Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on November 12, 2022 | 69 Comments
Just a quick info interlude before I post the final instalment of my present mini-series on health and welfare in a small farm future, probably on Monday.
Mostly, I want to alert you to the fact that Steve L – a much valued member of the Small Farm Future community – has consolidated his analyses of the case for manufactured foods into a supremely informative document, which I’ve posted on the Research page – available here. I haven’t fully got my head around it yet and will probably need to read it several times to take it all in. But at first blush, it’s not looking good for techniques like precision fermentation and ‘power to food’. Anyway, my thanks to Steve for troubling himself to take such a deep dive into the issues. Naturally, he (and I) would be interested in any comments or critiques of his analysis.
It was a timely offering, because over on Twitter, Mr Precision Fermentation, George Monbiot, has been lambasting me again for counterposing a small farm future to his high-energy, urbanist and – in my view – highly unecological vision. It’s curious to me that such a prominent writer, with whom I’ve had cordial interactions in the past, should needle at me so personally. Since he won’t actually debate the issues with me (or, so far, with Steve), I can only speculate about his reasons.
I’d been thinking of writing a blog post about my case for a small farm future in counterpoint to the vision Monbiot lays out in what Paul Kingsnorth calls “the humbly titled Regenesis”. But since Monbiot’s vision is such a good foil for sketching the nature of a small farm future or futures, since there’s an element of personal needle involved, and since my counter-analysis will be slightly longer than the average blog post or magazine article (although not massively long), I’ve been toying with the idea that it would be entertaining to publish it as a low-cost written pamphlet, 18th century coffee house style, “…in which certain propositions of Mr George Monbiot are considered and refuted”. Straw poll: would anyone be interested in purchasing such a document on a pay what you feel basis?
My brief exchanges with Monbiot and a few of his disciples have not reassured me that he and they, or indeed anything like enough people generally, are remotely alive to the true nature of the difficulties now upon most of humanity globally. Somebody who gets much closer to this is Peter Zeihan, whose fascinating book The End of the World Is Just the Beginning I shall be examining in my next but one post.
Finally, thanks for the various suggestions about how to improve the readability/usability of this website. I will try to give it a makeover at some point when I get the chance, and bear those points in mind. One small thing I’ve already done is renamed the old ‘Reading List’ category ‘Book reviews and reading list’ just to clarify that if you search on this, you’ll find posts in which I review or otherwise specifically engage with an author or a book. Sometimes positively, other times, I’ve discovered … not so much.
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Having ſpent the paſt few Years in the Study of the 18th Century, reading many publish’d Works of the Period, I allow that ſuch a Pamphlet would, eſpecially if your Arguments were cloth’d in the Style of the Time, be a Delight to me, and tho’ I cannot anſwer for the general Reception of your Plea for Patronage in the Matter, ‘twould certainly be a Publickation which I would gladly purchaſe.
(Errr, sorry. I am a lurker who was tempted out of the woodwork. Thanks for an interesting blog and book! *scuttles back again*)
Really, that was so delightful!
A Counter-Blaste To Monbiot, you bet, I’m all in, Chris. Bring on the emphemera!
(Elin, I was trying for the same, but lacked the skill to bring it off. A tip of the hat to you.)
Will the pamphlets be printed or electronic ? Letter press and mailed ? Count me in. I’d pay slightly less to read it online.
I wonder when I’ll be able to put a deposit down on the Monbiot Flying Car.
Is this the thing substack is trying to do?
IMHO Keep your powder dry untill March or so , see how he Monbiot ‘s mega distilleries work without electricity !
Thanks Chris.
And thanks Steve for an excellent bit of research and mathematics!
The part of the energy equation that should be obvious to anyone, even without Steve’s excellent analysis, is that if it were truly economical to get hydrogen from splitting water, and electricity from PV panels, then we wouldn’t currently be getting nearly all of our hydrogen from mined methane, and the largest fraction of our electricity from burning coal.
So much for obvious.
I contend that anyone who claims that generating electricity is trivial has never tried to do it at home without first acquiring purpose-built equipment.
Attach a DC motor to an exercise bike and get back to me with the results…
I followed the Paul Kingsnorth link too. I’m happy that he seems to be recovering from his pandemic paranoia and getting back to his forte.
I was interested in the bit about being able to convert data to material and back. Which Kingsnorth justly ridicules. But nobody ever seems to mention feedstock when they are talkiing about 3D printing. If I’m going to print an electric motor, I’ll need to put some conductive material and some magnetic material and some insulating material into the printer. Not to mention bearings.
Where does that all come from? Drone delivery?
Many years ago I worked for a land-raping capitalist pig (and occasional nice guy).
He would often say that mining, forestry, and some kinds of agriculture were the only real inputs to the economy. Everything else he said was “just moving stuff around”.
He oversimplified of course, but I took his point.
And moving stuff around takes energy.
I’d contribute to your pamphlet project too.
You all might enjoy Nate Hagen’s-The Great Simplification on Material Blindness.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5rDzVHIgheRxk4NR0kr3Ve?si=P7b01R_-RW-mPCSWoUnNJg&utm_source=copy-link
It just says the same as what your saying, but with Finnish Government funded research; totally vindicating!
Thanks for this, Alice — I will have a listen.
“I’ve been toying with the idea that it would be entertaining to publish it as a low-cost written pamphlet, 18th century coffee house style, “…in which certain propositions of Mr George Monbiot are considered and refuted”. Straw poll: would anyone be interested in purchasing such a document on a pay what you feel basis?”
Would this be in actual print, on paper, as it would have been done in the 18th century? Because if it would, I’d surely pay appropriately for it!
Given that “the Heinberg Pulse” and “the Michaux Monkeywrench”, along with other arguments for a full replacement of BAU energy with ‘renewables’ is not sparking any meaningful discussion in the energy / ecology / economy realms, I’m realizing our dominant culture (a dominator culture, in my opinion) isn’t interested in pivoting to a fact-based analysis of how to prepare for the future. So, at least, I can cling to my little printed piece of the 18th century as a comfort in my darker nights. Sigh.
Sorry – that should have been written as “arguments against” — not for. Against the plausibility of the mainstream story of a smooth “energy transition” in a meaningful time frame.
I would probably pay for such a pamphlet.
I love the idea of a pamphlet, Chris. These days, with the ‘print-on-demand’ option, it need not be a big expense upfront – and if ‘sold’ for a donation would hopefully recoup costs. But may I suggest that rather than making it a response to Monbiot alone (which would just encourage him to pick on you further) you address it to the whole Ecomodernist tribe, of which he (alas) in now one, having changed his mind on nuclear power and genetic engineering in the past few years, and now being in favour of both – as you can see on the Reboot Food and RePlanet websites, which I got to via this Guardian article – Replace animal farms with micro-organism tanks, say campaigners –
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/12/replace-animal-farms-micro-organism-rewilding-food-precision-fermentation-emissions
Monbiot has clearly ‘done a Mark Lynas’ and thrown his lot in with the ‘useful idiots’ who are happy to shill for corporations engaged in human and Earth unfriendly activities, and pretend that they are the rational ones while those who grow good veges are not.
Lots more that could be said on this, of course, but I know you will get my drift…
Thanks everyone for these comments, and indeed to Elin for breaking cover and difcourfing moft excellently in the Argot of our Forebears – which alas is not something I plan to do in my pamphlet since my presentations are lengthy and florid enough as they are. However, collectively you’ve reassured me that there’s enough mileage in the concept for me to proceed. And yes, I’m planning this to be a physical, printed offering.
Christine, I take your point about the merits of a wider engagement with ecomodernism. I actually wrote such a piece some years ago in response to the Ecomodernist Manifesto, which was published by Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain site: https://dark-mountain.net/dark-thoughts-on-ecomodernism-2/. Ironically, it was this piece which prompted Monbiot’s initial enthusiasm for my writing, while he’s now scorning me for associating with Kingsnorth, and for continuting to disassociate from ecomodernism.
I think it’s a stretch too far to engage with the whole ecomodernist firmament, although many of its major themes will inevitably make an appearance in my pamphlet. I’m not too bothered if I further provoke Monbiot’s ire. As I said above, that someone with a vastly larger public platform should duck serious debate and instead hurl insults at an obscure figure like me probably says something. Plus, to my mind, most of his brickbats on Twitter are unintentionally revealing of the deep contradictions and implausibility of his project.
One major implausibility, revealed in Steve’s analysis and Eric’s comment, is its prodigious energy requirements. I can muster various sources in support of my belief that abundant energy will not feature in a post fossil fuel future, but I’d welcome any suggestions from people here about good analyses on this point.
Anyway, thanks everyone for the encouragement to proceed.
Sorry to be so contrary, but I thought that the internet was the “coffee house” of the 21st century. And my understanding is that in the coffee houses of the 18th century the pamphlets were distributed free to the patrons to read while they sipped. If you need money, just ask.
I also agree with Christine that Monbiot’s and Replant’s vision “ain’t going to happen” anyway, since it can’t for many reasons but primarily because of it’s high energy requirements. Precision fermentation for the masses is just another take on the old desert island “assume a can opener” joke, but with “assume unlimited energy” instead.
Another problem is that the Replant vision assumes modern cities get to continue to exist, which is very comforting to their residents. The SFF argument to those residents is basically “farm or die”. It’s true, but not likely to be persuasive.
Besides, if the fantasy of studge production takes hold in the corridors of capital, huge quantities of capital will be diverted to fermentation oblivion and away from agricultural land (see my comment below), thereby cause farm land prices to collapse, at least briefly, allowing small farmers to get their own land on the cheap. The best long term strategy may be to just stay under the radar and let the precision fermentation advocates get on with it and waste a lot of time, money and energy.
The only reason to even try to counter their proposals would be to try to divert capital toward the establishment of small farms and the dismantling of industrial farming instead of studge production. But this will again raise the question of what to do about feeding cities, for which there is no pleasant answer.
I will admit to being pretty wary of Kingsnorth, myself.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5rDzVHIgheRxk4NR0kr3Ve?si=P7b01R_-RW-mPCSWoUnNJg&utm_source=copy-link
I really love this podcast, and the one with Douglas Rushkoff (who Christine mentions below)
Aand the one with Jamie Wheal, who for me describes so beautifully the joy and passion and forgiveness that are part of the counter argument to Studgetopia
If you don’t mind the tetchy tweets then (on reflecting on this overnight) it is a good idea to focus on Monbiot, Chris, since he is the ‘name’ which will draw attention to the arguments you will make. He is now an eco-modernist in all but self-ascription, but his platform on The Guardian and elsewhere means that he is seen as some sort of authority on what he writes about, with a leftie-greenie gloss, when it is clear that he has thrown his lot in with the corporations, and Big Numbers.
People who are good writers who plausibly argue one way to start with can then use their writing skills (as Monbiot has) to plausibly argue the other way. I am currently reading Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Survival of the Richest’ and he provides good examples of those who started out one way in the technosphere and then (like Stewart Brand) went full eco-modernist. (Rushkoff himself is an example of someone who didn’t do this, but has learned from the changes which have happened, and understands why they have happened/are happening – and is good at explaining all this, being a better writer than Monbiot as well.)
Rushkoff is clear that since the scientific and industrial revolutions (which were and are key drivers of capitalism and colonialism) it has been data/numbers/quantities versus ethics/values/qualities. I think this is something to consider when taking on Monbiot on the nonsensical quantities involved in feeding the world studge. These are why it ain’t going to happen, so at an intellectual level we don’t need to worry about it. A lot of money will be wasted on it, which could have been spent on improving local food systems and reducing hunger and poor nutrition everywhere. Which is really the point. Monbiot is as out-of-touch as Marie Antoinette – the poor are no more likely to eat studge than cake in a world where there is not one nation-state which is committed to all its citizens eating at all – let alone well. Some of us have experience of such a state, but my one (New Zealand) changed like most of the rest of the world in the 1980s, when neo-liberalism super-charged capitalism, greed became good, and economic growth rather than well-fed and housed children became the measure of a state’s success.
You are living in a state where the real king says ‘Eat organic’ and the courtier-who-would-be king says
‘Let them eat studge’! These are strange times…
George has always been inconsistent though. In the 2000s the ‘obscure figure’ he picked on was Colin Hines, as I was reminded by this article by Simon Fairlie, which curiously ‘King George’ published on his web site –
Battle of the Manifestos
26th March 2004
https://www.monbiot.com/2004/03/26/battle-of-the-manifestos/
To my mind, the real argument is not over whether studge is or ever could be practical, but what kind of mine (and heart) thinks it is even worth contemplating when nobody from any culture is going to want to eat it or feed it to their children instead of real food if they have the choice. Small farms (and large gardens) give people that choice, and the numbers which interest me are how many of them can be created a.s.a.p. everywhere.
On “studge ”
This is how they will get you used to it .
https://rmx.news/germany/german-meat-industry-warn-of-empty-supermarket-shelves-another-40-jump-in-meat-prices/
Apparently big capital hasn’t got the message that the food of the future will come from factory fermentation in the form of studge. A recent article in the NY Times describes the market for agricultural land in the US and it dosn’t look like many people think that it’s about to be “rewilded”. It also doesn’t look good for small farmers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/13/us/politics/farmland-values-prices.html?searchResultPosition=1
For those who can’t get past the NYT paywall, I have copied an excerpt:
“What is happening in South Dakota is playing out in farming communities across the nation as the value of farmland soars, hitting record highs this year and often pricing out small or beginning farmers. In the state, farmland values surged by 18.7 percent from 2021 to 2022, one of the highest increases in the country, according to the most recent figures from the Agriculture Department. Nationwide, values increased by 12.4 percent and reached $3,800 an acre, the highest on record since 1970, with cropland at $5,050 an acre and pastureland at $1,650 an acre.
A series of economic forces — high prices for commodity crops like corn, soybeans and wheat; a robust housing market; low interest rates until recently; and an abundance of government subsidies — have converged to create a “perfect storm” for farmland values, said Jason Henderson, a dean at the College of Agriculture at Purdue University and a former official at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
As a result, small farmers like Mr. Gindo are now going up against deep-pocketed investors, including private equity firms and real estate developers, prompting some experts to warn of far-reaching consequences for the farming sector.”
Joe wrote, “Apparently big capital hasn’t got the message that the food of the future will come from factory fermentation in the form of studge.”
I imagine that a number of venture capital and investment firms have already done calculations like mine, leading to an easy “pass” on studge factory opportunities (despite the hype), and increased interest in farmland investments.
https://yournews.com/2022/07/23/2382264/explained-un-agenda-2030-behind-farming-restrictions/
This is how the U.N. Intends to control food / farming , IMHO This is a much greater threat than Monbiots ramblings , though he is probably funded in some roundabout way by them .
Chris, could you post links to any bunfights you have with Monbiot. I would be delighted to mock his current work.
I’d side with Diogenese’s ‘hold fire’, but if you want to write it then go for it. It occurred to me I could purchase a few copies to send to people who are all for eating synthetic protein, but I don’t know of anyone who is. However, if studge ever does miraculously get off the ground, it might become the kind of additive that gets ‘studged'(?) into things like Hybrid Burgers, i.e. you might not even know you’re eating it.
Oddly enough, shortly after writing the above, Classic FM broadcaster Sam Pittis announced, in relation to a mention about cultured meat, that he’d happily eat it, adding something along the lines of “and leave the cows to happily go about their business”. He could be a worthy recipient.
Interesting & useful set of comments – thanks.
Regarding pamphlets, my thinking is that very long articles online are harder to read than printed ones, but printed ones have a greater cost of production and circulation – hence the desire on my part to recoup some of those costs. The economics of 18th century pamphleteering is but one of many topics on which I know almost nothing, but my understanding is that a small charge was often levied for this reason.
When it comes to arguing the case for and against studge, I think it’s hard to second guess the consequences. A possible outcome I fear is that a lot of public money will disappear into corporate coffers for a proof-of-concept that never arrives, while rural land & its occupants are enclosed by government fiat for rewilding, giving urban progressive types a warm feeling that something is being done for the climate and biodiversity, when in fact it’s just another diversion from the necessary actions and wastes yet more time. Of course, the scenario Joe proposes is also possible. In which case, I should probably just shut up. Not something I’m good at. But in the absence of certainty, I think there’s always a case for speaking truth to power – power in this instance being George Monbiot.
I’m interested in the discussion of rural land sales – and not a little envious of bargain basement prices like $3,800/acre. With the world in a weird current situation of overcapitalization and massive, fossil-fuelled overproduction of commodity crops at penuriously low prices, but poised on a cliff edge of future so-called ‘Malthusian’ hunger, I find it hard to think of farming itself as something that particularly attracts purchasers of agricultural land – but that’s probably wrong, since overproduction and low prices beget yet more concentration. Here in the UK, particularly Scotland, there seems to be a spike in land prices caused by large firms buying land for afforestation projects in pursuit of absurd claims to carbon neutrality. Speculative purchase for real estate development rings true as a price inflator, along with the general inflationary pressure of loose capital trying to find a home. But possibly it also reflects the darker truths Steve and Christine identify about where the world is headed and where the rich are placing their bets.
On which note, thanks Christine for those informative comments and links. Perhaps I should read Rushkoff’s book.
For my pamphlet project, I’m interested in any data and analyses people can recommend that bear on energy futures in general, and urban vs rural energy/material requirements in particular.
One of the problems with the urban/rural thing is that people are forever comparing high energy modern urbanism with high energy modern ruralism and (correctly) concluding that the former is more efficient. What we need to be doing is comparing the possibility of low energy ruralism with the impossibility of low energy urbanism, but people don’t seem to be able to get their heads around this judging from my engagements on Twitter. Hidde Boersma, cofounder of RePlanet tweeted to me about ‘deliberately choosing a high energy urban future’, as if it’s simply a matter of choice https://twitter.com/Hiddemhigh/status/1591877558815313920.
And talking of Twitter, Ruben – the most recent brickbats from George and others came under this tweet of mine https://twitter.com/csmaje/status/1590412619239673857. All quite tame by Twitter standards, but some real numbskull stuff all the same from his disciples along the lines of me wanting to revert to hunter gatherer lifestyles or being unreliably opinionated on the grounds of being a farmer etc.
But Twitter has its upsides. I always enjoy the ‘donkey man’ Jeff McFadden’s tweets, such as this one: https://twitter.com/JeffAndDonkeys/status/1592307306972479488. Love the de-anthropocentizing idea of photosynthesis being the worst disaster in world history rather than, say, agriculture or capitalism. Also love the stoic bloody mindedness of Jeff weighing the odds of his tweets doing any good at 0.00000001%, and then tweeting anyway.
As a progressive urban type I’d like to point out (again) that cities have existed for thousands of years and will probably continue to exist in a low-energy, small farm future. They’ll surely be very different from the cities of today, which is a good thing; it will also surely be a rough ride getting there, which… well, I’m not looking forward to it.
I think failure to recognise the possibility of a future low-energy ruralism and failure to recognise the possibility of a future low-energy urban existence are the same kind of category error. In reality I expect that a low-energy future will indeed be vastly more rural, but that cities will still exist in some form. Given a free choice I would much rather make the transition to that future from a rural or at least semi-rural situation, but that is not where I am.
I do appreciate that the practical implausibility of the continuation of high energy urbanism is a major fault in the arguments put forth by the eco-modernists: we cannot proceed on the basis that cities will continue exactly as they are now, only with electric cars and a few more bike lanes, because that is simply not viable. But I rather suspect that I use more energy living in this part of East London today than the people who lived in this house 120 years ago did. I can also see all kinds of ways that, even here, lower-tech strategies that didn’t exist or were very uncommonly employed 120 years ago could be put into place tomorrow, which would have genuine local benefit and increase local resilience — not sufficient to ensure a totally smooth transition, perhaps, but still orders of magnitude better than nothing (and certainly more significant than electric cars and a few bike lanes). It’s hard to calculate whether those changes would take less energy and materials than building as many new rural homes as would be required for, say, ten percent of the London population to return to small farms elsewhere. (Materials always represent an input of energy, too, whether they are going to urban insulation or new solar passive farmhouses or a series of rickety shacks.)
There is a very fine line between “we need an order of magnitude more people living and producing food and fibre rurally, and cities are going to have to change too” and writing off cities entirely on the grounds that modern ones are a product of a energy concentrations we won’t be able to muster in future. The relevant question is not “will cities as we know them today exist?” but perhaps something more like “how will city economies and rural economies interact in a low-energy future, and what does that mean for both rural and urban living during the transition to such a future?”
It’s difficult for me to accept the prospect of a modern city gradually and purposefully devolving into a much earlier version of itself. This is because of infrastructure replacement cycles within the city itself, and because of similar cycles of infrastructure replacement external to the city, infrastructure that supplies the city with its, water, food and energy, cycles which have made modern cities totally dependent on access to very high levels of energy and forms of energy, like electricity and diesel, that won’t be arround much longer.
Modern cities no longer have hundreds of hand-pumped wells that can let people manually pump and carry water to their homes. Horses, mules, donkeys and their carts and trolleys have been replaced by electric subways and liquid fuel vehicles. Water systems are powered by electric pumps and toilet flushes are what move sewage to and through the sewers. Firewood for space heating and cooking is now too far away for easy transport to the city. Even if it weren’t, modern city dwellings have no way of using firewood.
As cities have modernized, they have eliminated the old, premodern, methods of doing things. They have climbed a technological ladder and sawn off the rungs below them as they climbed. It would probably be much easier to build a whole new premodern city from scratch near the edge of a forest and surround it with market gardens than try to turn a modern city into a livable place that can use low-energy infrastructure.
I’ve touched on the difficulty of creating a new, wood based, energy supply, but the same kinds of difficulties hold true for food, too. There have been very few ancient cities that imported a significant portion of their food from far away (Rome being one of them) and most early cities relied on farms and gardens in close proximity to the urban core. None of that exists today.
As modern cities disintegrate there will be plenty of abandoned dwellings around the perimeter of cities that people will be able to use as shelter and be within walking distance of patches of open space for growing food. Industrial warehouses with their metal roofs and downspouts could supply water and nearby wooden structures can be dismantled for fuelwood. Thus, the edges of modern cities may still have a modest population (perhaps also strips along rivers), but the vast bulk of the urban core will be abandoned, used only for scavanging metals and other materials for export out of the city.
Very pertinent. There is a strong resemblance in much of this in the futuristic ruralisation William Morris depicts in his News From Nowhere, published in 1890.
This little article referencing Messrs Monbiot & Boersma may be of interest: https://gmwatch.org/en/106-news/latest-news/20127
Thanks Chris, interesting (is it just me or is there something of The Thunderbirds to those photos on the ReBoot site?).
Listening to Farming Today over the years I get the distinct impression GM and/or gene-edited food, or some sort of ReBrand on GMO technology, will be coming to supermarket shelves regardless, it’s just a matter of time. I believe animals can already be given GM feed and the eggs and meat then sold to consumers in countries purportedly against GM food. While apparently there’s no chance this affecting consumer health, does anyone know if in theory it would be possible for GM animal feed to result in undesirable outcomes in humans eating, say, a raw egg from a chicken fed GM corn? (It’s just a dystopian sci-fi plotline I’m mulling over, set in the year 2024:).
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT).
So far as I can tell the largest concern around GMO tech being released into the wild is around the genes in question escaping into weedy species (for herbicide resistance genes). There have been some experiments to examine whether genes can be transferred to microbes within animal guts. Controversy continues as to whether the latter effort has been sufficient.
Animal welfare doesn’t appear to have suffered thus far (breeding and housing issues claiming the top of list distinction here). And the food products from GMO fed animals seem essentially equivalent at this point in time as well (if you want to go into it further, search ‘GMO substantial equivalence’ … )
So back to HGT. It seems a fair argument that if a modified gene could transfer from a GMO feed to a gut microbe it would have happened by now. The newly modified gut microbe may have perished in due course without leaving any offspring. Boring.
BUT – if a stable transformation were to occur, and viable offspring were propagating and getting pooped out into the wild for other animals to access… now one has a thread to start some dystopian narrative around.
Why limit this notion to animals and their feed??? Humans have gut microbes, and have been consuming GMO materials for years. The human ‘feedlot’ is enormous. Food contamination with fecal microbes happens all the time.
Orson Welles or Mary Shelley could really make hay with such a start.
Thank you, Clem – much to chew over. I will take up that search.
Meantime, lovely little film here from Lincolnshire in 1974, farming on three acres – much to recognise and admire for advocates of small farming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZpeQAEm6Vc
I think the issue with GMOs, and even conventional grain, is the glyphosate and the ‘inert’ ingredient residues.
Glyphosate has only been tested for safety in isolation and the inert ingredients have not been tested at all but they may be the most toxic.
The ” drought tolerant ” GMO corn sown about a mile away from me turned brown and died in the second week of June this year , they were asked not to irritate it they did not I died .
Speaking of dystopian sci-fi plotlines involving chicken eggs and GMOs, how about transgenic chickens which lay eggs containing high concentrations of human hormones or other drugs? This research article describes how transgenic hens were successfully created to be “transgenic animal bioreactors” and their eggs contained “a high concentration of human erythropoietin” in the egg whites.
“The transgenic chicken has been considered as a prospective bioreactor for large-scale production of costly pharmaceutical proteins. In the present study, we report successful generation of transgenic hens that lay eggs containing a high concentration of human erythropoietin (hEPO) in the ovalbumin [egg white protein]… In terms of biological activity, there was no difference between the recombinant hEPO contained in the transgenic egg white and the commercially available counterpart, in vitro. We suggest that these results imply an important step toward efficient production of human cytokines from a transgenic animal bioreactor.”
“Generation of transgenic chickens expressing the human erythropoietin (hEPO) gene in an oviduct-specific manner: Production of transgenic chicken eggs containing human erythropoietin in egg whites”
Kwon, et al. PLoS One. 2018 May 30
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5976184/
Transgenic chickens were actually approved earlier by the FDA (US) in 2015 for the production of another drug (a human enzyme). The FDA says these chickens are “not likely” to enter the food supply.
“Because every cell in the modified chicken contains altered DNA, the FDA ‘asserts its jurisdiction over the entire chicken’.. The FDA says that the chickens are not likely to accidentally enter the food supply or adversely affect the environment because they are raised in indoor facilities.”
In 2009, the FDA also approved genetically modified goats which produce another type of human ‘farmaceutical’ in their milk.
“U.S. Government Approves Transgenic Chicken”
By Rachel Becker, Nature magazine on December 9, 2015
scientificamerican dot com/article/u-s-government-approves-transgenic-chicken/
Now I understand why Rocky Balboa ate all those raw eggs – Steve, you too are an absolute pearl! Damn if these dystopian plotlines don’t write themselves these days. As with Monbiot’s about-turn, truth really is stranger than fiction.
EPO in synthetic form is what professional cyclists used to take – probably still do – but on the fossil fuel-free small (chicken) farm reliant on humans with handtools it could maybe find its practical niche… reduction in recovery time following exertion, superhuman performance while out standing in our fields. That quite a few very young and fit competitive cyclists did suddenly drop dead from heart failure is the only fly in the ointment I can think of.
“Not likely” to enter the food supply – a reassuring touch from the FDA.
Wow! that GMWatch article you sent the link to explains a lot, Chris. Especially the bit about Monbiot and Lynas being good friends – I was wondering why and how he could have gone to the dark side when he claims to be so ‘rational’. The rebranding of ecomodernism as RePlanet was also interesting. In Chapter 8 of ‘Survival of the Richest’ Rushkoff gives a potted history of how persuasive tech has been/is being used to sell persuasive tech – and this seems to be what the RePlanet people are doing. The technical name for this is ‘astro-turfing’. The only question that remains is – who is funding it? – and GM Watch is promising a Part 2 to the article, which will hopefully answer this. It looks like the usual suspects – Monsanto et al. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Gates Foundation is involved. In fact, Monbiot himself documented how this all works 20 years ago – see “Corporate Phantoms” Demonize the GE Food Debate – https://www.prwatch.org/spin/2002/05/1220/corporate-phantoms-demonize-ge-food-debate. So I guess he knows how it’s done – which makes him such a valuable ‘catch’.
In 2009 I made a presentation to the AgriFood Research Network Conference XVI in Auckland entitled ‘A Trojan Horse named Bill: the enemies of open source prise open Africa’ which documented the role of the front groups of the corporations and governmental organisations which claimed to be ‘helping’ African farmers by selling GM seeds, synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. The equivalent of RePlanet in drawing all these groups together is AGRA – the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa – which received funding from the Gates Foundation.
Probably still does. It makes me stressed and sick dwelling on this stuff these days – I need to get out into my organic orchard! Where I have understorey flowers to plant – and that reminds me – the ‘re-wilding’ the world really needs is not of the ‘charismatic mega-fauna’ like wolves and bison, but of the invertebrate species and the birds which are suffering the most from the roll-out of GM plants and pesticides. (See work by Dave Goulson.) This is the true re-wilding that Monbiot et al are now hell-bent on preventing. An irony which I am sure your ‘pamphlet’ could expand on, Chris.
It appears Bill is still at it: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/11/10/open-letter-bill-gates-food-farming-and-africa
Short clip of Bill boasting he’ll make money from his artificial meat investments. He has a finger in every pie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XMfrLZ1isg
Thanks for further comments – a quick response from me to a few points, especially Kathryn’s.
On urbanism, perhaps it’s worth distinguishing between towns and cities. It’s true of course that there were cities in premodern times, but the big ones were mainly imperial centres whose size reflected their ability to extract resources from a wide area (and, concomitantly, usually a coastal location). Only in modern times with abundant cheap energy has it become feasible to imagine a whole world of cities whose peoples are not economically or politically coerced – and even then I’d say this is more imaginary than real.
It’s worth recalling how meagre the populations of cities were even in relatively recent times. In 1750, for example, just prior to industrial takeoff, Birmingham was England’s third most populous city with a population of 24,000 (Sheffield was 7th at 12,000). A century later, Birmingham’s population had leapt to 300,000.
I’m not suggesting that re-ruralization will be the exact mirror of that pattern, but I think things are going to get pretty bumpy as energy and material realities bite. Still, I agree that opportunities for lower energy and more self-reliant ways of life may open up in cities as their populations decline.
Small towns are a different matter, and much more compatible with a small farm future. I like to think that Chapter 15 of my book does address itself to Kathryn’s question “how will city economies and rural economies interact in a low-energy future, and what does that mean for both rural and urban living during the transition to such a future?” albeit quite tentatively and broad brush. But probably more in relation to towns than cities. As I see it, the big cities that remain in the future will mostly be major imperial power centres, and the less people in the countryside and small towns can have to do with them the better it’ll probably be for them.
And on Paul Kingsnorth, yes I’ve been quite wary of some of his positions too (I critique one of them on p.249 of my book). But I also align with a good many of his arguments. The same holds true for Monbiot. Monbiot contrasts himself to Kingsnorth as an empiricist versus a mystic, which I don’t think gets anywhere. Their views and differences reflect permanent tensions around and orientations to the human condition, which in my opinion ultimately have to be incorporated into a satisfactory contemporary politics.
On the GMWatch piece, thanks for that side debate – and nice to see you here again, Clem. My main concern about this is not the GM as such but Christine’s point about corporate astroturfing.
Anyway, more on all this soon. But in the meantime if anyone has any further thoughts, data or references in relation to the issue (and to urban/rural energy futures), please do let me know either publicly here or privately via the Contact Form.
I apologize. I replied to Kathryn before reading all of the comments. Your comment already covers most of the important points about the future of cities that I talk about.
As an aside, I notice that it often takes up to 30 seconds for a comment to post after hitting the Post Comment button. I’ve had high speed internet access since getting fiber a couple of years ago and no other sites take nearly that long for a comment to post (usually just a couple of seconds). I’m half a world away, but light moves pretty fast. I wonder if WordPress has slow servers or too few of them. If so, they have no reason to be “proud” of their “power”.
PS Your book and ideas get a prominent mention here:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-11-16/redwashing-consumerism-will-not-save-the-planet/
Apologies – I cannot re-read chapter 15 as I have loaned out my copy of your book. So I may miss major points in this response.
I would say that the big cities that exist today are major imperial power centres, or at least major corporate power centres, which comes to much the same thing in practical terms. I also think modern major cities are largely as they are because of economic and political coercion — both of their residents and of the people who don’t live in cities but are caught up in supplying them in one way or another.
I certainly think of settlements of, say, 20000 people as cities rather than towns; I am not suggesting that a city that is currently millions will remain so. That said, the population of the earth wasn’t 8 billion in 1850, either.
Okay so, this gets a bit dark….
I’m not convinced that 8 billion will be sustained — pandemics cutting population by 25% or more are not unheard of, and even now people are dying because of climate driven famine or weather disasters or resource wars. But if more than about a quarter of the current population are going to survive, then either cities will settle out at some size that is larger than they were before the industrial revolution, or rural areas are going to be far, far more densely populated than has ever historically been the case. And if fewer than that are going to survive, I think it gets very difficult to make any predictions at all about what comes next. We know what can happen when that kind of depopulation happens on a few continents (the Americas, Australia) as part of colonialism in the context of rising overall energy availability, which is that the colonisers moved in and built cities for trade purposes… but this is different, because we don’t have rising energy availability. I think when mass depopulation events do happen in one region or another, colonisation is pretty likely. Which comes first is variable.
I think one possible future pattern in somewhere like London with some combination of depopulation and re-localisation of production is that it will revert back to being smaller towns, with much more distinct identities. The area where I live — in Zone 3 on the Tube map, and between the rivers Lea and Roding — is an area that was once quite a fashionable place for the upper classes to come and spend the summer, away from the noise and smell of the city. Even today, crossing the River Lea is troublesome for me on a bicycle: my options either involve very busy roads with wholly inadequate cycle infrastructure, areas of park or industrial zones where it simply isn’t safe to walk or cycle after dark, or both. (The Roding is even more difficult, especially in Redbridge which is very much posher and has many more people who can afford to drive, but also partly because of the North Circular, ugh.). I don’t imagine that will get any easier as sea levels rise. And even today, there are people who live here who don’t strictly think of themselves as Londoners, and won’t go into central London (~25 minutes on the Tube) for anything they can get locally. (They’ll still happily order things online, though; the mental objection seems to be to personally travelling that far, rather than to having things that come from far away. I’ve definitely met people here who think “shopping locally” means going to Tesco.)
But I think cities have also developed as a result of trade in actual goods and services (not just rents) — and while fossil energy transport is a horrible idea, it was possible to transport goods and people before the advent of cars, trains and coal barges, and it will still be possible after their decline. Re-localisation of production will mean different amounts of power residing in different centres of trade than is currently the case, for sure; if I had the freedom to move anywhere in the UK and wanted to hedge my bets, I’d probably choose a house with a half-acre garden in a suburb of a mediaeval market “town” (I think most of these are now cities), preferably on higher ground to avoid flooding, and within a few miles of some kind of navigable canal system. I don’t currently have access to that kind of capital.
As an aside, I wonder how the efficiencies of mid to late shipping with work in a low-energy context..Containerised shipping is, if I understand it correctly, orders of magnitude more efficient than what came before, but not great for human-scale labour. But just like I don’t think we need to let go of germ theory, I am not convinced we need to let go of standardisation of containers — even if we need some standards that are more realistic for human scale handling.
Containerized shipping is much more labor efficient than break-bulk cargo (with longshoremen handling everything), but it is not more energy efficient. It consumes a lot of fossil fuels to get away from using human labor.
Modern ocean freight is just another of the high-energy technologies that require global supply chains for their existence. Nothing about a container ship or even a container can be craft built by hand. And the diesel fuel they need to operate is the same fuel needed to move container goods around land after ships dock.
If container ships can no longer be used for any reason, there is no fallback technology just waiting for the turn of a key to operate. We would need to start over by building steam ships, using coal, or go all the way back to wooden sailing ships, neither of which options would be fast or cheap.
The modern world has put all its eggs in the high-energy, high-technology basket. Those eggs are about to have a great fall and won’t be put back together again, with terrible consequence for modern lives.
Sailing ships could be set up to haul smaller container pieces – like single pallet boxes, these latter to be moved with pallet jacks moved by human power. Even in my advancing years I’m able to move one ton pallet cargo around on a flat surface for hours on end (the workout is good for my health as well).
Check out the little cargo boxes currently designed to fill the airlines shipping cargo bays. The sailing ships of yesteryear didn’t employ this sort of tech, but modern ones could.
There certainly is far too much reliance on diesel and gigantic equipment that will suffer or disappear in time. And waiting for that eventual time is certainly a recipe for far too much misery. But there are plenty of creative ways to make life livable in the absence of fossil fuels. Here the definition of livable will need some remodeling, so we best be getting on with it.
Clem, this is exactly the sort of thing I mean. And adapting airline shipping standards to sailing ships seems like a step in the right direction too. I’ve seen cargo bikes adapted to shift a Eurp pallet.
Joe, one of the interesting questions about all of this is whether we end up with a surplus or an insufficiency of manual labour, both overall and (since travel will be slower and more difficult) in each locality. I certainly agree that we’ve optimised for labour efficiency in the context of abundant fossil fuels, but some of those optimisations are not to energy use as such, and can still be applied without fossil fuels. I think the energy in acquiring and processing materials (mining, recycling, manufacturing) to make stuff might be a bigger limit than the energy of moving said stuff around with human, animal or wind power, but I don’t have a lot of expertise in either area. I do know that even my home is more efficient when I have standardised sizes of containers with interchangeable lids, and I do believe that trade in actual goods and services will continue to exist in some form. Of course, that doesn’t mean I think the future will be just like now only greener. I’m actually pretty pessimistic about our short term prospects, based on how we’re handling covid-19. But there is a lot of space, a lot of variation in possibility, between the worst-case calamity scenario and “just like now, only greener”, and I think it’s worth discussing what that might look like. I do think a small farm future is an integral part of that — I don’t see how it couldn’t be. But throughout the archaeological record, whenever humans have produced surplus calories we have traded some of them, and to do so we have developed transport and trade centres, and these… look a lot like cities.
Maybe it helps that I live in a city with plenty of churches that pre-date fossil fuels, and have seen the stones at Avebury and Stonehenge, which sure weren’t moved by steam traction.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/11/10/open-letter-bill-gates-food-farming-and-africa
Techno utopia blasted by African farmers .
Hi Chria, I am waging my own fights with M, just filed an article with a major newspaper as he is coming here next week. I have read three intereseting papers lately, which all has some relevance in this context. “Palatable disruption: the politics of plant milk”, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-18560-1_2
it has a sharp analysis that could also be applied to other novel foods.
“Rewilding Lite: Using Traditional Domestic Livestock to
Achieve Rewilding Outcomes” – the title is quite explanatory, https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/6/3347
“Sustainability claims behind booming food technologies lack evidence” doesn’t address prec fermentation or electro proteins, but it does demonstrate how little substance there is behind many of the food tech claims. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/5.57223f611841889cd0278e7.html
I don’t think any of them have something dramatically new for you or med, but these days it seems as if quoting research has a lot of traction (M is a master in the art). Keep up your good work.
I’ll buy it.
Brought to mind your attitude, Joel (this morning’s On Your (organic) Farm, in Pembrokeshire:
(The farmer) welcomes people onto his land – as visitors, neighbours, employees or volunteers. ‘Life’s a party’, says Gerald, ‘and they make the farm a buzzing place’.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fcf3
” if anyone has any further thoughts, data or references in relation to the issue (and to urban/rural energy futures)”
The 4th largest economy in the world ( California ) can’t keep the lights on when they run their air conditioners in the summer. Where is the power for studge production coming from ? Never mind about what happens after converting to 100% electric cars.
California can’t keep the lights on because political and economic failures that have left the power grid near-derelict and actively dangerous, through decades of profit-driven underinvestment.
Other countries have done better, by running their infrastructure as a commonwealth with a service ethos.
I do not doubt that this remark will attract diatribes about the evils of socialism from the sort of visitor that Chris finds it necessary to moderate: if only such misguided geniuses knew how badly the communist regimes of Central Europe had mishandled rural power distribution…
…If only they knew how the ‘economic liberalisation’ of the 1990`s have left them, too, with California’s economic disaster of a ptofit driven power ‘system’.
Fortunately, they do not have California’s political paralysis and artificial inability to gain access to capital for infrastructure; and even post-Soviet bureaucracies are better at implementing policy, cost-effectively, than California ever will be.
I am not optimistic about California fixing the power grid: there is no political mechanism for raising the staggering amount of money that is needed to recapitalise and rebuild their it.
They’re not, actually, very good at accountable government that actually gets things done. Even when it’s life-and-death essential.
It only needs a four-year gap in poltical consensus for the whole thing to regress, and need restarting from scratch, or worse; and I have the discouraging example of Superfund remediations lying fallow, for vital years while the race to prevent an irremediable groundwater contamination disaster is steadily being lost.
Also: I’m not being pessimistic *enough*, here.
The shape of the energy generation and distribution system that they want in California is nothing like sustainable, and it will only be ‘efficient’ in a narrow engineering sense that has no moral context for the destructive super-suburban affluence of the consumerist society that rural Californians think they want.
Nothing good will happen there until that changes.
So: you’re right in your counter-point about California, and I am even more pessimistic than you, about California.
But there is no need for either of us to be universally pessimistic: other places can and do find ways to solve these problems.
Electric cars are just a candy bar held out to con us into every things the same but solar / wind powered , the greens dare not talk about what the future would REALY be like with no fossil fuel , no one is , renewables will be hard pressed to keep water and sewage going never mind anything else , the new digital passport / currency are another pie in the sky technoutopian scheme , Texas has more wind power than CA ,solar panels ? don’t know Yet to replace gas it would take all of TX , AZ and part of Arizona covered in solar panels to replace .
Governments and greens are both running a planetary con job to keep the populous quiet untill the wheels fall off industrial civilisation
A quick note to say that Monbiot is a source of unending frustration and it’s good to see his nose tweaked.
And somewhat grating for me, personally, to see others doing it for better reasons than the petty amusement that I gain from doing it myself.
The pamphleteer approach?
Try it!
It’ll reach someone, and we’ll never know how many until you try.
I woder what other approaches might be worth trying, or re-trying…
I know that you’ve explored a storytelling approach in other blog posts and comments.
I’m fairly sure that some of the community here have been quietly promoting your work among the authors they know.
And… I wonder what other approaches are still unexplored.
Another post, for another time, perhaps: and I apologise if you have already and I haven’t read it yet.
I’m pretty sure George gets a kick out of these arguements.
I really wouldn’t worry about it. All these high technology solutions will go up in smoke at the next energy dip/recession/war. High technology is the outer layer on the civilisation onion: it needs all the other layers to be working for it to function. Declining fossil fuel outputs will choke high tech off after a brief studgy belch.
I also looked at the “replanet” thing from the Guardian. They are owned by a philanthropic family, and run by Credit Suisse ex-directors, etc. Yawn.
Honestly, we’d all be better off putting our energies into pro-future actions: healing air, soil, water, and each other. Leave George to his dreams, maybe they are all he has left.
I think it’s possible that we need to convince more people to engage in pro-future actions.
I think it’s possible that opposing the arguments of George Monbiot will get more people thinking about the logistics of said pro-future actions than would otherwise notice.
Perhaps I am too cynical.
I have found it too hard to do. Pro-future to most people seems to mean Star Trek or some other nonsense. Try to explain limits to growth to someone and I see the shutters come down and then the memes come out (‘somebody will think of something’). Could just be the effect I have on people though…
Only when things go off the rails do People think , TX had a bad winter a couple of years ago , talking a be ready stance to my in-laws got a vacant look untill they lost electricity for a,week , they live in town relying on civilisation to protect them , I live at the end of a long power feed that fails regularly , they sat and froze , cooked on a propane grill untill the gas ran out , we fired up the wood cook Stove and just carried on as usual accept for getting more sleep .
They bought a wood stove , had it installed and raided my wood lot .
one step in changing their minds/ outlook ! ( I am still working on them !)
I’ll take a copy! Especially if it has a hand drawn frontispiece and an enormously lengthy title, a la the Digger classic “An Humble Request…”
Sorry I haven’t responded to comments. I have news. I suddenly seem to have acquired a new, uh, writing project. It’s going to be short-term, but all consuming while I do it. I’ll say more about it in due course. But it means for the time being I’ll have to suspend posting & commenting here, so it turns out this post marks more of an interlude than I’d thought.
I do have a couple of posts lined up and ready to go, so I’ll put them out in the next few weeks. Feel free to comment on them, but please forgive me if I don’t respond much, or at all. In late December I’ll aim to post this year’s offering in the legendary Small Farm Future Holiday Special series. Then hopefully I’ll be back in action here sometime in February.
Thanks for the very informative conversations above, and apologies again for not participating in them just now.
Meanwhile, if anyone turns up interesting data or analyses on any topics of general interest to this blog such as, oh I don’t know, precision fermentation, energy and material futures, urban/rural footprints, agricultural wildlife impacts and the like, do please let me know – either in a public comment or privately via the Contact Form.
Ciao
Oh Chris, we will miss you of course but the new writing project sounds exciting!
Have what is probably just a tangent…. covid-19 combined with allotment activity has me reflecting on how seasonal my patterns of life are, these days. Most of my social life happens in summer and autumn now, when it’s easier to meet up outdoors (but after the frantic spring planting is done). In winter my journeys are more constrained (so many cycle routes I won’t take alone in the dark), and so is my outdoor social life (it is a bit cold for a picnic), and I find myself reading and reflecting more than I did over the summer. There is, of course, still plenty of physical work to do, but there’s only so much daylight and only so many dry days, and when it’s cold and wet the comforts of a hot water bottle and a book (or a blog, or even a pencil and paper for some of my own writing) are more inviting. I still have electric light rather than wax or tallow candles or rushlights, so I’m clearly well into the industrial age regardless of the coziness of my instinct to a sort of semi-hibernation. But I think having periods of rest and withdrawal is ultimately good for me.
It strikes me that in a low energy future this type of seasonality, in addition to affecting more people’s everyday lives, will affect trade much more than it does now — at least for most of the West. My uncle lives in Iqaluit, and for much of my childhood the town (village? Two thousand people, when I spent a summer there in 1997) had two or three ships per year, in summer and very early autumn, for all its imported goods, as the sea ice was too dangerous to navigate at other times. In other, more inland parts of Nunavut, the opposite transport situation was common: ‘ice roads’ went over lakes and swamps in the winter months, but melted in late spring. The period of melted ice is much longer now, in both cases.
The seasons are changing, and so must we, but even if it’s warmer than it should be and rather strange, there is something to be said for a sort of wintery hunkering down. I find I have a mental picture of you in fingerless gloves, writing with a quill by candlelight; but even if the truth is more like tapping away on a keyboard while the battery lasts, please know we are thinking of you.
See you in the spring.
Good luck with your project!
Well done Chris! It’s always good to have a fish on the hook – enjoy reeling it in. Tight lines!
Thanks all! Definitely time for me to do some winter hunkering right now…
Hullo Chris! Way too long since I’ve had the delight of commenting here.
I find so much of the gut-wrenching tedium of arguing with people who have decided to become good at arguing, rather than good at thinking and listening and understanding, nearly unbearable these days. Which is ironic because I used to very much BE one of those people, and even after my “I’ll argue with anyone for any length of time” approach faded, I still had a lot of “I can’t go to bed because someone on the internet is wrong” in me.
All of which to say, I’m very glad you’re debating the good debate still, and I’d certainly purchase a pamphlet; but the thought of the Monbiotian/Ecomodernesque debates exhausts me. Certainly, very few people seem in their ilk seem inclined to take the approach of the “steel man” (which I think I’ve mentioned here before, and which I believe you practice): directing your arguments at the most reasonable version of another point of view that you can muster. (It is self-consciously the opposite of “straw-manning”.) Rather than bleat about neo-hunters and gatherers and neo-Luddites, taking the points of a small farm future under the best light and debating those would yield so much more light, but many continue to prefer heat.
In any case –
I feel it’s likely you have important critiques of Joseph Tainter’s work on collapse, but that’s been my touchstone for 20 years. I don’t buy all of his theses unreservedly, but as someone trained in engineering, his dicta that (a) complexity costs energy; (b) societies tend to add complexity to solve their problems, compounding complexity upon complexity, and thus (c) at some point they rapidly ratchet up beyond what can be sustained and collapse still seems to me a plausible stylized truth. All of which to say: I’m not sure I’ve recommended this piece before, but I quite enjoyed “Integrating economic gain in biosocial systems” – https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230034395_Integrating_economic_gain_in_biosocial_systems – I found this blog’s recounting of it fairly accessible and intuitively accurate – http://ecologicalsociology.blogspot.com/2011/01/integrating-economic-gain-in-biosocial.html .
One last point: I can’t get over how an elementary point made by my major advisor, John Vandermeer, is so often glossed over: fossil fuels represent the multi-million-year distillation of solar energy collected many millions of years ago. They are a unique energy source that there is no reason to think is replaceable. There are more reasons than not to think that they are a one-time “boon” to our energy stores and that fission, fusion, freaking zero point energy, or what have you are going to be capable, in anything like the near term, of fully replacing an energy source that is essentially long-distilled biomass deposited worldwide from a previous age of the earth.
Fossil fuels’ discovery has been treated like a step along a teleology of humans always finding new concentrated energy sources to “gain” from. There is the small chance this is true — and a huge likelihood it is not. “Integrating economic gain in biosocial systems” is one example of working (or perhaps over-working) the logic of this relatively simple idea/realization.
Thanks for that Jahi. Nice to hear your voice here again! And thanks for the leads there – I’ll ponder Tainter and steel men…
Chris.
Maybe Monbiot has smelt the (18th century) coffee and now sees the predicament that we find ourselves in. A predicament that SFF lays out in great (and scary) clarity.
I think Monbiot is clutching at straws as he probably doesn’t like the world as described in SFF.
As a journalist, he may not like the idea of working the land and getting dirt under his finger nails. Not sure I do!
It’s up to you if you want to get stuck in a Twitter war with him but you are right and he is wrong. Making him see it your way isn’t really going to achieve anything.
Reality will play out in its own time. The world isn’t ready for the reality of energy depletion. But it will. Studge is a non-starter.