One farmer who works on about 3,500 acres burns through about 2,000 gallons of diesel per month, he said. “If the farmers cannot get crops out of the ground, then there is not food on the shelves.”
Food Shortage Worries Mount as PA Farms “Crushed” by Record Diesel Prices
Submitted 2 years ago by admin@exploding-heads.com to food_security@exploding-heads.com
squashkin@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
it is remarkable to me we grew to become so reliant on fossil fuels for food production
is there any way to decouple the two in time or will we be forced to deal with the consequences randomly at some point?
I guess you'd use renewables or revert to animal and more manual power, or make use of even more efficient designs
a big use of fuel is for creating and moving fertilizer too I guess?
this has been bothering me recently a bit as I thought I was freer from fossil fuels if I like take a walk but then realized my food may just be an oil byproduct
admin@exploding-heads.com 2 years ago
I think you are in the same boat as a lot of others. Unfortunately Biden admin has not realized it yet or does not care.
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 years ago
This actually points to something I've talked about at length before -- People see that something is made of plants and assume it's green, but industrial processes use a lot of energy at every step, so just because you ultimately use a plant doesn't mean it's necessarily green.
One very important thing that fossil fuels are used for is the production of fertilizer. Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer is produced using 2% of the world's natural gas, and that same fertilizer is presently becoming too expensive to bother with, which is one of the things that are going to lead to the incoming fuel shortages. In 2009 I did a study with publicly available data that suggested that we would have to use 1/3 of ALL non carbon fuel sources on earth to make up the ammonia production that year. I don't believe that has changed substantially enough for that to be a solution.
https://lotide.fbxl.net/posts/6006
For transportation and running their tractors, I think there might be options. Farmers could get their own oil presses and extract oil from their own seeds, then turn a bunch of that seed oil into diesel. Of course, that would only benefit the farmers who grew enough seeds to extract enough oil to be self-sufficient with regard to their diesel.
The reality is that politicians and businessmen have been lying to you, which is why you don't realize how much we rely on fossil fuels. Once you start digging, all sorts of things that they call "green" are in fact soaked in fossil fuels. It isn't clear at all how we can change all the stuff we need to change and to do it sustainably because fossil fuels are incredibly useful.
squashkin@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
well I think currently allegedly like a fifth of energy is renewables. so if push came to shove we might have to cut consumption by 80%. or boost up effeciency to cover the loss. not sure how feasible it would be to do that. or if there would still be things you can't just swap fossil fuels out of.