More “Renewable” Stupidity On The Environment From J.D.

(And I also posted here.)

The subject matter expert in noxious punditry from the Bucks County Courier Times opined as follows today (from here)…

It's a grim future for Lower Makefield, and for all of us.

When oil production peaks in 10 years or so, the energy apocalypse will be upon us. Fossil fuels will become scarce and energy so expensive that even watching TV will become a luxury. Food supplies will be disrupted, the economy will disintegrate and the comfortable SUV-driving, centrally air-conditioned middle class lifestyles we know will evaporate quicker than Al Gore's political career.

Ha and ha, you nitwit (However, he is “keeping it local,” sort of; I’ll give him that much…I’ll explain below).

Mullane’s latest audition for a job with Fix Noise pertains to a meeting at the Yardley-Makefield library last weekend held by Bill Mettler, a Montgomery County community activist, and George Owen, a retired architect who promotes the transition town philosophy in Media, Delaware County (with the philosophy stating that a “transition town” should “create its own energy, produce its own food, provide its own health care and mint its own currency”).

This of course is used as the butt of attempts at humor by Mullane (a global warming denialist if one ever existed). However, I fail to see the “yuks” here, particularly in light of the following (from here)…

Our indebted nation is borrowing money to give to oil companies, who despite dwindling resources, continue to produce and poison their customers.

If it is so limited, why do they continue to devote time and money to furthering its use? Royal Dutch Shell estimates that within seven years, the world’s oil supply will be depleted, leaving us with little time to waste. That time and money is desperately needed to further develop alternative energy sources that are sustainable. Meanwhile, we remain at war and in debt over oil which ruins our environment and consequently our lives.

I wish I could just accept that at face value as a call to action, but I can’t; as noted here, Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, said that “Easy oil and easy gas—cheap-to-produce oil and cheap-to-produce gas, close to the markets where it is consumed—will peak one day, because it is simply depleted,” but “If you look at the total of what Mother Nature has put in the ground, we have a very long way to go” (and of course, this assumes that you can trust any of the cretins involved in the business of drilling holes in the earth and plundering it to line their own pockets above all else, while threatening our health and siphoning off untold monies in this country that could be better spent elsewhere).

However, do not mistake that excerpt above as agreement on my part with J.D.’s snide derision here. Our energy policy has been a pathetic joke for so long, propping up governments towards whom we should not even be giving the time of day let alone a single dollar, that it’s long past time to effectively invest in alternative sources of energy.

And continuing with the “Kentucky Kernel,” this tells us the following…

Our right to life is jeopardized as we are unknowingly poisoned by the very thing that fuels our day. Wildlife die and water is contaminated by oil spills and irresponsible disposal of oil. Aside from the obvious consequences that we know about oil, we cannot overlook the resource that poisons us right at out backdoor.

The Appalachians, a beautiful landscape that makes our home unique, is being destroyed while its rivers and lakes are being contaminated as a result of coal mining. It has been found that freshwater lakes and the fish we consume from them have been tainted with mercury due to the burning of coal.

West Virginia and Kentucky have fallen victim to this conspiracy more than any state due to our widespread coal mining industry. While those who work in mines are poisoned by poor working conditions, their families are being harmed by the very product they derive from the Earth. The Center for Disease Control reports freshwater fish in the United States contain dangerous levels of mercury.

And as noted here, from June of last year, in the matter of our water and food supply…

A map of world food trade increasingly looks like a map of the water haves and have-nots, because in recent years the global food trade has become almost a proxy trade in water — or rather, the water needed to grow food. “Virtual water,” some economists call it. The trade has kept the hungry in dry lands fed. But now that system is breaking down, because there are too many buyers and not enough sellers.

According to estimates by UNESCO’s hydrology institute, the world’s largest net supplier of virtual water until recently was Australia. It exported a staggering 70 cubic kilometers of water a year in the form of crops, mainly food. With the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia’s main farming zone, virtually dry for the past two years, that figure has been cut in half.

The largest gross exporter of virtual water is the United States, but its exports have also slumped as corn is diverted to domestic biofuels, and because of continuing drought in the American West.

The current water shortages should not mark an absolute limit to food production around the world. But it should do three things. It should encourage a rethinking of biofuels, which are themselves major water guzzlers. It should prompt an expanding trade in food exported from countries that remain in water surplus, such as Brazil. And it should trigger much greater efforts everywhere to use water more efficiently.

Now granted, I have no current data on rainfalls in this country since the article by Fred Pearce was published. However, I think we would be as foolish as J.D. to ignore the long-term warning signs when it comes to production and consumption of food and maintaining our water supply.

Partly because, as noted here…

For more than a century, the federal government has spent billions of dollars, building our dams, reservoirs, aqueducts and pipelines. Ironically, in the same way that extracting/ transporting and processing water consumes large amounts of energy, the operation of power plants consume large amounts of water.

Thermal energy is one of the largest water users in the United States. However, irrigated agriculture accounts for 80 percent of water consumed in the U.S. This high percentage is partially because of low water use-efficiency (the portion of water actually used by irrigated agriculture relative to the volume of water withdrawn). For the western United States, agricultural farms are the single largest water user, half of which is used by the largest 10 percent of the farms. High levels of irrigation subsidies, combined with archaic water laws make water use in the western U.S. highly wasteful and inefficient. But there is room for improvement in agricultural water use in almost all parts of the U.S. Water use should be such that for a given locale, appropriate incentives are put in place to ensure that water withdrawals do not exceed the recharge rate; that water conservation techniques (such as rain water harvesting) are central to land use planning; that improved irrigation efficiency and better nutrient management (to reduce non-point water pollution from farm run-offs) are rewarded; and that growing water-intensive crops in water scarce regions discouraged.

And given all of this, I think it’s important to look at some “lessons learned” from Cuba that J.D. refers to in his column (from here, about the so-called “Special Period,” in which a group of Australians taught “permaculture” to Cubans after the collapse of the Soviet Union, on whom the country depended, as J.D. tells us)…

In reality, when (the "Special Period") began, it was (out of) necessity. People had to start cultivating vegetables wherever they could," a tour guide told a documentary crew filming in Cuba in 2004 to record how Cuba survived on far less oil than usual.

The crew included the staff of The Community Solution, a non-profit organization in Yellow Springs, Ohio which teaches about peak oil – the time when oil production world-wide will reach an all-time high and head into an irreversible decline. Some oil analysts believe this may happen within this decade, making Cuba a role model to follow.

"We wanted to see if we could capture what it is in the Cuban people and the Cuban culture that allowed them to go through this very difficult time," said Pat Murphy, The Community Solution's executive director. "Cuba has a lot to show the world in how to deal with energy adversity."

Scarce petroleum supplies have not only transformed Cuba's agriculture. The nation has also moved toward small-scale renewable energy and developed an energy-saving mass transit system, while maintaining its government-provided health care system whose preventive, locally-based approach to medicine conserves scarce resources.

Also, as noted here, “Water scarcity as a result of climate change will create far-reaching global security concerns, Nobel laureate and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Rajendra K. Pachauri has warned.”

And Pachauri tells us that “we may be able to avoid the worst effects of climate change” if “global emissions of greenhouse gases…decline by 2015.”

As J.D. would say, mark your calendars (though, if we don’t make that date partly because of opposition from Mullane and his simple-minded brethren, it won’t much matter).

Update: I guess this guy Metcalfe is a pal of J.D.'s (here).