Peak Oil is You
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Page added on February 2, 2015
Forget peak oil; we’ve reached peak everything
Peak oil is so last year. Now we can worry about peak everything: peak food, peak soil, peak fertilizer, even peak bees.
Let’s start small. We depend on bees to pollinate plants that account for about one-third of the world’s food supply, but since 2006 bee colonies in the United States have been dying off at an unprecedented rate. More recently the same “colony collapse disorder” has appeared in China, Egypt, and Japan.
Many suspect that the main cause is a widely used type of pesticides called neonicotinoids, but the evidence is not yet conclusive. The fact remains that one-third of the American bee population has disappeared in the past decade. If the losses spread and deepen, we may face serious food shortages.
Then there’s peak fertilizer, or more precisely peak phosphate rock. Phosphorus is a critical ingredient of fertilizer, and it is the eightfold increase in the use of fertilizers that has enabled us to triple food production worldwide from about the same area of land in the past sixty years.
At the moment we are mining about 200 million tonnes of phosphate rock a year, and the global reserve that could be mined at a reasonable cost with current technology is estimated at about 16 billion tonnes. At the current level of production it won’t run out entirely for 80 years, but the increasing demand for fertilizers to feed the growing population means that phosphate production is rising fast.
As with peak oil, the really important date is not when there are no economically viable phosphate rock reserves left, but when production starts to fall. Peak phosphate is currently no more than 40 years away—or much less, if fertilizer use continues to grow. After that, it’s back to organic fertilizers, which mainly means the urine and feces of 10 or 12 billion human beings and their domesticated animals. Good luck with that.
Peak soil is a trickier notion, but it derives from the more concrete concept that we are “mining” the soil: degrading and exhausting it by growing single-crop “monocultures”, using too much fertilizer and irrigating too enthusiastically, all in the name of higher crop yields.
“We know far more about the amount of oil there is globally and how long those stocks will last than we know about how much soil there is,” said John Crawford, Director of the Sustainable Systems Program in Rothamsted Research in England. “Under business as usual, the current soils that are in agricultural production will yield about 30 percent less…by around 2050.”
The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 25 percent of the world’s soils that are currently under cultivation are severely degraded, and another eight percent moderately degraded. (Even “moderately degraded” soil has lost half its capacity to store water.) And the only way to access new, undamaged soil is to deforest the rest of the planet.
All of which brings us to the issue of peak food. And here the concept of “peak” undergoes a subtle modification, because it no longer means “maximum production, after which yields start to fall.” It just means “the point at which the growth in production stops accelerating”: it’s the peak rate of growth, not actual peak production. But even that is quite ominous, if you think about it.
During the latter part of the 20th century, food production grew at around 3.5 percent per year, comfortably ahead of population growth, but the dramatic rise in crop yields was due to new inputs of fertilizers and pesticides, much more irrigation, and new “green revolution” crop varieties. Now those one-time improvements have largely run their course, and global food production is rising at only 1.5 percent a year.
Population growth has slowed too, so we’re still more or less keeping up with demand, but there are signs that food production in many areas is running up against what researchers at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in a report last year called “a biophysical yield ceiling for the crop in question.” Production of the food in question stops rising, then may even fall—and extra investment often doesn’t help.
The “peak” in this context is an early warning that there will eventually be a complete cessation of growth, possibly followed by an absolute decline. Peak maize happened in 1985, peak rice and wild fish in 1988, peak dairy in 1989, peak eggs in 1993, and peak meat in 1996. (The numbers come from a recent report by scientists at Yale, Michigan State University, and the Helmholtz Centre in Germany in the journal Ecology and Society.)
More recent peaks were vegetables in 2000, milk and wheat in 2004, poultry in 2006, and soya bean in 2009. Indeed, 16 of the 21 foods examined in the Ecology and Society report have already peaked, and production levels have actually flattened out for key regions amounting to 33 percent of global rice and 27 percent of global wheat production.
So we are already in trouble, and it will get worse even before climate change gets bad. There are still some quick fixes available, notably by cutting down on waste: more than a third of the food that is grown for human consumption never gets eaten. But unless we come up with some new “magic bullets”, things will be getting fairly grim on the food front by the 2030s.
23 Comments on "Forget peak oil; we’ve reached peak everything"
Mikeb on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 6:16 pm
2nd paragraph = stop reading.
Bee “collapse” disorder has been around since humans have kept hives. Bee populations are stable to rising.
THis guy is a asshole.
Perk Earl on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 6:25 pm
“Peak oil is so last year.”
Then why is it so hard to convince people?
Plantagenet on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 6:25 pm
Peak everything about now is right on schedule, according to the 1970s book “Limits to Growth”
Plantagenet on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 6:27 pm
Well, oil hasn’t peaked yet. In fact we’re in an oil glut. Most people who have an open mind have absorbed that fact, and it makes the “peak oil” story harder to accept.
Nonetheless, we may well be at or near the peak right now in a whole range of commodities other than oil.
yoananda on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 6:43 pm
don’t forget peak water.
competition for primary resources is already at work.
It’s behind debt crisis (ask central banks ! lol) and uprising all over the world. Not to mention geopolitical tensions.
Here in France we are also seeing bee disapeareance …
It seems that Meadows was absolutely right, including time framing.
Mortality rate will soon raise.
Fasten your seatbelt.
yoananda on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 6:48 pm
there is no oil glut (no matter how many time it’s repeated), there is demand shortage.
More over it’s no “oil” glut, it would be “barrel” glut, if there was any glut.
Not all barrels come equal in term of final energy accessible to the economy.
Oil net energy peak (we don’t have absolutely reliable numbers but …) would have been in 2012/2013 …
So peak oil is already there, but, hidden behind the false abundance name “oil glut”.
Makati1 on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 6:52 pm
I like the predictions of future ‘peaks’ decades or even years away. Not one takes into account that when oil becomes a scarce item, the other ‘peaks’ will also occur.
For instance, phosphate rock mining. Take away the huge mining machines and the freighters and it is gone. (You don’t mine 200,000,000 TONS of something with hand tools.) Ditto for coal, natural gas, uranium, etc. ALL now require huge machines to make their recovery possible.
We HAVE reached peak everything, except possibly government BS and domestic gullibility. They seem to have no limits.
antaris on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 7:16 pm
I like to watch the shows “gold rush” and “yukon gold”. Both shows about exchanging large amounts of expensive diesel fuel for a dusting of gold. In both of these shows you can watch “after the peak” and “depletion at work”.
Plantagenet on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 7:50 pm
@yoananda
Where is the “demand shortage”? The global demand for oil has gone up every year since 2009. But the supply has grown more rapidly then the demand, and supply now surpasses demand resulting in an oil glut.
Cheers!
Davy on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 8:25 pm
YO is spot on with “demand shortage”. It does not matter demand continues to rise. First issue is with this demand. Is this demand really rising or is it a faux demand growth. The next issue is demand growth has to be above a certain level per the needs of the economy. If demand is subpar it is damaging. We are in a growth driven global economy not a barely growing global economy. If our global economy is barely growing entropy is winning and problems are becoming predicaments. This follows through to the oil sector because of the codependence of economy and oil supply.
The excess supply we see now is oil that is not economic so the quality is not there. What does it matter if there is quantity if the economic usefulness of the production is lower economic quality not stimulating demand? The poor economic oil quality of the past several years has damaged growth by high prices in a distorted repressed debt driven central bank anti-deflation drive. Low interest rates and various central bank debt tools allowed a low economic quality oil to be produced that otherwise would not have been produced per normal market price discovery. This is much like we see in China and other Asian export driven economies that have mal-invested with excess industrial capacity and now are saddled with loss making industries. The oil sector over produced an expensive low quality oil. There is currently a demand shortage in a poor economic quality oil glut.
Plantagenet on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 9:37 pm
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the oil being produced. There is just an excess supply of it, i.e. we are in an oil glut.
yoananda on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 10:07 pm
oil glut is just an “intuitive” statement … it’s not really proved.
Price is determined by offer AND demand.
This time it’s demand shortage :
* slow down in china
* recession in europe
* lack of demand in US
* end of QE (the price of oil falls right after tapering … it’s not a coincidence).
It’s debt crisis that fuels the oil price falldown and not oil glut, because there is no global scale growth (population growth is not sufficient when capital bring much more money than labour)
it’s not an oil glut (repeating it won’t make it more true), it’s a demand shortage.
I have explained that it’s just a barrel glut, not a net energy glut. So again the limitating factor is … demand !
I have given many arguments. None of them have been refuted.
Let’s forget “oil glut” or keep it for another time when it will be true.
Shale oil is just a joke (based on high oil prices, low credit rates, and CAPITAL GLUT that’s searching for some yields).
Capital glut + shortage on demand + deflation = low oil prices.
To be fair, I would said that Saudi politics not to limit their production have added and oil glut to the demand shortage, but it’s a secondary factor, which came from competition between producers to keep market shares.
Plantagenet on Mon, 2nd Feb 2015 11:17 pm
The definition of a glut is an oversupply of a commodity sufficient to cause a large, rapid price drop.
That exactly describes the situation with oil.
AND check out the news media—there is news story after story about the current oil glut. Do a search for current news with the term “oil glut” in it and you get over a million hits.
We’re in an oil glut.
A cat is a cat.
E Z P Z.
Cheers!
Name on Tue, 3rd Feb 2015 12:48 am
It’s correct, Plant, it is an >$50/b oil glut. I like you, you’re funny and understand correctly that this is temporary (like in <1 year).
Cheers!
GregT on Tue, 3rd Feb 2015 12:53 am
Very good Yoananda,
You have done your homework. I wouldn’t discount geopolitics however, given the current globalist agenda.
simonr on Tue, 3rd Feb 2015 7:37 am
if a glut is
The definition of a glut is an oversupply of a commodity sufficient to cause a large, rapid price drop.
then in the context of a Peak oil discussion this is a meaningless definition.
Reductio ad absurdum
Mad Max discovers an old oil lorry, this would reduce market price, in the above example this would be a glut.
As crazy as this example is, it illustrates the difficulty of ascribing terms to temporary market conditions. In the above example as soon as the oil glut is exhausted, the decline resumes, and this is the same situation we are seeing played out today.
Simon
Dredd on Tue, 3rd Feb 2015 9:33 am
Peak evil (The Baby Is Not The Bathwater; The Guilty Are Not The Victims).
gordianus on Tue, 3rd Feb 2015 2:23 pm
Why is the definition of peak food different from the definition of peak anything else?
G
Makati1 on Tue, 3rd Feb 2015 7:13 pm
FYI:
“The group says more than 20 pounds of food is wasted each month for each of 311 million Americans, amounting to $1,350 to $2,275 annually in waste for a family of four. Think of it as dumping 80 quarter-pound hamburger patties in the garbage each month, or chucking two dozen boxes of breakfast cereal into the trash bin rather than putting them in your pantry.”
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/22/40-of-u-s-food-wasted-report-says/
“As much as half of all the food produced in the world – equivalent to 2bn tonnes – ends up as waste every year, engineers warned in a report published on Thursday.”
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jan/10/half-world-food-waste
THIS is why the world can support more people, not less. PEAK WASTE!
Davy on Tue, 3rd Feb 2015 8:21 pm
Sorry makster, the world can’t support more people because FF are depleting. Your Asia is an obscene example of overshoot. You are trying hard to defend the Asian overshoot predicament but can’t. Give it up and admit how bad your Asian adventure is going to turn out.
Newfie on Tue, 3rd Feb 2015 9:20 pm
No. We haven’t reached peak everything. Stupidity is still growing. I doubt it will peak anytime soon…
Ralph on Wed, 4th Feb 2015 5:13 am
There is no glut of $50 oil. Brent has risen to $57 from $48 in the last 4 days.
There is now a shortage of $50 oil.
ralfy on Mon, 9th Feb 2015 1:51 am
There is no oil glut because we have been resorting to unconventional production to meet demand.
Bee populations go up and down, but human dependence on them have likely been rising.