The Fallacy of Reversibility: Why Peak Oil Actually HELPS Industrial Agriculture

A sizeable faction of the people who think peak oil is important, and happening soon enough to care about, think it has big implications for agriculture. And most of them agree on what those implications are: as a society, we are going to have to give up the big combine harvesters, the thunderous power of 275 horsepower tractors, and instead we will have to return to small-scale, hand-labor organic production. Rather than having 2-5% of the working population involved in agriculture, as in most western societies at present, most people will need to be involved in growing food. This is part of the agenda of the relocalization movement, which itself is a recent reincarnation of a long-standing movement for localism.

This argument has never really made sense to me, but my recent explorations of food prices and biofuels have sharpened up my conviction that the thinking behind this position is mistaken. In this piece, I’m going to first document that some influential peak-oilers do in fact believe this, then try to discuss what I think the reasoning is — it’s not usually made very explicit but it depends on something I’m calling the Fallacy of Reversibility. Finally, I’m going to lay out why I don’t think things are going to go the way the proponents of relocalization expect, at least not any time soon.

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