(November 10, 2021 at 11:20 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: There's no alternative to petroleum based fertilizers under the current model, no. It's not physically possible to grow the amount of food we do the way we grow it without vast amounts of fossil fuels...the entire industry was based on it from seed to table.
And no, we also cant grow enough food from our own shit to keep humans shitting..it takes alot more shit - though that's the only way to make this work in perpetuity no matter what the population numbers are. I like fish. They're prodigious little shitters (but it's actually the amonia and not the shit per se that matters) - they can also be stacked vertically in ways that other livestock can't and as a consequence of living in water lend themselves extremely well to intensive crop production in deep water trough systems. All of which, by necessity, need to be in a controlled environment which handles variability in local weather..as well as being completely unsuitable for chemical pesticide introduction. Every bird, one delicious stone.
That's what we should be using our fossil fuel reserves for..building the materials and infrastructure required to step away from our wider oil addiction. You know, before we can't access enough of it to do that even if we all got together and realized we should. I think that in the longer view of history (assuming there is one) our flirtation with the current model will be seen as one of our biggest mistakes not for the environmental damage it wrought, but for the opportunity cost imposed on future generations as a consequence. If there isn't any future..well..we won't have been the first society to literally farm ourselves to death.
Nailhead squarely hit. Petroleum is far too valuable to be used for pushing cars and generating electricity.
Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson
