Peak Oil is Not About the Oil

…There is something that is very important for people to get their heads around. Peak oil is not about the oil, not about gasoline and diesel and heating oil and jet fuel. It’s not about cars, SUVs, vans, trucks, busses, trains, planes or ships.

Peak oil is about food and our progressive inability, after we pass the oil peak, to produce enough of it to feed our 6.5 billion global population. Even now, every day over 40,000 people worldwide die of starvation, malnutrition and nutrition related diseases. Each 1% gap between global demand and global supply will increase those deaths by 10-25%.

Food production in today’s world is critically dependent on oil (for pesticides, herbicides, agrichemicals, and agricultural, irrigation and distribution fuels) and natural gas (for artificial fertilizers) and clean water from ever scarcer and shrinking lakes and rivers and ever shrinking underground aquifers.

A shrinking global food supply is not just a problem for the third world. Everybody has to eat and we in the developed world tend to like to do that far more than those in the third world.

DailyKos