Measurement and Climate Change – Part 2
What’s left out of climate change models.
Climate change dominates many discussions today such that virtually everyone is aware of the real and potential costs of the use of fossil fuels. While the negative effects of fossil fuels on climate are often exaggerated beyond any reasonable likelihood, what’s remarkable is how little attention the benefits of fossil fuels receive in popular and expert discussions. In this series of essays, we’ll look at a large variety of information regarding the vast benefits of fossil fuels that often gets lost in what should be a “cost-benefit” analysis of climate change (and not just a “cost” analysis).
We’ll start with food.
Today, far fewer people need to be farmers in America, while many people elsewhere are stuck spending the vast majority of time farming, whether they want to or not. As Alex Epstein points out in his book in his book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less:
As recently as the 1800s, in England up to 80 percent of the average family’s income—which means 80 percent of their productive time—went to food, mostly low-quality bread … In places like Uganda, Zimbabwe, Nepal, Ethiopia, and Niger, more than two out of three people are farmers. A report on Zambia reports that “the average poor rural family here spends 80 percent of income on food.” And in Burundi, more than nine out of ten work in agriculture.
One widely ignored truth often ignored in climate change policy discussions is role fossil fuels play in the production of food worldwide. As Alex Epstein writes in his book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less:
One particularly egregious dismissal of the benefits of fossil fuels among our designated experts is the common phenomenon of discussing the negative side-effects of fossil fuels on food production while ignoring the fact that food production as we know it uses fossil fuels to enormous human benefit.
Vaclav Smil explores that point in interesting detail in his book How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going. Smil writes:
[U]ntil a few generations ago only a small share of well-fed elites did not have to worry about having enough to eat … [N]o recent transformation—such as increased personal mobility or a greater range of private possessions—has been so existentially fundamental as our ability to produce, year after year, a surfeit of food … There are still significant numbers of children, adolescents, and adults who experience food shortages, particularly in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, but during the past three generations their total has declined from the world’s majority to less than 1 in 10 of the world’s inhabitants … This impressive achievement is even more noteworthy if expressed in a way that accounts for the intervening large-scale increase of the global population, from about 2.5 billion people in 1950 to 7.7 billion in 2019. The steep reduction in global undernutrition means that in 1950 the world was able to supply adequate food to about 890 million people, but by 2019 that had risen to just over 7 billion: a nearly eight-fold increase in absolute terms! … Modern food production, be it field cultivation of crops or the capture of wild marine species, is a peculiar hybrid dependent on two different kinds of energy. The first, and most obvious, is the Sun. But we also need the now indispensable input of fossil fuels, and the electricity produced and generated by humans … [T]he modern world’s most important—and fundamentally existential—dependence on fossil fuels is their direct and indirect use in the production of our food. Direct use includes fuels to power all field machinery (mostly tractors, combines, and other harvesters), the transportation of harvests from fields to storage and processing sites, and irrigation pumps. Indirect use is much broader, taking into account the fuels and electricity used to produce agricultural machinery, fertilizers, and agrochemicals (herbicides, insecticides, fungicides), and other inputs ranging from glass and plastic sheets for greenhouses, to global positioning devices that enable precision farming.
Fossil fuels have allowed food to be as plentiful as it is:
[W]e could not harvest such abundance, and in such a highly predictable manner, without the still-rising inputs of fossil fuels and electricity. Without these anthropogenic energy subsidies, we could not have supplied 90 percent of humanity with adequate nutrition and we could not have reduced global malnutrition to such a degree, while simultaneously steadily decreasing the amount of time and the area of cropland needed to feed one person. Agriculture—growing food crops for people and feed for animals—must be energized by solar radiation, specifically by the blue and red parts of the visible spectrum. Chlorophylls and carotenoids, light-sensitive molecules in plant cells, absorb light at these wavelengths and use it to power photosynthesis, a multi-step sequence of chemical reactions that combines atmospheric carbon dioxide and water—as well as small amounts of elements including, notably, nitrogen and phosphorus—to produce new plant mass for grain, legume, tuber, oil, and sugar crops. Part of these harvests is fed to domestic animals to produce meat, milk, and eggs, and additional animal foods come from mammals that graze on grasses and aquatic species whose growth depends ultimately on phytoplankton, the dominant plant mass produced by aquatic photosynthesis … In 2021, Kansas is the country’s leading wheat-growing state and so we move to the Arkansas River Valley. In this heart of American wheat country, farms are now commonly three to four times larger than they were a century ago — and yet most of the field work is done by only one or two people operating large machinery … Seed comes from certified growers, and young plants receive optimum amounts of inorganic fertilizers—above all, plenty of nitrogen applied as ammonia or urea—and targeted protection against insects, fungi, and competing weeds … Producing wheat now takes less than two hours of human labor per hectare (compared to 150 hours in 1801), and with yields of around 3.5 tons per hectare this translates to less than two seconds per kilogram of grain. Many people nowadays admiringly quote the performance gains of modern computing (“so much data”) or telecommunication (“so much cheaper”)—but what about harvests? In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two seconds. This is how our modern world really works … Most of the admired and undoubtedly remarkable technical advances that have transformed industries, transportation, communication, and everyday living would have been impossible if more than 80 percent of all people had to remain in the countryside in order to produce their daily bread (the share of the US population who were farmers in 1800 was 83 percent).
What goes into the massive food production process?
Today, as ever, no harvests would be possible without Sun-driven photosynthesis, but the high yields produced with minimal labor inputs and hence with unprecedented low costs would be impossible without direct and indirect infusions of fossil energies … Machines consume fossil energies directly as diesel or gasoline for field operations including the pumping of irrigation water from wells, for crop processing and drying, for transporting the harvests within the country by trucks, trains, and barges, and for overseas exports in the holds of large bulk carriers. Indirect energy use in making those machines is far more complex, as fossil fuels and electricity go into making not only the steel, rubber, plastics, glass, and electronics but also assembling these inputs to make tractors, implements, combines, trucks, grain dryers, and silos. But the energy required to make and to power farm machinery is dwarfed by the energy requirements of producing agrochemicals. Modern farming requires fungicides and insecticides to minimize crop losses, and herbicides to prevent weeds from competing for the available plant nutrients and water. All of these are highly energy-intensive products but they are applied in relatively small quantities (just fractions of a kilogram per hectare). In contrast, fertilizers that supply the three essential plant macronutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—require less energy per unit of the final product but are needed in large quantities to ensure high crop yields … Ammonia is the starting compound for making all synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers. Every crop of high-yielding wheat and rice, as well as of many vegetables, requires more than 100 (sometimes as much as 200) kilograms of nitrogen per hectare, and these high needs make the synthesis of nitrogenous fertilizers the most important indirect energy input in modern farming. Nitrogen is needed in such great quantities because it is in every living cell: it is in chlorophyll, whose excitation powers photosynthesis; in the nucleic acids DNA and RNA, which store and process all genetic information; and in amino acids, which make up all the proteins required for the growth and maintenance of our tissues. The element is abundant—it makes up nearly 80 percent of the atmosphere, organisms live submerged in it—and yet it is a key limiting factor in crop productivity as well as in human growth. This is one of the great paradoxical realities of the biosphere and its explanation is simple: nitrogen exists in the atmosphere as a non-reactive molecule (N2), and only a few natural processes can split the bond between the two nitrogen atoms and make the element available to form reactive compounds … [L]eguminous food crops, including soybeans, beans, peas, lentils, and peanuts, are able to provide (fix) their own nitrogen supply, as can such leguminous cover crops as alfalfa, clovers, and vetches. But no staple grains, no oil crops (except for soybeans and peanuts), and no tubers can do that … The [nitrogen] barrier was then broken decisively with the invention of ammonia synthesis by Fritz Haber in 1909 and with its rapid commercialization (ammonia was first shipped in 1913), but subsequent production grew slowly and the widespread application of nitrogenous fertilizers had to wait until after the Second World War. New high- yielding varieties of wheat and rice introduced during the 1960s could not express their full yield potential without synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers. And the great productivity shift known as the Green Revolution could not have taken place without this combination of better crops and higher nitrogen applications. Since the 1970s, the synthesis of nitrogenous fertilizers has undoubtedly been the primus inter pares among agricultural energy subsidies—but the full scale of this dependence is only revealed by looking at detailed accounts of the energy required to produce various common foodstuffs. I have chosen three of them to use as examples, and I picked them because of their nutritional dominance. Bread has been the staple of European civilization for millennia. Given the religious proscriptions on the consumption of pork and beef, chicken is the only universally favored meat. And no other vegetable (although botanically a fruit) surpasses the annual production of tomatoes, now grown not only as a field crop but increasingly in plastic or glass greenhouses. Each of these foodstuffs has a different nutritional role (bread is eaten for its carbohydrates, chicken for its perfect protein, tomatoes for their vitamin C content) but none of them could be produced so abundantly, so reliably, and so affordably without considerable fossil fuel subsidies. Eventually, our food production will change, but for now, and for the foreseeable future, we cannot feed the world without relying on fossil fuels.
And what size role do fossil fuels play in the food production process?
With diesel fuel containing 36.9 megajoules per liter, the typical energy cost of wheat from the Great Plains is almost exactly 100 milliliters (1 deciliter or 0.1 liters) of diesel fuel per kilogram—just a bit less than half of the US cup measurement. I will use specific volume equivalents of diesel fuel to label individual foodstuffs with the energy embedded in their production … Milling the grain needs an equivalent of about 50 mL/kg to produce white bread flour, while published data for large-scale baking in modern efficient enterprises—consuming natural gas and electricity—indicate fuel equivalents of 100–200 mL/kg. Growing the grain, milling it, and baking a 1-kilogram sourdough loaf thus requires an energy input equivalent of at least 250 milliliters of diesel fuel, a volume slightly larger than the American measuring cup. For a standard baguette (250 grams), the embedded energy equivalent is about 2 tablespoons of diesel fuel; for a large German Bauernbrot (2 kilograms), it would be about 2 cups of diesel fuel (less for a wholewheat loaf). The real fossil energy cost is higher still, because only a small share of bread is now baked where it is bought. Even in France, neighborhood boulangeries have been disappearing and baguettes are distributed from large bakeries: energy savings from industrial-scale efficiency are negated by increased transportation costs, and the total cost (from growing and milling grain to baking in a large bakery and distributing bread to distant consumers) may have an equivalent energy consumption as high as 600 mL/kg! But if the bread’s typical (roughly 5:1) ratio of edible mass to the mass of embedded energy (1 kilogram of bread compared to about 210 grams of diesel fuel) seems uncomfortably high, recall that I have already noted that grains—even grains after processing and conversion into our favorite foods—are at the bottom of our food energy subsidy ladder.
What are chickens’ weight in fossil fuels?
Rather than tracing the energy cost of beef (a meat that has already been much maligned), I will instead quantify the energy burdens of the most efficiently produced meat—that of broilers reared in large barns in what have become known as CAFOs, central animal feeding operations … In 1950, 3 units of feed were needed per unit of live broiler weight; now that number is just 1.82, about a third of the rate for pigs and a seventh of the rate for cattle. Obviously, the entire bird (including feathers and bones) is not eaten, and the adjustment for edible weight (about 60 percent of live weight) puts the lowest feed-to-meat ratio at 3:1. Producing one American chicken (whose average edible weight is now almost exactly 1 kilogram) needs 3 kilograms of grain corn … [F]eed costs alone can be as low as 150 milliliters of diesel fuel per kilogram of edible meat, and as high as 750 mL/kg. Further energy costs arise from a large-scale intercontinental trade in feedstuffs: it is dominated by the shipment of American corn and soybeans and the sale of Brazilian soybeans. Brazilian soybean cultivation requires the equivalent of 100 milliliters of diesel fuel per kilogram of grain, but trucking the crop from producing areas to ports and shipping it to Europe doubles the energy cost. Growing broilers to slaughter weight also requires energy for heating, air conditioning, and maintaining the poultry houses, for supplying water and sawdust, and for removing and composting waste. These requirements vary widely with location (above all, due to summer air conditioning and winter heating), and hence when combined with the energy cost of delivered feed a wide range of volumes is produced—from 50 to 300 milliliters per kilogram of edible meat. The most conservative combined rate for feeding and rearing the birds would be thus an equivalent of about 200 milliliters of diesel fuel per kilogram of meat, but the values can go as high as 1 liter. Adding the energy needed for slaughtering and processing the birds (chicken meat is now overwhelmingly marketed as parts, not as whole broilers), retailing, storing and home refrigeration, and eventual cooking raises the total energy requirement for putting a kilogram of roasted chicken on dinner plates to at least 300–350 milliliters of crude oil: a volume equal to almost half a bottle of wine (and for the least efficient producers, to more than a liter). The minima of 300–350 mL/kg is a remarkably efficient performance compared to the rates of 210–250 mL/kg for bread, and this is reflected in the comparably affordable prices of chicken: in US cities, the average price of a kilogram of white bread is only about 5 percent lower than the average price per kilogram of whole chicken (and wholewheat bread is 35 percent more expensive!) …
What are tomatoes’ weight in fossil fuels?
Given that vegans extol eating plants, and that the media have reported extensively on the high environmental cost of meat, you might think that gains in the energy cost of chicken have been surpassed by those in the cultivation and marketing of vegetables. You would be mistaken to think that. The opposite has been true, in fact, and there is no better example to illustrate these surprisingly high energy burdens than taking a close look at tomatoes. They have it all—an attractive color, a variety of shapes, smooth skin, and a juicy interior. Botanically, a tomato is the fruit of the Lycopersicon esculentum, a small plant native to Central and South America that was introduced to the rest of the world during the age of first European transatlantic sailings but which took generations to establish worldwide appeal. Eaten out of hand, in soups, filled, baked, chopped, boiled, pureed into sauces, and added to countless salads and cooked dishes, it is now a global favorite embraced in countries ranging from its native Mexico and Peru to Spain, Italy, India, and China (now its largest producer). Nutritional compendia praise its high vitamin C content: indeed, a large tomato (200 grams) can provide two-thirds of the daily recommended requirement for an adult. But as with all fresh and juicy fruits, it is not eaten for its energy content; it is, overwhelmingly, just an appealingly shaped container of water, which comprises 95 percent of its mass. The remainder is mostly carbohydrate, a bit of protein, and a mere trace of fat … As with all but a small share of the fruits and vegetables that are consumed in modern societies, tomato cultivation is a highly specialized affair and most of the varieties available in North American and European supermarkets come from only a few places. In the US it is California; in Europe it is Italy and Spain. In order to increase their yield, improve their quality, and reduce the intensity of energy inputs, tomatoes are increasingly grown in plastic-covered single- or multi-tunnel enclosures or in greenhouses—not only in Canada and the Netherlands but also in Mexico, China, Spain, and Italy. This brings us back to fossil fuels and electricity. Plastics are a less expensive alternative to constructing multi-tunnel glass greenhouses, and the cultivation of tomatoes also requires plastic clips, wedges, and gutter arrangements. Where the plants are grown in the open, plastic sheets are used to cover the soil in order to reduce water evaporation and prevent weeds. The synthesis of plastic compounds relies on hydrocarbons (crude oil and natural gas), both for raw materials (feedstocks) and for the energy needed to produce them. Feedstocks include ethane and other natural gas liquids, and naphtha produced during the refining of crude oil. Natural gas is also used to fuel plastic production, and it is (as already noted) the most important feedstock—the source of hydrogen—for the synthesis of ammonia. Other hydrocarbons serve as feedstocks to produce protective compounds (insecticides and fungicides), because even plants inside glass or plastic greenhouses are not immune to pests and infections. Expressing the annual operating costs of tomato cultivation in monies is done easily by adding up the expenditure on seedlings, fertilizers, agrochemicals, water, heating, and labor, and by prorating the costs of original structures and devices—metal supports, plastic covers, glass, pipes, troughs, heaters—that are in place for more than one year. But putting a comprehensive energy bill together is not that simple. Direct energy inputs are easy to quantify on the basis of electricity bills and gasoline or diesel fuel purchases, but calculating the indirect flows into the production of materials requires some specialized accounting, and usually some assumptions. Detailed studies have quantified these inputs and multiplied them by their typical energy costs: for example, the synthesis, formulation, and packaging of 1 kilogram of nitrogenous fertilizer requires an equivalent of nearly 1.5 liters of diesel fuel. Not surprisingly, these studies show a wide range of totals, but one study—perhaps the most meticulous study of tomato cultivation in the heated and unheated multi-tunnel greenhouses of Almería in Spain—concluded that the cumulative energy demand of net production is more than 500 milliliters of diesel fuel (more than two cups) per kilogram for the former (heated) and only 150 mL/kg for the latter harvest. We get this high energy cost, in large part, because greenhouse tomatoes are among the world’s most heavily fertilized crops: per unit area they receive up to 10 times as much nitrogen (and also phosphorus) as is used to produce grain corn, America’s leading field crop. Sulfur, magnesium, and other micronutrients are also used, as are chemicals protecting against insects and fungi. Heating is the most important direct use of energy in greenhouse cultivation: it extends the growing season and improves crop quality but, inevitably, when deployed in colder climates it becomes the single largest user of energy. Plastic greenhouses located in the southernmost part of Almería province are the world’s largest covered area of commercial cultivation of produce: about 40,000 hectares (think of a 20 km × 20 km square) and easily identifiable on satellite images—look for yourself on Google Earth. You can even take a ride on Google Street View, which offers an otherworldly experience of these low-elevation, plastic-covered structures. Under this sea of plastic, the Spanish growers and their local and immigrant African laborers produce annually (in temperatures often surpassing 40°C) nearly 3 million tons of early and out-of-season vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, green beans, zucchini, eggplant, melons) and some fruit, and export about 80 percent of it to EU countries. A truck transporting a 13-ton load of tomatoes from Almería to Stockholm covers 3,745 kilometers and consumes about 1,120 liters of diesel fuel.[40] That works out to nearly 90 milliliters per kilogram of tomatoes, and transport, storage, and packing at the regional distribution centers as well as deliveries to stores raises that to nearly 130 mL/kg. This means that when bought in a Scandinavian supermarket, tomatoes from Almería’s heated plastic greenhouses have a stunningly high embedded production and transportation energy cost. Its total is equivalent to about 650 mL/kg, or more than five tablespoons (each containing 14.8 milliliters) of diesel fuel per medium-sized (125 gram) tomato! You can stage—easily and without any waste—a tabletop demonstration of this fossil fuel subsidy, by slicing a tomato of that size, spreading it out on a plate, and pouring over it 5–6 tablespoons of dark oil (sesame oil replicates the color well). When sufficiently impressed by the fossil fuel burden of this simple food, you can transfer the plate’s contents to a bowl, add two or three additional tomatoes, some soy sauce, salt, pepper, and sesame seeds, and enjoy a tasty tomato salad. How many vegans enjoying the salad are aware of its substantial fossil fuel pedigree?
While many people are aware that motor oil is often used as a replacement for syrup in the production of television commercials, fewer understand how much actual motor oil goes into the production of real syrup.
Fish are a great food source, but also a great consumer of fossil fuels:
As it turns out, capturing what the Italians so poetically call frutti di mare is the most energy-intensive process of food provision … just two skewers of medium-sized wild shrimp (total weight of 100 grams) may require 0.5–1 liters of diesel fuel to catch—the equivalent of 2–4 cups of fuel.
As Smil summarizes:
So, the evidence is inescapable: our food supply—be it staple grains, clucking birds, favorite vegetables, or seafood praised for its nutritious quality—has become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels. This fundamental reality is commonly ignored by those who do not try to understand how our world really works and who are now predicting rapid decarbonization. Those same people would be shocked to know that our present situation cannot be changed easily or rapidly … Our best data are available for the US, where, thanks to the prevalence of modern techniques and widespread economies of scale, the direct energy use in food production is now on the order of 1 percent of the total national supply. But after adding the energy requirements of food processing and marketing, packaging, transportation, wholesale and retail services, household food storage and preparation, and away-from-home food and marketing services, the grand total in the US reached nearly 16 percent of the nation’s energy supply in 2007 and now it is approaching 20 percent … Can we reverse at least some of these trends? Can the world of soon-to-be 8 billion people feed itself—while maintaining a variety of crop and animal products and the quality of prevailing diets—without synthetic fertilizers and without other agrochemicals? Could we return to purely organic cropping, relying on recycled organic wastes and natural pest controls, and could we do without engine-powered irrigation and without field machinery by bringing back draft animals? We could, but purely organic farming would require most of us to abandon cities, resettle villages, dismantle central animal feeding operations, and bring all animals back to farms to use them for labor and as sources of manure. Every day we would have to feed and water our animals, regularly remove their manure, ferment it and then spread it on fields, and tend the herds and flocks on pasture. As seasonal labor demands rose and ebbed, men would guide the plows harnessed to teams of horses; women and children would plant and weed vegetable plots; and everybody would be pitching in during harvest and slaughter time, stooking sheaves of wheat, digging up potatoes, helping to turn freshly slaughtered pigs and geese into food. I do not foresee the organic green online commentariat embracing these options anytime soon. And even if they were willing to empty the cities and embrace organic earthiness, they could still produce only enough food to sustain less than half of today’s global population … And without synthetic fertilizers, yields of food and feed crops dependent on the recycling of organic matter would be a fraction of today’s harvest. Corn, America’s largest crop, yielded less than 2 tons per hectare in 1920, and 11 tons per hectare in 2020. Millions of additional draft animals would be needed to cultivate virtually all of the country’s available farmland … [T]he very low nitrogen content of organic matter means that farmers have to apply very large quantities of straw or manure in order to supply enough of this essential plant nutrient to produce high crop yields. The nitrogen content of cereal straws (the most abundant crop residue) is always low, usually 0.3–0.6 percent; manure mixed with animal bedding (usually straw) contains only 0.4–0.6 percent; fermented human waste (China’s so-called night soil) has just 1–3 percent; and manures applied to fields rarely contain more than 4 percent. In contrast, urea, now the world’s dominant solid nitrogenous fertilizer, contains 46 percent nitrogen, ammonium nitrate has 33 percent, and commonly used liquid solutions contain 28–32 percent, at least an order of magnitude more nitrogen-dense than recyclable wastes. This means that to supply the same amount of the nutrient to growing crops, a farmer would have to apply anywhere between 10 and 40 times as much manure by mass … [A]t least half of recent global crop harvests have been produced thanks to the application of synthetic nitrogenous compounds, and without them it would be impossible to produce the prevailing diets for even half of today’s nearly 8 billion people … Given that we are expecting at least 2 billion more people by 2050, and that more than twice as many people in the low-income countries of Asia and Africa should see further gains—both in quantity and quality—in their food supply, there is no near-term prospect for substantially reducing the global dependence on synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers.
And going vegan does not appear to be an answer:
The quest for mass-scale veganism is doomed to fail. Eating meat has been as significant a component of our evolutionary heritage as our large brains (which evolved partly because of meat eating), bipedalism, and symbolic language. All our hominin ancestors were omnivorous, as are both species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus), the hominins closest to us in their genetic makeup; they supplement their plant diet by hunting (and sharing) small monkeys, wild pigs, and tortoises. Full expression of human growth potential on a population basis can take place only when diets in childhood and adolescence contain sufficient quantities of animal protein, first in milk and later in other dairy products, eggs, and meat … [M]ost people who become vegetarians or vegans do not remain so for the remainder of their lives. The idea that billions of humans—across the world, not only in affluent Western cities—would willfully not eat any animal products, or that there’d be enough support for governments to enforce that anytime soon, is ridiculous … Moreover, there are billions of people in Asia and Africa whose meat consumption remains minimal and whose health would benefit from more meaty diets.
Even the much wider availability of drinking water is due to the use of fossil fuels. As Epstein writes:
While “natural” water is glorified by advertising today, the reality is that most environments are naturally deficient in drinking water. Drinking water for most people at most times, has been naturally dirty and/or distant … Clean drinking water, like virtually every other value, must be produced … Tap water, which with few exceptions is perfectly healthy and far healthier than most “natural” water historically or today, is about one half of a cent per gallon. This means that a worker drinking one gallon a day works less than a second to acquire it. This is nothing short of magical. What’s the source of our magical ability to acquire food and water? Above all, the magic of machines, mostly fossil-fueled, that empower a relative handful of individuals to produce far more and better food and water than entire populations can produce via manual labor.
One economist has estimated that if fossil fuels were banned today, 6 billion people would die within a year.
As Smil summarizes:
[R]eaders of this book now understand that our food is partly made not just of oil, but also of coal that was used to produce the coke required for smelting the iron needed for field, transportation, and food processing machinery; of natural gas that serves as both feedstock and fuel for the synthesis of nitrogenous fertilizers; and of the electricity generated by the combustion of fossil fuels that is indispensable for crop processing, taking care of animals, and food and feed storage and preparation. Modern agriculture’s higher yields are not produced with a fraction of the labor that was required just a lifetime ago because we have improved the efficiency of photosynthesis, but because we have provided better varieties of crops with better conditions for their growth by supplying them with adequate nutrients and water, by reducing weeds that compete for the same inputs, and by protecting them against pests … All these critical interventions have demanded substantial—and rising—inputs of fossil fuels; and even if we try to change the global food system as fast as is realistically conceivable, we will be eating transformed fossil fuels, be it as loaves of bread or as fishes, for decades to come.
And as Epstein writes:
Every aspect of today’s amazing food and water production, from the metal fences used to raise livestock to the irrigation infrastructure to the construction of grocery stores and the office buildings of researchers, is produced by machines … And the vast majority of these machines run on fossil fuels because that is by far the most (and sometimes only) cost-effective solution.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll examine Vaclav Smil’s analysis of the under-appreciated materials that constitute the “four pillars of civilization.”