EnviroLink Forum

Today we use vast amounts of food to make bio-deisel.

From Wiki;


This has happened due to the campaigns of the green movement to avoid dependance on fossil fuels. The Agri-lobby has of course seen the dollar signs and helped out to get it to happen.

For all those people who live on a pound a day or less this increase in food prices at a time of bumper harvests has resulted in them seeing their children slowly starve. Death may well be finally as a result of disease but cronic malnutririon make Jack a weak boy.



If 5% a year of these people are dieing as a result of this overpriced food then that's 50million people a year. That's about 8 times more than Hitler managed at his peak kill rate.

Does this make GreenPeace/Freiends of the Earth the most evil organisations of all time?

nope. it is the oil industry lobby preventing electric cars and previously preventing hybrid cars (until the Japanese flooded the market with them). People continuing to drive big gas guzzlers while local fuel sources dry up drives the push to go biodiesel and ethanol. The real problem always boils down to consumer choices or in this case, a limit on consumer choices in the USA

The real cost of food is directly tied to the cost of fuel because fuel is needed to make the cheap food of Canada and USA and to ship it overseas. Local farming is based on what makes the most profit which is never food. Armies need money more then food to keep up their arms. The people who control the land grow cash crops and destroy food crops of their enemies. Starvation is almost always man-made with a little help from the weather

Stop buying cotton, tobacco, tea and coffee so the price of those crops do not tempt farmers to grow them instead of local grains. Stop buying cell phones that use rare substances that are causing much of the current wars in northern Africa.

EDIT: I take that back... you can blame these eco organizations for not listening to Amory Lovins. The vehicles of the world use 20% of the fuel and half of that is airplanes. Driving a fuel efficient vehicle has almost no impact nor does mixing in biofuels. The real problem is building efficiency (almost 50% of fuel use) and if that was tackled, we would not have a fuel crisis and not be invading the oil-producing countries and instead concentrate on the extremists in Afghanistan who are the same groups of people attacking Africa right now. Fuel would still be cheap (Canadian and USA grain would be cheap around the world), greenhouse gas emissions would drop (less push to do something like biofuels), and extremists would be busy in Afghanistan trying to beat the USA (and other armies involved) and trying to oust Saddam Hussein (too liberal for the Islamic extremists). Peace in Africa would result in food aid only needed for local droughts and would not be blocked and stolen by armies trying to starve-out their enemies.

note that 2005 is when fuel prices rose greatly and shipping costs increased dramatically including the price index. What was happening was a movement by big retail chains like Walmart to stock up against this rising cost of shipping. Part of this rising cost of shipping was the financial crisis bringing about increased insurance rates on the sale of fuel due to the possible price fluctuations while the oil is crossing the ocean. It was a "perfect storm" of cost rises for the grains industry. I personally was directly affected because I was working at a grain cleaning company that specialized in over-seas grain markets. The shipping cost increases caused the local price of the grain to hit rock bottom and farmers were just holding on to the grain so I was laid off. The problem was NOT lack of grain... the farmers were just keeping it in bins.

See how the oil prices went from $40/barrel to $60/barrel in 2005 and continued to rise to past $100/barrel in 2008... this is the time period of the grain price increases in your quote. I did not mention the crash in the shipping industry in 2008... this is when warehousing in my city had reached amazing proportions with half-mile long piles of shipping containers in my city's downtown rail yards. Walmart simply quit ordering stuff and the shipping industry died. The fluctuation on fuel use was still not very big but it sure made a difference on fuel prices... for a couple years. We are back to the same fuel costs but we are using 10% more fuel. I suspect it is air conditioning in the USA.

here is the Baltic Dry Index which is a general indicator of world shipping costs. The delay in seeing these costs hit grain costs is the stored grain after shipping. When prices rise, the stores are used up first before the shortage raises the costs and justifies ordering grain in spite of the higher shipping costs. Farmers with grain in their bins still often choose a different crop the following year causing a shortage the following year so there is a reason for that particular grain to remain high price. The year after that is when many farmers in my area left fields empty because grain prices were so low (due to shipping prices being so high). Again, the price of the grain remains high in Africa and low in Canada. Farmers are switching to grains that can be made into ethanol simply because the price has not bottomed out and thus the real cause is not a lack of grain but a lack of incentive to grow food due to shipping costs. Blame it on inefficient buildings as Amory Lovins has been preaching since the 1970s

Also note that when the shipping industry crashed, big multinationals started 2-4 year projects to build bigger and more efficient ships and run in-house so the costs would be kept very low. Now that they have hit the shipping market, the shipping costs have dropped dramatically (a glut in the market... it recovers as this glut kills off a few more inefficient shipping companies with aging ships)

Think twice before buying something from overseas... you may be starving kids in war-torn Africa

In theory it looks great but there are a few drawbacks: vehicles are restricted in routes without being hybrid systems, Electricity currently is mostly supplied by non-renewables, and the technology currently used for the grid is inefficient and thus has considerable energy losses in transmission to rural locations like rail and highways. Europe has been converting to electric trains quite successfully but they have smaller challenges then the Rocky Mountains and great plains areas for grade and temperature extremes. It still has lots of potential if political will can overcome the tangle of laws put in place by the oil industry lobby to keep USA free of electric vehicles. Electric transport and wind-powered ships could take the bite out of rising fuel prices and keep Africa fed on cheap grain from the prairies. Still better if Africa can grow it's own food and get along enough not to try and starve groups with crop burning, shooting at relief workers, and planting land mines in farm fields.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9253?utm ... il+Drum%29


I don't disagree with you in the present. I'm thinking a couple of decades down the road. Above is where the article is based on Siemens looking into this.


Siemens Trolleytruck


To circumvent the limitations of batteries, Siemens is experimenting with a possible solution - a cross breed between a freight tram and an electric lorry. They developed a hybrid lorry under the name ‘eHighway’ which can be powered by both its diesel engine and electricity. In this case, the electricity isn’t stored in on-board batteries but comes from an overhead wire, using a modern form of the system used by a trolleybus – which makes this a trolleytruck.

oh electric vehicles and trolley connection to the grid has been something I was deeply interested in and committed to back 35 years so far so I am very interested and can say much about it but this thread is specifically who is to blame for starving people so that is why I keep going that direction.

"A couple decades" is 2032...........
I agree with Ann that the fossil fuel industry is the "most evil", and it is truly unfortunate that they feed a multitude of other industries. Relentless logic is a b****, but I think there will be more overshoot and delay, personally, than Mr. Goodchild's even drop with oil.
A Time Frame For Systemic Collapse

By Peter Goodchild

30 August, 2011
Countercurrents.org

"A time frame for systemic collapse can be extrapolated easily from the on-line document The Coming Chaos, an abridgement of a larger text. The most significant page is at the start of the text, the chart of estimated past and future oil production. Most of the other time frames will parallel that curve. Then one can look at the chapter on electricity, which as Richard Duncan says will be the first really distinct, “on-off” type of indicator. The next parallel can be found in the chapter on economics, which mentions two "phases," divided by the point at which money as such is no longer an important means of exchange; past examples occurred with the crash of the USSR, and in Weimar Germany.

In the chapter on famine, the fall of population appears as a parallel to the fall in fossil fuels. Some critics have said that the two do not necessarily go together -- or, rather, “fall” together. But they do, for a very simple mathematical reason. Fossil fuels are the source of more than 90 percent of the energy -- in the strict "physics" sense of the word -- in modern industrial society. If we take away 90 percent of the energy, we necessarily take away 90 percent of the population. (If we take away 100 percent of the energy, we necessarily take away 100 percent of the population.) No, we cannot replace that 90 percent with some "alternative" form of energy, as is explained in chapter one, because there isn't enough of any “alternative” to make much difference.

The same first chapter also illustrates why a voluntary reduction in population cannot work. (For that matter, neither would a mandatory reduction in population, and for the same reason.) Again, it's simple arithmetic. Oil production will fall, over the next few decades, by about 3 percent annually, and if instead we say 2 percent or 4 percent the final result isn't much different. But even if every woman on earth stopped having children from this day forward, there would still not be a 3 or 2 or 4 percent annual reduction in population.

It can be seen, therefore, that the curve of estimated past and future global oil production is not merely one of a myriad of problems with which mankind will have to deal. It is the time scale with which most other problems can be measured, and it is the cause of most other problems. (including passing the tundra methane self release point, which is an eventual ELE)JE

But if anyone really needs a magic number, a good choice would be 2030. That's the date at which, with a 3 percent annual decline in oil production, the year's production will be half of that in the peak year. And half of peak oil means half of everything else in human society. A very important “half” will be population, because the other half will have died of famine. And that's the one item that very few people can mentally assimilate."

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"With every decision, think seven generations ahead of the consequences of your actions" Ute rule of life.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”
― Chief Seattle

I caught that but my previous point was that the supply of grain has nothing to do with the prices of that grain in Africa so reducing fuel use in land vehicles will drop fuel use by 10% at most and you can see by the graphs that we are using 10% more fuel in only a few years which will cancel out the effect of going 100% electric in the time span of the typical lifespan of a vehicle (10 years)... the price of grain in Africa will not change if fuel prices stay the same and of course fuel prices will continue to rise. Going electric will make no difference for African food prices. Going high efficiency for buildings will make a big difference as you can see from the price dive of fuel prices from the small 3% fluctuation of use that the shipping industry caused when it crashed. Right now you can drop your house energy bill in half with insulation and better windows and that will equal a 25% drop in world energy use if everybody did the same. Going 100% electric vehicles = about 6% total energy use reduction IF we were to only use renewable energy (so it will be less then that... USA uses 5% renewables so 5% of 6% equals almost nothing)

Your picture got me thinking
The main problems with electric vehicles are the batteries and the time it takes to charge them.
It should be possible to have lanes on the free ways dedicated to recharging the vehicles as they travel in them. In other words refuelling on the go.

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Pollution is not the solution

You know those tanks folks use in their gas grills? When they use them up, they simply return the empty tank and exchange it for a full one. We employ a similar principle in manufacturing with electrically powered industrial vehicles--forklifts, tuggers, etc. Like a store of readily available, full gas tanks, we keep a bank of charged/charging batteries. The batteries are interchangeable with several vehicle types. Larger ones use two or more at a time. There is no vehicle downtime waiting for batteries to charge, only swapping them out, like filling a gas tank.

Have one, perhaps a few universal battery sizes and it sounds like a practical solution for cars and trucks to me.

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TANG SOO!