How peak oil affects food and everything else
Media Education Foundation has released a new documentary called “Blind Spot” which
explores the inextricable link between the energy we use, the way we run our economy, and the multiplying threats that now confront the environmental health and stability of our planet. Taking as its starting point the inevitable energy depletion scenario known as “Peak Oil,” the film surveys a fascinating range of the latest intellectual, political, and scientific thought to make the case that by whatever measure of greed, wishful thinking, neglect, or ignorance, we now find ourselves at a disturbing crossroads: we can continue to burn fossil fuels and witness the collapse of our ecology, or we can choose not to and witness the collapse of our economy. Refusing to whitewash this reality, Blind Spot issues a call to action, urging us to face up to the perilous situation we now find ourselves in so that we might begin to envision a realistic, if inconvenient, way out.
Image by Farther Along at Flickr (creative commons)
You can watch a ten-minute excerpt here. By watching it, I learned that:
- The U.S. now has more prisoners than farmers.
- Corn ethanol is energy negative (making it uses more energy than burning it).
- It takes 30 calories of energy to bring one calorie of lettuce from California to the average plate.
- The average item of food travels 1,500 hundred miles to your plate.
- The concept of peak oil (essentially, that we are running out of cheap oil), is still ignored or rejected by most businesses, governments and individuals.
See the related posts for more information on peak oil, as well as here and here.
I can’t wait to check out this documentary. You may also be interested in a new book on which I saw a review today. The book is entitled “Time’s Up”. Dmitri Orlov explains in his review that the author lays out the case that human extinction is becoming the default choice, unless we act very soon.
Are we at peak oil yet. Yes or no, depending on who you believe.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tara-lohan/can-you-suvive-life-after_b_290776.html