Peak Everything: Eight Things We Are Running Out Of And Why
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 05.27.08
Getty Images
Why is everything running out at the same time? We did a series on Planet Green where we looked at why those basic things that we take for granted, like water, food and fuel are getting expensive and scarce, all at once.
Peak Corn:
Blame Earl Butz. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford's Secretary of Agriculture brought in the Farm Bill that dramatically increased the amount of corn produced in America. He encouraged farmers to "get big or get out," and to plant crops like corn "from fence row to fence row." Further billions in subsidies to farmers encouraged production, and soon America was awash in cheap grain, and with it cheap meat. Food costs as a portion of the American diet dropped to the lowest level in history; we became corn. Michael Pollan writes: "If you eat industrially, you are made of corn. It holds together your McNuggets, it sweetens your soda pop, it fattens your meat, it is everywhere. It is fed to us in many forms, because it is cheap- a dollar buys you 875 calories in soda pop but only 170 in fruit juice. A McDonalds meal was analyzed as almost entirely corn." ::More
Peak Oil
In 1956, American geophysicist M. King Hubbert calculated that the rate of production of fossil fuels would peak in the United States in about 1970 and then start declining. He was laughed out of the conference room. However, ultimately he was proven correct; now we are probably at the worldwide Hubbert's Peak. A hundred years ago you just stuck a pipe in the ground and the oil rushed out; now it is not so easy, and America's oil comes from deep under the ocean, is cooked out of rocks in Alberta, or is purchased from nations with security issues. Now the United States, Canada, Norway, and the United Kingdom are well past their peak, while Saudi Arabia and Russia are approaching it. Oil is still being found (there was a recent big hit in Brazil, and there are thought to be big reserves in the Arctic.) but it harder to get at and a lot more expensive. ::More
Peak Dirt
Really, Peak Dirt- the world is losing soil 10 to 20 times faster than it is replenishing it. Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe tells us that dirt is complicated stuff, made from sand or silt, then years of plants adding nutrition, bugs and worms adding their excrement, dying and rotting.
"The resulting organic matter feeds a whole underground ecology that aerates the soil, fixes nutrients, and makes it more hospitable for plant life, and over time the process feeds back on itself. If the soil does not wash away or get parched by drought, it very gradually thickens. It takes tens of thousands of years to make 15 centimeters of topsoil, about 6 inches' worth." ::more
Peak Gas
The headline in our local paper today: Natural gas bills to soar by 20 per cent. What is going on?
Blame the price of oil. Everyone knows that the price of oil is way up, but it is an international commodity. Natural gas, on the other hand, usually is subject to more local rules of supply and demand in North America alone. However it does follow the market. Director of Energy Policy Malini Giridhar of Enbridge Gas told the Star: "Oil trades between 6 to 12 times the price of natural gas,The price ratio is now 11 times, which is close to the upper end of the range." Commodities markets are pushing up natural gas in reaction to higher oil prices, she said, rather than to gas supply and demand. ::More
Peak Water
We have lots of water in the States, so much that we can let it just flow over Niagara Falls, right? How did it get to the point where there are such problems in Georgia and the Southwest?
Blame Willis Carrier. Before he invented air conditioning,not many people lived in the American Southwest, it was just too hot for much of the year. It was only after World War II, when air conditioning became common and affordable, that the mass migration of people and industry could happen from cooler Northern states to California, Nevada and Arizona. Without AC, Atlanta and Florida are almost uninhabitable. ::More
Peak Electricity
It was a cool summer in 2003; it wasn't until the middle of August that we got a serious heat wave. By then, all of the air conditioners were pumping full blast and the electrical grid was running at almost full capacity. On August 14, a branch fell on a power line near Cleveland, Ohio. A software bug failed to trigger alarms, and power started surging through other lines, causing a cascading failure that shut down 100 power plants across the Northeastern United States and Canada. In some parts of the affected area, it took almost a week before things were back to normal.
Has the system been improved since then? Do we have additional generating capacity and more transmission lines? No, we still have what Bill Richardson called "a superpower with a third-world electricity grid." ::More
Peak Rice
They are rationing rice in Costco and Wal-Mart; People have started panic buying and hoarding. In Manila, they post armed guards around it. The price of rice has trebled, and the World Bank says 33 countries are facing civil unrest. What is going on?
Blame rats. First of all, most of the rice in America is sold to Asians for whom it is a staple; it really doesn't take much of a panic to run out of Basmati rice over here. Most rice is eaten in the country where it is grown, and only 6 percent of the rice crop is traded around the world. In some countries, as much as 17 percent of the crop is eaten by rats; so good secure rice storage might be the first place to start. ::More
Peak Metal
When my dad was a teenager, his first job at the in-law's family auto parts company was to retrieve the batteries from cars that they bought before they were stolen for their lead content. A generation later, you had to pay an extra tax to the government to get rid of the batteries. Now, we are back to a time my late father would recognize- that metals are too scarce and too valuable to just leave around unprotected.
They just built a new soccer stadium in Toronto, Canada, with lovely aluminum bleachers; before the stadium even opened, someone unbolted the seats and carried them away. In Scotland, the "Great Drain Robbery" involves shipping manhole covers to China. In India, eight people have died, falling into open manholes after their covers were stolen. In Baltimore, thieves cut down and carted away 136 aluminum lamp posts. In California thieves can remove a platinum-filled catalytic converter in ninety seconds. Copper? Stealing it is a growth industry all over the world, as it hits four bucks a pound- two years ago it was a buck and a quarter. ::More
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You forgot Peak Helium and Peak Hops. Beer drinkers won't even be able to cry in the beer over that one. Oh, the irony.
I can´t believe this article is trying to blame the fact that we are running out of recsources on anything other than ourselves. Earl Butz, Carrier, rats, seriously? How about our own consumer decisions?
LA: you might want to hit the links and see the rest of the reasons, there is a lot more that involves consumer decisions.
But we don't make our decisions in a vacuum; if corn is cheap then people will eat it; if air conditioning is cheap people will move to hot, dry parts of the country. Don't blame consumers for making what are logical choices under the circumstances presented to them.
Exactly: blame the shortages on too many humans!
There are too many people, that's for sure.
But a big problem lurking behind all of these is investment dollars and a lack of investment supply – even more so than a lack or a peak of any of these items. It used to be that people were investing in real estate. Before that, I it was the dot coms. Now that the housing bubble has burst, there’s a bunch of money floating around looking for a home. Many of these items—yes, even corn and rice futures—are now the en vogue items of speculative investment. Where all this “money” came from that’s looking for a home is actually an interesting story. I’d recommend watching Money as Debt:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
But I digress. You can see this very clearly with gold, platinum and palladium, but also in other metals like copper. It's abundantly obvious in the case of crude oil -- as the price for crude oil now is as frothy with speculation as it is because it is a real commodity that is probably dwindling in supply.
While I’m not saying we aren’t or won’t seen the peak of these things – I am saying that there are commodity markets exacerbating the supply function for the market for all of these items. This isn’t so complicated a subject, and I think people should be thinking about it.
sorry-- should edit: Dirt. Dirt has nothing to do with commodity markets. Peak dirt is just all our top soil washing into our oceans with a healthy supply of pesticides and herbicides and causing some nice dead zones. I think, though, that's the only exception to the list that isn't being affected by "the market."
Quantitatively, Peak Gas is incorrect. Natural gas is depleted linearly in complete opposition to a Hubert depletion distribution.
If dirt is not a commodity, and as such can't be included in the list, as per stevejusts definition, then perhaps it should be peak phosphate, which is also rapidly being depleted.
Mack's got the right idea -- people consume more when things are cheaper. Water (something I know about) is traditionally priced at ZERO -- people only pay the cost of delivery in their water bills. Now that water is getting scarce, water utilities don't know what to do (they call for conservation, etc.)
What they need to do is raise prices -- by 500%. Check out this, this or this post from my blog.
Three other things we're low on: fish, bees, and frogs. Of those, the fish shortage has the biggest impact.
This all has to do with over consumption, but over consumption is addicting. How can countries like the US and Canada kick the habit and put smart controls on valuable resources such as oil? (There are much, much better uses for oil then running cars...OMG !!!!1!!one!!1!!!!!). Most people won't want to walk to work when they've driven their whole life. Without clearing this hurdle, all other initiatievs will amount to moot.
I'm not too well versed on these issues, but the article made me hopeful in that scarcity/higher costs will finally drive the mainstream into less wasteful practices, and hopefully that will move the market towards less wasteful products.
The common thread - the item that ties these all together and makes them feel like they're all hitting at the same time - is awareness. And with heightened awareness will come better consumer decisions, which will pull the system back into equilibrium. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
While there is some useful and interesting information in this series of articles, the slant is who to blame, which is negative and irresponsible journalism. Take out your anger elsewhere... like over an expensive beer. I want to see factual, researched and solution-oriented articles. Blaming won't bring change.
What about peak intelligence?
I think you guys are taking the who to blame bit way too seriously...In my opinion, the auther is not actually blaming the inventer, but actually showing how stupid some people are by blaming anyone but themselves.
On energy related matters, including peak oil, I must suggest The Oil Drum and Energy Bulletin as the two go-to places to learn more about energy and sustainability.
http://theoildrum.com
http://energybulletin.net
to learn more about peak oil, here's a great TOD primer:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4041
We need to learn as much as we can about energy.
Why are we so committed to believing that there are too many people?
Consider that our bodies consume food at a rate of about 120 watts. If we were robots we'd use no more power than our desktop computers or our game consoles. Even witht he tremendous amount of energy we use the fertilize, irrigate, and ship our food we are under 1 kW each. Now of course we know of no way to make food using electrical energy and raw materials, but it could happen someday.
If we wanted to desalinate our water- all our water, hundreds of thousands of gallons each a year, it would take about a kilowatt of power per person.
We use on average less than 3 kW of power for transportation of ourselves and the goods we buy (work it out from gallons of gas used and conversion efficiencies).
Lighting and heating and cooling our homes takes at most another 5 kW. I'm being generous here- for homes with any sort of decent energy efficiency it would be significantly less.
Manufacturing, recreation, and construction remain, and I don't know how to estimate those. Let's be generous and say on average half an object's consumption is embedded energy. Than people, on average, would use 20 kW each. To supply this to 6 billion people would take 120 Terrawatts of power, or .1% of the solar power reaching the earth daily. And notice that in developed countries, a demographic transition ends exponential population growth. It is likely that world population will level off well before reaching 20 billion people. So is it so hard to believe we could blanket our uninhabitable deserts in solar farms of whatever sort and sustainably, renewably provide for ourselves?
To clarify: when I mentioned using electrical energy to produce food, I wasn't talking about some far-off star trek future. I was hypothesizing that we might be able to use our energy to, say, produce light to allow us to farm on every floor of a 100 story building. Bam- 100-fold more arable land, with no land conversion needed (hence minimal ecological impact).
I agree that too many people is at the root of the problem. I disagree that simply industrializing the rest of the world is the best plan to cap population growth. I live in an industrialized society, and I'm not all that keen about where I think its headed. If you ask me, I think we're headed for a Peak space problem.
The bottom line....we, as humans need to make better decisions in our everyday lives. There are too many of us that seek instant gratification, I admit to being one of those people; we need to think long term, even if we will not reap the benefits of our choices. This boils down to sustainability, which in itself is a level of consciousness. When we make choices, let us think twice before acting. Simple physics says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Whatever we do though, don't blame our thug overlords. They're here to protect us and solve all the problems, after all they have the guns and prisons to make it happen. Or so the story always goes, and the emperor remains fully clothed.
I agree that too many people is at the root of the problem. I disagree that simply industrializing the rest of the world is the best plan to cap population growth. I live in an industrialized society, and I'm not all that keen about where I think its headed. If you ask me, I think we're headed for a Peak space problem.
it's not that we are running out of these commodities, that's only part of the problem...
the real problem we are using more than the earth can possibly provide.
time to rein in all those excesses or there will be lights out arccoss the world!
Why, of all pictures that could've been used to represent rice, would you choose that one?
LA: Because my point in the article was that the rice shortages can be seen as being political in nature, and rice has always been political. Showing a guard protecting Vietnamese rice farmers during the Vietnam War seemed appropriate.
"I can´t believe this article is trying to blame the fact that we are running out of recsources on anything other than ourselves. Earl Butz, Carrier, rats, seriously? How about our own consumer decisions?"
Don't forget our own reproductive practices: peak metal, for example, would not be a problem if the population was not growing -- we could recycle the metal we have already dug up again and again. Me? I'm only going to have 1 or 2 children, if any -- any more than that overpopulates the planet. Consumer decision and reproductive practices: excessive greeding and excessive breeding. It's time to cut back our wasteful lifestyles in favor of modest, sustainable ones, and cut our breeding down to a level that the Earth will like. (For a while we should probably breed at _less_ than 2 kids/couple so the population will "die off" to a sustainable level via attrition. But then we need to increase the breeding some afterwards so we don't all die off.). And then switch to renewable for our energy. It would be possible then because there would not be so many people and the people would be modest in their energy usage instead of splurging like they are now.
It does not have to be all doom and gloom, but we do have to Change. But real change is not something people like. Although people seem to hoot and toot about "change" -- when it comes to *real* changes, where they have to *give something up* they are too attached to -- they avoid it like the plague. Big giveups are even worse. Never mind that in most cases, when one finally does give up something, and gets used to not having it, it actually is not as bad as one may have thought initially. I would not be surprised that if sufficiently far after the end of the age of greed, not just the age of petroleum, (after the tough crash had been worked through) people's lifespans were longer, not shorter, due to having less materialistic stress. (In addition, not haivng all those petrochemicals in food would make it much healther, too. Cancer rates would probably be down with less carcinogenic substances out there.)
Our choice is this: we can either change now, and have less pain, or wait and wait and be forced to change, with a great deal of pain.
We can talk and talk but nothing will change. Only action brings change. We indulge ourselves. We want to impress but we are not fully cognitive of that which we wish to impress. It could not occur to many of us that what we say is said to fulfil an empty ideal that is born of the conditioning we have encountered throughout our lives and that problem is further compounded by our very nature. What makes us tick? Father, mother, friends, piers, rivals, enemies?
Somewhere there is self gratification but also there is that which was handed to us. Can we be asked to right the wrongs of our fathers and mothers when they them selves were just children when they made their mistakes, partly taught, partly imbued by human nature and so on by their forebares?
The problem runs deep because many do not know how to put right that which is wrong when everything we were lead to believe made us feel it was right. We are all confused children to some degree. Unfortunately some of the less confused children may have character problems which we can barely concieve. And they may be the ones that take their sustainance from the insustainability of others.
I cannot say that evil exists in humans as much as I cannot say it does as I believ even the most ferfenct harmer causes harm while blind to the full impact and gravity of their actions. Even those who take glee from the suffering of others does so blindly not in a worldly sense but spiritually. They will pay a spiritual price but perhaps not before we pay an earthly one. We have a choice. We have a voice.
What may be needed is the smart children to lead the others with less selfish intent; perhaps intent is not the word as the error is a subcounscious one on the part of all.
Change and the ability to facilitate it is there. Evolution depends on adaptation. It is time to evolve. To do so we must listen to something other than the inner voice we are comfortable with. Listen to deeper instincts as survival was one of our earliest wisdoms. Those who feel so inclined to survive really do now need to stand and be counted. You will have friends ;-)
Well thats my view anyway x
_Dirt: The Story of Civilizations_ is an excellent book on the current and several *previous* collapses of empires as their topsoil washed away. David Montgomery argues that this is a direct outcome of food becoming a tradeable commodity so that farmland is an investment; in a bad (ecological or economic) year, farmers take up unsustainable practices to pay money interest with soil capital: this makes the soil weaker, and the cycle accelerates.
It might be that we're running out of everything at once because we're so good at using one thing to make up deficits in another -- we could replace soil with hydroponic greenhouses, if we had the materials to build them and the energy to heat them and the water to flush them with.