Norman Borlaug, Possibly Greatest Hero of 20th Century, Has Died

I celebrate neither Borlaug’s life nor his death. All his so-called green revolution accomplished was to speed overpopulation to hitherto unthinkable growth levels all across this planet.

Earth’s population grew from approximately 1 billion to 1.6 billion in the 19th century. But in the 20th century, the approximate growth was from 1.6 billion to 6 billion. All that, despite two world wars, big and little holocausts, nakhbas, and other assorted persecutions and calamities.

Most of the problems with life on Earth, including massive decay of the environment, in my judgement are assignable to overpopulation.

Much of that insupportable population increase of some 4.4 billion persons in a single century clearly was assignable to the discovery, exploitation and usage as fuel of a likely one-half of this planet’s fossil-originated energy supplies. When Earth’s fossil fuel resources dwindle and permanently run out in our present century, not a few scientists who study likely after-effects of world peak oil predict a largescale die-off of a significant amount of the population increase that Borlaug’s crop experimentation and research made possible.

Because it never was a case of “feeding the hungry”. In decades to come, when the mists of illusion are blown away, it will be seen in clearer perspective as the instrumentation of enablement for marginal populations to bring much larger populations to the feeding table.

But there will come a time when the fossil-based hydrocarbons no longer will be available for massive use as fertilizers, and at the advent of that certainly, no more green revolutions will be present to be exploited. As hard-hearted as it may sound, death by starvation will overtake hundreds of millions, and then billions.

And the irony of all this, is that in six hundred years, none of epic of self-destruction will be thought of as having had greater consequence in human history than did the black death plagues of the mid-14th century.

Frequently, it is impossible to judge events of such magnitude — including events that already have occurred and those we may expect to occur because of the timing and consequences of inexorable changes — without escaping from our own contemporary mindsets and prejudices.

Some of you reading all this are probably young enough to enable to be alive some 60-70 years from now. If so, I think what I have described above is a long event that will take shape within your lifetimes.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html

http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm

For starters.

I couldn’t care less about their university credentials. Only the facts on which they base their assumptions.

So have yourself a thoroughly enlightening even if positively disheartening read.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

This particular starvation will last as long as the world population remains out of synch with the energy resources necessary to sustain such historically outsized levels which have developed in the past 11 decades. It is hard to say which political influences, if any, have anything at all to do with Earth’s readily locatable and easily extractable energy resources, and the near certitude of their dissipation. The influence, if anything, is the intertial deadweight of governmental and private institutions all around the world, and the fact that most people face unpleasant likelihoods or even certitudes as though they were walking about under the influence of some of narcotic.

What other conclusion could any thinking person operating on the basis of cold logic and reasoning rather than biases and the conventional wisdoms of the world’s consumers? Why don’t you ask yourself why, in the face of extensive and convincing evidence about world peak oil, little or no effort on a planetary scale is being made to stop the burning of what is left of the oil supply for mere transportation and building heating uses, reserving it instead mainly for truly vital uses such as carbon-based fertilizers with which to help feed the planet’s still expanding billions, and for specialized requirements such as plastics production? Biofuels, unlike fossil fuels, are renewable.

No, Mary. In absence of hard evidence of massive and immediate change in all of the above, I agree with those who say we inevitably are headed for the greatest human die-off in the researchable history of the Earth’s human population.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Aside from my widely-known Zionism stuff, I am and always have been eurocentric. But as I am not a religionist, neither am I a racist. So it is culture on which I always focus as the core of any particular civilization. I would in fact have no problem with Europe truly becoming Eurabia, but for the fact of arab and islamic culture. At least insofar as I consider religions largely as culturally derived social artifacts of any given population or civilization.

We both understand that petroleum, natural gas and coal are not the only form of energy on the planet. (I treat these collectively rather than singularly, because any one of these three fossil resources can be converted to serve more or less the same energy related function.) But as we head into autumn 2009, fossil fuels are the most source of energy to power the aircraft, ships, automobiles, and trucks of the world. And where electric power is used in place of fossil fuels for transportation purposes, that power is mostly generated by turbines that burn fossil fuels. Major exceptions, of course, are the great hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, and increasingly, hitherto-exotic sources such as solar, wind and steam generated by heat along the earth’s great geologic plates. And ultimately, putting to better use the sunlight from Earth’s own star may well provide an energy resource beside which fossil fuels pale in comparative significance.

And because we are living in the present, we must deal with the problems of the present as well as those we can predict for the future.

If the graphs concerning world oil production and expected levels of production for upcoming decades is even close to accuracy, then most of the world’s population is headed for trouble. Much of the world’s producable croppage will be diverted to use as a more or less direct replacement of number 2 diesel oil. Fortunately, diesel engines are approximately one-third more efficient than their gasoline equivalents, and diesel fuel, requires less refining than gasoline. If I am not mistaken, about 40 percent of Europe’s fuel supplies are diesel, and it has been noted that in Germany, for example, thrifty housewives buy Canola cooking oil off supermarket shelves for use as fuel. Mainly, one would imagine, because the taxes on foodstuffs are kept purposely low, and those on fuels purposely prohibitive.

But a lot of countries and entire civilizations are becoming motorized, and their usage of gasoline and petrodiesel for transportation is much of the reason that fossil fuel consumption increases each year at a steady and significant rate. Simultaneous with that, there is strong evidence which shows that most of the known petroleum sources are in the not too long-term process of peaking, then starting the again not too long-term process of running dry.

So as long as all of us on this third rock from the Sun are as dependent as we are on fossil fuels, we all are floating about on a flotilla of Titanics all headed — together or separately — for the same fatal field of icebergs.

China, to the credit of the intelligence and foresightedness of its national leadership, long has practiced a stringent level of population control. I know more about that then I do about Japan, east Asia, Thailand and Singapore, but I would assume the form and productiveness of their present economic structures have had some effect on birthrates.

Mary, your question was whether I think all this is a good thing or a bad thing. I haven’t answered that question, because good or bad has little or no relationship to megatrends such as we have been discussing. What happens is that we all adapt to the world in which we live our separate, communal, national or international lives.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Dishman,

T Boone Pickens thinks oil will not be so incredibly cheap much longer. Maybe you and I are better educated than him. But T Boone has made hundreds of millions of dollars in the energy industry, and I think he knows what he’s talking about. That’s why he is investing so much of his money and time in gigantic wind-powered electrical power generation. Which is the most significant use for the Texas panhandle since they planted Amarillo there.

Malthus never talked or wrote about the discovery, total dependence and looming disappearance of petroleum and its related fossil fuels. Maybe we would all view him with a little more respect if he were expounding in our era as an Oxbridge don, backed up by significant theses based on studies of the actual depletion of the world’s oil fields.

I never have written that I think the technology of tomorrow will be a linear progression of the technology of today. It could be a wonderland. Equally possible is that our grandchildren or great-grandchildren will be living in a 21st century equivalent of the dark ages into which western Europe sank after the western Roman Empire broke up in the 5th century.

Polywell Fusion? Solar power satellites? Mini-nuclear reactors? When will I be able to hike over to Sears Roebuck and buy myself a Kenmore Model T Polywell Fusion on which to cook a meal, heat my house, warm the water for my daily shower, etc? I bought a VW Jetta TDI diesel in March 2006. The best warranty that I could get from VW of America — then or now — limits me to use of B5 (5 percent biodiesel, 95 percent petrodiesel. But their Jettas in Germany and much of the rest of Europe will burn up to B100, and they are designed to handle it.

The hoped for miracles of the future are jim dandy. But I don’t believe such stuff until I can drive it home from the dealership, download it from Microsoft or whomever, or pick one up at Menards or Home Depot. So wake me up when the great technological fix finally arrives.

Meantime, if society starts falling on its collective ass when sweet Brent crude hits $400 per barrel on its way up to $800, a whole lot of us in this country that purposely wiped out most of our metropolitan rail-based transportation systems — courtesy of General Motors, Firestone Tire and Rubber, and Ike’s great new american autobahn system — will be finding every kind of difficulture just driving to Menards or Home Depot, to say nothing of commuting from large outcounty suburbs into central city jobs. For such an otherwise well-ordered society such as ours, we never gave much thought to appropriate city and regional planning.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Dishman,

I am a man neither of beliefs, unbeliefs, or hopes. My concerns solely deal with observable data and long-term planning to overcome or at least alleviate problems arising from inevitable major changes that affect life on our planet. And I note that the researchers on fossil fuels depletion and its effects on world agriculture never mention Malthus.

The central problem they allude to is that much of modern food-producing agriculture is artificial, and depends on significant amounts of fertilizer derived from these fossil fuels, plus diesel fuel and gasoline to power the machinery used to cultivate and harvest the crops, plus a lot more such fuels to power the food processing plants in which the crops are turned into edibles, and yet much more fuel to move all the pre-processed and post-processed foods from farm fields to processing plants, from processing plants to distribution centers, from distribution centers to local markets, from local markets to consumers’ homes.

Possibly it has occurred to you that unless there are means at hand to fulfill all these modern industrialized steps with little or no interference, the large urban populations that comprise much and possibly the bulk of the world’s present population, find themselves hungry, then starving, then victims of mass death. Precisely that happened in Leningrad (now once again Saint Petersburg) in northwestern Russia in the winter of 1941-1942, when the invading german armies purposely blockaded the great city rather than attempting to occupy it. About half the population died of starvation and related effects.

When and if there ever is a serious breakdown of the transportation system — including breakdowns caused by a serious lack of fuel — then this would become at least a serious local emergency and possibly a global one. When the fuel supplies that sustained the growth of power of all the major societies in the 20th century shrinks and possibly disappears, organized urban society itself is doomed to shrink, and in many ways fully collapse. Nor will there then be any global power with means at hand to offer any assistance. Each such country, including the United States, will be far too busy attempting to reorganize our local, regional and national transportation systems so as to maintain this country on a unified basis.

Instead of drooling over the meanness of it all from the perspective of some long dead economist such as Malthus, I suggest that concerned people everywhere begin immediately to consider long-range solutions to problems almost certain will accompany the end of oil.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

What you really ought to be doing, if your are concerned about the real likelihood of massive starvation of human populations and the equally real possibility of the disintegration of civilization itself.

The answer, in my judgement, is population control. But no civilization has undertaken such steps with the exception of China. Because of that, I think China will better handle the events that will beset most of the world, when the time comes. When that times, democracy will cast aside and forgotten in the general re-arrangements to assure survival.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI