[waldo]

I am obsenely fascinated by how PO will unravel. Here's a question. If starvation is due to shipping/fertilizer/ag inputs depleting, and freezing is due to natural gas/heating oil/propane depleting (and blackouts), which happens first? My vote is freezing. It just seems that the supermarkets will run out of exotic items first, then finally just have local produce, so running out of food will be a slow affair. But nearly nobody (other than perhaps posters here) is set up to get and burn wood, and that's not something you can set up overnight. Perhaps I'm rambling. Interested in people's opinions.

By the way didn't mention gasoline, people will begin sleeping at the office if necessay so getting to work seems third on the list, even if we still need things done at the office. But I guess if the plumber/carpenter/etc. can't drive out to fix things that's important. Personally I'm making sure I can fix my own, but that's a different forum.

[FrankRichards]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('waldo', ' ') But nearly nobody (other than perhaps posters here) is set up to get and burn wood, and that's not something you can set up overnight.

[davep]

There's a huge change from fuel or propane heating to wood around here. It's about five to seven times cheaper. So, although food is going up in price, it's nothing compared to the increase in price of fossil fuel heating.

The state is also backing this move, with a 50% tax rebate on the cost of 65%+ efficiency wood stoves/inserts.

[Ferretlover]

Good luck figuring this one out...
IMHO, peak-everything will happen at different speeds, caused by depletions of different items at different times in different places.
These conditions will be aggravated by the (inept or private agenda) response of the federal, state and local governments, and general chaos of the citizenry who don't have a clue what is going on during 'normal' times.
There is No getting around how deeply FFs are interwoven into fabric of human life-and, how unprepared we are to deal with its (FF) loss...

[MacG]

Why not have both at the same time? Freezing and starving that is. Add "in the dark" just for the joy of it.

[Tyler_JC]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('waldo', 'I') am obsenely fascinated by how PO will unravel. Here's a question. If starvation is due to shipping/fertilizer/ag inputs depleting, and freezing is due to natural gas/heating oil/propane depleting (and blackouts), which happens first? My vote is freezing. It just seems that the supermarkets will run out of exotic items first, then finally just have local produce, so running out of food will be a slow affair. But nearly nobody (other than perhaps posters here) is set up to get and burn wood, and that's not something you can set up overnight. Perhaps I'm rambling. Interested in people's opinions.

By the way didn't mention gasoline, people will begin sleeping at the office if necessay so getting to work seems third on the list, even if we still need things done at the office. But I guess if the plumber/carpenter/etc. can't drive out to fix things that's important. Personally I'm making sure I can fix my own, but that's a different forum.

[dohboi]

Many good points here. But, while refrigeration and much preparation of food obviously involves electricity, I can't see how hardly any of the production and transportation of food (in the US at least) uses electricity.

Natural Gas is the major heating fuel in the frigid upper midwest, but many are still reliant on oil. Matt Simmons, the king of PO, is speaking in St. Paul in a few days, and the advanced publicity quotes him as saying that peak NG may have an even more dramatic short term effect than PO, because its wide use in heating homes.

Most people have some kind of electric space heater in the house for warming or adding warming to specific rooms. But if everyone switches to electricity as their primary heating source, we will likely have brown outs and blackouts on the coldest nights of the year (like the 15+ degree below 0 F night we had a couple days ago, 40 below with wind chill--and that's in the southern part of the state), with lots and lots of frozen bodies in the morning.

New Orleans is going to look like a walk in the park.

And of course if everyone turns to wood burning, we will quickly denude the countryside.

We need massive projects to increase insulation in housing and increase the concentration of people living under the same roof. Maybe Simmons will get policy makers thinking in more realistic terms around here. But I doubt it. Policy is primarily driven by what industries can influence which politicians most effectively. And insulation companies do not seem to have a lot of political clout.

[Chesire]

We need massive projects to increase insulation in housing and increase the concentration of people living under the same roof. Maybe Simmons will get policy makers thinking in more realistic terms around here. But I doubt it. Policy is primarily driven by what industries can influence which politicians most effectively. And insulation companies do not seem to have a lot of political clout.



Hah, cheaper and less hassle to just have a real or manufactured grid crash in the dead of winter. Demand destruction at its finest

[Blacksmith]

Out here we supplement wood heat with natural gas. Forestry will sell you a $15 permit to get two cords of wood from burn areas, nice and dry, though slightly charded.

[waldo]

I do heat my smallish house 95 % with wood from my own property in a very nice Jotul wood stove I got 2 years ago, all with wood from my property, and mostly dead trees although that will have to change going forward. So I'm familiar with chain saws and manual wood splitting which I've been doing since I haven't bought a splitter, and know what how much it takes to do this. I'm sorry, I don't think I'm so special, but I can see maybe 5 % of the population doing/being capable/having access to do this.

And if you buy the wood it is going to price per btu the same as fossil fuels when it gets to that point, and be just as scarce.

So yes, I think people are going to freeze.

[Ferretlover]

Not to mention that the loss of unreplaced trees will have an effect on future CC...
Hope you are planting to replace those lost trees...

[waldo]

planting apple and nut trees.

[Blacksmith]

When I was young my parents had an apple orchard, burned the wood from the apple trees, great wood.

[lateStarter]

Waldo, if you are in the US, you probably should have placed this thread in the Americas Forum. Results wil be different in most other countries.

Where I was last living in the US (MD), I doubt we would have frozen to death even during the worst winter if we had decent sleeping bags. I would be more worried about what happens after the trucks to Safeway start rolling in less frequently or not at all.

Even within the US, the freezing option varies widely. If this was a poll fo the US, I'd say starving was a more likely option.

[dohboi]

Good point, but I guess the very question assumes that we are talking about places where winter cold is a significant threat, as the question is meaningless for reliably balmy climates.

How have your winters been recently in Poland? Any supply shortages or price pressures for heating fuels? Do Poles rely on Russian natural gas mostly?

[yesplease]

Food is only significantly impacted insofar as biofuel production drives up current prices. Very little in terms of crude's refined products are needed in terms of food production. It's mostly natural gas for fertilizer and whatever electricity is, mostly coal and then some other stuff. The large mobile machines need diesel, and naturally lube, from oil, but that's a relatively small part of the overall cost based on what I've read. Heating oil otoh scales with diesel, so that's in lock step more or less.

[dohboi]

That seems to fit pretty well with what Dale Allen Pfeffer says on p. 8 of his '06 book "Eating Fossil Fuels." In a table titled "Total Energy Directly and Indirectly Consumed in U.S. Farms in 2002..." he gives:

27.3% Diesel
8.6% Gasoline

(so about 36% directly from oil products)

29% Fertilizers
8.3 % Pesticides
3% Natural Gas
4.6% LP Gas

(So about 45% from LP Gas, Natural Gas and products heavily dependent on NG imputs)

The rest, 20.7%, is electricity.

I'm guessing that the majority of the fuel used to get the food to market and to table is going to be diesel and gasoline again (and that's not going to be an inconsiderable amount, since the average distance traveled for US food items farm-to-table is something like 1500 miles).

So oil is not insignificant in the production of food in the US, but NG is at least as large a factor.

I guess I just automatically lump oil and NG together in these discussions, since both seem to be peaking at about the same time and both are used for heating as well as food production...

I think the main challenges for food production will actually come from the uncertainties brought about by climate change. See the just-released excellent report out from carbon equity:

climate code red


We had flooding near here that about doubled the all-time record, while many other counties were experiencing record drought. The SW and SE of the US seem to be just drying up completely. The great breadbasket of the plains is set to return far drier norms for the last 10,000 years (Holocene) even before the effects of GW.

The climate's going nuts, and farmers are on the front lines.

[nocar]

Freezing or starving biggest problem in the future - is that the question?

For me it seems natural to look back on how things were done in preindustrial times. Sweden and neighboring Finland have short growing seasons, rather poor soils, long winters but not as cold winters as many parts of Canada, like Montreal. I have never heard that people were afraid of the cold when facing winter, but having enough to eat was a big worry in bad years.

Of course, there are stories about the house being so cold in the morning that you had to break the ice on the water bucket before you could cook the morning porridge. But after you got the fire going, things picked up.

There are ways to deal with the cold - sleeping in the warmest room (kitchen), sleeping several people in the same bed, lots of blankets and quilts. Bed pans (like a covered frying pan with a long hnadle, you put hot coal inside and put it inside the bed before you go to bed) and hot water bottles.

Double glazing on windows started about as soon as people had windows. In the fall you placed the extra set of inner windows in the window frames which then stayed to spring.

And of course you prepared for winter by making lots of firewood. And built the houses tight (log houses with moss between the logs and a high treshhold to keep out the draft were common).

In Scandinavia, people occasionally die from cold if being caught outdoors in cold weather. Never heard of anyone dying from cold indoors, not in old times, not today. Although starving people might go begging for food and then freeze to death, in old times. And today some people who live in campers on winter holidays use gas heaters inappropiately and die from carbon monoxide poisoning.

With good houses, experience and the right equipment (like lots of blankets and warm clothes) you do not need very much fuel to keep warm in winter. But in regard to food there is little you can do to reduce the needed amount and still be comfortable.

nocar

[dohboi]

Good points, all. But remember that:

1) You are talking about cultures long accustomed to dealing with cold weather without large ff inputs

2) You are talking about cultures living at or near the numbers of people the local ecosystem can support.

Neither of these hold true any longer, especially in frigid parts of the US. It is the sudden discontinuities that concern me. People who have always equated the effort of staying warm in the winter with simply turning up the thermostat and paying the not-very-high heating bill. If there are interruptions in gas, oil, or electric heating sources, many won't know how to cope.

And even if all these people figure out how to cut wood, there won't be enough wood for long in and around the most densely populated areas.

My prediction is that as the tundra thaws, the newly exposed peat bogs will be mined and burned for heat, further damning us to catastrophic climate change.

Even with all that, your point is well taken that food is an even more primary and irreplaceable need of humans than external sources of heat.

[HamRadioRocks]

I think starving would be a bigger problem than freezing. Since learning about Peak Oil, I've kept my home warmer in summer and cooler in winter than in my Pre-Peak-Oil Awareness days. I've actually found it easier to lower the thermostat in winter (from 67 to 58 degrees, a drop of 9 degrees) than raise it in summer (from 79 to 81 degrees). In dropping the thermostat in winter, it helps to gradually lower the thermostat from October to January. On the colder nights of the winter, I wear socks and long johns to bed. If I were REALLY forced to have a colder house, I could wear my coat inside and pile on more blankets to sleep. Come to think of it, central heating has been universal for only a few generations, so tens of thousands of generations of people did survive without it. Not having heat would be EXTREMELY uncomfortable, but it would be survivable.

On the other hand, there is no way to get around the fact that everyone needs a certain minimum level of food and that there are many, many critical nutritional needs. Even before central heat became universal, everyone had to eat food.