The standard of living in China for the average individual is much lower than it is here in the USA especially in the rural country side. Also it is much easier to go back to something when you haven't traveled that far from the starting point. Also lest us not forget that China is still a totalitarian regime and has no qualms about destroying the environment or displacing millions of people (Three Gorges Dam). While the Chinese attempts at being more self sufficient are laudable their export driven economy does not bode well for an era of waning oil.

Oil has also increased the carrying capacity of farmland. I worked around and with the Amish for the past 8 years or so. Their farming methods are similar to those used 80 years ago or more. It's painfully obvious that going back to the old method of farming will result in much higher food prices and possible starvation. The yields for the Amish are at best half of a modern farm. Average dairy production is half to a quarter of what a similar sized herd of cows. Not to mention horses eat up a lot of extra land that could be productive farm land otherwise. Their farms are much more sensitive to weather changes because plowing and harvesting is so much slower. Task that take minutes with powered machinery take hours by hand. Large families are required to make such farms work. Obviously large farm families worked in the past when the population was much smaller. To think we could go back to that now and not run into issues of starvation is pure fantasy.

Also food will have to be much more expensive for smaller farms to survive. The only farmers who can compete with mainstream commercial operations on price are the Amish who use child labor and live like it's the early 1900s. Very small farms rely on niche markets where price is secondary to other considerations. An increase in food prices means less disposable income for other goods and services. It's part of the reason why food is so heavily subsidized, it's a form of economic stimulus.

Endless growth is not possible on a finite planet. But decreasing the population to advert an ecological/energy crisis along with decreasing consumption does not make for a growing economy. We just had a great example of what decreased consumption does for the economy. People lost jobs and our government along with those across the world (including China) have been trying to pump in various economic stimuli to restart the consumption machine ever since.

We need to do something but until people ditch the idea of instant comfort and embrace financial sacrifice we are indeed doomed to experience a hard lesson in the realities of resource depletion.

That's an unknown really. Cutting it out instantaneously, yes that would cause problems, but we know it won't happen. But I bet that if we to a phased and sustained effort to revive trains, use buses, revitalize urban centers with the idea that they should be walkable, cycleable, public transportational, and car ownership discouraged, that we will actually find that our economy is stimulated. The money that previously went into cars would go instead into real estate, dining, sports events, music, etc. Think of one of the most car-hostile cities in this country, New York.

I really wish I could be vegetarian, for both ecological and religious reasons. Not to mention that meat just grosses me out a bit. But sadly, I'm allergic to every non-meat source of protein except eggs -- soy, milk, nuts, beans, most seeds and grains. The best compromise I've been able to find is to insist on humanely raised meat, grass-fed and organic when possible.

I live in the country, I suspect you do not. My perspective of car ownership and oil dependency is colored by this. The lack of affordable oil will kill off rural areas. There is evidence of such now. Before the age of auto transport there was a huge disparity of the standard of living between a rural area and a major metropolitan area. There will be again once oil rises to unaffordable levels. Also the automotive industry employs a lot of people here in the USA. Compare that to the bicycle industry whose manufacturing base is almost exclusively overseas. I'd bet most of the parts on your as bike as well as mine came from half way around the world.

There is nothing wrong with trying to do what you mentioned for cities in your post. To do otherwise in a densely settled area would be inefficient. That said areas that are thickly settled like New York City never had a big need for a car. NYC was designed to be more people friendly simply because of it's age. Newer developments are designed for the car which while short sighted perhaps is reality. In these newer cities you will loose economic output simply because the manpower of maintaining and running an infrastructure that is more mass transit/pedestrian/cyclist friendly requires fewer people to make such a system work. Gas stations, car dealerships, auto repair, ect all help to drive economic activity in such areas.

Now in rural areas discouraging car ownership would effectively be signing an economic death sentence to such areas. It is normal to have to drive 30 miles or more one way to get to work where I live. Jobs pay very little, 10 dollars an hour is considered to be a good wage :rolleyes: I do not need to be an expert in economic theory to figure out what happens when you take away the one thing that has made rural living comfortable. I see it directly, when fuel goes up it makes everything more expensive. Nothing is locally made anymore so anything in stores has most likely been shipped thousands of miles from it's point of origin.

Every penny that fuel goes up is a penny less that rural individuals can put into their local economy. There are no good solutions for rural areas, just ones that may hurt less than others. I accept this and don't have a problem with it. I just have a problem with people who think that somehow baring some sort of revolutionary new energy source, we'll be able to pull through this without some discomfort. That very notion is what is holding up any serious effort to avoid serious complications from environmental and resource problems.

I have seen a couple of studies that seem to indicate that the Amish farms are actually more productive per acre than many factory farms. Mechanization has allowed fewer people to produce more food, but they are not nearly as efficient.

My daughter is in an Environmental program where they are teaching large organic farming techniques, it is labor intensive, however crop yields are close to what you get from the mechanized factory farms, without the massive chemical applications. Yes the cost of food is going to rise. Currently the US has one of the lowest percentages of income spent on food ~12% vs 15% in the EU and 46% in Pakistan. Interestingly enough that number has dropped in the US from in the past, in 1949 it was 22% of income. Americans are notorious for eating out.

No matter what happens it is going to take a re-education as well as a skill shift to survive, people that are flexible and willing to accept change are going to come out way ahead of the game, the ones that insist on things staying the same and expecting to have cheap energy forever are the ones that are going to be in trouble.

Aaron :)
http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=239780

I'd like to know how your studies account for the steady increase of yield per acre for the past 100 years. If Amish farming practices were superior no one would have switched to tractors.

I pick up milk from Amish farms. I know I've posted this elsewhere but I figure you would be interested in seeing it too just to understand my background in this.

http://x1e.xanga.com/289f24e4c733523...o185802147.jpg

Those are milk cans. I worked in that plant for about 5 years. I also had my own milk route I operated for a while but now work for someone else who has a route. Any way a cow at a typical Amish farm produces about 40 pounds of milk. Some are much lower. Compare this to right around 60 for most farms. There are some dairy farms that can get 80-90 pounds per cow. This is without hormones, just good genetics and good farming practices. Keep in mind horses need to eat too. It takes at least 5 acres per horse to be self sufficient for feed. Most Amish have 4 horses which is approximately 20 acres of land. Also there is a lot of human power to feed too. It takes a lot more land to provide the energy needs for an Amish farm versus the typical farm.

Also the cans themselves are much more inefficient. A truck typically gets about 7-8 mpg on a route. Even the largest can trucks can only haul about 20,000 pounds worth of milk. A bulk tanker can go up to 55,000 pounds of milk. Fuel per pound of milk transported is no where near as efficient. The quality of the milk is much lower as well which has to do mainly with not being able to properly refrigerate the milk. Milking into buckets is not very sanitary, when a cow urinates or defecates some of those waste products invariably wind up in the milk. This typically does not happen very often when using milkers and a pipeline. This is why can milk is the lowest grade milk out there.

It takes a lot more land to produce food the way the Amish do it. Oil is like having a bunch of man hours in a bottle. The work you can do by yourself with a gallon of fuel makes you more productive not less. Also the Amish are not fuel free, more like fuel light. They still have some stationary engines for certain task like loading silo or threshing.

Labor is key here. It's pretty obvious why the USA used to be an agrarian society versus what we have now. It simply took a lot more people to produce food. Labor in the past was free (children) but we can not have large farm families with the population we have now. That leaves having to pay a lot of people. Food will be very expensive. The other option is to have some mechanization that is ran on fuels grown on the farm or bio mass (such as a gasifier). Instead of growing food for draft animals who eat 365 days a year one could grow fuel (or scavenge bio-mass) for a tractor/rotor tiller that only "eats" a week or two out of the year.

Agreed.

All the more reason that we should be investing heavily in public transportation and downplaying the use of cars. It's the urban areas where cars create the greatest problems. They really are badly equipped to deal with an urban environment. And we need to encourage more urban growth and less suburban.

Unpave paradise and tear up the parking lots.

Interesting post. It does seem that food prices would rise, but at the same time I wonder what a cheap food policy actually accomplishes. I wonder if more dollars flowed into the hands of local farmers if that wouldn't ricochet throughout the economy. More labor intensive techniques, higher prices... but more jobs, more money staying in the community.

I really don't know how this works, but I also wonder if the cheap food policy is -- in the long run -- just a short term benefit that we pay for in the long run. Many of the farming techniques, particularly factory farms that are not too careful about their waste output, seem like they are going to be destructive in the long run.

Overall, for myself, I'd be willing to pay more money for food, even if it took some money out of my electronics budget. I could keep my computer a few extra years. I could scrounge some bicycle parts. I could do without cable television... but it sure would be nice if we had a secure food system that was not to the detriment of my grandchildren's lives.

Good thread! A couple random thoughts on the last few interesting posts:

1. When I read the statement that "nothing can replace oil," I think that's literally correct. No ONE thing can replace oil. But I expect that a combination of several things can replace oil, or at least someday will.
2. The necessity of private cars in rural areas is partially due to the fact that many people living in rural areas are living the same lifestyle they would be living in the city or small town. Only a very small percentage of rural dwellers are actually farmers any more.
3. Recent studies suggest that most Amish men (and many of the women) work at jobs off the farm. So evidently they are very productive, even using a lot of non-motorized equipment.
4. Sustainable agriculture is not the same as tracitional Amish agriculture. Sustainable agriculture is actually more innovative and more scientifically advanced than the standard industrial farming practices of the US.
5. Sustainable agriculture is sometimes more labor intensive than standard agriculture. In some parts of the world this makes it more expensive, in other areas it's cheaper. It all depends on the local cost of labor versus machinery and other inputs.
6. More labor intensive farming would provide jobs for people in developing countries and help reverse the trend of mass migration from rural areas to the huge new metropolises. Sustainable agriculture is about sustaining the people as well as the land, so we would hope to see better living and working conditions for millions of people if sustainable systems were set up.

There used to be a lot more agricultural based employment in this area. The near by town where I live has an old industrial section that is almost completely abandoned. About 90 percent of those old businesses were agriculturally related. The biggest blow was when the rail road company decided to rip out the train tracks. Rail is still the preferred method of transporting massive amounts of grain. Also there are small cheese factories that dot the countryside that are now converted houses/businesses. The reasoning behind this was to have places that were close enough by so one could transport milk by horse without spoiling. Also there used to be many local canaries for canning local produce. A lot of older people will tell stories about how when they were a kid how they'd grow a garden to sell to these places.

If you've ever went out to the Dakotas you'll start noticing a lot of abandoned farms and towns. As farming has gotten more efficient it takes less people to do it. Those areas only had agriculture to support them and never had a manufacturing base like Wisconsin does. It's obvious that ag did employ a lot more people at one time.

Replace oil in it's functionality yes, but not in it's convenience. What I find interesting is how farms used to operate machinery before the advent of REA and reliable fuel distribution. There were many "off-grid" farms back in the teens and twenties. They used large wind generators to charge batteries. My friend's farm has remnants of this and the stuff occasionally is up for sale on craigslist or local auctions. Also tractors and stationary engines up until the 30s could be made to run a variety of fuels including alcohol. Alcohol could be brewed up by the farmer. Not very convenient but it was less work than throwing up feed for horses.

True. I've talked to a lot of older people plus my grandparents lived on farms too. Up until the 80s when the farm economy crashed people who lived in town worked in town and people who lived in the country farmed. I used to have a collection of old for sale ads from the 40s and 50s. When I'd look at cars for sale a lot of them had 5000-6000 miles on them, even ones that were 5-6 years old. People used to drive a lot less. I'm thinking part of this is because trains used to have passenger service to pretty much any town you would want to go to. My Great Grandfather used to take the train in the 30s and 40s from his farm to work down in Milwaukee (300 miles away) during the week to help make ends meet on the farm. My friend's Grandpa used to take the train up north during the winter to work as a logger.

When I was in high school I had to interview an older person about what they remembered about the area. It was very interesting. The lady I talked to was in her 90s. She told me that back in the teens and twenties roads were very poor. People started getting cars when she was in her teens but used them very locally or to drive to the train station. The train would go to bigger towns so folks would take them to get things they couldn't get in the smaller community. There were a lot more small towns then too which most have died off. You would have a somewhat larger hub community served by the railroad and then little towns where local farmers could pick up odds and ends or go to the very local bar (a favorite pastime in beer drinking Wisconsin). The car and good roads killed off those small communities because it was no longer an all day buggy ride to a hub community.

That's because their 5-8 kids are doing all the work on the farm.

It will definitely make things more expensive here. No one is willing to work for a couple of dollars a day in this country. In places that are truly third world where human power is cheaper than machines those areas never really mechanized in the first place.

I've read that in some cases food aid from the USA caused a lot of issues with rural economies in third world nations. When people got free food it put the local farmers out of business. The focus should have been on better farming practices along with some food aid so people could avoid needing it in the future.

But we only learned half of the lesson. Maybe we reduced direct food aid and replaced it with teaching "modern" agriculture as well as providing tractors and combines to developing countries. But instead of exporting our version of agricultural practices to these countries, we should be helping them to develop methods that are more practical in their local regions, as well as more sustainable.

Also, we should have wide discussions on whether we westerners should be willing to spend a few more pennies on food in order to better sustain farmers around the world.

Good link. I too have my doubts about the veracity of "Gasland." Unfortunately, the EPA report on fracking hazards isn't due out for a couple years. In the meantime we're at the mercy of biased claims from both sides of the fracking debate.

But I don't think drinking water contamination is the biggest risk of fracking. I'm more concerned that fracking is making hydrocarbon energy cheap again. A huge amount of natural gas is coming onto the world markets right now, and it's available at very chepa prices compared to other energy sources. Unfortunately, natural gas does emit CO2 and other pollutants==even if to a lesser extent than coal and petroleum. Also, as I mentioned earlier, it's this cheap natural gas that's making the recovery and refining of oil sands and oil shale feasible. And that is a very scary idea!

I wouldn't say it's entirely cheap natural gas making this feasible. The higher the price of oil is a big factor in the fracking and oil shale boom. With out high priced oil the overhead involved would not be worth the effort. Although in some ways I'd glad they are using natural gas, otherwise we'd be burning coal instead which would be much worse.

Doesn't the shale oil boom depend on reasonable natural gas prices? Some of the energy estimates per-barrel of oil are staggering.

Their only other choice is to use coal--and I don't know if even the Canadian government would approve of that. So I agree that they probably need the cheap natural gas to both extract the tar and refine it into gasoline.