[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by zamler

How can you begin to believe this?

Because it's true. Science and facts back it up.

Food production has increased exponentially because of technology

I don't disagree with that but want to emphasis a point. TECHNOLOGY has advanced our ability to cultivate and harvest crops. OIL is not synonymous with TECHNOLOGY. Oil is not responsible for much of the improvement in agriculture and farming. Oil is a means by which certain machinery is driven, but not responsible for the advances made in agriculture itself.

can you honestly say nothing would change if suddenly we used zero oil for fertilizer, machinery, and industrial food production in general?

First of all you're lumping three complex issues together under the banner of a single argument and incorrectly tying those things together to one unrelated product. You're also making a specious argument that something would "suddenly" happen, like Thanos snaps his fingers and half of all life in the universe disappears. This won't happen. I have said multiple times that the hydro carbon molecule will not disappear overnight, it will just be used in better and more efficient ways. So now that balloon is officially popped we can move on to the three unrelated issues.

Oil is irrelevant to fertilizer production. Fertilizers are composed of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. The hydro carbon molecule is irrelevant when it comes to fertilizers as they are organic molecules found in natural sources. Where the hydro carbon molecule is used is in the extraction of ammonia for the use in nitrogen fertilizers. This is done predominantly with natural gas because of availability and cost. But there are many other sources of ammonia that we could collect and eliminate the need for the use of natural gas in the process. More importantly, there are a number of ways to naturally get nitrogen back into the soil and not need to use a spray fertilizer at all. Crop rotation has long been that solution in the vast majority of the world.

Machinery is red herring. Fossil fuels are NOT required for the operation of machinery. There are other ways to drive machinery. If there was an application where electric motors makes the most sense it is actually in farming. The high torque and greatly efficient motors are a natural for the conditions farmers use their equipment. A solar and wind array could charge the equipment and not require any fuel period. Benefits would also be that pollutants were not spread across the land and the crops themselves. This is an easy solution to implement but we don't do it because it would require change, and people are change averse. We continue to use the same dirty process because it's the way it's been done for a couple generations... and because farmers are subsidized to do so.

Industrial food production is also a red herring. Production systems are machines driven by electricity. The major part of the industrial food production process where fossil fuels are important is in transportation of the products. We solve the transportation issue, we solve the fossil fuel issue.

And that's scratching the surface.

There is the problem with your arguments. They are superficial examinations of an issue and don't delve into the depth and complexity of what is being discussed. They are cast through a very narrow lens and really only focused on western culture, ignoring a massive component to the larger problem. Worse, western standards and values are injected into the problem (see population growth as an example) and an incorrect assumption is made. In the larger global situation we have many solutions to problems that can be used, many from other parts of the world that make us change the way we do things. Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to look into the past, understand how it was done when we didn't have the advantages we have today, and then adopt it at a larger scale using our technological advantage.

Everything you present is tied to one solution, and you continue to look for a non-existent silver bullet to solve complex problems. Complex problems usually require complex solutions, which we have the ability to put together.
Having stated that, even this silver bullet solution (oil) is grossly overblown and wrong in many ways, being attributed to the increases in areas where it had no part what so ever. Oil has been very beneficial in a lot of ways, but it is extremely damaging in others. We need to use oil the best ways possible and channel it to products that have the least environmental impact. Oil is an important product, but it needs to become a niche product more so than the foundation of an economy. We have the technology and the capacity to make the shift, we just need the resolve to do so.