The shit is just beginning to hit the fan. (Kunstler's latest blog entry)

[JohnyCanuck]

STATUS QUO-OH


SNIP

These are not your daddy's or granddaddy's floods. These are 500-year floods, events not seen before non-Indian people starting living out on that stretch of the North American prairie. The vast majority of home-owners in Eastern Iowa did not have flood insurance because the likelihood of being affected above the 500-year-line was so miniscule -- their insurance agents actually advised them against getting it. The personal ruin out there will be comprehensive and profound, a wet version of the 1930s Dust Bowl, with families facing total loss and perhaps migrating elsewhere in the nation because they have no home to go back to.

Iowa in 2008 will be an even slower-motion disaster than Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Beyond the troubles of 25,000 people who have lost all their material possessions is a world whose grain reserves stand at record lows. The crop losses in Iowa will aggravate what is already a pretty dire situation. So far, the US Public has experienced the world grain situation mainly in higher supermarket prices. Cheap corn is behind the magic of the American processed food industry -- all those pizza pockets and juicy-juice boxes that frantic Americans resort to because they have no time between two jobs and family-chauffeur duties to actually cook (note: reheating is not cooking).

Behind that magic is an agribusiness model of farming cranked up on the steroids of cheap oil and cheap natural-gas-based fertilizer. Both of these "inputs" have recently entered the realm of the non-cheap. Oil-and-gas-based farming had already reached a crisis stage before the flood of Iowa. Diesel fuel is a dollar-a-gallon higher than gasoline. Natural gas prices have doubled over the past year, sending fertilizer prices way up. American farmers are poorly positioned to reform their practices. All that cheap fossil fuel masks a tremendous decay of skill in husbandry. The farming of the decades ahead will be a lot more complicated than just buying x-amount of "inputs" (on credit) to be dumped on a sterile soil growth medium and spread around with giant diesel-powered machines.

Like a lot of other activities in American life these days, agribusiness is unreformable along its current lines. It will take a convulsion to change it, and in that convulsion it will be dragged kicking-and-screaming into a new reality. As that occurs, the US public will have to contend with more than just higher taco chip prices. We're heading into the Vale of Malthus -- Thomas Robert Malthus, the British economist-philosopher who introduced the notion that eventually world population would overtake world food production capacity. Malthus has been scorned and ridiculed in recent decades, as fossil fuel-cranked farming allowed the global population to go vertical. Techno-triumphalist observers who should have known better attributed this to the "green revolution" of bio-engineering. Malthus is back now, along with his outriders: famine, pestilence, and war.

SNIP

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/06/status-quo-oh.html

[electropop]

1. The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse:

Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Condi.

[jgraz]

2. Sorry, Bush is afraid of horses.

[nashville_brook]

7. thinks they're Puma.

[Buzz Clik]

3. Yep. This will be different than Katrina.

1. A cold, wet spring delayed planting in many Midwestern states. Many fields remain unplanted.
2. Flooding has a negative impact on corn, but kills soybeans.
3. Existing contracts for crops as oil and ethanol already has put pressure on the markets.

This will be interesting, kids. The corn that was so plentiful for feeding cattle will not be there in previous quantities. Prices will go up for the corn and all products that depend on the corn. Farmers will suffer tremendously.

[kestrel91316]

6. Cattle shouldn't even be fed corn, anyway!!!!!

Cattle should be grazed on GRASS until slaughter. Grain in the quantities fed to cattle in feedlots is BIOLOGICALLY INAPPROPRIATE.

All the flood-prone areas should be in pasture, not row crops. The only reason grain is fed to cattle is that puts weight (mostly fat) on them FASTER. So those increasing quarterly profits can increase even faster.

Don't get me started.

:rant:

[Buzz Clik]

11. I don't disagree. I was simply commenting on today's reality.

[kestrel91316]

13. I'm sorry. I wasn't yelling at YOU. I was just ranting at the situation.

[Recursion]

14. Yep

And the amount of pasturable land is a lot larger than the amount of tillable land.

Healthy cows live in herds on regularly-rotated pasturage and eat grass. It's the only way to farm in the energy situation we'll be facing soon.

[Frustratedlady]

4. Thanks for pointing out that not all the homes which were flooded were in

a normal floodplain, and that they were NOT required to have flood insurance. I don't think people realize all that has happened. Generally, those who are in the floodplain know they are taking a chance, and you won't hear many complaints from them when a flood occurs. These folks know they will have to replace much of their property on their own nickel, so people should not assume the government is paying for rebuilding to the same or better condition of lost property.

Also, thank you for posting this writing that explains the long range effects of this flood to the economy. I'm wondering how much the contamination of gas and oil tanks, lawn mowers, vehicles, etc., to the farmland, yards and gardens? How long will it take before that is remedied by Mother Nature?

[nashville_brook]

9. i'm amazed at how many otherwise smart people in FL don't get flood insurance

There's hardly an acre any where in FL that isn't flood-able. when you fly over the state, especially central florida, you see just about as much blue as green -- this state is barely above water. most of the new suburban developments with names like Cypress Springs (where I live) are built on "drained" swamps -- you only get cypress in swampy areas. If there's Cypress kness anywhere near your property, you NEED flood insurance. And yet, you'd be hard-pressed to find people here who have bought the insanely cheap policy ($220 a year last I checked). Also, when I asked about flood insurance for our property, our insurance agent had no idea how to go about writing it ("oh, i'll have to research that and get back to you."). fracking amazing.

[ellie]

5. That is incredibly alarming

Thanks for posting the link. I enjoy reading Kuntsler, even though he scares me.

[Frustratedlady]

8. Another thought. People are talking about this year's crop.

We have farmers who have last year's crop in storage at home, but they could not move it, as the elevators were also flooded. So, we would not be able to depend on the stored grain, either.

Also, Quaker Oats lost much of their grain when their storage bins split.

[nashville_brook]

10. that's a good point, not only are the crops lost, but the infrastructure to process

them is also under stress, or water.

[TheWraith]

12. It's Y2K!!!!111one

Oh, wait, that didn't work out for him either. Maybe someday he'll quit fearmongering and actually try to educate himself on the issues.

[JohnyCanuck]

15. High input industrial agriculture and factory farming are unsustainable.

Eating Fossil Fuels
by Dale Allen Pfeiffer

SNIP

In the 1950s and 1960s, agriculture underwent a drastic transformation commonly referred to as the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution resulted in the industrialization of agriculture. Part of the advance resulted from new hybrid food plants, leading to more productive food crops. Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%.4 That is a tremendous increase in the amount of food energy available for human consumption. This additional energy did not come from an increase in incipient sunlight, nor did it result from introducing agriculture to new vistas of land. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers (natural gas), pesticides (oil), and hydrocarbon fueled irrigation.

The Green Revolution increased the energy flow to agriculture by an average of 50 times the energy input of traditional agriculture.5 In the most extreme cases, energy consumption by agriculture has increased 100 fold or more.6

In the United States, 400 gallons of oil equivalents are expended annually to feed each American (as of data provided in 1994).7 Agricultural energy consumption is broken down as follows:

· 31% for the manufacture of inorganic fertilizer

· 19% for the operation of field machinery

· 16% for transportation

· 13% for irrigation

· 08% for raising livestock (not including livestock feed)

· 05% for crop drying

· 05% for pesticide production

· 08% miscellaneous8

Energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retail outlets, and household cooking are not considered in these figures.

To give the reader an idea of the energy intensiveness of modern agriculture, production of one kilogram of nitrogen for fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of from 1.4 to 1.8 liters of diesel fuel. This is not considering the natural gas feedstock.9 According to The Fertilizer Institute (http://www.tfi.org), in the year from June 30 2001 until June 30 2002 the United States used 12,009,300 short tons of nitrogen fertilizer.10 Using the low figure of 1.4 liters diesel equivalent per kilogram of nitrogen, this equates to the energy content of 15.3 billion liters of diesel fuel, or 96.2 million barrels.

Of course, this is only a rough comparison to aid comprehension of the energy requirements for modern agriculture.

In a very real sense, we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow in agriculture. Along the way, there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased 4-fold while crop yields only increased 3-fold.11 Since then, energy input has continued to increase without a corresponding increase in crop yield. We have reached the point of marginal returns. Yet, due to soil degradation, increased demands of pest management and increasing energy costs for irrigation (all of which is examined below), modern agriculture must continue increasing its energy expenditures simply to maintain current crop yields. The Green Revolution is becoming bankrupt.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html