers kill themselves each year in India. And that is just the reported suicides. Many state bureaucrats do not report the suicides for obvious reasons.
Understood, Ron, and I’ve heard of the Indian farmer suicides as well. There seem to be a myriad of reasons and farmer suicides apparently transcend India and even include Canada.
Meanwhile, I seem to be seeing an explosion of community ‘farms’ in my neck of the woods. I put farms within single quotes because they are hardly farms and more like exploratory test-beds, often in raised beds.
BTW, hope you’re doing well in Mexico.
Ricciardi et al. (2018) place the number at ~32% of food supply on 24% of arable land.
Their Figure 5 is particularly useful in seeing the distribution of crops by farm size. Oilcrops are more common on larger farms, while cereals, fruits, pulses, and roots/tubers are more common among smallholders.
CITATION: Vincent Ricciardi, Navin Ramankutty, Zia Mehrabi, Larissa Jarvis, Brenton Chookolingo (2018). How much of the world’s food do smallholders produce? Global Food Security. 17: 64-72.
ABSTRACT: The widely reported claim that smallholders produce 70-80% of the world’s food has been a linchpin of agricultural development policy despite limited empirical evidence. Recent empirical attempts to reinvestigate this number have lacked raw data on how much food smallholders produce, and have relied on model assumptions with unknown biases and with limited spatial and commodity coverage. We examine variations in crop production by farm size using a newly-compiled global sample of subnational level microdata and agricultural censuses covering more countries (n=55) and crop types (n=154) than assessed to date. We estimate that farms under 2ha globally produce 28-31% of total crop production and 30-34% of food supply on 24% of gross agricultural area. Farms under 2ha devote a greater proportion of their production to food, and account for greater crop diversity, while farms over 1000ha have the greatest proportion of post-harvest loss.
Californians dutifully load up their recycling bins and feel good about themselves. They’re helping the environment and being good citizens.
But their glow might turn to gloom if they realized that much of the stuff is headed to a landfill.
That’s because there’s no longer a recycling market for a lot of the paper, cardboard, plastic and other junk that’s left curbside.
Moreover, people are tossing garbage into those blue bins that they shouldn’t be. It just gums up the process.
“People are engaged in wish recycling,” says Mark Oldfield, public affairs director at CalRecycle, which runs the state’s recycling program. “They think: ‘This should be recycled. I’m going to put it in the bin.’”
“It’s amazing what people put in recycling bins,” Oldfield continues. “Dirty diapers. Broken crockery. Old garden hoses. Some of the worst offenders are old batteries.”
But what constitutes forbidden material is more nuanced than soiled diapers and corrosive batteries. Oldfield says it includes pizza boxes blotched with cheese and grease, plastic wrappers for food, shredded paper, unclean jelly jars, broken glass, unrinsed bottles and newspapers that have lined bird cages. Even paper envelopes with plastic address windows.
Recyclers these days don’t want items with mixed material such as paper and plastic, or cardboard and tape. It doesn’t pay to tear the stuff apart. Off to the landfill.
Moreover, what used to be California’s — and the world’s — largest overseas market for recyclables recently shut its door.
“China doesn’t want our garbage anymore,” says Steve Maviglio, a political strategist who is advising the recycling industry. “It’s time we cleaned up our own mess.”
Sad but true. Recycling seems largely a myth designed to make the public feel as if they “doing the right thing.” We used to separate paper, metal and glass, washing containers carefully, crushing tins to reduce volume, place these items in their designated containers. I couldn’t count the number of times I cut my hand scrubbing out a tin cans. This stopped dead when I noticed the “garbage men” tossing the “recyclable” stuff into the part of his truck containing non-recyclable waste. “No profit in recyclables anymore,” he told me.
This morning I took some steel waste to the recycler, around the corner. Got 20 pesos for it, didn’t think I’d get that much!
NAOM
Recent Non-Ferrous Scrap Metal Prices paid to individual recyclers in the US:
California should follow Europe’s lead and abolish landfills. Problem solved.
Often when I buy things I am horrified by the packaging. I suppose some of it is intended to prevent theft or to make the item more attractive on the shelf but now if you buy something online it comes in the same plastic tomb. Small items may be incapsulated in plastic that weighs nearly as much as the product.
“No profit in recyclables anymore,”
Is that the answer to everything?
It’s not just the plastic waste! More volume means less items per delivery, which means more vehicles are needed for less goods, which means more fuel consumed and more congestion.
NAOM
If you abolish landfills, the trash would just be shipped to other states that would welcome the revenue, much like how NYC’s trash is shipped around the country today. Costs of waste services in California would also go up, which would lead to increased illegal dumping and burning.
Apparently you aren’t familiar with the situation in Europe.
Burning it is the right plan. Trash incineration is widespread in Northern Europe and several countries are experiencing trash shortages. Germany imports about a million tons a year. Norway is considering importing from New York.
It’s really dumb that they use so much gas to generate electricity in the Northeast while dumping or exporting trash.
Climate Change: What Would Kavanaugh Do?
By Patrick J. Michaels and Trevor Burrus
In a 2012 dissent from a District of Columbia Appellate Court opinion, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh acknowledged that “dealing with global warming is urgent and important” but that any sweeping regulatory program would require an act of Congress.
Scalia held this opinion so strongly that, in his last public judicial act, he wrote the order (passed 5-4) to stay the Obama Administration’s sweeping “Clean Power Plan.” Such actions occur when it appears the court is likely to vote in a similar fashion in a related case.
This all devolves to the 2007 landmark ruling, 5-4, in Massachusetts v. EPA, that the EPA indeed was empowered by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide if the agency found that they endangered human health and welfare (which they subsequently did, in 2009). Justice Kennedy, Kavanaugh’s predecessor, voted with the majority.
Will Kavanaugh have a chance to reverse that vote? That depends on what the new Acting Administrator of the EPA plans to do about carbon dioxide emissions. If the agency simply stops any regulation of carbon dioxide, there will surely be some type of petition to compel the agency to continue regulation because of the 2009 endangerment finding. Alternatively, those already opposed to it might petition based upon the notion that the science has changed markedly since 2009, with increasing evidence that the computer models that were the sole basis for the finding have demonstrably overestimated warming in the current era. It’s also possible that Congress could compel EPA to reconsider its finding, and that a watered-down version might find itself at the center of a court-adjudicated policy fight.
I hate to break it to you, Cats, but global climate doesn’t have any concern at all about the news. There is no good news for climate, and there is no bad news for climate, because people aren’t in control, certainly no single person sitting on a court is going to have any effect at all.
As I studied my neighbors lawn, I asked him when was the last time he had heard a cricket or seen a grasshopper? He couldn’t answer, he had not even noticed they were gone. He lives right next to a lake. I asked him when was he had heard a frog last? He again was puzzled. No bugs on the windshield, nothing in the grass except a few small flies, no song of Katydid or cicada or cricket chirps. No more frog chorus. No more owls hooting or screaming in the night. No bears walking the darkness.
Of course he proudly described the poisons he applied to the lawn and flower gardens to keep the bugs down.
Gene Kritsky, an entomologist at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Ohio, told New York Magazine that a decline in cicada numbers in places like New York is likely due to land use.
“If trees were removed from areas where cicadas had emerged in the past and they are not within a mile of other cicadas, then the population would not replenish itself,” Kritsky told New York Mag. “This has resulted in a very sporadic distribution of the cicadas in more urban areas.”
Besides their three-to-four-week mating fest that ends in death, periodical cicadas live out most of their long lives as nymphs underground. Clearing a forest deprives the insects of their food source — they suck on sap from roots — and new pavement can become a tomb.
So keep clearing the forests, spraying the poisons, changing the climate. When the bugs are gone, bye bye to stupid humans too.
Oh you like to eat bugs? People are eating cicadas now, they are great bio-accumulators and the eastern half of the US is covered by mercury from coal burning. Good luck to all the candidates for the Mad-Hatters club. Same for fresh water fish.
I may not see a bear again but we sure see the effects of Bayer everywhere.
We have a lot of bears here, and growing. They are savage beasts who think nothing of attacking you or your family. I couldn’t name anyone I know who would be upset if bears went extinct locally.
I suppose you feel the same way about wolves?
BTW Lots of bears where I live. If you’re afraid of them get a dog. My mutt spots them long before I do and runs them off without any trouble. I worked in the arctic a lot where we always had a guy with a rifle to deal with aggressive polar bears. Over ten years we saw quite a few. Never had to kill one.
Shit, what wimps. I used to track bears for fun, got within a couple of yards of them sometimes. Until the hunters and cars killed them all they used to wander through my neighborhood and yard at night. Nice creatures, much better than humans.
It’s people that kill bears not the other way around. Ratio is hundreds of thousands to one. Just in the eastern US one hundred thousand bears can be shot each year, and who knows how many car kills and illegal kills happen.
Lightning is more dangerous, dogs are way more dangerous.
Despite all this slaughter of bears, they are far too intelligent and tolerant to want to eradicate humans. Something one cannot say about people. Also bears are far more important to the ecosystem than people.
Maybe you and your fellow villagers should shoot the cars instead. I hear cars kill and maim lots of people every day.
“It’s people that kill bears not the other way around.”
Yes. Many people are just looking for any excuse to kill a bear. Over the years I’ve had many exploration camps where crews would leave food garbage lying around then shoot bears eating the garbage. This was done in spite of the fact that helicopter pilots almost always volunteered to fly out bear attracting trash. A clean camp doesn’t attract bears.
They are savage beasts who think nothing of attacking you or your family.
Uh huh!
.
Do people ever imagine that we evolved in the same natural settings as all manner of carnivores much more atheletic than humans yet we managed to out-produce them. Apparently a human of average intelligence can live surrounded by wildlife and not have to shoot everything with teeth.
People are so wrapped in their security blankets (real or imagined) that they have lost their edge and start to fear everything. The media helps to instill an omnipresent fear of the world.
Time to get of our bubbles and back into the world.
““Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not. In the second place most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot – throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Get out and see something, one can’t miss or even imagine what one should miss when it is gone, if one has never seen or experienced it.
Odds of getting eaten are miniscule in most places, more likely a tumble or fall will get you, or maybe you will get lost and have a real adventure. Maybe get bitten by deerflies and mosquitos if lucky. Wear a hat.
Don’t drop it on your foot – throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Just reread it— that world has faded into the overpopulation and madness of now.
Even for the clueless, for those who are capable of reading a book, highly recommended.
Larson was a fave.
I would be more cautious of Republicans.
Much more dangerous and vicious.
Move into town.
I wonder how many people equate golf courses with nature?
Typical golf course in Florida… 😉
.
Is this guy playing or just watching?
Quietly waiting for ….
What’s his/her handicap? Are their no rules for proper golf dress?
I thought he was overdressed! Whoever heard of wearing alligator shoes on the golfcourse?
This is more an intrusion of suburbanites on wild life, subsidized by government spending on suburban roads.
Our local crocodiles have had a couple of golfers at one of our courses, over the years. Hurry up and putt, make it snappy!
The good news is that golf is dying. Men don’t spend that much time away from their wives any more.
Yes Gone Fishing, its getting more and more quiet out here/ in here.
There are insects all over the place in my backyard. I know because I have to spray before anytime the grandkids plan to come over. One is allergic to bees/wasps so we can’t take any chances. Another benefit is fewer mosquitos, flies and other nastys that bite you.
There are insects all over the place in my backyard. I know because I have to spray before anytime the grandkids plan to come over.
The total flying insect biomass decreased by more than 75 percent over 27 years in protected areas, according to a study published October 18, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Caspar Hallmann from Radboud University, The Netherlands, and colleagues.
Insects play a crucial role in ecosystem functioning, pollinating 80 percent of wild plants and providing a food source for 60 percent of birds. Previous research has shown an overall pattern of decline in insect diversity and abundance, but has focused on single species or taxonomic groups, rather than monitoring insect biomass over an extensive period.
While ignorance can be remedied, deliberate ignorance is inexcusable!
What I am supposed to do, let the little ones get stung and have an allergic reaction?
What’s your plan? Spray the whole damn planet so your grand kids can feel safe? If they are in so much danger in your yard then maybe have them wear protective clothing, make them aware of their surroundings, keep them in a screened porch or just send then to the mall where there are no natural dangers!
Most of the planet is sprayed and wherever people are inconvenienced the spraying increases. They are either clueless or don’t care about what they are doing. Humans uber alles.
Mosquito control was wandering around my area (county government agents). It looked like they were sampling ponds and lakes. We hardly have enough mosquitos to even get bitten this year, so spraying would only be justification for their jobs.
Maybe all these toxins and mutagens we introduce into the environment will mutate the insect life and produce things like this!!!! Eyes of the Moth man – documentary on Point Pleasant west Virginia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C66O2C5Tee4
Have fun with this, this is a real classic from the crazy ’60’s.
November 15th 1966 – four young adults traveling through the West Virginia backwoods of an abandoned TNT Plant come across something unnatural. The headlights from their 57′ Chevy strike what appears to be a black, lurking, lumbering, 7 foot tall man with red eyes and wings! Over the course of the next year, before the winged man of Point Pleasant would make his departure from his menacing raid on the God fearing souls of a minute church going community, 46 people would die tragically and hundreds more would be left traumatized and emotionally scarred for life. With rumors adrift of a haunting Indian curse, wild stories of men in black, bridge collapses, and a history of uncanny coincidences, UFO sightings, and even alien abductions, The Eyes of the Mothman is the first feature length documentary to delve deeper and try to uncover the truth behind this unsolved mystery from 43 years ago.
Yeah! Remember back in the 60s when Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring was published?
Seems we now have an even more virulent infestation of Homo ignorantis. Is there a spray we can use that eliminates ignorance and makes people understand the consequences of their actions?!
Given your link I found this one rather ironic…
.
BTW I photographed this one in Brazil. It has an 8 in. wingspan.
.
A beauty!
DDT?
The problem isn’t “spraying.” It’s over-spraying, or inappropriate spraying, or careless spraying.
If it weren’t for sprays (pesticides), I would have to kiss my apple orchard goodbye.
My bumpersticker:
NO PESTICIDES NO FOOD
Why do you grow strains that are extremely susceptible to disease? You just stated a 100 percent loss without pesticides.
Apples are cursed, it seems, and we live on an old New England farm where we decided to grow heritage varieties, the kind they had in old days, that should have been allowed to go extinct.
We probably wouldn’t have 100% loss with no pesticides, I was exaggerating, but the crop would be reduced, the quality would suck, and I would have to work twice as hard for a nasty crop.
One of the dirty secrets of organic apple growing is that they play games, like locating an “organic” orchard deep within a “conventional” orchard which is sprayed as usual. Following “organic rules,” the farmers keep a wide buffer around the organic crop.
Oh, and they still have to spray the organic trees–more frequently! Hard to believe, isn’t it? But organic growers have to use elemental sulfur to control fungi, and it kinda sucks as it doesn’t last after a mere 1/2 of rain, and if you use too much it damages the trees.
And they spray kaolin clay on the fruit–basically dirt, basically kitty litter–to try to keep the insects from fucking up the fruit, but again it kinda sucks because it’s bulky, and expensive, and you have to spray it frequently.
In short–farming is a goddamn tragedy. I agree with Jared Diamond:
That’s why we call fishing and hunting recreation now. Always a good story around the campfire at night.
KISS? Nope we make it much more complicated/annoying/destructive and call it better.
Well I don’t so much care about what everybody else on the planet does, where did I ever say that? I just think me, my wife and my family have the right to spend time in my own damn backyard whenever we want without getting bit or stung or annoyed by bugs crawling all over us.
Ever see anyone die of anaphylaxis? I have, as a former EMT.
People have a right to protect themselves from pests, with chemicals!
[Personally, I don’t use bug dope because it stinks and I hate that feeling of that shit on my skin.]
May I suggest swimming in DEET then. Also, if you soak your clothes in ammonia and then sleep in them they’ll never get wrinkly and you’ll never have to iron them again.
54 deaths out of 281 million people. Wow Mike, sounds like a real public health crisis! If you saw one of those I’d recommend you buy a lotto ticket, drama queen.
Just curious. Most of my field work (geology) has been in the Mountain West.
‘Green desert’ monoculture forests spreading in Africa and South America
“Some 350 kg of paper per person a year are consumed in Europe, half of which is packaging, while in Brazil and Uruguay the average is 50 kgs per person annually,” Brazilian activist Winfridus Overbeek, international coordinator of the Uruguay-based World Rainforest Movement (WRM), told IPS.
Overbeek said that in Europe as well as North America, there is no longer enough space to plant the trees required for that high level of consumption, so companies are shifting production to countries of the developing South.
Guadalupe Rodríguez, a member of the Germany-based Rainforest Rescue, told IPS that “monoculture forests tend to be seen as a good thing, because they are green and pretty. But if you approach them, you won’t hear a single bird, because there is nothing there, just silence.
“A monoculture forest is almost like a stone quarry,” she added. “In tropical rainforests, by contrast, you hear animals, water flowing, because they are full of life.”
If it isn’t paper, people will want to plant sugar cane, or corn, palm for oil, cotton, or hemp.
People talk about cutting down the rainforest so they can produce biofuel for their airplanes.
Then they can drop bombs on the protesters.
Yeah, people are beyond stupid.
Let’s see, rain forest provides food, medicine, habitat for millions of species, water and weather management services and many other benefits. Lasts for millions of years with no need for human input. Also provides mystery, danger, adventure.
Airplanes, last 30 to 40 years with lots of maintenance, suck up and burn expensive fuel, don’t do much to help anything, need large clear cut and prepared areas plus shelter and a large industrial civilization to build and provide for them.
I think we have a winner
I wonder how much of that 350 kg is recycled.
Is there a link between paper usage and plastic bags? Paper bags v plastic bags. If plastic bags are banned would that lead to more paper usage and, thus, more land massacred to provide ram material. Maybe we need to do more to produce useful fiber from plant waste.
NAOM
Happy Bastille Day Comrades!
It was the start of getting rid of those nasty Kings and Queens, and letting the populace rule.
Unfortunately, capitalism has taken over, but is on its dying days.
At this moment capitalism looks to be replaced by something even worse- economic dictatorship of the oligarchs.
Apparently we are not ready for good behavior, good thing we are owned.
It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB0YB5bzD48
“Populace rule” requires an involved, educated and informed citizenry. I my view, one who condemns capitalism doesn’t meet those standard. It’s like blaming basketball for the chaos in a pick up game that nether team plays by the rules and no referee.
It is government that sets the laws and regulation in the capitalism game. When you live in a country that half it’s citizenry are anti government and regulations. Plus 80% of it’s citizens are to distracted, short sighted and self center to optimize it’s government. There will be those who point the finger at everything but themselves.
America has the government and economy it deserves
True capitalism was around for about 200 years out of 200,000 of human existence (i.e. 0.1%) and then only for a proportion of the population. It looks likely that it owes it’s existence solely to ever increasing supplies of cheap energy (and with no short term consequences from it’s use), which might now be dwindling quite quickly. So replacing it with something else, and something probably worse for almost everyone, would be a predictable development just about now.
Also predictable:
I don’t think capitalism is linked as much to cheap energy as it is to the enlightenment and the pursuit of rational behavior that resulted.
When the ruling parts of western society discovered that by abandoning tradition and religion based social structures more physical wealth was popular it was entirely rational to base the “economy” on what worked best as far as could be seen in that age. Adam Smith captured it perfectly in the little story about the needle factory: Applying scientific methods to manufacture increased output long before the steam engine became dominant. Competitive markets were a natural next step when production increased and new ideas were out performing old.
It’s just that now we have different problems in the industrial societies and no one wants to move away from the game that gave us so much but has now become it’s own worst enemy.
Rational behavior?
Well, it has benefited me—
But I have had to restrict ethical conduct, and be good at the con, and not think of the result.
Capitalism is pretty basic, and it is best if you are 16, and reading Ayn Rand.
Yeah, I had a little trouble wording that. Maybe I should have something along the lines that capitalism seems to reward those with the shortest outlook, weeks over years, and that the apparent success of those individuals generates envy among those who see themselves falling behind.
And then the short term viewpoint is all that is left in the largest arenas of public discussion.
by the way, I just noticed that I am seen here as both Jim and JJHMAN. I’m not trying to hide, just rather dim witted about these things. ;>)
Yep,
Small Hands
Big Lies
But that is just a end game thing——-
““Populace rule” requires an involved, educated and informed citizenry.”
Well, the republicans are doing their best to eliminate that.
NAOM
Dennis- is there a real phenomena of peak credit [debt]?
Consider the following statement-
“We no longer have business cycles, we have credit cycles.
Post-crisis [2008] growth, mild as it’s been, has been largely a function of debt, which central banks encouraged and enabled. The result was inflated asset prices without the kind of “recovery” seen in previous business cycles.”
Perhaps this doesn’t apply to all countries. Some are truly in the midst of inherent growth phases, like India.
Others, it can be argued, have borrowed growth via quantitative easing and increasing the overall debt load of the country.
I am concerned that many countries have rounded the top not just on energy production, but also on base economic output. What economic system works when growth isn’t part of the assumption/outcome?
For example, the pension system in the USA assumes returns far in excess of what has been accrued, in order to pay the ‘promises’. Without growth far in excess of what has transpired, that system is broken. Can you imagine paying for college with a loan these days, expecting wages to allow you to pay the money back? Its a broken system, built on stilts of debt.
Right?
like India.
Probably the second major country over the falls.
Oh sure India has massive problems with sustainability and on, but my point in using them as an example is simply that they are growing. Growing pretty fast too. I know people from there and they have a sense of economic possibility that was far beyond reach until recently. Go to Toledo or Milan and show me growth (not built on massive debt).
Oh sure India has massive problems with sustainability
A ecological nightmare.
One has to be in a awfully small box to even to approach survivability.
Your claims about social Security is just Republican propaganda. The system is fine, except that the donations are capped, and the Republicans can’t resist stealing from it to pay for tax cuts.
Social Security has to exist in a political environment that includes Republicans. that’s the problem. It would be solvent if we could charge SS taxes on all income. However if you are limited to taxing people who expect to benefit from the plan than you have to pay benefits to people that have some proportion to the taxes they pay. Limiting the exposure to taxes to the people who really don’t care if they get the benefit is a kind of compromise that avoids getting too much resistance from the very wealthy who could quash SS if they were angered.
I don’t think anyone is “stealing” SS money. The first “borrowing” from the trust fund was done by Lyndon Johnson to pay for the Vietnam war. It’s all funny money. Either the government is going to pay the benefit or they aren’t irrespective of whether there are bonds in a desk drawer or not.
Ummh..alimbiqu- I didn’t mention anything about social security. perhaps your comment was directed to someone else who’s comment I don’t see.
Hickory,
As long as debt is not overdone it is not a problem. Think of mortgage lending rules. Total debt can be about 3 times annual income and typically be serviced without a problem.
For World debt (both public and private) this would equate to a debt to GDP (income) level of about 300 to 1. Also note that a lot of the increase in the World Debt to GDP has been in emerging economies and China since about 2011 or so. Historically debt to GDP has been lower in less developed economies (as a group) and as these economies develop they will have better access to credit and debt to GDP will rise. This tends to increase the average World debt to GDP.
Maybe its over my head, but I look at the data for the USA, for example, and see credit extended currently at about 150% of GDP. But that does not include the financial sector debt, or the city, state, or federal government debt. And so, correct me if I am wrong, but the underfunded pension plan debt (teachers, police, etc) is not tallied here. The debt that blew up the world economy (financial sector) in 2008 is not tallied here.
Also, the congress has used unrealistic growth numbers to pretend that the social program (particularly medical) funding escalation baked in over the next decade can be managed.
I think there is a strong chance that the shit on this will hit the fan right about when the next deep recession/depression comes calling (as you say mid 2020’s Dennis).
Between energy and debt, it may be huge.
Chevy Bolt EV Premier | $40.67 TO GO OVER 35,000 miles???!!! Ride along owner’s review
While negative news of Brexit continues to plague the U.K., there is some light in the darkness. Non-profit service, MyGrid GB, which charts the changes in electricity generation in the U.K., today tweeted that the country has gone for 1,009 hours without relying on coal this year.
This compares to 624 hours across the whole of 2017, and 210 hours in the 12 months of 2016.
While gas and nuclear still represent the largest share of electricity – 48.6% and 22.8%, respectively, this week – solar PV’s share has significantly increased recently, due to the current heat wave being experienced in the U.K.
A combination of good meteorological conditions in the first half of 2018 has led Spain to cover 45.8% of the electricity demand on its grid via renewable energy sources (the figure excludes the Balearic and Canary Islands).
Wind energy systems were the peninsula’s primary source of electricity, covering 22.6% of its electricity demand, the highest penetration of any type of energy, renewable or not. “Compared with the first six months of 2017, wind production has increased by 10.4%,” added the REE.
In the first half of 2018, renewable energies accounted for a higher share of German gross electricity generation, for the first time beating coal-fired and lignite-fired power stations.
Nearly 118 billion kWh have been generated by PV, wind other renewable energy plants in the period, according to Germany’s Federal Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW). This is an increase of more than 10% over the previous year.
California’s greenhouse gas pollution levels fell below 1990 levels for the first time since the American state’s emissions peaked in 2004, new Air Resources Board data has shown – and several years before the target date of 2020.
or some might prefer the last news story from a US perspective:
The steady growth of California’s renewable energy resources is having a big impact. While the size of the states GHG emissions drop is impressive on whole — 2.7% is nothing to sneeze at—the power sector’s decline was much larger.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the electric power sector dropped from 83.67 million metric tons in 2015 to 68.58 million metric tons in 2016 — a decline of about 18%.
Hope all those who watch the FIFA World Cup Final (the real football world cup) enjoy it! I’m rooting for the underdogs, Go Croatia! For those in the US, how did a game in which the ball is only kicked a select few times, with most of the game involving the ball being carried by hand, get the name “football”? The rest of the world wants to know.
Edit: Little did I know that while I was writing my post, the World Cup Final was well advanced and Croatia was down 4-2, the final score. So France win another World Cup Final and that just shows how much interest I have paid to the competition this time around!
For those in the US, how did a game in which the ball is only kicked a select few times, with most of the game involving the ball being carried by hand, get the name “football”? The rest of the world wants to know.
LOL! Here’s my theory: Apparently many American ‘FOOT’ ball fans have difficulty distinguishing certain parts of their anatomy from other parts…
BTW, it would be rather amusing to see little Croatia beat the big bad French, eh?!
As opposed to handball?
Well, can handball be played with a genuine pigskin?
Hang that, off the back of your wimpy pick up truck! 😉
.
Pig Uber or Uber Pig?
Now now, EFredM,
Don’t forget Rugby, which is properly Rugby football. Comes out of the later 19th Century in England it does, in two forms Rugby union and Rugby league and they carry the ball and pass the ball and enjoy all sorts of mayhem. Gave rise to American football, Canadian football too.
I saw a bumper sticker here, from the local Rugby team: Rugby players eat their dead.
Plus Australian Rules Football, or should that be no-rules?
notanoilman,
Australian football is one of the very few solid pieces of evidence that Earth has indeed been visited by beings from another world.
I think they’re trying to encourage us, for their own inscrutable ends.
I’d like to know how come a game derived from rugby became football. Is it that Americans in their zeal to throw off all vestiges of their colonial past decided not to use the name used in other British colonies for what might have essentially been the same game at the time?
So, I decided to do some internet searching and found that in using the name soccer, the US has held on to a very old name for footbal that fell out of use quite sometime ago. American football is much more closely related to Rugby tgan it is to what is now know everywhere else as football.
So I guess congratulations are in order for the US for proving American exceptionalism once more. The only country in the world to have held on to an ancient name for football and stuck to using the name football for a game related to what the rest of the world calls rugby! Strange country the US. One of the most scientifically advanced countries in the world stubbornly hanging on to an ancient weights and measures system that was inherited from their former colonial rulers, while the rest of the world has moved on!
Incidentally, news around my neck of the woods has been surrounding rumours that a former Olympic bronze medallist is joining a local rugby team.
The term ‘Soccer’ is common in the UK too.
NAOM
islandboy,
The game’s name is Rugby football, or Rugger football for graduates of Rugby school. That’s UK usage, though it’s commonly shortened to rugby.
Yes Rugby Football versus Association Football, which was shortened to Soccer.
“45.8% of the electricity demand on its grid”
Wah, wah! The grid will collapse if there are more than 20% renewables!
Or, at least, so say the trolls.
NAOM
By 45.8% of “electricity demand on the grid” they actually mean electrical energy or kWh. Electrical energy is to electrical power as distance is to speed and the figure given is akin to saying that half the distance covered in a particular journey was done in an EV without saying how fast the distance was covered.
The take away from that is that the actual power (kW or MW) delivered to the grid could have been much higher than 45.8% at times, as was the case in Portugal on March 11, 2018 when the energy delivered to the grid was 143% of consumption! See:
The problem is that increasing amounts of renewable power mean that ff powered generators are experiencing lower capacity factors, unable to match the offer prices of renewables. It’s the people who are on the losing end that are pushing this BS. The network operators don’t care where the power is coming from as long as they can balance demand with supply all the time.
Excellent news.
To give it some perspective since the population is growing at about 80 million people per year, the rate of new net renewable electric power capacity addition in 2017 was 6 times the rate needed per capita to provide power at the current per capita rate. Considering utilization factor, that means that renewables would meet the increase in demand two times over if they have a 33% utilization factor.
Since renewables are growing fast, they are now taking care of newly added demand from population but are making a larger dent in the need for continuing existing power sources.
With population net increase falling, that should even make a bigger dent in FF power sources in the coming years.
Absolute net rate of global population growth.
Global population net time for increase by one billion people.
That looks like a very realistic projection. I would not argue with that projection at all. Unless of course collapse happens before we reach 11 billion. And I would consider that highly likely. Most likely well before we reach 10 billion.
Especially if countries are having problems like this:
The Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) is lamenting the failure of successive political administrations to effectively deal with the growing public health issue arising from poor management of the country’s solid waste and waste disposal sites.
As I have stated a number of times on this site, any projection more than 5 years or at most ten years forward are not very useful due to the large number of intersecting growing predicaments and problems.
Still, it’s nice to know the official projections since that is what the academics think and probably what the businesses/governments are using as guidelines for current action.
Except for the US government which at this point has wandered down the rabbit hole while doing a great and fantastic job.
Except for the US government which at this point has wandered down the rabbit hole while doing a great and fantastic job.
Yep, we are totally in Alice in Wonderland territory.
.
.
An eye opening interview with Dr. James White.
A sit down with Dr. James White professor of paleoclimatology at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Alpine and Arctic Institute. “Shifts of 10C or more within a human life time.” (Host — Antonio Reid)
“I am really trying to develop a detailed understanding of how dangerous just 1-2C of global average warming really is. And those global averages could correspond to be 10C or more here in North America.”
That is an excellent video interview! Thanks for sharing it. The prof is a straight shooter.
I think that over the coming decade the myth that our emissions dominate climate change will be eroded away. I liken the present climate situation as lighting a match, the match will burn brightly but only for a short time. Once applied to a larger amount of combustible material the original match burn will become unnecessary and, in the long run, insignificant to the total amount of energy released (or captured in the Earth system case).
And for those with a burning interest in such things: A fire smolders in an abandoned coal mine deep underground. Gases seep to the surface through fissures in the earth. A blue-collar Pennsylvania town vaporizes, chased away by the blaze. But this is not Centralia, where subterranean seams of anthracite have been burning since 1962. No, this is Laurel Run, a town done in by a mine fire that’s been burning nearly twice as long.
Though Centralia has garnered the lion’s share of attention as the ghost town made famous by a mine fire, the central Pennsylvania borough is not the only place to have been erased from below. Underground fires have come and gone since Pennsylvania’s mines first opened in the 18th century. More than three dozen active mine fires are currently burning in that state. When those infernos were away from population centers, people mostly ignored them. A few times, though, when acrid gases rose through city streets, there was no option but to raise the white flag of surrender and relocate an entire community.
Because it is not true, manmade CO2 is not even the dominant factor now. It is merely a trigger or catalyst, which is why small changes in it are so potent, it helps unleash the other multitude of factors that add up to much larger forcings, which push the feedbacks even further/faster. The problem is that CO2 levels are temperature/biological dependent which means that the levels won’t drop later on. Not on any human timescale.
It took a huge long term event to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels after the PETM, even then it took over 40 million years to get down to the ICE AGE we now live in (or did live in). Greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide and methane, played a significant role during the Eocene in controlling the surface temperature. The end of the PETM was met with a very large sequestration of carbon dioxide in the form of methane clathrate, coal, and crude oil at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, that reduced the atmospheric carbon dioxide.[7] This event was similar in magnitude to the massive release of greenhouse gasses at the beginning of the PETM, and it is hypothesized that the sequestration was mainly due to organic carbon burial and weathering of silicates. For the early Eocene there is much discussion on how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere. This is due to numerous proxies representing different atmospheric carbon dioxide content. For example, diverse geochemical and paleontological proxies indicate that at the maximum of global warmth the atmospheric carbon dioxide values were at 700–900 ppm
There are vast stored quantities of carbon to be released in the form of CO2 and methane (which degrades to CO2). That is fact. As the world warms they get released. As the snow and ice recede the world warms quickly. As the plankton levels drop, the CO2 sequestration slows down. As the oceans warm their ability to sequester CO2 reduces.
So what is the great event that will suck CO2 from the atmosphere to eventually break the warm period? More coal making? More silicate to carbonate weathering? Millions of years?
Even after the PETM ended it was still quite a warm world and the temperature dropped by several C then rose slowly over millions of years to a similar maximum. It took about 15 million to drop far enough that Antarctica could glaciate, which later melted again and finally over 40 million years after the Eocene Optimum we entered another Ice Age.
That is a long time to wait for a return to “normal” temperatures.
As the sea levels rise and as the oceans warm the ability to produce methane increases. Methane has an instantaneous warming factor over 150 times that of CO2.
We now have the a CO2 equivalent of close to 800 ppm when one does not factor in the lifetime of the gases involved. What really counts and what really heats is what is there now and there is no reason to think they will reduce since natural sources are taking over.
Then there is albedo change. A 1 percent change in albedo is 2.7 watts/m2 at the surface (global). In reality, the changes are over 100 w/m2 in the region where the snow loss occurs. That forces phase change and major permanent environmental change in that region. So going from 0.30 to 0.29 has a larger effect on the planet than the CO2 increase by itself. I doubt if we can accurately measure the planetary albedo to one percent or even three percent. So the changes will be another surprise.
It took thousands of years to push CO2 levels up in the PETM. We are doing it at many times that rate (0.2 Gt/yr vs. 40Gt/yr). That means we are now seeing the very start of warming, not the end of warming. We are seeing the first few feet off the starting line on what could be a journey of millions of years. We won’t even start to see the effects of the Southern Ocean soaking up all that energy for a few hundred years. it’s a long term journey.
Only a few climate scientists have really rung the alarm bell early on. Most play with models and try to understand the full complexity of a multivariate fully interdependent non-linear system. Nice to know eventually, but we do not have eventually to act.
It takes massive long term geological and orbital changes to move the planet from it’s preferred states.
The myth of small changes that will recover in thousands of years on their own. The myth that the system does not move to preferred states and try to stay there. The myth that we can stop the warming at 1.5 or 2C with minimal change on our part. The myth that we can comprehend the earth system after partially understanding and observing a very small perturbation during a single extremely small time slice.
Geologic history of the planet refutes the myth.
GoneFishing,
Thanks.
I asked because any convinced denier of human-caused climate change would read it and say “SEE?” Such are not likely to read any farther.
I actually managed to read through all of this, and all I can say is, “wow”…
Even with those fires, country bumpkins in PA are conditioned to think coal will always be relevant. Doesn’t matter if they are employed in the coal industry or not, they’ll vote for any Republican who promises them more coal. Hell, doesn’t even matter if there are any coal mines in their county, they’ll still be eager to vote for coal.
Honestly for anyone looking to move, avoid Pennsylvania altogether, it’s a lost cause. The city folks are brainwashed to vote Democrat while the rural folks only want to breathe in coal dust while they cling to their bibles, guns, and fetus models (used to “teach” the children about abortion).
“Sympathy with organic food production is at an all-time high. Perhaps ‘It’s a nice idea, when you can afford it’ sums up the approach of many people. But extending these principles of production to the whole food system? It just doesn’t seem practical. There are an awful lot of people to feed in the world and, if you’re hungry, you don’t care much about the niceties of how the food was produced.
A new report from Global Justice Now, From The Roots Up, shows that not only can small-scale organically produced food feed the world, but it can do so better than intensive, corporate-controlled agriculture. As a matter of fact, it already is feeding millions of people…
…We’re talking about who controls our food supply and how that power is used.
For in our global economy, it is not the amount of food produced which dictates whether people eat or starve. If it was, we would not see the inhumane but common spectacle of people malnourished while surrounded by food. Rather, it is the increasing grip which big business exerts over our food system, in accordance with a near religious faith in the power of the market.
So agroecology does not simply say ‘we can grow more’. It says, we can give people control over their food. “
“A comprehensive new study of global food supplies confirms and thoroughly documents for the first time what experts have long suspected: over the last five decades, human diets around the world have grown ever more similar—by a global average of 36 percent—and the trend shows no signs of slowing, with major consequences for human nutrition and global food security.”
Yair,
I reckon one of the problems we have is that food is too readily available and too cheap, people don’t value it . . . a few queues and a ration book or two would clarify a lot of minds.
The first thing my mother bought when we got of the ship from the UK and moved to rural Tasmania was a house cow to provide us with milk and butter. I can remember helping her pack onions in wood shavings to tide us over until the next dig . . . in those days it seems food took a much larger portion of the weekly income than it does now.
I am not complaining though. On a very low fixed income, we shop wisely, waste nothing and find my wife and I can eat very well on sixty bucks per week . . . it would be considerably less if we lived in town.
It would take a lot less “peasant farmers” to feed the masses if there was less extravagance and waste.
Addendum to my most recent comments about food, and my own words about it:
Consider Earth as a giant farm– the farm of all farms.
At least try to transcend your particular schema of agriculture and/or farming and/or you, how you fit in, and in relation to your own energy and nutrient inputs and outputs and how they and you in general are and/or can be integrated (better) with your surrounds, like in a win-win symbiotic sense.
In fact, think about it while you are in the process of an ‘output’. Ask yourself what happens to it/them and can they and what happens to them be better approached and utilized, such as by your surrounds and the creatures within it, and stuff like that.
“We examine variations in crop production by farm size using a newly-compiled global sample of subnational level microdata and agricultural censuses covering more countries (n=55) and crop types (n=154) than assessed to date. We estimate that farms under 2ha globally produce 28-31% of total crop production and 30-34% of food supply on 24% of gross agricultural area. Farms under 2ha devote a greater proportion of their production to food, and account for greater crop diversity, while farms over 1000ha have the greatest proportion of post-harvest loss.”
“In a review of agricultural census data, we find that globally family farms constitute over 98% of all farms, and work on 53% of agricultural land. Across distinct contexts, family farming plays a critical role for global food production…
Based on a comprehensive analysis of global agricultural census data, family farming is by far the most predominant form of agriculture. At the same time, the fact that family farmers are not a defined group in most countries is a major challenge. Improvements are required both in agricultural census design and data collection and the development of specific, targeted and effective policies on family farming in most parts of the world. Further, although many benefits have been documented to accrue from small-scale and family farming, much research remains to be done to understand the precise mechanisms, limits, and contextual dependencies of these relationships.”
The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide
~ Sarah K. Lowder, Jakob Skoet and Terri Raney,
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy
“Globally, about 84% of farms are smaller than 2 ha, and they operate about 12% of farmland. In countries at lower levels of income, smaller farms operate a far greater share of farmland than do smaller farms in the higher-income countries.
In low- and lower-middle-income countries, as well as in countries of East Asia and the Pacific (excluding China), South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, about 70–80% of farms are smaller than 2 ha and operate about 30–40% of the land…
According to the most commonly used definitions, more than 90% of the world’s farms can be considered family farms, while 84% of all farms are small farms (less than 2 ha)…”
“In 2013, the United Nations announced that the world’s agricultural needs can be met with localized organic farms. That’s right, we do not need giant monocultures that pour, spray and coat our produce with massive amounts of poisons, only to create mutant pests and weeds while decimating pollinators and harming human health. Don’t believe the hype: We do not need genetically modified foods ‘to feed the world’.
From my experience, many of these – how shall we call them – ‘worker bees’ (i.e the GMO salesmen) who work for these companies and spread this propaganda, actually believe conventional tactics are necessary to ensure food security. They’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and cannot envision another possibility. The changes threaten their very existence.”
My semi-educated guess is that atleast 5 billion of the current 7.6 B peole on the planet, and perhaps many more, derive the vast bulk of their sustenance [protein, carb, fat] from large scale modern agricultural production techniques.
This includes a range of chemicals, machinery and technology (irrigation, genetically improved/selected plant material, etc), and is highly dependent in all phases on external energy input which vastly extends the human and animal labor previously available.
Is this a good thing? There are many facets of that question. Good for feeding the highest number of people. Bad if you are a ‘veal’ cow calf. Bad if you value clean water.
Should we move towards a cleaner system more dependent on local markets, and sustainable when it comes to energy and chemicals- certainly. But realize that this goal entails a massive downsizing in human population. That is a key element of this discussion. The carrying capacity of sustainable food production in this world is probably a lot closer to 1 billion than 7 billion people. In part it depends what we eat. The carrying capacity is higher with a diet based on crickets and algae, than chicken parmesan and meatloaf.
I’m a professional ag guy, retired some time now, and I am slow to accept any agricultural statistics gathered and collated on the grand scale, because I learned all the way back in grade school about “lies, damned lies, and statistics”, courtesy of Twain if I remember correctly.
So I don’t know these days how much of the world’s food is produced by traditional pre industrial methods, obsolete industrial methods such as the ones I pursued as a young man, and modern industrial methods.
But I do know this. One HELL of a lot of food is still produced by very small scale farmers who use very little in the way of industrially supplied inputs, in some parts of the world, and when they do have such inputs, they are mostly fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel, all in very modest quantities.
And such farmers, and their local customers, eat LOW on the food chain. It takes a lot of grain to produce beef, but if you eat the grain, you can provide for three times as many people, roughly, per acre of land in production.
What I ‘m saying, in essence, is that a rural poor Chinaman lives on a third or less of the grain, etc, consumed directly as bread, and INDIRECTLY as meat, as a typical lard ass Yankee.
NUANCE always matters.
So my semi educated guess is that maybe half or even more of the world’s food supply is still produced by very small scale farmers using very modest amounts of purchased fertilizers, pesticides, fuel and so forth.
It’s hard to say because things have been and are changing so fast, and because damned near all the statistics you see published these days by any organization with an agenda ( meaning just about EVERY organization ) are cherry picked and massaged to further said agenda.
If I recall correctly from perusing this site years ago, you grew apples, right?
Search above and tell that yahoo what it’s like to run an orchard.
Mine is very small, so it’s more of a hobby, but it certainly is a good edumacation in the Darwinian nature of farming.
People will get back to basics when they are forced to–or die. For now, it’s big ag all the way to the graveyard.
Caelan, this one’s for you: the aerial tramway emoji has been the least used emoji on Twitter for the last 71 days. You might want to work on improving this, obviously not enough people understand the benefits of these systems like you do. 😆 😉
I don’t know where NASA does their summaries but the chart has June second hottest by he look of it (and only just). Columbia has a high probability of El Nino next year so records are likely to be falling then (they will be in July in UK based on current temperatures)
“June 1998 was exceptionally warm at the time due to the then prevailing strong El Niño conditions — about 0.33°C above the trend line of the late 1990s. In contrast, the current El Niño phase is considered neutral.”
From the GISTEMP graph, it appears as if we have a 1.5 to 2C change already.
Greenland is experiencing a year without a summer. This is going mostly unnoticed to groups like NASA because there is a highly limited number of observation stations on Greenland.
Frisky Bobby, Do you seriously believe scientists at NASA are unaware of what is happening in Greenland due to climate change!
From your link:
Millions of shorebirds descend on the Arctic each year to mate and raise chicks during the tundra’s brief burst of summer. But that burst, which usually begins in mid-June, never arrived this year for eastern Greenland’s shorebirds, a set of ground-nesting species. Instead, a record late snowpack—lingering into July—sealed the birds off from food and nesting sites. Without these key resources avian migrants to the region will not reproduce in 2018, experts say. Breeding failures like this may grow more common because some climate change models predict increased springtime snow in the shorebirds’ nesting habitat.
So you don’t even recognize one of your own cold blobs?! Colder than normal weather in summer in Greenland with snowfall is exactly what the models predict and you think climate scientists are surprised by this? You are truly an idiotic troll!
More snow means more energy needed to melt it, which means temperatures are further suppressed because energy is going into melting the snow. That’s previously unforeseen cooling.
That’s egregiously incorrect. Snow can occur any time there are the right atmospheric conditions under freezing. Under freezing does not mean colder than previously, and more snow could be due to more moisture rather than lower temps. And the existence of snow does not mean cooling, it means that, if the snow is to become water some energy that could have gone to warming will have to melt it. Does not at all create an additional cooling effect, nor will that energy necessarily be used to melt the snow, and if that snow is warmer than snow used to be, there could be far less energy needed to melt it now than in the past.
I’m not a climate scientist, these are just rather basic observations about how weather, freezing, melting, and temperature works. I’m sure someone more educated could come up with a much better explanation of how wrong your statement was.
Bob – you must be having to spend more and more time trying to find places that are colder than average. As far as snow: 1) there is no net energy loss – the heat is initially given out to the environment when it is formed, same with ice – it’s likely the net heating and cooling happen in different places; 2) when it lands on ice or permafrost snow acts as insulation and tends to inhibit the heat leaving, which prevents the ice thickening, so it can worsen climate change impacts.
Burning jungle to burn palm oil. European and Indonesian mandates on biofuel mean palm oil is being burned in vehicles.
Burning Paradise: Palm Oil in the Land of the Tree Kangaroo
What happened when a giant Korean conglomerate set its eyes on Indonesia’s largest intact rainforest–
and how that palm oil made it into the world’s soap, moisturizer, and gas tanks https://www.mightyearth.org/BurningParadise/
Africa’s Oldest Trees Are Dying, and Scientists Are Stumped A mysterious killer is claiming the mighty baobab.
“It is very surprising to visit monumental baobabs, with ages greater than a thousand to two thousand years, which seem to be in a good state of health, and to find them after several years fallen to the ground and dead,” says study coauthor Adrian Patrut of Romania’s Babes-Bolyai University.
“Statistically, it is practically impossible that such a high number of large old baobabs die in such a short time frame due to natural causes.”
BTW the Baobab tree is an important part of the story of the Little Prince
“I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Back to this carrying capacity issue:
All the old hands here know I’m fully on board with the resource depletion, climate running hot, overpopulation questions.
So…… Hopefully nobody will see fit to call me a blooming idiot in this particular context, at this time, although most all of you who have commented are due a lecture on practical politics, because just about all of you have forgotten the first basic rule of winning over voters……. you must be respectful, first of all, if you want people to even CONSIDER changing their minds about their fundamental beliefs.
Now I know it’s hard for people familiar with the hard sciences to comprehend the mindsets and beliefs of people who lack this training……… but who ARE quite well versed in the “sorta kinda” sciences of economics, politics, law, and so forth.
Not everybody who believes in the power of the MIGHTY MIGHTY MARKET and the INVINCIBLE INVISIBLE HAND is a religious conservative, nor a redneck, nor a racist, nor a xenophobe, or even an ordinary idiot.
As a matter of fact, there are obviously many millions of people who have studied economics, at least at the basic level, and history, at least at the basic level, who have NOT studied the hard sciences, other than ARITHMETIC sufficient to run a business or hold a particular job…….. people who have NEAR ZERO knowledge of the hard sciences.
What they DO KNOW is that the economists ( and others) who are telling them that we have plenty of resources, and if we run short of any particular resource, that we can substitute another, or do without that one easily, have a LONG record of being RIGHT in their arguments.
A good lot of us here are old TOD hands, who firmly believed that peak oil would be receding in the mirror close to ten years ago, or maybe even longer. WE ALL LAUGHED AT THE REPUBLICAN CONSERVATIVE TYPES whose mantra was DRILL BABY DRILL.
Well, baby drilled, and we have plenty of fucking oil……. for the present anyway. There’s plenty of copper wire in the big box stores, there’s plenty of food in the supermarkets. Paul Erlich was wrong about people starving on the grand scale ……… but I took him seriously…….. back then and when. I believed in the Green Revolution, being an professional ag guy myself….. but I didn’t believe the socalled Third World would be able to AFFORD the Green Revolution…..I won a public speaking contest by arguing that yes the technology was sound, but that the necessary infrastructure needed to implement it didn’t exist… meaning roads, electrical grids, packaging plants, machinery, fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, all needed on the grand scale…… who was going to PAY for all this stuff?
From the pov of people who lack serious training in the hard sciences, and who are suspicious of us to begin with, but know the basic outlines of economic and technological history, WE look like goddamned fools and idiots…….. JUST AS SURELY as they look like fools and idiots to US.
PRAY let us not forget that you can graduate from nearly any well known university without taking even ONE real science course. So help me Sky Daddy. I doubt that more than one person out of ten in the USA is has even foggiest understanding of the basics of biology, ecology, climate, geology.
This does not mean however that we can’t communicate with such people, and that we can’t at least potentially convert them into voters who take environmental issues seriously…. especially if they happen to be reasonably well educated in ANY field that requires some thinking… some ability to understand and sort out facts, draw conclusions, etc.
I will be back with another long comment sometime later this evening outlining the way I work personally with people trained in business, history, and economics, but not biology, geology, chemistry, etc, to help them truly understand the carrying capacity issue.
We can either try to win such people over, and thus help win elections for the environmental camp, or we can call them names….. which does make us feel better, lol. I must admit I occasionally call people who disagree with me idiots….. but I try not to make a HABIT of it.
Back atcha all later.
I suppose all this is easy for me to understand and accept because I have lived in both camps, politically, professionally, and culturally, whereas hardly any, if any, of the other regulars here have similar personal histories.
just about all of you have forgotten the first basic rule of winning over voters……. you must be respectful, first of all, if you want people to even CONSIDER changing their minds about their fundamental beliefs.
Mac, I have expressed this point before, but apparently, you did not consider my opinion important. That is your preoperative. Nevertheless I will give it to you again:
I have no desire to win over voters. Trump voters are all just down in the dirt stupid. Trump, as he said, could shoot someone on fifth avenue and he would not lose any voters. That is true. That is a testament as to how unbelievably stupid Trump voters are.
We can either try to win such people over, and thus help win elections for the environmental camp, or we can call them names….. which does make us feel better, lol. I must admit I occasionally call people who disagree with me idiots….. but I try not to make a HABIT of it.
No, no, no. you are never going to win such people over. These people, most of them anyway, believe that the world is 6,000 years old and the sun rises and sets in Donald Trump’s ass. You will never win them over. They are all just down in the dirt stupid. These idiots should just be ignored, not argued with.
We must hope that a majority of the American people are not as dumb as the average Trump supporter. However, that may not be the case. If that is the case then we are just fucking doomed.
I lean with you on that Ron, however OFM’s point remains valid when applied to a very big block of potential voters- those who are not stoneground partisan and are potential swing voters, undecided’s or sometimes don’t vote. Its a huge group of people that can make a landslide one way or another. Who captures the bulk of their trust or hope can win big. I’m not expecting the 30% hardcore republicans (or democrats) to ever switch camps. But there is another 30-40% worth fighting for. Democrats will have to win more than a 3 million majority to win the white house because of the electoral college, as we saw this time. It better be even bigger than that with the supreme court becoming the tool of the republican party.
I have no desire to win over voters.
That is far in the rear view mirror.
I have no desire to win over voters. Trump voters are all just down in the dirt stupid. Trump, as he said, could shoot someone on fifth avenue and he would not lose any voters. That is true. That is a testament as to how unbelievably stupid Trump voters are.
No they are even stupider than that! Trump just shot Uncle Sam on the world stage, I bet they still support him! Trump is a traitor, anyone one who still supports him is also guilty of treason by association.
.
Respect is earned, the idiots need to pull their heads out.
And to think, if Trump was smart enough to have an Email account. We could “lock him up”.
Where are the Trump supporters today? How do they feel about that treasonous performance in Helsinki yesterday?
18 U.S. Code § 2381 – Treason
US Code
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
If You’ll Believe Russia Is the Aggressor in Ukraine You’ll Believe Anything
Raul Ilargi Meijer RUSSIA INSIDER 2015
Fuck Raul Ilargi Meijer and the horse he rode in on!
For the record, I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not a single other person agrees with me or not! I think Trump is a traitor while Putin is a war criminal and I base that on a reasonably good grasp of both US and World History!
Well, I would suggest you learn Russian, as it is the spoken language of the Ukraine, and 90% of the population are Russian.
It has been a part of Russia for about as long as the USA has been a country, and was given in a drunken gesture when the Ukraine was part of that Empire.
But I guess we could give the Ukraine back to the 10% of the original inhabits, and the USA back to the indigenous inhabitants?
It seems fair.
But I guess we could give the Ukraine back to the 10% of the original inhabits, and the USA back to the indigenous inhabitants?
It seems fair.
Are you fucking serious?! Sorry, not buying your outrageous and pathetically lame defense of what amounts to war crimes and human rights violations by the Russians under Putin!
The Jews were a minority in Germany under the Nazis! I guess according to your logic that made what the Nazis did to them okay, right?
Yeah, quite fascinating indeed! I’m just really tired of all the stupid little cockroaches that have come out from under all the rocks that Trump et al have been turning over.
10:32 PM ET Thu, 12 July 2018 Historian Yuval Harari of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem says populists are selling “nostalgic fantasies about the past instead of real visions for the future.”
Nationalism and populism are no match for global problems!
Whatever you may think of him at least the 44th POTUS does understand how the world works and has some concept as to where it is going. He has also read Yuval Harari’s books!
Not a bad speech all in all and it sure beats Trump’s constant twitter barrage.
Before I watched this 7-minute video I only thought Jordan Peterson a fool. But this video removed all doubt.
Jordan Peterson – Overpopulation
If you don’t have 7 minutes to spare, here are the important points he covered. Bold mine.
Who says the world has an overpopulation problem? I don’t buy that.
There has been a huge argument for years between the economists and the biologists. The biologists contend that we will breed until we exhaust the resources of the planet. The economists counter with the argument that we are pretty damn smart and we can figure out how to do more with less. I agree with the economists.
Projections are that the population will peak at around 9 or 10 billion sometime around the middle of the 21st century, then our population will start to decline pretty precipitously. With our technological progress, we can handle that without too much of a problem. We can certainly grow enough food to do it.
We are certainly going to squeeze out a lot of other animals, especially the large predators and mammals as large as ourselves. But that is just the price we have to pay.
The dangers of CO2 are somewhat overstated and there is some decent evidence for that too. But it’s hard to sort it out because most of the climate change argument is predicated on an underlying philosophy such that if you’re an anti-capitalist you believe we are going to burn up the planet. And that’s just not helpful because I cannot tell if your science is right or if you’re just anti-Western and anti-capitalist.
We are fishing out the oceans but if we left them alone they would come back in about 15 years. And we are capable of doing that.
He doesn’t believe biologists on anything, he takes the word of the economists instead. He thinks the climate change debate is being controlled by people who hate capitalism. And he believes that all our environmental problems can be saved by more people and human ingenuity.
Basically, he agrees with the late economist Julian Simon that humans are the ultimate resource and their brains can and will solve all environmental problems.
Peterson is kind of a latter-day phenomenon. He has been on most of the late night talk shows including Bill Maher’s show. He says he is a conservative Christian. He said, on another video I watched, that if he could have voted he would have voted for Trump. But he is Canadian and cannot vote in the US.
Seems to me that most people hope he is right- even most ‘progressives’ and scientists. Easier to hope he is right than to acknowledge the painful reality and make huge changes- such as not having children, not traveling in airplanes, eating far down the food chain, etc.
The delusion is more comfortable.
Allows Elon Musk to rationalize space colonization- ‘we can figure it out’
We definitely won’t stop breeding because we are too smart. But we might stop if we can enjoy sex without pregnancy. As far as i know, the Republicans are the only political party worldwide seriously against contraceptives.
Fool?! Nah, he is a monumental fucking idiot of highest order. As are all religious conservatives. Unfortunately they have managed a coup d’etat in the US. Between the POTUS who is the liar in chief. Then his vice Pence and how they are managing to control the supreme court. Forget liberal secular democracy we are under theo fascism. They don’t believe in evolution and the only species that matter is humans.
Maybe they got their ideas from watching Married with Children.
Al Bundy & Marcy D’Arcy Predict Trump & Hillary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA5HSVRJpZA&t=2s
Lol that is freaking gold.
Guys/Gals….. Yes J P is an idiot. So is Trump. But you can see why they have risen in credibility.
Go ahead and laugh, but I think the final straw was the bathroom debate. You know, when self-declared identity folks decide what bathroom they will use, and school districts said okay. Then, the parents had visions of their daughters sharing bathrooms at parks, etc. Added on to social justice warriors telling people what to think, it just became too much. Sometimes change is too fast for many people to handle. I know it is for me.
Myself, I am just sick of it all. When the Pride Parades come on tv and I see guys in hot pants and make-up shaking their booty, and the anger directed at politicians who do not particpate..I just sigh. I don’t care what people do in their bedrooms or who they do it with. I don’t care who people love or what their beliefs are. Just don’t beat me over the head with it. keep it at home.
I believe that is the basis for people listening to the reactionaries. I don’t listen to them and don’t plan to. I’m too busy building and reading about energy. 🙂
regards
Haha you aren’t there anyway. You’re sitting at home watching TV. Change the channel if you don’t like the show.
agreed Paulo.
tolerance is one thing, but forcing average folks to confront ‘sexual freedom’ is another
Guess what?! There is a parade in Key West for average people! You don’t even have to be gay to be there and have fun!
And no one is forcing anyone to be here! These people are fathers, mothers, daughters, brothers, and sisters of someone. They work in all fields, they are tax paying citizens who have human rights and they are allowed to pursue happiness and party just like every one else. You don’t want to socialize with them, well they probably don’t want to socialize with you either.
.
True enough, and I do change the channel. I also used to work in the school system and couldn’t avoid the PC stuff. That, you cannot walk away from as the bandwagon will crush and maim.
People seem to lack spirituality these days. Substituting in hedonism and gender identity doesn’t nseem to be cutting it though.
Take care.
I had what I consider an epiphany over the last 24 hours. I can’t remember what exactly triggered it or whether I had heard it expressed before. I just remember think that if I was in trouble, I would much rather my fate be decided by an arbiter who makes their decisions based on a deep sense of fairness and justice, basic human principles of right and wrong, than one who is making their decisions based on their belief in a particular deity.
I may have had the thought after reading or watching something about Trumps supreme court pick.
People seem to lack spirituality these days. Substituting in hedonism and gender identity doesn’t nseem to be cutting it though.
So you think this is a choice? That people decide to be outcasts from large parts of society for fun, or because they’re bored? That they risk the inherent dangers – of disease, of physical attack, of reduced job prospects, of denying their very humanity through being closeted- for kicks?
That believing will make it better?
+1
The weirdest PC stuff in America is worshiping the military and veterans.
And clergy….and god.
But wait–collapse called off. Carrying capacity a myth:
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-earths-carrying-capacity-for-human-life-is-not-fixed
Another garbage article discussing carrying capacity (of humans) without reference to how other animal and fish species will cope. Why not talk about carrying capacity for cattle? Our planet is currently in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals with literally dozens going extinct every day. This will only accelerate as we add another couple billion not very smart humans to the planet.
Such articles as this never mention what is happening to the planet. They never mention massive pollution, expanding deserts, falling water tables, species extinction, rivers running dry, lakes drying up, oceans dying, or any of the other problems that just keep getting worse, never better. They almost always concentrate on food production or how many people can fit into the state of Texas.
In fact, we have been engineering our environments to more productively serve human needs for tens of millennia. We cleared forests for grasslands and agriculture. We selected and bred plants and animals that were more nutritious, fertile and abundant. It took six times as much farmland to feed a single person 9,000 years ago, at the dawn of the Neolithic revolution, than it does today, even as almost all of us eat much richer diets.
And that is the goddamn problem. We have figured out how to feed more people and keep them alive longer thus enabling the population explosion. And it is more and more people that are destroying the earth. Why can’t stupid economists see that problem?
Anyone who believes in infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman of an economist.
Kenneth Boulding
I love this argument:
“For decades, each increment of economic growth in developed economies has brought lower resource and energy use than the last. That’s because demand for material goods and services saturates.”
No, stupid it’s because they got sick of the high wages, pollution and hassle and sent the manufacturing to poor countries.
Precisely!
I hear he’s really popular with incels aka dudes who can’t get laid
Jordan Peterson- Useful Idiot
http://hipcrimevocab.com/2018/03/10/jordan-peterson-useful-idiot/
Deconstructing Jordan Peterson
http://hipcrimevocab.com/2018/03/17/deconstructing-jordan-peterson/
Final Thoughts on Jordan Peterson
http://hipcrimevocab.com/2018/03/25/1270/
This is Gone Fishing’s video from bottom of last thread:
CLIMATE CHANGE – WHY WE ARE HEADING FOR EXTINCTION AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgFc4Zhvjtg
I’m watching this now, in stunned amazement: he is either a lunatic or like the boy who says the emperor isn’t wearing any clothing. I’m leaning toward the former, given the contents, which I’ve never heard put this way before. But I’m open-minded.
Anyone care to comment on the contents of this video?
He is a crank as far as I am concerned, because planet earth has shrugged off just about everything thrown at it since the day it was formed. Humans are but a flea on the back of an elephant roaming through the incredibly vast continents. I expect your initial reaction is what most any other rational person viewing the video would think first also.
An elephant shrugging off a flea might be not far off extinction for that flea unless it can find something else to feed on, which would agree with the main premise of the talk, so shall we put you down as broadly in agreement? Yours is similar to the Gaia argument – human induced climate change is annoying mother earth so she just gets rid of the cause: humans; wait a few million years and the itch has gone and the scratch healed over.
The only thing I am in agreement with is that scientists have continually altered their lectures in response to what those who fund the grants are wanting to hear. In the 70’s the science was all about how a new ice age was on the way, then in the the 80’s the science transitioned to being all about acid rain, then in the 90’s to global warming, then in the 2000’s to climate change, and now in the 2010’s to catastrophic extinction. You tell me how people who change what they panic about once every decade aren’t supposed to be looked at as cranks?
That’s nice Billy. Now go back to Faux News and Hate Radio to learn more about the world.
The only thing I am in agreement with is that scientists have continually altered their lectures in response to what those who fund the grants are wanting to hear.
Could you please cite for us the last ten scientific peer reviewed papers you have actually read. Doesn’t even have to be climate science related. Which science lectures have you attended in person or at the very least watched on line in the last two months? Again it doesn’t have to be climate science related.
Perhaps Bill Franti would find science more acceptable and interesting if ‘it’ had maintained concern about the coming ice age, if indeed it ever did, and had ignored acid rain, global warming, and anything else he doesn’t like to hear addressed. Perhaps Bill would rather go the Dr. and have a hole drilled in his head to let the evil spirits out when he one day has a stroke.
I’d suggest reading Six Degrees by Mark Lynas and Under a Green Sky by Peter Ward. Not many large bodied life forms will survive 5°C warming, and it’s possible that once we get above 2 or 3 then there will be no way to prevent getting to 5 or higher because of the release of non-fossil fuel greenhouse gases (e.g. from permafrost or southern ocean out gassing). At the moment it may not be possible to stop below 2 or 3 because of the lags in the system (physical and human) and tipping points concerned with the Arctic and global circulation patterns. If the warmth and changing circulation patterns (which could come from a trip to a new steady state warm – i.e. equable climate – earth) eventually cause the seas to become anoxic then hydrogen sulphide will wipe out almost everything.
All that could take a lot of time, but I think his argument is that action is needed now (I’d say a few years ago) to prevent it. And if we can’t prevent it we should at least hold to account those responsible – we are, after all a very strongly reciprocal species, and are prepared to undergo a lot of hardship just to get even.
It isn’t like the emperor’s new clothes because scientists have been putting up their equivalent of flashing neon signs (i.e. peer reviewed papers) saying the same thing, for many years now.
Anyone care to comment on the contents of this video?
Yes, I will!
His point is, that based on a reasonable understanding of the scientific literature we are already locked in to a global average temperature increase above the 2° C mark. He comes to this conclusion using simple arithmetic.
Then he goes further with elementary logic and concludes, again based on currently available scientific research, that there are numerous tipping points and feedback loops that come into play at that point which will in all likelihood raise global average temperatures past the 3.5° to 4° C mark which puts into play even more tipping points and feedback loops.
In which case, again based on readily available scientific research from the fields (pun intended) of plant physiology, global grain production is heavily impacted. Thus leading to massive food shortages. Etc…
He concludes that not only is this circumstance a bad thing it constitutes an unprecedented global emergency.
He then goes on to say that it is our duty as citizens of the world to rise up against the forces behind this unprecedented evil which he equates with the likes of Nazi Germany.
Based on his consistency principle rational sane people should rise up against such evil because it is our moral duty to do so.
He also mentions social science research, which while not having a ready link to at the moment, I have read and it holds water! It requires only about 3 to 5% of the population to get involved in active resistance to governments to engender social change.
So I conclude that the professor is a rational man and the lunatics are the the ones currently in charge of the asylum.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results!
Albert Einstein
Thanks. This is very cogent.
Fred gave a great summary.
Even if the planet only moves to a 6C rise instead of the 12C maximum, there will be very little difference for most life on earth.
The fact is that even ignoring global warming completely, we are on a path to destruction and failure. Continued growth of the current paradigm leads to catastrophe without temperature rise.
Once we realized that we are also creating a permanent catastrophe for all future generations of all species on this planet due to our activities also causing global warming, we are in a complete moral and ethical situation with only one clear response. This response has not been attended yet with any vigor.
Synapsid —
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER EARTH’S YOUNGEST BANDED IRON FORMATION IN WESTERN CHINA
The banded iron formation, located in western China, has been conclusively dated as Cambrian in age. Approximately 527 million years old, this formation is young by comparison to the majority of discoveries to date. The deposition of banded iron formations, which began approximately 3.8 billion years ago, had long been thought to terminate before the beginning of the Cambrian Period at 540 million years ago.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-scientists-earth-youngest-banded-iron.html#jCp
DougL,
Yes, I saw that this morning. Thanks. My first thought on reading it was “the Black Sea”.
Four thousand feet deep and average E-W length 730 miles, and it’s been accumulating sediment for tens of millions of years in anoxic–indeed, by definition euxinic–conditions below, if memory serves, the top 100 feet or so. It might serve as the only current example of something like the kind of basin that could eventually produce a banded-iron sequence under an oxygenated atmosphere.
My second thought was “Time for more port.”
This Cambrian BIF is an interesting mirror reversal of the various records of restricted oxygen-containing settings during the Precambrian when Earth’s atmosphere lacked free oxygen. I keep thinking there’s a great field trip there but I’ve never been able to secure the funding.
Port: 1200 calories per bottle.
Wine: 500
Just sayin’.
PS At least you’re not on Baileys. 2400.
JN2,
Good port…er…point. I take about six days per bottle of fine Tawny, about two thirds of a white-wine glass each afternoon. Walk three to six miles each morning so it helps to have something to come home to.
Wine, now: I was living in the Bay Area the year California wines won the blind tasting against French wines, and wine and things wine and how to serve and tastings and tours and, and… I learned a lot about wine, especially good wines, and after about three years of that I was in a position to say that I don’t like wine. Well, champagne is OK.
Once I was treated to a glass of a Rothschild cabernet in the restaurant of Portland’s premier hotel, and I thought that yeah, that was pretty good. It was selling retail at the time (1990) for $80 a bottle; who knows what the equivalent would be today. But I wasn’t thrilled.
A Kopke 10-year Tawny, now–that’s the goods.
Time for…
I still live here in the “wine country” and after 40 years I think wine is OK with a meal. I do prefer a good beer and we now have a lot of nifty brewpubs to sit in and talk about politics.
A pox on mass produced beers, light beers and flavored beers.
I suspect only the Germans really understand beer.
I am less than crazy about beer (or wine) but do drink the odd local ‘craft’ beer in town and will have wine, too, if you feed me some good cheese and/or crusty French bread (with pate) with it.
The best beer I’ve ever had might have been a German one or from somewhere from Eastern Europe.
Stubbes (German?) Chocolate in Ottawa makes (or made) a sensational beer chocolate truffle which was my favorite of the favored dark chocolate truffles. Maybe I should have asked what the beer was… Perhaps it’s not too late…
I wonder how the Annapolis Valley here in Nova Scotia fares where wine is concerned.
Give me an available and affordable port recommendation and I’ll give it a try.
Caelan MacIntyre,
My preferred port is Kopke Fine Tawny. I used to order it in through the local supermarket and a wine shop downtown until the supermarket just started stocking it to ease up on the paperwork. I don’t know what that would be like in Nova Scotia, beautiful place though it be.
The other port that I drink is Warre’s Heritage Ruby Porto, which I bought by mistake once and found I like. (Tawnies are aged in wood, rubies aren’t.) Both the Kopke and the Warre’s sell for about $15 a bottle here in western Washington state.
Those who drink wine don’t, in my experience, like port. Ports have higher alcohol (19% for port while a burgundy is about 13%) and are said to be sweeter but I’ve no way to compare–there certainly are dessert ports just as there are dessert wines, and white ports are said to be dry but I’ve never tried one. You might try a dry Madeira, not a port but another fortified wine, or a Fino sherry if you really want to experiment.
Good, thanks. I’ll give one of your ports a shot, see what I think, and report back.
Western Washington State… On my halfway pit-stop from Vancouver on the way to Mount Baker for some hikes and swims, I used to drop into Bellingham for a couple of cold premixed drinks for the trip. Pleasant memories.
Caelan MacIntyre,
That’s great country. So’s the geology: a stack of thrust plates with an active volcano on top; who could ask for more?
Yep.
I drink wine:port in a 2:1 ratio. I would drink more port if it had less calories! Here in the UK, Lidl (German discounter) has an excellent ruby port (Armilar) for $8.50…
JN2,
I’ll look into Armilar, and thanks for the tip. I hadn’t heard of that house.
Far-right Bay Area figure Kyle ‘Based Stickman’ Chapman posts bail in Texas for assault charge
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/Far-right-Bay-Area-figure-Kyle-Based-Stickman-13063731.php
Fat Boy give him a pardon?
First, I am not an apologist for anyone. I think Jordan Peterson has some good ideas but I don’t worship anyone, especially in today’s world.
But I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand the argument that world population isn’t a problem, just yet. Birth rates have fallen. Most of the people in third world countries don’t use much resources.
However! I will admit that eventually it will be a problem, once population runs into peak resource. Who knows when that is, I give it another few decades at best. But then, suddenly the situation will turn, and we will reach peak population and on the other side everybody will be complaining of a lack of workers to keep this thing running.
So the problematic moment may not actually last long, if you catch my drift. It may resolve itself fairly quickly, but only by the system breaking apart into less complex structures.
But I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand the argument that world population isn’t a problem, just yet. Birth rates have fallen. Most of the people in third world countries don’t use much resources.
You can believe whatever you want but actual scientific research tells us you are either in denial or ignorant of reality. We are currently adding 83 million people to the planet every year and the planet is already deep in overshoot.
https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/ecological-footprint/
World Footprint
The world’s ecological deficit is referred to as global ecological overshoot. Since the 1970s, humanity has been in ecological overshoot, with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year. Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.7 Earths to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year. We use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate through overfishing, overharvesting forests, and emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than forests can sequester.
“Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.7 Earths to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste.”
The current strategic status of humanity is the military equivalent of being overrun at all strategic points and we can only hold the “less valuable” ground. Usually that does not end well and retreat is the only option to save at least some.
Do we have the sense, the focus, the courage to retreat in the face of overwhelming odds? Sound as if now is/was the time.
Or will this time be remembered as the time that were?
But I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand the argument that world population isn’t a problem, just yet.
I’ve heard many versions of this argument:
The British Isles aren’t over-populated: Just look at all the open land in Scotland.
Birth rates are falling, not rising.
Resources keep growing to meet rising demand.
OK. So when exactly do we know the earth is over-populated? When people begin starving? When crisis hits?
By then, it’s too late. The time to ameliorate the problem is in advance of it, not when TSHTF.
It’s analogous to my orchard: Pesticides are used as prophylactics. I must spray in advance of scab spore release and insect infestation. If I wait until the damage manifests, it’s too goddamn late to do anything about it.
In the end, continuing to fight nature will result in our demise. Let that be your guide.
Who knew the day this thread was started (June 11) was “World Population Day”?
World Population Day 2018 – NFPB urges women to take advantage of contraceptives
Jamaica women are being encouraged to make use of contraceptives that are available to the public as they plan their families and empower themselves.
The National Family Planning Board made the appeal as it observes today’s commemoration of World Population Day under the theme ‘Family Planning is a Human Right’.
The agency’s executive director Lovette Byfield said the government has made a variety of contraceptive methods available to Jamaican women at an affordable cost but said that these means are underutilised.
“Having a child is usually a happy time, but unfortunately, too many children in Jamaica are born into families that did not plan for them. We have been working assiduously over the years to provide family planning services to women of reproductive age from all walks of life, yet still, many of our women are not taking advantage due to issues such as low negotiation skills, unwillingness of the partner and low contraceptive knowledge plagued by various myths,” said Byfield in a statement.
Herein lies the problem. As Ron wrote in his lead post, far too many people think an expanding human population is a good thing. In my neck of the woods, talk of overpopulation seems almost taboo. It seems no one wants to blame uncontrolled expansion of the population (overpopulation) to any of the problems we face. In my neck of the woods social problems such as a under stress, underfunded school system, a similarly challenge health care system, high unemployment and high crime rates could easily be blamed on the propensity of folks, especially those who can least afford it to have kids, sometimes lots of them.
There is a debate raging in my country that, has been getting a fair amount of coverage in the same newspaper that published the article above, about decriminalizing abortion, if even under limited circumstances. As is to be expected, religious circles staunchly oppose the idea and there are lots of what I consider idiotic ideas floating around on the subject , including for example that, contraception is a plot to “wipe out black people”. (The Jamaican population over 90% of African decent with 7.3 percent mixed ethnicities (African + other), 1.3 percent East Indian, 0.2 percent white, 0.2 percent Chinese, and 0.1 percent other ethnicities). A 56 year old, childless adult like myself is a real rarity but, hey, I’ve been successful at playing my part in not contributing to the world population so far. I must say though, that I often get very strange looks when I tell people that I have no offspring!
Which brings to another thing I’ve thought about at times. It would appear that thinking too much about population control in terms of ones own family planning choice is not a successful short term evolutionary strategy. To expand on this , some of the most intelligent women I know are childless while most of my high school and college friends and acquaintances have reasonably small families (two or three children) but, college educated people only make up about 14% of the Jamaican population (85% of collage graduates emigrate). I will never forget a television news broadcast a few years ago featuring protests by construction workers at the site of a new hotel. This dude proclaims that his salary is not enough to cover the needs of his thirteen children! So an unskilled laborer has 13 kids (undoubtedly with more than one partner) while a college educated couple has 2!
Another example is the sister of a young woman I met about a year and a half ago. The woman I met is in her mid twenties and has one four year old boy. Her older sister has four children, a boy in his mid teens and three girls, the youngest one being about three years old. The older sister is pregnant again, so it seems she is “popping one out” about every four or five years! The father of the first two is deceased and the fathers of the other two contribute nothing to their upbringing, the father of the unborn child is an unemployed young man. This woman was given a tiny (15 ft. x 15 ft.), two bedroom house by Food for the Poor in collaboration with a wealthy couple from the US and to my knowledge has never held a job. I don’t know if she managed to finish high school before getting pregnant the first time.
There are many more examples too numerous to mention but, it would appear to me that it is the people least able to control their sexual impulses that are “inheriting the earth”. It seems that we are witnessing a planet full of increasingly thoughtless people rather than one with an increasing proportion of smart, thinking people. We are well and truly f#%@*d.
Yea you hit the nail on the head, especially in your last paragraph. Humanity is breeding intelligence out of the population.
Hoisted by our own petard.
If intelligence is mostly an inherited trait and the smart ones are reducing their fertility rate voluntarily or making it zero, the result is obvious.
If concern for the planet is a learned trait bolstered by family action and those who are concerned have few children to teach, the result is less people who are truly concerned and less chances for those to find a similar partner.
Self eradication during a battle is not helpful.
About 65 years ago I told my dad I thought it was strange that rich people had fewer children than poor people. He replied that it had always been that way.
The disadvantaged are just as likely to have “useful” children as the talented. There is much evidence to support that. Who ever heard of Einstein’s parents, or Thomas Edison’s?
Worry more about Supreme Court appointees.
Hmmm, seems Edison’s mother homeschooled him using advanced science texts of the time. You saying she was stupid? I can inform some of the descendants of Edison of your reply.
Einstein’s father was an electrical engineer.
Apparently I wasn’t clear. I never said Edison’s mother was stupid. I only said his parents, or Einstein’s weren’t ever “heard of”.
the point was only that great people quite often arise from obscurity and assuming that because the rich and famous, or the well educated, are having fewer children that there is a danger of dumbing down the population. Neither of my parents graduated from high school. My father never went to high school, dropping out at the end of the 8th grade. I have a MS in engineering.
I’ve never heard of any of Edison’s decendents either. Perhaps you could introduce some of them to Malala Yousafzai, Barack Obama and Angela Merkle some folks who were born in obscurity. They seemed to have made their way to usefulness.
I never assume that uneducated, obscure people have any less inherent talent than those who have demonstrated success.
You are explaining exactly why education concerning population growth is very long overdue. Creating the optimum number of people that can be properly educated and employed with a certain minimum level of intensity and focus on each individual, would lead to a society where each individual has the potential to live a free, comfortable, productive existence. Instead we now have the opposite when we praise population growth above all else.
Here is a series of carbon maps delineating our world according to Background, Responsibility and Vulnerability.
https://www.carbonmap.org/#Area
Below is a People at Risk Map
Country sizes show the number of people injured, left homeless, displaced or requiring emergency assistance due to floods, droughts or extreme temperatures in a typical year. Climate change is expected to exacerbate many of these threats.
There are many manifestations of over-population, and I see the following as one-
Loner culture among youth in S. Korea. Here is one of many recent articles on the phenomena-
https://qz.com/1024923/exhausted-by-the-herd-single-south-koreans-are-gingerly-embracing-the-yolo-lifestyle/
note- S. Korea imports 87% of net energy as of 2015
Good, now they can finally face themselves and figure out who they are. Will be disconcerting but getting a little peace can be a great reward.
“You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.”
— Nikola Tesla
What you mean “may live to see”, the worst was developed before I was born.
Way way off oil topics but interesting…at least it was for me.
Yesterday, I was on my way to pick up son at Comox airport. I live 1 hour west of Campbell River which is also 1.5 hours west of Comox. I went through an RCMP roadblock with regular officers, commercial inspectors, fish and game, fisheries…the whole enchilada about 1/2 way to town. They were checking for impaired drivers and tourists with too many fish, (there are some real tourista hogs who can up salmon and take it home). No problems, although I naturally have that instant guilt thing going and a bit of anger rising up, “What is this, a Police State”? But, if you get snarky they get serious and all of a sudden a cracked windshield gets noticed, etc. So I am polite and pleased enough if they pull some impaired people off the road. It’s all a polite Canadian kind of thing, yes sirs and no sirs, have a great day, and a few thank yous, while I drive off thinking pretty loud, “What is this, a fucking Police State”!
Anyway, I stopped to visit father-in-law at hospital and while there noticed my wallet was missing. I won’t go into the details but holy shit, Batman. I tore the car apart and checked the seats, behind, everywhere. Checked at the hospital desk. Drove back to in laws house, checked there, and then back to hospital. Phoned business at other stops made. It was a nightmare. This is the point….I realized that without the stuff in my wallet I was totally screwed. license and money of course, but health card, gun possesion card, other licenses and certifications, bank card…new credit card, even my freaking costco and library card would have to be replaced. And I still had to drive to the damn airport after having gone through one checkpoint. It was my sons car with cruise control so I set it for 1 mile over and gingerly went through every known speed trap. Pissed off? irritated? resigned? Outwardly calm and laughing about it, but the whole gamut of negative emotions were just under the surface.
Turned out the wallet was found at the hospital and security had it. Not one red cent was missing and not one card was disturbed. I picked it up on the way home.
The other point: I am a cash payer kind of guy and live on the fringes with a pretty low down profile….or so I thought. Until I lost my wallet. We might live on Waldens Pond (a river actually), but try losing your wallet and maintain serenity. Hah.
Yes sir, this comment makes me feel a lot better. That I’m not the only idiot who loses his wallet and freaks out. It seems like I do it at least once a month. Good thing my heads attached.
BTW, that’s why god created cruse control, Thank you sir
Interesting example of we can be cruising along in our pleasant country and lives, and not realize how quickly you can find yourself on the outside looking in. Especially when there is a police state.
I had read a story of how quickly a Jewish family in Germany in the 1930’s went from normal life, to prisoner in their own neighborhood, to prisoner on a cattle train, as an example.
I had the same response to Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It was the opening chapters that I found so unnerving, how quickly everything changed (e.g., bank account frozen, job ended, news blacked out). And she wrote before everything went digital.
I agree, a masterpiece.
Kinda looking like the US is heading strongly in that direction.
Bank accounts have been getting frozen for many years. They may not be able to jail people directly for owing money, but they find their ways to make them completely destitute and end up “defying” the court.
https://www.thenation.com/article/prosecutors-and-judges-have-brought-back-debtors-prisons/
The US would not renew my passport, and I was in Colombia.
I took a plane to a offshore possession of Colombia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andrés_(island)) and suck it up and flew into Costa Rica with a expired passport, which wasn’t caught at customs.
So, what do you do with a expired passport, a car, and a freaking out travel companion?
Bending the curve.
Just moving vehicles from 25 mpg to 35 mpg would save close to 7 million barrels of gasoline per day.
Going to 50 mpg would save 11 million barrels per day.
This could already have been done.
Increasing passenger load could cut the demand by up to half.
Changing habits could cut the demand by 20 to 30 percent.
No BEV involved.
So is peak oil a real problem or is the real problem the lack of planning and government intervention (short term profit versus long term survival)?
Since only a little more than 1 person per 7 owns a car, the market is not saturated. Possibly there are more passengers than is suspected and alternative transport is used quite a lot. Maybe westerners could be a bit more practical?
So what do you think the pmpg of that motorcycle could be?
I’m hoping that he is giving a ride to a few of his neighbors kids and those are not all his own. On the other hand if that were an electric motorcycle powered by solar power and everyone in his circumstance was afforded a means to switch to non fossil fuel powered transport humanity might make some real progress in the right direction.
If we could convince the Koch bros. that it is their moral obligation to give up 90 percent of their wealth and give an electric scooter to everyone in say India there might be some hope for the planet. Trust me, the Kochs would not have to endure any hardships if they had to live on only 10% of their current wealth.
On the other hand if they don’t see the light then we might have to charge them with crimes against humanity, take them to a tribunal in Nuremberg and they will be given a fair trail, convicted, sentenced to death and summarily executed!
Cheers!
Don’t forget to include the free solar panels and battery storage so they can charge their EV’s.
Really? Death threats are allowed in the comment sections now?
While my statement of conviction and consequent sentencing to death was hyperbole there is indeed precedent for such action.
The same was done to the Nazis at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity and the atrocities they committed during World War II! It wasn’t a death threat then and it isn’t now!
It is called justice!
It is part of international law and legal process. What the Kochs and others have knowingly done and continue to do is evil and definitely crosses into territory that constitutes criminal behavior against humanity. Millions if not billions of humans will die because of their actions! And that is science based not hyperbole.
Go study some science, history and international law.
Millions are dying each year from air, water and soil pollution right now!
The poster child:
20 Signs China’s Pollution Has Reached Apocalyptic Levels | China Uncensored
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwOBRH56Ic0&t=2s
How China’s Pollution Became a National Emergency
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rj9Wx_jg40
Lesson to be learned: Action is often only taken against murdering polluters when it is extremely obvious, often not even then. The people appear to be mostly captives of the production system.
China doesn’t have a chance of survival, and I have family on the mainland.
Sounds right. Get them out if you can. My friend and his family escaped a few years ago, living the good life now here in the American Dream.
Shall we take a peak?
Heatwave sees record high temperatures around world this week
From Europe to Africa, extreme and widespread heat raises climate concerns in hottest La Niña year to date on record
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/13/heatwave-sees-record-high-temperatures-set-around-world-this-week
This new invention should get some people off the road, though I am a bit up in the air about it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/flying-car-blackfly-developers-give-first-look-cbs-this-morning/
Cave Rescuer Slams Elon Musk’s Submarine Idea
Musk is already on Mars.
The road to food sovereignty
There just has to be something wrong with those stats. I think they are assuming all, or at least most farms, are peasant farms that don’t use tractors or chemical fertilizer.
The Green Revolution and population growth
Intensification: increase the yield output (i.e. kilograms of crop produced per unit area of land). This is typically achieved through a combination of chemical inputs (such as fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides); improved water use (e.g. irrigation); mechanization and improved farming practices; and the use of higher-yielding crop strains or seeds.
Snip
From 1961 to 2014, global cereal production has increased by 280 percent. If we compare this increase to that of total population (which increased by only 136 percent over the same period), we see that global cereal production has grown at a much faster rate than the population. Cereal production per person has increased despite a growing population.
Another link about the Green Revolution
Borlaug (b. 1914) was hired in 1944 to run a wheat-research program established by the Rockefeller Foundation and the government of Mexico in an effort to make that country self-sufficient in the production and distribution of cereal grains. Borlaug’s team developed varieties of wheat that grew well in various climatic conditions and benefited from heavy doses of chemical fertilizer, more so than the traditional plant varieties. Wheat yield per acre rose fourfold from 1944 to 1970. Mexico, which had previously had to import wheat, became a self-sufficient cereal-grain producer by 1956.
From your link:
The industrial food chain is using at least 75 per cent of the world’s agricultural land and most of agriculture’s fossil fuel and freshwater resources to feed barely 30 per cent of the world’s population.
This is what the Green Revolution gave us?
Conversely, more than 500 million peasant farms around the world are using less than 25 per cent of the land – and almost no fossil fuels or chemicals – to feed 70 per cent of humanity.
And here is where they used almost no fossil fuels, chemicals or chemical fertilizer? This is where the Green Revolution had no effect whatsoever? In the early 60s, it was predicted that there would be worldwide famine by 1975. But the Green Revolution started to have its dramatic effect, enabling the population to more than double. Instead of famine, we had a population explosion.
I know you saw it on the internet Caelan, so it has to be true. But I don’t believe a goddamn word of it. There just has to be something wrong with those stats and that article.
Yair,
Dunno Ron. I haven’t tracked developments for a while but when I read all this bullshit about how big is better and how Bourlag’s Green Revolution and John Deere will feed the world I suggest to folks they do a bit of research into rice.
Rice used to be the staple food of over half the worlds population and, back when I was sloshing around in rice paddies, the size of the average rice farm (despite broadacre production in the US and Australia) was just over an acre.
These ratios may have changed but, the fact remains, that although chemical inputs have risen and better varieties introduced, rice a most laborious crop, is still produced at an artisanal level and it would be impossible to produce the volume required by any other means.
This is true of all crops. They can (and will again) be grown on a small sustainable scale. In Australia the seasonal vegetable requirements of any given town or city could be grown within fifty kilometers of the CBD.
I am old enough to have driven one of ten or a dozen fifty horsepower tractors in staggered formation Sundercutting a three thousand acre paddock and content that those days, with a vibrant community living off the land, were far more sustainable than the present sterile system where people are displaced by machinery. . . completely unsustainable in the long term.
They can (and will again) be grown on a small sustainable scale. In Australia the seasonal vegetable requirements of any given town or city could be grown within fifty kilometers of the CBD.
Yeah, but “Houston, we have a problem!”
New research has calculated that nearly 33% of the world’s adequate or high-quality food-producing land has been lost at a rate that far outstrips the pace of natural processes to replace diminished soil.
The University of Sheffield’s Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, which undertook the study by analysing various pieces of research published over the past decade, said the loss was “catastrophic” and the trend close to being irretrievable without major changes to agricultural practices.
The continual ploughing of fields, combined with heavy use of fertilizers, has degraded soils across the world, the research found, with erosion occurring at a pace of up to 100 times greater than the rate of soil formation. It takes around 500 years for just 2.5cm of topsoil to be created amid unimpeded ecological changes.
And, “Houston, we have another problem!” Too Many people!
https://www.footprintnetwork.org/2016/10/26/global-wildlife-populations-drop-two-thirds-2020-human-demand-continues-exceed-planets-capacity/
Global wildlife populations could drop two-thirds by 2020 as human demand continues to exceed the planet’s capacity
Oakland, California, USA—The overexploitation of ecological resources by humanity is directly contributing to the 67 percent plunge in wild vertebrate populations scientists forecast for the 50-year period ending in 2020, according to WWF’s Living Planet Report 2016.
The top threats to species identified in the report are directly linked to human activities, including habitat loss, degradation, and overexploitation of wildlife. According to Global Footprint Network, humanity is currently using the resources of 1.6 planets to provide the goods and services we demand each year while we only have one Earth.
Under a business-as-usual path for the underlying drivers of resource consumption, increasing human demand on the Earth’s ecosystems is projected to exceed their regenerative capacity by about 75 percent by 2020, according to Global Footprint Network, which has collaborated with WWF on the biennial Living Planet Report since 2000.
Humans seem to think they can survive on this planet even if they eliminate the rest of the biosphere. I think they are in for a rather rude surprise.
“Houston, we now have a very very very long list of problems…”
Yair,
Bit of small scale rice farming on this vid . . . note the walk behind tractors which in some places/systems can take the place of buffalo.
For those that are interested, that style of horizontal hopper cooled diesel made by Kubota and countless Chinese manufacturers are known as buffalo engines and are endemic to southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Set at fifteen hundred RPM and with basic maintenance they will last for many thousands of hours . . . we had one on a genset that had over fifty thousand on it when I sold it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvFHiv5SkpY
I’ve farmed a 2-acre CSA and orchard for ten years now. It’s not “peasant” farming. If we didn’t use “chemicals,” we would grow only weeds and insects. As it is, it’s a back-breaking pain in the ass. But it keeps me at home at a part-time job when I’m not teaching. It’s pocket money.
The idea that 7.6 billion people are going to be fed by “peasants” is a motherfucking crock of shit.
The idea that 7.6 billion people are going to be fed by “peasants” is a motherfucking crock of shit.
I agree. In fact, I think Caelan’s entire article is a motherfucking crock of shit. If one has a deeply held ideology it can make them create their very own “alternative facts”.
Yeah, but if you applied permaculture techniques to grow plants to feed insects like grasshoppers and then everyone could eat grasshopper protein instead of eating cows, chickens and pigs… Ah, never mind! Peasant farmers feeding the planet is still a motherfucking crock of shit.
Then again… Maybe some very savvy high tech modern peasants. 😉
https://cowboycrickets.com/blogs/cricketsarefood
Cheers!
I get that you guys think this is a crock. Not arguing with that (yet…?). But does that mean you each believe that his statement below is false?
“The industrial food chain is using at least 75 per cent of the world’s agricultural land and most of agriculture’s fossil fuel and freshwater resources to feed barely 30 per cent of the world’s population. Conversely, more than 500 million peasant farms around the world are using less than 25 per cent of the land – and almost no fossil fuels or chemicals – to feed 70 per cent of humanity.”
Also, very minor point. When these folks use the term “peasant” I believe that they are describing a type of farm economy. This differs somewhat from what most westerner’s mean when they use the same term. They are usually studying rural politics and development.
Related fields-of-study are agrarianism, family economy, folk culture. There are overlaps with Shumacher’s intermediate technology, reskilling, permaculture, etc.
Conversely, more than 500 million peasant farms around the world are using less than 25 per cent of the land – and almost no fossil fuels or chemicals – to feed 70 per cent of humanity.”
To claim that 25% of the land, and almost no fossil fuels or chemicals are feeding 70 percent of humanity is pure bullshit. It is not just bullshit, it is bullshit piled up on top of bullshit. No one is allowed to make such a statement without showing the worldwide study that supports such a claim. If you can cite that study, post the link to that study, then I will gladly review it. But I do not believe it exists. But I will gladly apologize and admit my error if you can cite your legitimate source.
You are entitled to your opinion Mr/Ms Aspera, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
The source of all this nonsense is:
The road to food sovereignty
1. Peasants are the main or sole food providers to more than 70% of the world’s people,1 and peasants produce this food with less (often much less) than 25% of the resources – including land, water, fossil fuels – used to get all of the world’s food to the table. 2. The Industrial Food Chain uses at least 75% of the world’s agricultural resources and is a major source of GHG emissions, but provides food to less than 30% of the world’s people.2
I read note 2 of this publication and it does not support the claim that they say it does. They just suggest what they think note 2 says:
“2: Who produces the most food? 16. Leah Samberg et al, “Subnational distribution of average farm size and smallholder contributions to global food production,” Environmental Research Letters, 20 November 2016. 17. FAO, “Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture,” SPFS, DOC 27.8 Revision 2, Volume III, 2001, p. 25. 18. UNCHS, “ The State of the World’s Cities 2001,” UN Centre for Human Settlements, Ch. 3, p. 72-73. 19. Peter Fellows and Martin Hilmi, “Selling Street and Snack Foods,” Diversification Booklet no. 18, Rural Infrastructure and Agro-Industries Division, FAO, Rome, 2011. 20. The contribution small-scale fisheries make to global fish catches is subject to debate because there is a lack of good reporting, and no consensus on the definition of artisanal fisheries. In the information gathered, we conservatively estimate that a minimum of 25% of the global catch (in weight) can be attributed to small-scale fisheries, but this share could be as high as 50% as FAO’s study suggests. FAO, Voluntary Guideline for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication, Rome, 2015. Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller, “Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining,” Nature Communications 7, Article number: 10244, 19 January 2016. Telephone Conversation with Dirk Zeller, UBC Professor and Senior Researcher and Project manager of the Sea Around Us, February 2016. (http://www.seaaroundus.org) 21. 23% (in energy content) of the food produced for human consumption is traded internationally, 80% of which is for 15 products: wheat, soybean, palm oil, maize, sugar, rape and mustard seed and oil, rice, soybean oil, pig meat, sunflower seed oil, barley, cocoa beans, oil crops, poultry meat. See Jennifer Clapp, “Food self-sufficiency and international trade: a false dichotomy?” The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets In Depth 201516, Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), 2016, p. 6. See also, Fader et al. “Spatial decoupling of agricultural production and consumption: quantifying dependences of countries on food imports due to domestic land and water constraints,” Environmental Research Letters, March 2013, p. 15. 22. ETC Group, Who Will Feed Us? Questions about the food and climate crises, ETC Communique 102,
2009. Available online at http://www.etcgroup.org/ content/who-will-feed-us ETC Group, Who Will Feed Us? The Industrial Food Chain or the Peasant Food Web?, Booklet, 2014. Available online at http://www.etcgroup.org/ content/who-will-feed-us-0 23. The confusion over figures arises for a number of legitimate reasons: (1) researchers focus on crops and under-emphasize fishing, hunting and gathering and urban production; (2) researchers consider only the major food crops, ignoring other essential and nutritious crops that cover less land area and/or have little commercial value; (3) there is confusion in determining the amount of land that may be held by peasants. A peasant family may have 10 ha on a semi-arid hillside or 2 ha on better soils and slopes; (4) researchers tend to underestimate the food that is wasted or overconsumed by the Chain”
There is no support in the above study, or whatever the fuck it is, for their claim. Note 2, the source of their claim, says absolutely nothing about chemicals, chemical fertilizer, or fossil fuel. They just made that shit up. End of story.
Ron, I don’t know what I said that provoked such a response. I don’t think I expressed an opinion of my own, nor did I give any facts, mine or anyone’s (except trying to explain how the word “peasant” can be misunderstood in how its used in the academic literature). If I came across as doing so, that’s my mistake in writing poorly. But I did think that I was entitled to ask a question of you guys. And you did give me your answer, so thanks.
I AM looking for facts (not opinions). I’m collecting empirical, peer-reviewed evidence on various sides of this issue. And don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not claiming the original source is that sort of evidence. I am trying to find evidence that counters the extreme and polar-opposite claims I keep running into. And, probably like you, I’m not much impressed with publications that have cartoon-like images on the cover (i.e., “The road to food sovereignty”). I’m still looking.
[ I was going to try for some humor in this reply, say something like “based on your response, I’ll put you down as undecided.” But I’ll wait for the heat to subside.]
See here.
Ron: “I read note 2 of this publication and it does not support the claim that they say it does. They just suggest what they think note 2 says:”
Incoherent. “They [the authors] just suggest what THEY [themselves?] THINK [they wrote it, and they don’t know?] note 2 says”.
But apart from micro-critique, the reality is that the etcgroup.org document is quite well-referenced with numerous citations to authoritative sources, and any serious attempt to analyze it will take a bit of time, digging out the references, reading and evaluating. It will take many hours.
Hey Alan, note 2 was a copy and paste. You cannot possibly misquote a copy and paste. Note 2, says absolutely nothing about chemicals, chemical fertilizer, or fossil fuel. End of story.
Your words, Ron, which I quoted, were not a copy and paste. They were your words.
But apart from micro-critique, the reality is that the etcgroup.org document is quite well-referenced with numerous citations to authoritative sources, and any serious attempt to analyze it will take a bit of time, digging out the references, reading and evaluating. It will take many hours.
No, I really don’t think it will take all that long. Just bring up each document and do a search on each: “fossil fuel”, then “chemicals” then “chemical fertilizer”.
It should not take more than a minute or two with each document.
Michael B’s Poison
Indeed, it sounds more like self-inflicted ass-backward work and closer to industrial agro, complete with poison and monoculture.
Weeds are plants and many are edible, healthy and, along with insects, form part of a vital ecosystem– excluding your orchard apparently.
Fruit trees and all other trees, etc., can grow without you or your poisons, Michael, and they’ve been doing so long before we as a species arrived on the scene.
Also are some people, including on this blog, commenting with some concern about our planet losing insects (and the wildlife that depend on them), due in part to such things as pesticides, monocrops and general agricultural practices?
And our current way-of-‘life’, which includes your agro, looks like it’s taking down the planet and us with it…
Pick your poison.
Eat The Weeds
Caelean have you grown any food? What? Do you have any basis in reality for your pronouncements on growing food? Forgive the presumption, but it comes across as wishful thinking rather than based on experience.
Am I wrong?
Irrelevant to the issue, which you are turning personal (and that is a distraction), and since people are obviously growing their own food all around the planet. Just look at others who have been doing so if you wish and are not just keyboard warrioring, and try things yourself and report back to boot. In fact, if you want to make it personal, I dare you. Oh and, if you want to call me on it, you will have to change your name to your real one rather than hide in the shadows behind the relative comfort of your screen.
Also, not everyone is going to do things as well as others. It’s a learning process. So, you want to take this personally, then consider that I have just thrown down the gauntlet for you right here in public so to speak. Let’s have a go.
At least proclaim that you have grown mint or perhaps petunias, or maybe raised a guinea pig, or something for the readers get confidence in your agricultural expertise from.
Ah yes, I thought so…
The irony of you under the veil of anonymity recommending that I proclaim something about myself (to mention nothing of your ad-hominem form of logical fallacy) is laughable.
No surprise there of course.
Nevertheless, I’m happy to indulge you, but since my own ‘agricultural expertise’ is irrelevant to the issue, and since you are making the request regardless, then the onus is on you to offer something of your own ‘agricultural expertise’ first, along with your real name (and ideally a place online where we can get a sense of you/your expertise) as a gesture of good faith/will, and to get the ball rolling.
I won’t hold my breath. ‘u’
Caelan, dear boy. You try eating Colorado potato beetles, Japanese beetles, saw flies, codling moths, plum curculios, apple maggot flies, banded cutworms, round-headed borers, tomato hornworms, squash borers, cucumber beetles, European corn borers, scab fungus, fire blight, powdery mildew, late blight, sooty blotch. Get back to me and let me know how yummy they are.
And, oh yeah–let me know what happened to the fucking crops you grew them on.
“Weeds are plants and many are edible, healthy and, along with insects, form part of a vital ecosystem– excluding your orchard apparently. ”
Guess what? I love eating dandelions, lambs quarters, smart weed, wood sorrel, etc.
But you try taking them to a goddamn farmers market and selling them.
And nature contains poisons like you would not believe.
There is no question that modern agriculture is destroying habitat, changing the climate, and only increasing the population. It’s a tragedy, but that’s the way it is, and it is that way because it got that way.
Somewhat moot points from your ostensible ‘prefab/commodified’ monoculture, Michael B. There are differences between natural poisons and human-made and many diseases and bugs, etc., seem to love a whole lot of similar plants all conveniently lined up for them.
Your responses thus far give me a sense of less surprise that you would find what you are doing hard work. This boy over here suggests you may be making your work harder than it needs to be. From a systemic/global/species perspective, no surprise there either.
Glad you like the so-called weeds. We might want and have to get used to them, maybe along with some bugs. A votre sante.
+1
One handy way to avoid using poisons is to growth things in a greenhouse. The Dutch do this. IF you grow indoors, you are less likely to have problems with weeds, insects or fungus, because they can’t get at your crop very well. And if they do, the controlled environment allows you to combat them more easily, for example by introducing parasites.
The truth is that most farmers do a pretty crappy job when it comes to sustainability. The common counterargument is that they can’t afford to be sustainable, but it’s usually bullshit. The real problems are that they don’t know how to run their business very well, and are given the wrong incentives.
The Green Revolution of the 1960’s and Its Impact on Small Farmers in India
See also here.
Calean, I do not have a problem with anything in that report. In fact, I think it is spot on. In all past famines in India, it has been the case where much food was produced but bureaucrats mishandled everything.
However, the current situation in India is entirely different. Farmers are going broke because of falling water tables and climate change. About 17,000 farmers kill themselves each year in India. And that is just the reported suicides. Many state bureaucrats do not report the suicides for obvious reasons.
Understood, Ron, and I’ve heard of the Indian farmer suicides as well. There seem to be a myriad of reasons and farmer suicides apparently transcend India and even include Canada.
Meanwhile, I seem to be seeing an explosion of community ‘farms’ in my neck of the woods. I put farms within single quotes because they are hardly farms and more like exploratory test-beds, often in raised beds.
BTW, hope you’re doing well in Mexico.
Ricciardi et al. (2018) place the number at ~32% of food supply on 24% of arable land.
Their Figure 5 is particularly useful in seeing the distribution of crops by farm size. Oilcrops are more common on larger farms, while cereals, fruits, pulses, and roots/tubers are more common among smallholders.
CITATION: Vincent Ricciardi, Navin Ramankutty, Zia Mehrabi, Larissa Jarvis, Brenton Chookolingo (2018). How much of the world’s food do smallholders produce? Global Food Security. 17: 64-72.
ABSTRACT: The widely reported claim that smallholders produce 70-80% of the world’s food has been a linchpin of agricultural development policy despite limited empirical evidence. Recent empirical attempts to reinvestigate this number have lacked raw data on how much food smallholders produce, and have relied on model assumptions with unknown biases and with limited spatial and commodity coverage. We examine variations in crop production by farm size using a newly-compiled global sample of subnational level microdata and agricultural censuses covering more countries (n=55) and crop types (n=154) than assessed to date. We estimate that farms under 2ha globally produce 28-31% of total crop production and 30-34% of food supply on 24% of gross agricultural area. Farms under 2ha devote a greater proportion of their production to food, and account for greater crop diversity, while farms over 1000ha have the greatest proportion of post-harvest loss.
DOWNLOAD: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325405959_How_much_of_the_world%27s_food_do_smallholders_produce
Environmentally minded Californians love to recycle — but it’s no longer doing any good
By George Skelton
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-recycling-problems-california-20180709-story.html
Californians dutifully load up their recycling bins and feel good about themselves. They’re helping the environment and being good citizens.
But their glow might turn to gloom if they realized that much of the stuff is headed to a landfill.
That’s because there’s no longer a recycling market for a lot of the paper, cardboard, plastic and other junk that’s left curbside.
Moreover, people are tossing garbage into those blue bins that they shouldn’t be. It just gums up the process.
“People are engaged in wish recycling,” says Mark Oldfield, public affairs director at CalRecycle, which runs the state’s recycling program. “They think: ‘This should be recycled. I’m going to put it in the bin.’”
“It’s amazing what people put in recycling bins,” Oldfield continues. “Dirty diapers. Broken crockery. Old garden hoses. Some of the worst offenders are old batteries.”
But what constitutes forbidden material is more nuanced than soiled diapers and corrosive batteries. Oldfield says it includes pizza boxes blotched with cheese and grease, plastic wrappers for food, shredded paper, unclean jelly jars, broken glass, unrinsed bottles and newspapers that have lined bird cages. Even paper envelopes with plastic address windows.
Recyclers these days don’t want items with mixed material such as paper and plastic, or cardboard and tape. It doesn’t pay to tear the stuff apart. Off to the landfill.
Moreover, what used to be California’s — and the world’s — largest overseas market for recyclables recently shut its door.
“China doesn’t want our garbage anymore,” says Steve Maviglio, a political strategist who is advising the recycling industry. “It’s time we cleaned up our own mess.”
Sad but true. Recycling seems largely a myth designed to make the public feel as if they “doing the right thing.” We used to separate paper, metal and glass, washing containers carefully, crushing tins to reduce volume, place these items in their designated containers. I couldn’t count the number of times I cut my hand scrubbing out a tin cans. This stopped dead when I noticed the “garbage men” tossing the “recyclable” stuff into the part of his truck containing non-recyclable waste. “No profit in recyclables anymore,” he told me.
This morning I took some steel waste to the recycler, around the corner. Got 20 pesos for it, didn’t think I’d get that much!
NAOM
Recent Non-Ferrous Scrap Metal Prices paid to individual recyclers in the US:
Bare Bright Copper $2.25/lb.
No. 1 Copper $2.25/lb.
No. 2 Copper $2.05/lb.
LT Copper $1.35/lb.
Insulated CU Wire #1 $1.20/lb.
Insulated CU Wire #2 $0.60/lb.
Low Grade ICW $0.20/lb.
Red Brass $1.25/lb.
Semi Red Brass $1.25/lb.
Yellow Brass $1.30/lb.
Reefer Ends $0.30/lb.
Brass Radiators $1.10/lb.
Irony Brass Radiators $0.50/lb.
Heater Cores $0.50/lb.
Aluminum Cans $0.45/lb.
Mill Sheet Aluminum $0.40/lb.
Cast Aluminum $0.35/lb.
PTD Aluminum Siding $0.40/lb.
Aluminum Clips (MLC) $0.40/lb.
Compressors/Ballast/Sealed Units $0.05/lb.
Batteries $.15/lb.
6063 Aluminum $0.45/lb.
Clean Aluminum Wheels $0.45/lb.
Light Irony Aluminum $0.25/lb.
Heavy Irony Aluminum $0.09/lb.
ACSR / Neoprene $0.13/lb.
Aluminum Shavings $0.13/lb.
Aluminum / Copper Reefers $1.00/lb.
Aluminum / Copper Reefers (dirty) $0.70/lb.
Aluminum Coolers $0.30/lb.
Electric Motors $0.09/lb.
Stainless Steel $0.30/lb.
Clean Lead $0.35/lb.
Wheel Weights $0.13/lb.
Ferrous Scrap Metal Prices
P&S Prepared 7.25/per 100lbs
P&S Unprepared $6.75/per 100lbs
#1/#2 Prepared $7.00/per 100lbs
#1/#2 Unprepared $6.50/per 100lbs
Oversize Torch $2.50/per 100lbs
Busheling $6.25/per 100lbs
Auto Slabs Whole $5.25/per 100lbs
Rebar (Unprepared) $2.25/per 100lbs
Sheet Iron (Shredder Tin) $6.00/per 100lbs
Foundry Cast Iron $5.50/per 100lbs
Dirty Cast $5.25/per 100lbs
Fence $3.00/per 100lbs
California should follow Europe’s lead and abolish landfills. Problem solved.
Often when I buy things I am horrified by the packaging. I suppose some of it is intended to prevent theft or to make the item more attractive on the shelf but now if you buy something online it comes in the same plastic tomb. Small items may be incapsulated in plastic that weighs nearly as much as the product.
“No profit in recyclables anymore,”
Is that the answer to everything?
It’s not just the plastic waste! More volume means less items per delivery, which means more vehicles are needed for less goods, which means more fuel consumed and more congestion.
NAOM
If you abolish landfills, the trash would just be shipped to other states that would welcome the revenue, much like how NYC’s trash is shipped around the country today. Costs of waste services in California would also go up, which would lead to increased illegal dumping and burning.
Apparently you aren’t familiar with the situation in Europe.
Burning it is the right plan. Trash incineration is widespread in Northern Europe and several countries are experiencing trash shortages. Germany imports about a million tons a year. Norway is considering importing from New York.
It’s really dumb that they use so much gas to generate electricity in the Northeast while dumping or exporting trash.
Climate Change: What Would Kavanaugh Do?
By Patrick J. Michaels and Trevor Burrus
https://www.cato.org/blog/climate-change-what-would-kavanaugh-do
In a 2012 dissent from a District of Columbia Appellate Court opinion, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh acknowledged that “dealing with global warming is urgent and important” but that any sweeping regulatory program would require an act of Congress.
Scalia held this opinion so strongly that, in his last public judicial act, he wrote the order (passed 5-4) to stay the Obama Administration’s sweeping “Clean Power Plan.” Such actions occur when it appears the court is likely to vote in a similar fashion in a related case.
This all devolves to the 2007 landmark ruling, 5-4, in Massachusetts v. EPA, that the EPA indeed was empowered by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide if the agency found that they endangered human health and welfare (which they subsequently did, in 2009). Justice Kennedy, Kavanaugh’s predecessor, voted with the majority.
Will Kavanaugh have a chance to reverse that vote? That depends on what the new Acting Administrator of the EPA plans to do about carbon dioxide emissions. If the agency simply stops any regulation of carbon dioxide, there will surely be some type of petition to compel the agency to continue regulation because of the 2009 endangerment finding. Alternatively, those already opposed to it might petition based upon the notion that the science has changed markedly since 2009, with increasing evidence that the computer models that were the sole basis for the finding have demonstrably overestimated warming in the current era. It’s also possible that Congress could compel EPA to reconsider its finding, and that a watered-down version might find itself at the center of a court-adjudicated policy fight.
I hate to break it to you, Cats, but global climate doesn’t have any concern at all about the news. There is no good news for climate, and there is no bad news for climate, because people aren’t in control, certainly no single person sitting on a court is going to have any effect at all.
As I studied my neighbors lawn, I asked him when was the last time he had heard a cricket or seen a grasshopper? He couldn’t answer, he had not even noticed they were gone. He lives right next to a lake. I asked him when was he had heard a frog last? He again was puzzled. No bugs on the windshield, nothing in the grass except a few small flies, no song of Katydid or cicada or cricket chirps. No more frog chorus. No more owls hooting or screaming in the night. No bears walking the darkness.
Of course he proudly described the poisons he applied to the lawn and flower gardens to keep the bugs down.
It appears as if Brood VII is headed for extinction.
http://www.cicadamania.com/cicadas/category/broods/brood-vii/
http://www.cicadamania.com/cicadas/what-might-cause-cicadas-to-go-extinct/
Of course as insects go, so go the creatures that eat them.
Gene Kritsky, an entomologist at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Ohio, told New York Magazine that a decline in cicada numbers in places like New York is likely due to land use.
“If trees were removed from areas where cicadas had emerged in the past and they are not within a mile of other cicadas, then the population would not replenish itself,” Kritsky told New York Mag. “This has resulted in a very sporadic distribution of the cicadas in more urban areas.”
Besides their three-to-four-week mating fest that ends in death, periodical cicadas live out most of their long lives as nymphs underground. Clearing a forest deprives the insects of their food source — they suck on sap from roots — and new pavement can become a tomb.
So keep clearing the forests, spraying the poisons, changing the climate. When the bugs are gone, bye bye to stupid humans too.
Oh you like to eat bugs? People are eating cicadas now, they are great bio-accumulators and the eastern half of the US is covered by mercury from coal burning. Good luck to all the candidates for the Mad-Hatters club. Same for fresh water fish.
I may not see a bear again but we sure see the effects of Bayer everywhere.
We have a lot of bears here, and growing. They are savage beasts who think nothing of attacking you or your family. I couldn’t name anyone I know who would be upset if bears went extinct locally.
I suppose you feel the same way about wolves?
BTW Lots of bears where I live. If you’re afraid of them get a dog. My mutt spots them long before I do and runs them off without any trouble. I worked in the arctic a lot where we always had a guy with a rifle to deal with aggressive polar bears. Over ten years we saw quite a few. Never had to kill one.
Shit, what wimps. I used to track bears for fun, got within a couple of yards of them sometimes. Until the hunters and cars killed them all they used to wander through my neighborhood and yard at night. Nice creatures, much better than humans.
It’s people that kill bears not the other way around. Ratio is hundreds of thousands to one. Just in the eastern US one hundred thousand bears can be shot each year, and who knows how many car kills and illegal kills happen.
Lightning is more dangerous, dogs are way more dangerous.
Despite all this slaughter of bears, they are far too intelligent and tolerant to want to eradicate humans. Something one cannot say about people. Also bears are far more important to the ecosystem than people.
Maybe you and your fellow villagers should shoot the cars instead. I hear cars kill and maim lots of people every day.
“It’s people that kill bears not the other way around.”
Yes. Many people are just looking for any excuse to kill a bear. Over the years I’ve had many exploration camps where crews would leave food garbage lying around then shoot bears eating the garbage. This was done in spite of the fact that helicopter pilots almost always volunteered to fly out bear attracting trash. A clean camp doesn’t attract bears.
They are savage beasts who think nothing of attacking you or your family.
Uh huh!
.
Do people ever imagine that we evolved in the same natural settings as all manner of carnivores much more atheletic than humans yet we managed to out-produce them. Apparently a human of average intelligence can live surrounded by wildlife and not have to shoot everything with teeth.
People are so wrapped in their security blankets (real or imagined) that they have lost their edge and start to fear everything. The media helps to instill an omnipresent fear of the world.
Time to get of our bubbles and back into the world.
““Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not. In the second place most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot – throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Get out and see something, one can’t miss or even imagine what one should miss when it is gone, if one has never seen or experienced it.
Odds of getting eaten are miniscule in most places, more likely a tumble or fall will get you, or maybe you will get lost and have a real adventure. Maybe get bitten by deerflies and mosquitos if lucky. Wear a hat.
Don’t drop it on your foot – throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Just reread it— that world has faded into the overpopulation and madness of now.
Even for the clueless, for those who are capable of reading a book, highly recommended.
Larson was a fave.
I would be more cautious of Republicans.
Much more dangerous and vicious.
Move into town.
I wonder how many people equate golf courses with nature?
Typical golf course in Florida… 😉
.
Is this guy playing or just watching?
Quietly waiting for ….
What’s his/her handicap? Are their no rules for proper golf dress?
I thought he was overdressed! Whoever heard of wearing alligator shoes on the golfcourse?
This is more an intrusion of suburbanites on wild life, subsidized by government spending on suburban roads.
Our local crocodiles have had a couple of golfers at one of our courses, over the years. Hurry up and putt, make it snappy!
NAOM
At least golf is a dying sport:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4w7H48tBS8
The good news is that golf is dying. Men don’t spend that much time away from their wives any more.
Yes Gone Fishing, its getting more and more quiet out here/ in here.
There are insects all over the place in my backyard. I know because I have to spray before anytime the grandkids plan to come over. One is allergic to bees/wasps so we can’t take any chances. Another benefit is fewer mosquitos, flies and other nastys that bite you.
There are insects all over the place in my backyard. I know because I have to spray before anytime the grandkids plan to come over.
You apparently don’t know as much you think!
https://phys.org/news/2017-10-percent-decrease-total-insect-biomass.html
The total flying insect biomass decreased by more than 75 percent over 27 years in protected areas, according to a study published October 18, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Caspar Hallmann from Radboud University, The Netherlands, and colleagues.
Insects play a crucial role in ecosystem functioning, pollinating 80 percent of wild plants and providing a food source for 60 percent of birds. Previous research has shown an overall pattern of decline in insect diversity and abundance, but has focused on single species or taxonomic groups, rather than monitoring insect biomass over an extensive period.
While ignorance can be remedied, deliberate ignorance is inexcusable!
What I am supposed to do, let the little ones get stung and have an allergic reaction?
What’s your plan? Spray the whole damn planet so your grand kids can feel safe? If they are in so much danger in your yard then maybe have them wear protective clothing, make them aware of their surroundings, keep them in a screened porch or just send then to the mall where there are no natural dangers!
Most of the planet is sprayed and wherever people are inconvenienced the spraying increases. They are either clueless or don’t care about what they are doing. Humans uber alles.
Mosquito control was wandering around my area (county government agents). It looked like they were sampling ponds and lakes. We hardly have enough mosquitos to even get bitten this year, so spraying would only be justification for their jobs.
Maybe all these toxins and mutagens we introduce into the environment will mutate the insect life and produce things like this!!!!
Eyes of the Moth man – documentary on Point Pleasant west Virginia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C66O2C5Tee4
Have fun with this, this is a real classic from the crazy ’60’s.
November 15th 1966 – four young adults traveling through the West Virginia backwoods of an abandoned TNT Plant come across something unnatural. The headlights from their 57′ Chevy strike what appears to be a black, lurking, lumbering, 7 foot tall man with red eyes and wings! Over the course of the next year, before the winged man of Point Pleasant would make his departure from his menacing raid on the God fearing souls of a minute church going community, 46 people would die tragically and hundreds more would be left traumatized and emotionally scarred for life. With rumors adrift of a haunting Indian curse, wild stories of men in black, bridge collapses, and a history of uncanny coincidences, UFO sightings, and even alien abductions, The Eyes of the Mothman is the first feature length documentary to delve deeper and try to uncover the truth behind this unsolved mystery from 43 years ago.
Yeah! Remember back in the 60s when Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring was published?
Seems we now have an even more virulent infestation of Homo ignorantis. Is there a spray we can use that eliminates ignorance and makes people understand the consequences of their actions?!
Given your link I found this one rather ironic…
.
BTW I photographed this one in Brazil. It has an 8 in. wingspan.
.
A beauty!
DDT?
The problem isn’t “spraying.” It’s over-spraying, or inappropriate spraying, or careless spraying.
If it weren’t for sprays (pesticides), I would have to kiss my apple orchard goodbye.
My bumpersticker:
NO PESTICIDES NO FOOD
Why do you grow strains that are extremely susceptible to disease? You just stated a 100 percent loss without pesticides.
Apples are cursed, it seems, and we live on an old New England farm where we decided to grow heritage varieties, the kind they had in old days, that should have been allowed to go extinct.
We probably wouldn’t have 100% loss with no pesticides, I was exaggerating, but the crop would be reduced, the quality would suck, and I would have to work twice as hard for a nasty crop.
One of the dirty secrets of organic apple growing is that they play games, like locating an “organic” orchard deep within a “conventional” orchard which is sprayed as usual. Following “organic rules,” the farmers keep a wide buffer around the organic crop.
Oh, and they still have to spray the organic trees–more frequently! Hard to believe, isn’t it? But organic growers have to use elemental sulfur to control fungi, and it kinda sucks as it doesn’t last after a mere 1/2 of rain, and if you use too much it damages the trees.
And they spray kaolin clay on the fruit–basically dirt, basically kitty litter–to try to keep the insects from fucking up the fruit, but again it kinda sucks because it’s bulky, and expensive, and you have to spray it frequently.
In short–farming is a goddamn tragedy. I agree with Jared Diamond:
Farming is the worst mistake in the history of the human race.
That’s why we call fishing and hunting recreation now. Always a good story around the campfire at night.
KISS? Nope we make it much more complicated/annoying/destructive and call it better.
Well I don’t so much care about what everybody else on the planet does, where did I ever say that? I just think me, my wife and my family have the right to spend time in my own damn backyard whenever we want without getting bit or stung or annoyed by bugs crawling all over us.
I worked forest service for 9 years, field/not office, and didn’t apply bug dope once. Maybe you’re weak and lack tolerance?
FYI big dope is not required to avoid being stung.
https://dengarden.com/gardening/How-to-Avoid-Bee-and-Wasp-Stings
Ever see anyone die of anaphylaxis? I have, as a former EMT.
People have a right to protect themselves from pests, with chemicals!
[Personally, I don’t use bug dope because it stinks and I hate that feeling of that shit on my skin.]
May I suggest swimming in DEET then. Also, if you soak your clothes in ammonia and then sleep in them they’ll never get wrinkly and you’ll never have to iron them again.
54 deaths out of 281 million people. Wow Mike, sounds like a real public health crisis! If you saw one of those I’d recommend you buy a lotto ticket, drama queen.
https://www.buzzaboutbees.net/bee-sting-facts.html
Survivalist,
Where-all did you work?
Just curious. Most of my field work (geology) has been in the Mountain West.
‘Green desert’ monoculture forests spreading in Africa and South America
“Some 350 kg of paper per person a year are consumed in Europe, half of which is packaging, while in Brazil and Uruguay the average is 50 kgs per person annually,” Brazilian activist Winfridus Overbeek, international coordinator of the Uruguay-based World Rainforest Movement (WRM), told IPS.
Overbeek said that in Europe as well as North America, there is no longer enough space to plant the trees required for that high level of consumption, so companies are shifting production to countries of the developing South.
Guadalupe Rodríguez, a member of the Germany-based Rainforest Rescue, told IPS that “monoculture forests tend to be seen as a good thing, because they are green and pretty. But if you approach them, you won’t hear a single bird, because there is nothing there, just silence.
“A monoculture forest is almost like a stone quarry,” she added. “In tropical rainforests, by contrast, you hear animals, water flowing, because they are full of life.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/sep/26/monoculture-forests-africa-south-America
Paperless?
If it isn’t paper, people will want to plant sugar cane, or corn, palm for oil, cotton, or hemp.
People talk about cutting down the rainforest so they can produce biofuel for their airplanes.
Then they can drop bombs on the protesters.
Yeah, people are beyond stupid.
Let’s see, rain forest provides food, medicine, habitat for millions of species, water and weather management services and many other benefits. Lasts for millions of years with no need for human input. Also provides mystery, danger, adventure.
Airplanes, last 30 to 40 years with lots of maintenance, suck up and burn expensive fuel, don’t do much to help anything, need large clear cut and prepared areas plus shelter and a large industrial civilization to build and provide for them.
I think we have a winner
I wonder how much of that 350 kg is recycled.
Is there a link between paper usage and plastic bags? Paper bags v plastic bags. If plastic bags are banned would that lead to more paper usage and, thus, more land massacred to provide ram material. Maybe we need to do more to produce useful fiber from plant waste.
NAOM
Happy Bastille Day Comrades!
It was the start of getting rid of those nasty Kings and Queens, and letting the populace rule.
Unfortunately, capitalism has taken over, but is on its dying days.
At this moment capitalism looks to be replaced by something even worse- economic dictatorship of the oligarchs.
Apparently we are not ready for good behavior, good thing we are owned.
It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB0YB5bzD48
“Populace rule” requires an involved, educated and informed citizenry. I my view, one who condemns capitalism doesn’t meet those standard. It’s like blaming basketball for the chaos in a pick up game that nether team plays by the rules and no referee.
It is government that sets the laws and regulation in the capitalism game. When you live in a country that half it’s citizenry are anti government and regulations. Plus 80% of it’s citizens are to distracted, short sighted and self center to optimize it’s government. There will be those who point the finger at everything but themselves.
America has the government and economy it deserves
True capitalism was around for about 200 years out of 200,000 of human existence (i.e. 0.1%) and then only for a proportion of the population. It looks likely that it owes it’s existence solely to ever increasing supplies of cheap energy (and with no short term consequences from it’s use), which might now be dwindling quite quickly. So replacing it with something else, and something probably worse for almost everyone, would be a predictable development just about now.
Also predictable:
I don’t think capitalism is linked as much to cheap energy as it is to the enlightenment and the pursuit of rational behavior that resulted.
When the ruling parts of western society discovered that by abandoning tradition and religion based social structures more physical wealth was popular it was entirely rational to base the “economy” on what worked best as far as could be seen in that age. Adam Smith captured it perfectly in the little story about the needle factory: Applying scientific methods to manufacture increased output long before the steam engine became dominant. Competitive markets were a natural next step when production increased and new ideas were out performing old.
It’s just that now we have different problems in the industrial societies and no one wants to move away from the game that gave us so much but has now become it’s own worst enemy.
Rational behavior?
Well, it has benefited me—
But I have had to restrict ethical conduct, and be good at the con, and not think of the result.
Capitalism is pretty basic, and it is best if you are 16, and reading Ayn Rand.
Yeah, I had a little trouble wording that. Maybe I should have something along the lines that capitalism seems to reward those with the shortest outlook, weeks over years, and that the apparent success of those individuals generates envy among those who see themselves falling behind.
And then the short term viewpoint is all that is left in the largest arenas of public discussion.
by the way, I just noticed that I am seen here as both Jim and JJHMAN. I’m not trying to hide, just rather dim witted about these things. ;>)
Yep,
Small Hands
Big Lies
But that is just a end game thing——-
““Populace rule” requires an involved, educated and informed citizenry.”
Well, the republicans are doing their best to eliminate that.
NAOM
Dennis- is there a real phenomena of peak credit [debt]?
Consider the following statement-
“We no longer have business cycles, we have credit cycles.
Post-crisis [2008] growth, mild as it’s been, has been largely a function of debt, which central banks encouraged and enabled. The result was inflated asset prices without the kind of “recovery” seen in previous business cycles.”
Perhaps this doesn’t apply to all countries. Some are truly in the midst of inherent growth phases, like India.
Others, it can be argued, have borrowed growth via quantitative easing and increasing the overall debt load of the country.
I am concerned that many countries have rounded the top not just on energy production, but also on base economic output. What economic system works when growth isn’t part of the assumption/outcome?
For example, the pension system in the USA assumes returns far in excess of what has been accrued, in order to pay the ‘promises’. Without growth far in excess of what has transpired, that system is broken. Can you imagine paying for college with a loan these days, expecting wages to allow you to pay the money back? Its a broken system, built on stilts of debt.
Right?
like India.
Probably the second major country over the falls.
Oh sure India has massive problems with sustainability and on, but my point in using them as an example is simply that they are growing. Growing pretty fast too. I know people from there and they have a sense of economic possibility that was far beyond reach until recently. Go to Toledo or Milan and show me growth (not built on massive debt).
Oh sure India has massive problems with sustainability
A ecological nightmare.
One has to be in a awfully small box to even to approach survivability.
Your claims about social Security is just Republican propaganda. The system is fine, except that the donations are capped, and the Republicans can’t resist stealing from it to pay for tax cuts.
Social Security has to exist in a political environment that includes Republicans. that’s the problem. It would be solvent if we could charge SS taxes on all income. However if you are limited to taxing people who expect to benefit from the plan than you have to pay benefits to people that have some proportion to the taxes they pay. Limiting the exposure to taxes to the people who really don’t care if they get the benefit is a kind of compromise that avoids getting too much resistance from the very wealthy who could quash SS if they were angered.
I don’t think anyone is “stealing” SS money. The first “borrowing” from the trust fund was done by Lyndon Johnson to pay for the Vietnam war. It’s all funny money. Either the government is going to pay the benefit or they aren’t irrespective of whether there are bonds in a desk drawer or not.
Ummh..alimbiqu- I didn’t mention anything about social security. perhaps your comment was directed to someone else who’s comment I don’t see.
Hickory,
As long as debt is not overdone it is not a problem. Think of mortgage lending rules. Total debt can be about 3 times annual income and typically be serviced without a problem.
For World debt (both public and private) this would equate to a debt to GDP (income) level of about 300 to 1. Also note that a lot of the increase in the World Debt to GDP has been in emerging economies and China since about 2011 or so. Historically debt to GDP has been lower in less developed economies (as a group) and as these economies develop they will have better access to credit and debt to GDP will rise. This tends to increase the average World debt to GDP.
My view is that the “debt problem” is overblown.
See
https://www.bis.org/statistics/totcredit.htm?m=6%7C380%7C669
and decide for yourself.
Maybe its over my head, but I look at the data for the USA, for example, and see credit extended currently at about 150% of GDP. But that does not include the financial sector debt, or the city, state, or federal government debt. And so, correct me if I am wrong, but the underfunded pension plan debt (teachers, police, etc) is not tallied here. The debt that blew up the world economy (financial sector) in 2008 is not tallied here.
Also, the congress has used unrealistic growth numbers to pretend that the social program (particularly medical) funding escalation baked in over the next decade can be managed.
I think there is a strong chance that the shit on this will hit the fan right about when the next deep recession/depression comes calling (as you say mid 2020’s Dennis).
Between energy and debt, it may be huge.
Chevy Bolt EV Premier | $40.67 TO GO OVER 35,000 miles???!!! Ride along owner’s review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NErgbTvNwFU
Just thought I’d highlight some “good” news and provoke the trolls this Sunday afternoon.
UK surpasses 1,000 hours without coal this year alone, solar shines
While negative news of Brexit continues to plague the U.K., there is some light in the darkness. Non-profit service, MyGrid GB, which charts the changes in electricity generation in the U.K., today tweeted that the country has gone for 1,009 hours without relying on coal this year.
This compares to 624 hours across the whole of 2017, and 210 hours in the 12 months of 2016.
While gas and nuclear still represent the largest share of electricity – 48.6% and 22.8%, respectively, this week – solar PV’s share has significantly increased recently, due to the current heat wave being experienced in the U.K.
Spain covers 45.8% of H1 2018 electricity demand with renewables
A combination of good meteorological conditions in the first half of 2018 has led Spain to cover 45.8% of the electricity demand on its grid via renewable energy sources (the figure excludes the Balearic and Canary Islands).
Wind energy systems were the peninsula’s primary source of electricity, covering 22.6% of its electricity demand, the highest penetration of any type of energy, renewable or not. “Compared with the first six months of 2017, wind production has increased by 10.4%,” added the REE.
Germany: Renewables beat coal for the first time
In the first half of 2018, renewable energies accounted for a higher share of German gross electricity generation, for the first time beating coal-fired and lignite-fired power stations.
Nearly 118 billion kWh have been generated by PV, wind other renewable energy plants in the period, according to Germany’s Federal Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW). This is an increase of more than 10% over the previous year.
Meanwhile, California slashes emissions to below 1990 levels
California’s greenhouse gas pollution levels fell below 1990 levels for the first time since the American state’s emissions peaked in 2004, new Air Resources Board data has shown – and several years before the target date of 2020.
or some might prefer the last news story from a US perspective:
Rising renewables, falling gas propel California past carbon reduction goal
Dive Insight:
The steady growth of California’s renewable energy resources is having a big impact. While the size of the states GHG emissions drop is impressive on whole — 2.7% is nothing to sneeze at—the power sector’s decline was much larger.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the electric power sector dropped from 83.67 million metric tons in 2015 to 68.58 million metric tons in 2016 — a decline of about 18%.
Hope all those who watch the FIFA World Cup Final (the real football world cup) enjoy it! I’m rooting for the underdogs, Go Croatia! For those in the US, how did a game in which the ball is only kicked a select few times, with most of the game involving the ball being carried by hand, get the name “football”? The rest of the world wants to know.
Edit: Little did I know that while I was writing my post, the World Cup Final was well advanced and Croatia was down 4-2, the final score. So France win another World Cup Final and that just shows how much interest I have paid to the competition this time around!
For those in the US, how did a game in which the ball is only kicked a select few times, with most of the game involving the ball being carried by hand, get the name “football”? The rest of the world wants to know.
LOL! Here’s my theory: Apparently many American ‘FOOT’ ball fans have difficulty distinguishing certain parts of their anatomy from other parts…
BTW, it would be rather amusing to see little Croatia beat the big bad French, eh?!
As opposed to handball?
Well, can handball be played with a genuine pigskin?
Hang that, off the back of your wimpy pick up truck! 😉
.
Pig Uber or Uber Pig?
Now now, EFredM,
Don’t forget Rugby, which is properly Rugby football. Comes out of the later 19th Century in England it does, in two forms Rugby union and Rugby league and they carry the ball and pass the ball and enjoy all sorts of mayhem. Gave rise to American football, Canadian football too.
I saw a bumper sticker here, from the local Rugby team: Rugby players eat their dead.
Plus Australian Rules Football, or should that be no-rules?
notanoilman,
Australian football is one of the very few solid pieces of evidence that Earth has indeed been visited by beings from another world.
I think they’re trying to encourage us, for their own inscrutable ends.
I’d like to know how come a game derived from rugby became football. Is it that Americans in their zeal to throw off all vestiges of their colonial past decided not to use the name used in other British colonies for what might have essentially been the same game at the time?
So, I decided to do some internet searching and found that in using the name soccer, the US has held on to a very old name for footbal that fell out of use quite sometime ago. American football is much more closely related to Rugby tgan it is to what is now know everywhere else as football.
So I guess congratulations are in order for the US for proving American exceptionalism once more. The only country in the world to have held on to an ancient name for football and stuck to using the name football for a game related to what the rest of the world calls rugby! Strange country the US. One of the most scientifically advanced countries in the world stubbornly hanging on to an ancient weights and measures system that was inherited from their former colonial rulers, while the rest of the world has moved on!
Incidentally, news around my neck of the woods has been surrounding rumours that a former Olympic bronze medallist is joining a local rugby team.
The term ‘Soccer’ is common in the UK too.
NAOM
islandboy,
The game’s name is Rugby football, or Rugger football for graduates of Rugby school. That’s UK usage, though it’s commonly shortened to rugby.
Yes Rugby Football versus Association Football, which was shortened to Soccer.
“45.8% of the electricity demand on its grid”
Wah, wah! The grid will collapse if there are more than 20% renewables!
Or, at least, so say the trolls.
NAOM
By 45.8% of “electricity demand on the grid” they actually mean electrical energy or kWh. Electrical energy is to electrical power as distance is to speed and the figure given is akin to saying that half the distance covered in a particular journey was done in an EV without saying how fast the distance was covered.
The take away from that is that the actual power (kW or MW) delivered to the grid could have been much higher than 45.8% at times, as was the case in Portugal on March 11, 2018 when the energy delivered to the grid was 143% of consumption! See:
https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1461598/renewable-records-iberian-peninsula
The problem is that increasing amounts of renewable power mean that ff powered generators are experiencing lower capacity factors, unable to match the offer prices of renewables. It’s the people who are on the losing end that are pushing this BS. The network operators don’t care where the power is coming from as long as they can balance demand with supply all the time.
Excellent news.
To give it some perspective since the population is growing at about 80 million people per year, the rate of new net renewable electric power capacity addition in 2017 was 6 times the rate needed per capita to provide power at the current per capita rate. Considering utilization factor, that means that renewables would meet the increase in demand two times over if they have a 33% utilization factor.
Since renewables are growing fast, they are now taking care of newly added demand from population but are making a larger dent in the need for continuing existing power sources.
With population net increase falling, that should even make a bigger dent in FF power sources in the coming years.
Absolute net rate of global population growth.
Global population net time for increase by one billion people.
That looks like a very realistic projection. I would not argue with that projection at all. Unless of course collapse happens before we reach 11 billion. And I would consider that highly likely. Most likely well before we reach 10 billion.
Especially if countries are having problems like this:
Poor management of Jamaica’s solid waste, disposal sites a growing public health issue – JET
The Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) is lamenting the failure of successive political administrations to effectively deal with the growing public health issue arising from poor management of the country’s solid waste and waste disposal sites.
As I have stated a number of times on this site, any projection more than 5 years or at most ten years forward are not very useful due to the large number of intersecting growing predicaments and problems.
Still, it’s nice to know the official projections since that is what the academics think and probably what the businesses/governments are using as guidelines for current action.
Except for the US government which at this point has wandered down the rabbit hole while doing a great and fantastic job.
Except for the US government which at this point has wandered down the rabbit hole while doing a great and fantastic job.
Yep, we are totally in Alice in Wonderland territory.
.
.
An eye opening interview with Dr. James White.
A sit down with Dr. James White professor of paleoclimatology at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Alpine and Arctic Institute. “Shifts of 10C or more within a human life time.” (Host — Antonio Reid)
“I am really trying to develop a detailed understanding of how dangerous just 1-2C of global average warming really is. And those global averages could correspond to be 10C or more here in North America.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqa9HNR9KTc
That is an excellent video interview! Thanks for sharing it. The prof is a straight shooter.
I think that over the coming decade the myth that our emissions dominate climate change will be eroded away. I liken the present climate situation as lighting a match, the match will burn brightly but only for a short time. Once applied to a larger amount of combustible material the original match burn will become unnecessary and, in the long run, insignificant to the total amount of energy released (or captured in the Earth system case).
And for those with a burning interest in such things:
A fire smolders in an abandoned coal mine deep underground. Gases seep to the surface through fissures in the earth. A blue-collar Pennsylvania town vaporizes, chased away by the blaze. But this is not Centralia, where subterranean seams of anthracite have been burning since 1962. No, this is Laurel Run, a town done in by a mine fire that’s been burning nearly twice as long.
Though Centralia has garnered the lion’s share of attention as the ghost town made famous by a mine fire, the central Pennsylvania borough is not the only place to have been erased from below. Underground fires have come and gone since Pennsylvania’s mines first opened in the 18th century. More than three dozen active mine fires are currently burning in that state. When those infernos were away from population centers, people mostly ignored them. A few times, though, when acrid gases rose through city streets, there was no option but to raise the white flag of surrender and relocate an entire community.
http://www.abandonedcountry.com/2015/05/12/laurel-run-pennsylvania-fire-on-the-mountain/
and this:
Pennsylvania’s last massive coal breaker comes down, ending an era
http://www.mcall.com/news/nationworld/pennsylvania/mc-pennsylvania-s-last-massive-coal-breaker-comes-down-ending-an-era-20180316-story.html
GoneFishing,
Your first sentence: Why a myth?
Because it is not true, manmade CO2 is not even the dominant factor now. It is merely a trigger or catalyst, which is why small changes in it are so potent, it helps unleash the other multitude of factors that add up to much larger forcings, which push the feedbacks even further/faster. The problem is that CO2 levels are temperature/biological dependent which means that the levels won’t drop later on. Not on any human timescale.
It took a huge long term event to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels after the PETM, even then it took over 40 million years to get down to the ICE AGE we now live in (or did live in).
Greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide and methane, played a significant role during the Eocene in controlling the surface temperature. The end of the PETM was met with a very large sequestration of carbon dioxide in the form of methane clathrate, coal, and crude oil at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, that reduced the atmospheric carbon dioxide.[7] This event was similar in magnitude to the massive release of greenhouse gasses at the beginning of the PETM, and it is hypothesized that the sequestration was mainly due to organic carbon burial and weathering of silicates. For the early Eocene there is much discussion on how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere. This is due to numerous proxies representing different atmospheric carbon dioxide content. For example, diverse geochemical and paleontological proxies indicate that at the maximum of global warmth the atmospheric carbon dioxide values were at 700–900 ppm
There are vast stored quantities of carbon to be released in the form of CO2 and methane (which degrades to CO2). That is fact. As the world warms they get released. As the snow and ice recede the world warms quickly. As the plankton levels drop, the CO2 sequestration slows down. As the oceans warm their ability to sequester CO2 reduces.
So what is the great event that will suck CO2 from the atmosphere to eventually break the warm period? More coal making? More silicate to carbonate weathering? Millions of years?
Even after the PETM ended it was still quite a warm world and the temperature dropped by several C then rose slowly over millions of years to a similar maximum. It took about 15 million to drop far enough that Antarctica could glaciate, which later melted again and finally over 40 million years after the Eocene Optimum we entered another Ice Age.
That is a long time to wait for a return to “normal” temperatures.
As the sea levels rise and as the oceans warm the ability to produce methane increases. Methane has an instantaneous warming factor over 150 times that of CO2.
We now have the a CO2 equivalent of close to 800 ppm when one does not factor in the lifetime of the gases involved. What really counts and what really heats is what is there now and there is no reason to think they will reduce since natural sources are taking over.
Then there is albedo change. A 1 percent change in albedo is 2.7 watts/m2 at the surface (global). In reality, the changes are over 100 w/m2 in the region where the snow loss occurs. That forces phase change and major permanent environmental change in that region. So going from 0.30 to 0.29 has a larger effect on the planet than the CO2 increase by itself. I doubt if we can accurately measure the planetary albedo to one percent or even three percent. So the changes will be another surprise.
It took thousands of years to push CO2 levels up in the PETM. We are doing it at many times that rate (0.2 Gt/yr vs. 40Gt/yr). That means we are now seeing the very start of warming, not the end of warming. We are seeing the first few feet off the starting line on what could be a journey of millions of years. We won’t even start to see the effects of the Southern Ocean soaking up all that energy for a few hundred years. it’s a long term journey.
Only a few climate scientists have really rung the alarm bell early on. Most play with models and try to understand the full complexity of a multivariate fully interdependent non-linear system. Nice to know eventually, but we do not have eventually to act.
It takes massive long term geological and orbital changes to move the planet from it’s preferred states.
The myth of small changes that will recover in thousands of years on their own. The myth that the system does not move to preferred states and try to stay there. The myth that we can stop the warming at 1.5 or 2C with minimal change on our part. The myth that we can comprehend the earth system after partially understanding and observing a very small perturbation during a single extremely small time slice.
Geologic history of the planet refutes the myth.
GoneFishing,
Thanks.
I asked because any convinced denier of human-caused climate change would read it and say “SEE?” Such are not likely to read any farther.
I actually managed to read through all of this, and all I can say is, “wow”…
Even with those fires, country bumpkins in PA are conditioned to think coal will always be relevant. Doesn’t matter if they are employed in the coal industry or not, they’ll vote for any Republican who promises them more coal. Hell, doesn’t even matter if there are any coal mines in their county, they’ll still be eager to vote for coal.
Honestly for anyone looking to move, avoid Pennsylvania altogether, it’s a lost cause. The city folks are brainwashed to vote Democrat while the rural folks only want to breathe in coal dust while they cling to their bibles, guns, and fetus models (used to “teach” the children about abortion).
Who controls our food?
New Study on Increasing Homogeneity within Global Food Supplies Warns of Serious Implications for Farming and Human Nutrition
Yair,
I reckon one of the problems we have is that food is too readily available and too cheap, people don’t value it . . . a few queues and a ration book or two would clarify a lot of minds.
The first thing my mother bought when we got of the ship from the UK and moved to rural Tasmania was a house cow to provide us with milk and butter. I can remember helping her pack onions in wood shavings to tide us over until the next dig . . . in those days it seems food took a much larger portion of the weekly income than it does now.
I am not complaining though. On a very low fixed income, we shop wisely, waste nothing and find my wife and I can eat very well on sixty bucks per week . . . it would be considerably less if we lived in town.
It would take a lot less “peasant farmers” to feed the masses if there was less extravagance and waste.
Addendum to my most recent comments about food, and my own words about it:
Consider Earth as a giant farm– the farm of all farms.
At least try to transcend your particular schema of agriculture and/or farming and/or you, how you fit in, and in relation to your own energy and nutrient inputs and outputs and how they and you in general are and/or can be integrated (better) with your surrounds, like in a win-win symbiotic sense.
In fact, think about it while you are in the process of an ‘output’. Ask yourself what happens to it/them and can they and what happens to them be better approached and utilized, such as by your surrounds and the creatures within it, and stuff like that.
How much of the world’s food do smallholders produce?
The State of Family Farms in the World
The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide
~ Sarah K. Lowder, Jakob Skoet and Terri Raney,
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy
United Nations Calls for an End to Industrialized Farming
My semi-educated guess is that atleast 5 billion of the current 7.6 B peole on the planet, and perhaps many more, derive the vast bulk of their sustenance [protein, carb, fat] from large scale modern agricultural production techniques.
This includes a range of chemicals, machinery and technology (irrigation, genetically improved/selected plant material, etc), and is highly dependent in all phases on external energy input which vastly extends the human and animal labor previously available.
Is this a good thing? There are many facets of that question. Good for feeding the highest number of people. Bad if you are a ‘veal’ cow calf. Bad if you value clean water.
Should we move towards a cleaner system more dependent on local markets, and sustainable when it comes to energy and chemicals- certainly. But realize that this goal entails a massive downsizing in human population. That is a key element of this discussion. The carrying capacity of sustainable food production in this world is probably a lot closer to 1 billion than 7 billion people. In part it depends what we eat. The carrying capacity is higher with a diet based on crickets and algae, than chicken parmesan and meatloaf.
I’m a professional ag guy, retired some time now, and I am slow to accept any agricultural statistics gathered and collated on the grand scale, because I learned all the way back in grade school about “lies, damned lies, and statistics”, courtesy of Twain if I remember correctly.
So I don’t know these days how much of the world’s food is produced by traditional pre industrial methods, obsolete industrial methods such as the ones I pursued as a young man, and modern industrial methods.
But I do know this. One HELL of a lot of food is still produced by very small scale farmers who use very little in the way of industrially supplied inputs, in some parts of the world, and when they do have such inputs, they are mostly fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel, all in very modest quantities.
And such farmers, and their local customers, eat LOW on the food chain. It takes a lot of grain to produce beef, but if you eat the grain, you can provide for three times as many people, roughly, per acre of land in production.
What I ‘m saying, in essence, is that a rural poor Chinaman lives on a third or less of the grain, etc, consumed directly as bread, and INDIRECTLY as meat, as a typical lard ass Yankee.
NUANCE always matters.
So my semi educated guess is that maybe half or even more of the world’s food supply is still produced by very small scale farmers using very modest amounts of purchased fertilizers, pesticides, fuel and so forth.
It’s hard to say because things have been and are changing so fast, and because damned near all the statistics you see published these days by any organization with an agenda ( meaning just about EVERY organization ) are cherry picked and massaged to further said agenda.
If I recall correctly from perusing this site years ago, you grew apples, right?
Search above and tell that yahoo what it’s like to run an orchard.
Mine is very small, so it’s more of a hobby, but it certainly is a good edumacation in the Darwinian nature of farming.
People will get back to basics when they are forced to–or die. For now, it’s big ag all the way to the graveyard.
Caelan, this one’s for you: the aerial tramway emoji has been the least used emoji on Twitter for the last 71 days. You might want to work on improving this, obviously not enough people understand the benefits of these systems like you do. 😆 😉
https://twitter.com/leastusedemoji
?
It’s cute. ^u^
I don’t know where NASA does their summaries but the chart has June second hottest by he look of it (and only just). Columbia has a high probability of El Nino next year so records are likely to be falling then (they will be in July in UK based on current temperatures)
That one came out on July 16
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/news/
Article states that June 2018 is tied for third place with June 1998
“June 1998 was exceptionally warm at the time due to the then prevailing strong El Niño conditions — about 0.33°C above the trend line of the late 1990s. In contrast, the current El Niño phase is considered neutral.”
From the GISTEMP graph, it appears as if we have a 1.5 to 2C change already.
Greenland is experiencing a year without a summer. This is going mostly unnoticed to groups like NASA because there is a highly limited number of observation stations on Greenland.
Late Snowpack Signals a Lost Summer for Greenland’s Shorebirds
Frisky Bobby, Do you seriously believe scientists at NASA are unaware of what is happening in Greenland due to climate change!
From your link:
Millions of shorebirds descend on the Arctic each year to mate and raise chicks during the tundra’s brief burst of summer. But that burst, which usually begins in mid-June, never arrived this year for eastern Greenland’s shorebirds, a set of ground-nesting species. Instead, a record late snowpack—lingering into July—sealed the birds off from food and nesting sites. Without these key resources avian migrants to the region will not reproduce in 2018, experts say. Breeding failures like this may grow more common because some climate change models predict increased springtime snow in the shorebirds’ nesting habitat.
So you don’t even recognize one of your own cold blobs?! Colder than normal weather in summer in Greenland with snowfall is exactly what the models predict and you think climate scientists are surprised by this? You are truly an idiotic troll!
More snow means more energy needed to melt it, which means temperatures are further suppressed because energy is going into melting the snow. That’s previously unforeseen cooling.
Green means above freezing.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx_frames/gfs/ds/gfs_arc-lea_t2max_10-day.png
This ones a little trickier. Numbers and lines on a graph.
http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/
This one compares global land to NH land temps. NH land is where most of the food is grown.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vnh/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/plot/crutem4vnh/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/trend
That’s egregiously incorrect. Snow can occur any time there are the right atmospheric conditions under freezing. Under freezing does not mean colder than previously, and more snow could be due to more moisture rather than lower temps. And the existence of snow does not mean cooling, it means that, if the snow is to become water some energy that could have gone to warming will have to melt it. Does not at all create an additional cooling effect, nor will that energy necessarily be used to melt the snow, and if that snow is warmer than snow used to be, there could be far less energy needed to melt it now than in the past.
I’m not a climate scientist, these are just rather basic observations about how weather, freezing, melting, and temperature works. I’m sure someone more educated could come up with a much better explanation of how wrong your statement was.
Bob – you must be having to spend more and more time trying to find places that are colder than average. As far as snow: 1) there is no net energy loss – the heat is initially given out to the environment when it is formed, same with ice – it’s likely the net heating and cooling happen in different places; 2) when it lands on ice or permafrost snow acts as insulation and tends to inhibit the heat leaving, which prevents the ice thickening, so it can worsen climate change impacts.
Burning jungle to burn palm oil. European and Indonesian mandates on biofuel mean palm oil is being burned in vehicles.
Burning Paradise: Palm Oil in the Land of the Tree Kangaroo
What happened when a giant Korean conglomerate set its eyes on Indonesia’s largest intact rainforest–
and how that palm oil made it into the world’s soap, moisturizer, and gas tanks
https://www.mightyearth.org/BurningParadise/
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/oldest-tress-africa-baobabs-dead-climate-science/
Africa’s Oldest Trees Are Dying, and Scientists Are Stumped
A mysterious killer is claiming the mighty baobab.
“It is very surprising to visit monumental baobabs, with ages greater than a thousand to two thousand years, which seem to be in a good state of health, and to find them after several years fallen to the ground and dead,” says study coauthor Adrian Patrut of Romania’s Babes-Bolyai University.
“Statistically, it is practically impossible that such a high number of large old baobabs die in such a short time frame due to natural causes.”
BTW the Baobab tree is an important part of the story of the Little Prince
“I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Back to this carrying capacity issue:
All the old hands here know I’m fully on board with the resource depletion, climate running hot, overpopulation questions.
So…… Hopefully nobody will see fit to call me a blooming idiot in this particular context, at this time, although most all of you who have commented are due a lecture on practical politics, because just about all of you have forgotten the first basic rule of winning over voters……. you must be respectful, first of all, if you want people to even CONSIDER changing their minds about their fundamental beliefs.
Now I know it’s hard for people familiar with the hard sciences to comprehend the mindsets and beliefs of people who lack this training……… but who ARE quite well versed in the “sorta kinda” sciences of economics, politics, law, and so forth.
Not everybody who believes in the power of the MIGHTY MIGHTY MARKET and the INVINCIBLE INVISIBLE HAND is a religious conservative, nor a redneck, nor a racist, nor a xenophobe, or even an ordinary idiot.
As a matter of fact, there are obviously many millions of people who have studied economics, at least at the basic level, and history, at least at the basic level, who have NOT studied the hard sciences, other than ARITHMETIC sufficient to run a business or hold a particular job…….. people who have NEAR ZERO knowledge of the hard sciences.
What they DO KNOW is that the economists ( and others) who are telling them that we have plenty of resources, and if we run short of any particular resource, that we can substitute another, or do without that one easily, have a LONG record of being RIGHT in their arguments.
A good lot of us here are old TOD hands, who firmly believed that peak oil would be receding in the mirror close to ten years ago, or maybe even longer. WE ALL LAUGHED AT THE REPUBLICAN CONSERVATIVE TYPES whose mantra was DRILL BABY DRILL.
Well, baby drilled, and we have plenty of fucking oil……. for the present anyway. There’s plenty of copper wire in the big box stores, there’s plenty of food in the supermarkets. Paul Erlich was wrong about people starving on the grand scale ……… but I took him seriously…….. back then and when. I believed in the Green Revolution, being an professional ag guy myself….. but I didn’t believe the socalled Third World would be able to AFFORD the Green Revolution…..I won a public speaking contest by arguing that yes the technology was sound, but that the necessary infrastructure needed to implement it didn’t exist… meaning roads, electrical grids, packaging plants, machinery, fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, all needed on the grand scale…… who was going to PAY for all this stuff?
From the pov of people who lack serious training in the hard sciences, and who are suspicious of us to begin with, but know the basic outlines of economic and technological history, WE look like goddamned fools and idiots…….. JUST AS SURELY as they look like fools and idiots to US.
PRAY let us not forget that you can graduate from nearly any well known university without taking even ONE real science course. So help me Sky Daddy. I doubt that more than one person out of ten in the USA is has even foggiest understanding of the basics of biology, ecology, climate, geology.
This does not mean however that we can’t communicate with such people, and that we can’t at least potentially convert them into voters who take environmental issues seriously…. especially if they happen to be reasonably well educated in ANY field that requires some thinking… some ability to understand and sort out facts, draw conclusions, etc.
I will be back with another long comment sometime later this evening outlining the way I work personally with people trained in business, history, and economics, but not biology, geology, chemistry, etc, to help them truly understand the carrying capacity issue.
We can either try to win such people over, and thus help win elections for the environmental camp, or we can call them names….. which does make us feel better, lol. I must admit I occasionally call people who disagree with me idiots….. but I try not to make a HABIT of it.
Back atcha all later.
I suppose all this is easy for me to understand and accept because I have lived in both camps, politically, professionally, and culturally, whereas hardly any, if any, of the other regulars here have similar personal histories.
just about all of you have forgotten the first basic rule of winning over voters……. you must be respectful, first of all, if you want people to even CONSIDER changing their minds about their fundamental beliefs.
Mac, I have expressed this point before, but apparently, you did not consider my opinion important. That is your preoperative. Nevertheless I will give it to you again:
I have no desire to win over voters. Trump voters are all just down in the dirt stupid. Trump, as he said, could shoot someone on fifth avenue and he would not lose any voters. That is true. That is a testament as to how unbelievably stupid Trump voters are.
We can either try to win such people over, and thus help win elections for the environmental camp, or we can call them names….. which does make us feel better, lol. I must admit I occasionally call people who disagree with me idiots….. but I try not to make a HABIT of it.
No, no, no. you are never going to win such people over. These people, most of them anyway, believe that the world is 6,000 years old and the sun rises and sets in Donald Trump’s ass. You will never win them over. They are all just down in the dirt stupid. These idiots should just be ignored, not argued with.
We must hope that a majority of the American people are not as dumb as the average Trump supporter. However, that may not be the case. If that is the case then we are just fucking doomed.
I lean with you on that Ron, however OFM’s point remains valid when applied to a very big block of potential voters- those who are not stoneground partisan and are potential swing voters, undecided’s or sometimes don’t vote. Its a huge group of people that can make a landslide one way or another. Who captures the bulk of their trust or hope can win big. I’m not expecting the 30% hardcore republicans (or democrats) to ever switch camps. But there is another 30-40% worth fighting for. Democrats will have to win more than a 3 million majority to win the white house because of the electoral college, as we saw this time. It better be even bigger than that with the supreme court becoming the tool of the republican party.
I have no desire to win over voters.
That is far in the rear view mirror.
I have no desire to win over voters. Trump voters are all just down in the dirt stupid. Trump, as he said, could shoot someone on fifth avenue and he would not lose any voters. That is true. That is a testament as to how unbelievably stupid Trump voters are.
No they are even stupider than that! Trump just shot Uncle Sam on the world stage, I bet they still support him! Trump is a traitor, anyone one who still supports him is also guilty of treason by association.
.
Respect is earned, the idiots need to pull their heads out.
And to think, if Trump was smart enough to have an Email account. We could “lock him up”.
Where are the Trump supporters today? How do they feel about that treasonous performance in Helsinki yesterday?
18 U.S. Code § 2381 – Treason
US Code
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 807; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(2)(J), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)
Not all agree with your point of view.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-17/ilargi-meijer-treason-get-life
If You’ll Believe Russia Is the Aggressor in Ukraine You’ll Believe Anything
Raul Ilargi Meijer RUSSIA INSIDER 2015
Fuck Raul Ilargi Meijer and the horse he rode in on!
For the record, I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not a single other person agrees with me or not! I think Trump is a traitor while Putin is a war criminal and I base that on a reasonably good grasp of both US and World History!
Well, I would suggest you learn Russian, as it is the spoken language of the Ukraine, and 90% of the population are Russian.
It has been a part of Russia for about as long as the USA has been a country, and was given in a drunken gesture when the Ukraine was part of that Empire.
But I guess we could give the Ukraine back to the 10% of the original inhabits, and the USA back to the indigenous inhabitants?
It seems fair.
But I guess we could give the Ukraine back to the 10% of the original inhabits, and the USA back to the indigenous inhabitants?
It seems fair.
Are you fucking serious?! Sorry, not buying your outrageous and pathetically lame defense of what amounts to war crimes and human rights violations by the Russians under Putin!
The Jews were a minority in Germany under the Nazis! I guess according to your logic that made what the Nazis did to them okay, right?
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/trump-putin-helsinki-ukraine/565235/
Trump administration deletes 20 years of critical online medical guidelines – “There is nothing else like it in the world”
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2018/07/trump-administration-deletes-20-years.html
Yair,
This is fascinating stuff . . . .
http://www.allischalmers.com/forum/trump-putin_topic152155.html
Yeah, quite fascinating indeed! I’m just really tired of all the stupid little cockroaches that have come out from under all the rocks that Trump et al have been turning over.
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/07/12/we-should-never-underestimate-human-stupidity-historian.html
‘We should never underestimate human stupidity’:
10:32 PM ET Thu, 12 July 2018
Historian Yuval Harari of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem says populists are selling “nostalgic fantasies about the past instead of real visions for the future.”
Nationalism and populism are no match for global problems!
Whatever you may think of him at least the 44th POTUS does understand how the world works and has some concept as to where it is going. He has also read Yuval Harari’s books!
Not a bad speech all in all and it sure beats Trump’s constant twitter barrage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W58kWkSNeI
President Obama delivers the Nelson Mandela Lecture in South Africa