Excellent article! It mirrors the things acquaintances of mine who have been farmers in their youth have related to me. One big problem is people anthropomorphize animals too much, a chicken or turkey does not think like a person, if it can be said to think at all. I personally have never found anyone who has actually raised large numbers of chickens who has any great love for the critters or mistakes them for having human like needs. A chicken is basically a biological machine developed over thousands of years by humans to turn scrap into protein. A chicken in a small cage where it’s kept warm, fed, kept from predators, seems happy enough to me…if they were stressed their egg laying would suffer, and evil, profit oriented factory farmers would change their process it seems to me.

Feeding people is and always will be a messy business until the day when we start growing meat in tanks. It goes back to the statement I made about societies not surviving prosperity. Prosperity means more and more people get removed from the day to day necessities of food production, hunting, farming, raising livestock, and then silly, overly emotional attitudes like this take hold. The purpose of farming is to produce the most quality product for the least money to feed the largest number of people. It’s distressing to think that today, a man like Borlaug (who fathered the Green Revolution and is credited for saving a billion people from starvation) would be demonized by green activists rather than praised for his service to humanity. This mindset also applies to people who put preservation of a small fish or such above the needs of people. I don’t think mankind should completely ignore nature and conservation, but human needs come first.

Penn and Teller did one of their Bulls*** shows on organic produce, with some interesting and amusing results. They took organic and normal products to an organic food market and had people do taste tests, the majority of people preferred the taste of the regular produce over the organic. They also did a test familiar to anyone who’s worked in audio perceptual testing, where they had an organic and non-organic banana, they told the people which was which in this test, and they overwhelmingly chose the organic banana. Only problem was it was the same banana, a non-organic one they’d cut in half. I’ve seen the same thing done in audio where a cheap Japanese integrated amp was A/B compared using a selector switch with an expensive audiophile tube amp. People overwhelmingly preferred the tube amp, describing all sorts of differences in great detail, but the switch wasn’t connected to anything, they were always listening to the cheap Japanese amp. People are funny things.

As an aside, I hate the term “organic” as applied to food. Organic has a long standing, unambiguous definition, that is contains carbon atoms. All food is “organic” except salt. I don’t like it when well defined terms get co-opted and corrupted for a cause.

Andy observed that many present Cassandras (not his term)

Whose term is this? If it’s from a contrarian/skeptic/denier/lukewarmer we have a case of tragic irony here. I mean, how did things turn out for the Trojans?

And his big failure was to address that question in the context of one where he hit the nail on the head: How can the economy of a nation that throws out a couple trillion dollars every few months, survive?…let alone throw trillions more at CO2 sequestration, etc. [and all down the drain for no climate gain]

See detailed graphs in The Oil Watch Monthly September 2009 prepared by <a href=”Rembrandt at The Oil Drum: Europe

World liquids increased at 2 million bbl/day per year from 1985 to 2005.
Then NON-OPEC CRUDE oil peaked in 2004/2005 and has declined since.
On top of that OPEC cut back its oil production.

From 2004 to 2009, Global CRUDE oil has “plateaued” between 72 and 75 million bbl/day.

For further perspectives, see the ASPO Oct 2009 conference in Denver.

Note particularly the tutorial presentation by Robert L. Hirsch.

See Matthew Simmons, slide 35 which details the global world crude oil peaked in 2005.

Severian, I thought you might enjoy this, especially the part about how turkeys raised in a shed might not understand that they are being “abused” in a way that their free-range domestic brethren aren’t.

One of the things you mention, fishing, is a good example of what happens when you practice hunter/gatherer approaches with the kind of ruthless efficiency that modern technology allows. It is easy to do serious damage that way, but what is encouraging is the growth of aquaculture, which seems to finally be getting the attention it deserves.

But it also brings out the Luddite attitudes that are so common among some, sadly. I see people protesting aquaculture complaining that the fish aren’t as healthy or good as wild, particularly in the case of salmon. Well, which is it, you want the salmon saved, or you want to eat only wild? I’ve had both, wild is better tasting, but farmed fish are good, and available year round. You also seem to see a lot of fish farming in Southeast Asia, I regularly get Basa, a type of fresh water catfish, for very low prices, and the fish is a good mild, flaky white fish suitable for about anything. Anything that makes protein an affordable and replenishable resource is fine by me.

But on energy, I can’t recall the environmentalist who said this unfortunately, but he stated that it would be a disaster if humanity found a plentiful, cheap, and clean energy source because of what we’d do with it. How do you deal with people of that mindset? That seems to be the mentality that results in the problems we have where efficient nuclear be damned, and coal be damned, the goal is not pollution control, but reduction of mankind’s power and abilities.

He thinks the conditions of this blip in time that future historians will dub as the Oil PRICE crisis that the industrial world has seen for a mere thirty five years is a permanent reality. Of course, it is not, its merely a temporary transitory situation.

Mankind entire rise above the animal stage has been marked by his harnessing of ever greater amounts of energy per capita. And the steady march forward has continued in the background and will continue to do so, until it bursts forth as the new conventional wisdom. Cheap, clean, energy in prodigious quantities, is coming within but a few decades. And no it won’t be wind and sun.

Perfected nuclear, controlled thermonuclear, an electrified world, and perfected ICEs will answer our every need fro power and mobility.

The Earth is mostly empty but the uneducated who study in our Universities don’t know that. There is literally no problem that is not on the verge of solution.

Pollution: Its solved; all we need do is declare Victory.

CO2: Who cares? The GHG effect is overrated by about two orders of magnitude transforming it into a mostly benign ‘greening’ activity.

War: It has always and ever been true.

Food Supply: Industrialization of bio food calories is but in its infancy. Eating fish is a resort to hunter gatherer lifestyles and can’t be as efficient as agriculture or industrial food production.

Disease: Auto immune diseases are on the verge of solutions. The breakthrough will lead to control and be as impressive as Pasteur and Koch in eliminating the bacterial diseases in 1900.

Development: The entire world will be developed in the next two score years.

I think there are so many other factors to oil production figures in any particular year it’s difficult to assign a drop to peak oil being passed. Geopolitical issues, local governments interference with the process (think Iraq under sanctions with decaying infrastructure, or Venezuelas nationalization of the oil fields and non-payment of debt to the oil companies which resulted in them withdrawing support and equipment maintenance), oil companies (and countries) not pumping when prices are low, and even things like the US government restricting oil exploration and drilling in areas where abundant reserves are known to exist. With all of this going on, it’s about as difficult to attribute the effects of peak oil as it is to tease temperature records out of tree rings, plenty of opportunity for the wrong conclusion to be reached.

I think rather than production figures a better metric would be known reserves, and even that changes rapidly based on new discoveries.