A Little Bit About Me

1
A Little Bit About Me

• Serving Green Party councillor in Norwich, where
  I live with my wife Juliette.
• I teaches Philosophy at the University of East
  Anglia.
• I am also the Lead Green Candidate in the
  upcoming European Elections.
• Passionate about green jobs, better and cheaper
  public transport, free insulation for every
  British home and an International agreement on
  Climate Change.
• Hope to join the largest political group of
  international Greens, who vote together more than
  any other in European Parliament, and are a real
  international party.
• Here tonight to talk to you about global oil
  supplies and their relationship with food
  security

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Peak Soil

• The Relationship Between
• Peak Oil Global Food Security

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Peak Oil

• The moment in time when max global petroleum
  extraction is reached.
• The concept is based on the observed production
  rates of individual oil wells, and the combined
  production rate of a field of related oil wells.
• Production rate from an oil field over time
  usually grows exponentially until the rate peaks
  and then declines sometimes rapidly until the
  field is depleted.

4
A Bell shaped production curve, as originally
suggested by M. King Hubbert in 1956

• This concept is derived from the Hubbert curve,
  and has been shown to be applicable to the sum of
  a nations domestic production rate, and is
  similarly applied to the global rate of petroleum
  production.
• M. King Hubbert created and first used the models
  behind peak oil in 1956 to accurately predict
  that United States oil production would peak
  between 1965 and 1970

5
Food Security

• Food security refers to the availability of food
  and one's access to it.
• Worldwide around 852 million people are
  chronically hungry due to extreme poverty.
• Up to 2 billion people lack food security
  intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty.
  
• Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution
  transformed agriculture around the globe, world
  grain production increased by 250.
• Oil shortages WILL interrupt this food supply.

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Addicted to Oil

• High dependence of most modern industrial
  transport, agricultural and industrial systems on
  oil will cause the post-peak production decline.
• Supply shortfalls would cause extreme price
  inflation, unless demand is mitigated with
  planned conservation measures and use of
  alternatives.
• World crude oil demand grew an average of 1.76
  per year from 1994 to 2006, with a high of 3.4
  in 2003-2004. World demand for oil is projected
  to increase 37 over 2006 levels by 2030
• A significant factor on petroleum demand has been
  human population growth.

7
Global Population

• In 2000, the United Nations estimated that the
  world's population was growing at the rate of
  1.14 (or about 75 million people) per year.
• In the last few centuries, the number of people
  living on Earth has increased many times over. By
  the year 2000, there were 10 times as many people
  on Earth as there were 300 years ago.

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World population 19502000
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Global Population

• Oil production per capita peaked in the 1970s.
• The worlds population in 2030 is expected to be
  double that of 1980
• Oil production in 2030 will have declined back to
  1980 levels as worldwide demand for oil
  significantly out-paces production.
• Geologist Dale Allen Pfeiffer contends that
  current population levels are unsustainable, and
  that to achieve a sustainable economy and avert
  disaster the United States population would have
  to be reduced by at least one-third, and world
  population by two-thirds.

10
Energy Demand

• Energy demand is distributed amongst four broad
  sectors transportation, residential, commercial,
  and industrial.
• In terms of oil use, transportation is the
  largest sector and the one that has seen the
  largest growth in demand in recent decades.
• Between 1995 and 2005, US consumption grew from
  17.7 to 20.7 million barrels a day, a 3 million
  barrel a day increase.
• China, by comparison, increased consumption from
  3.4 to 7 million barrels a day, an increase of
  3.6 million barrels a day, in the same time frame.

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Global Energy Consumption
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Agricultural Reliance on Fossil Fuels

• Supplies of oil and gas are essential to modern
  intensive agriculture techniques.
• A fall in global oil supplies could cause spiking
  food prices and unprecedented famine in the
  coming decades
• The largest consumer of fossil fuels in modern
  agriculture is ammonia production (for
  fertilizer) via the Haber process, which is
  essential to high-yielding intensive agriculture.
• The specific fossil fuel input to fertilizer
  production is primarily natural gas, to provide
  hydrogen via steam reforming.
• However, given sufficient supplies of renewable
  electricity, hydrogen can be generated without
  fossil fuels using methods such as electrolysis.

13
Agricultural Reliance on Fossil Fuels

• The Vemork hydroelectric plant in Norway used its
  surplus electricity output to generate renewable
  ammonia from 1911 to 1979
• Iceland currently generates ammonia using the
  electrical output from its hydroelectric and
  geothermal power plants.
• Unfortunately, almost every large-scale source of
  renewable energy still requires petroleum inputs,
  such as to fuel construction equipment and to
  transport workers and material
• If the supply of petroleum should fall faster
  than people can learn how to build renewable
  energy infrastructure using only renewable
  inputs, it may not be possible to maintain the
  intensive agriculture necessary to support the
  high global population.

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Agricultural Reliance on Fossil Fuels

• Modern or industrialized agriculture is dependent
  on petroleum in two fundamental ways
• Cultivation - Getting the crop from seed to
  harvest (fertilizers, pesticides etc).
• Transport - Getting the harvest from the farm to
  the consumer's refrigerator.
• Petroleum is providing the energy required to
  process food before it reaches the market. It
  takes the energy equivalent of a half-gallon of
  gasoline to produce a two-pound bag of breakfast
  cereal.
• The kiwi from New Zealand, the asparagus from
  Argentina, the broccoli from Guatemala - Food
  items on the consumer's plate travel an average
  of 1,500 miles to get there.

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The Dangers of Intensive Farming

• Intensive farming or intensive agriculture is an
  agricultural production system characterized by
  the high inputs of capital, labour, or heavy
  usage of technologies such as pesticides and
  chemical fertilizers relative to land area.
• Modern day forms of intensive crop based
  agriculture also involve the use of mechanical
  ploughing, herbicides, fungicides and plant
  growth regulators.
• These techniques have enabled a substantial
  increase in production, yet have also
  dramatically increased environmental pollution
  by
• Increasing erosion.
• Poisoning water with agricultural chemicals.
• Destroying forests to make room for farmland.

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The Dangers of Intensive Farming

• Intensive farming alters the environment in many
  ways
• Limits or destroys the natural habitat of most
  wild creatures, and leads to soil erosion.
• Fertilizers drain into rivers and lakes, altering
  their biology.
• Pesticides generally kill useful insects as well
  as those that destroy crops.
• Intensive farming IS NOT sustainable - It often
  results in desertification, or land that is so
  poisonous and eroded that nothing else will grow
  there.
• Requires large amounts of energy input to
  produce, transport, and apply chemical
  fertilizers/pesticides.
• Use of pesticides have numerous negative health
  effects in workers who apply them, people that
  live nearby the area of application or
  downstream/downwind from it, and consumers who
  eat the pesticides which remain on their food.

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Sustainable Agriculture as defined by the 1990
farm bill

• The term sustainable agriculture means an
  integrated system of plant and animal production
  practices having a site-specific application that
  will, over the long term
• Satisfy human food and fiber needs
• Enhance environmental quality and the natural
  resource base upon which the agricultural economy
  depends
• Make the most efficient use of nonrenewable
  resources and on-farm resources and integrate,
  where appropriate, natural biological cycles and
  controls
• Sustain the economic viability of farm operations
• Enhance the quality of life for farmers and
  society as a whole

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Sustainable Farming

• Sustainable farming integrates three main goals
• Environmental stewardship.
• Farm profitability.
• Prosperous farming communities.
• These goals have been defined by a variety of
  disciplines and may be looked at from the vantage
  point of the farmer or the consumer.

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Sustainable Farming

• Intensive Farming refers to the ability of a farm
  to produce food indefinitely, without causing
  severe or irreversible damage to ecosystem
  health. The two key issues are
• Biophysical - The long-term effects of various
  chemicals on soil properties and processes
  essential for crop productivity.
• Socio-economic - The long-term ability of farmers
  to obtain inputs and manage resources such as
  labour.

20
Sustainable Farming

• Sustainable agriculture depends on replenishing
  the soil while minimizing the use of
  non-renewable resources, such as natural gas
  (used in converting atmospheric nitrogen into
  synthetic fertilizer), or mineral ores (e.g.,
  phosphate). Possible sources of nitrogen that
  would, in principle, be available indefinitely,
  include
• Recycling crop waste and livestock or human
  manure
• Growing legume crops and forages such as peanuts
  or alfalfa that form symbioses with
  nitrogen-fixing bacteria (rhizobia)
• Hydrogen required for industrial production of
  Nitrogen (via the Haber process) could be made
  by electrolysis of water using electricity
  perhaps from solar cells or windmills rather from
  natural gas.

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Food Security

• The consumer's growing awareness of the
  vulnerability to oil availability and prices is
  one of several factors fuelling current interest
  in organic agriculture and other sustainable
  farming methods.
• Some farmers using modern organic-farming methods
  have reported yields as high as those available
  from conventional farming but without the use of
  fossil-fuel-intensive artificial fertilizers or
  pesticides.
• Unfortunately, the reconditioning of soil to
  restore nutrients lost during the use of
  intensive monoculture agriculture techniques made
  possible by petroleum-based technology will take
  time.

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In Conclusion

• Time to act is now.
• Reliance on overseas oil is bad news - not just
  for the environment but for our economy.
• Soil will die if we dont start protecting it
  NOW.
• In the event of an oil crisis, food production
  prices will soar and British people will suffer.
• Green New Deal would see many jobs created in
  this centurys Green Revolution.
• Eastern Region can be a global leader in switch
  to sustainable farming.
• Vote Green on June 4th!