By Tony McQuail
Published in September 2014
Our current problems stem from our failure to understand and accept that we are biological organisms on a finite planet. We have experienced a brief moment in history when we seemed able to step outside those constraints and that has coloured our assumptions of what is real and normal. In a century we have burned through millions of years worth of accumulated biomass in the form of fossil fuels. Our beliefs in economic growth and mechanical progress rest on this conflagration. It seems intuitively obvious to me that we cannot sustain these levels of energy use with renewable sources. But what seems obvious, is unthinkable in most discussions of how to address climate change, peak oil and environmental degradation. Our society is committed to technofix fantasies that will allow us to continue on our present trajectory. Don’t believe them.
I’ve been an organic farmer interested in renewable energy for nearly 40 years. In the 70’s we built a passive solar home. We put up the first modern interconnected wind generator on the Ontario Hydro grid in 1978. We were using photovoltaic panels to run electric fences more than 20 years ago and currently use them to run our livestock water and garden irrigation in the summer. We formed a coop, although unsuccessful, with other farmers and tried to make an ethanol still. We bought a team of horses for farm power that could run on home grown renewable fuel. We helped form the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario.
In the early 70’s as an environmental studies student at the University of Waterloo and while farming, I looked at the research on energy productivity of different systems. Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) or Net Energy Productivity is the ratio of energy that comes out of a system divided by the energy put into it. What was fascinating was comparing pre-industrial with industrial agriculture and food systems. Pre-industrial systems showed an EROEI of 5 to 50, for every unit of energy put into the system between 5 and 50 units came out. In pre-industrial agriculture that energy was human labour, draft animals, tools and seeds saved from previous crops. The high end of the scale was intensively managed and layered systems like paddy rice. The low end was simple subsistence agriculture – but to me the interesting thing was that agriculture systems did not go lower than 5 units out per unit in. My guess is that an agricultural system that produced less than 5 units literally “starved out”. It didn’t yield enough surplus energy to have a reserve for bad harvests or to raise the next generation.
Industrial agriculture with its fertilizers, pesticides, diesel fuel, big machines, transport, processing and distribution networks has an EROEI of 0.1. In other words 10 units of energy are used in the system to get one unit of energy to the table. Industrial Agriculture is a system for converting petroleum into food in an extremely wasteful fashion. Unfortunately, what we have done with industrial agriculture has been echoed across our whole economy where we have redesigned our activities to use ever greater amounts of energy as we replace labour with fossil fuels. When we first started this substitution the EROEI of petroleum was impressive. Early oil wells often produced over 100 units of energy for every unit spent in drilling. There is little easy oil to find now. Today’s light crude is returning between 6 to 8 units for every unit in. The Tar sands may be getting down to 1 out for 1 in if you count all the hidden subsidies. As EROEI decreases environmental impact increases and the driver of our past 100 years of economic growth collapses. Without a high EROEI the rate of growth that we assume denotes a healthy economy is impossible. Trying to achieve those rates of growth with low EROEI energy systems will be incredibly destructive and counter productive.
The reason is the “compost conundrum”. We’ve all heard of the greenhouse effect but I’d like to offer an additional phrase to help us grapple with the challenges ahead. We actually have a green house on our farm. I understand that CO2 acts like glazing helping hold radiant heat inside the earth’s atmosphere. But I also think that if I took all the biomass that I grew in the greenhouse over the course of the summer and torched it inside the greenhouse some night the greenhouse would still experience a sudden rise in temperature – even if there was no sunlight. Our burning of the fossil fuels is taking the biomass accumulated by millions of years of photosynthesis and burning it in the geological equivalent of a night. So I’m concerned that we not get so focused on CO2 that we loose track of the CAUSE of the problem which is our intensity and scale of energy use. CO2 sequestration and carbon credits attack the symptom but not the root cause of our problems and delay our addressing the real issue.
As an organic farmer I make compost piles. These heat up, not because of sunlight, but because of the metabolic activity of the rapid increase of microbial populations within the compost pile. They are oxidizing carbohydrates within the compost pile and generating heat from their rapid growth.
Back when 1 unit of energy produced 5 to 50 units, the food we ate only produced a fraction of waste heat. Once we started eating food produced in the industrial system each unit of food eaten contributes 11 units of waste heat – one for the food eaten and 10 for the energy used to grow it. The growing human population is on a J-curve, similar to the microbes in a compost pile. If we add in the additional energy we humans now use, plus the energy from our food, we see an incredible increase in our energy use and waste heat generation. A “modern” North American probably produces 100 times as much waste heat from their machines as from their body heat. We are turbocharging our compost pile.
If we use high energy-embedded food to create so-called new energy for our machines, we will destabilize society, especially if food is taken out of the mouths of the poor to put into SUV’s and jet planes. This will also destabilize the ecological life support of our planet. Are we reaching the point of “peak oil” or as Richard Heinberg has written “peak everything.” What can we do?
Well, the answer seems to be right under our noses. We need to redesign our economies and societies to run on the energy that goes into our mouths. And we need to remember how to produce that energy (call it food for ease of comprehension) in a manner that yields an EROEI of 5 or more. As a society we need to develop an ecological agriculture around and within our urban centres where food is grown with a minimum of energy inputs and a maximum of ecological design. We need to redesign our cities to be walkable, bikeable, breathable and livable. Where most of the energy to make the city function comes from the food we eat. If we did that then we could likely use photovoltaics, wind generators, methane digesters and convert some biomass into liquid fuels to provide the energy to run public transit and communications technologies and even some tractors and combines in larger farm fields. And we could use our remaining petroleum far more carefully to bridge the gap between where we are today and where we need to be if we are to have a tomorrow.
We may love our machines – but they don’t love us. We need to remember that as we make choices. We need to love our children more than our machines.
As individuals we can set out to redesign our personal lives. Each time we have a choice to make we can ask “Is there a way I can accomplish this task with my own energy?” “Can I live close enough to my work so I can walk and bike there?” “Could I grow some of my own food with my own labour?” “Could I use a heat exchanger and seal and insulate the house so we could heat it with passive solar and our families body heat?” Each time we figure out ways to meet our basic needs with our own energy we are part of the solution and we buffer ourselves from the disruption to our lives from peak oil and the economic chaos associated with it.
If we don’t there will be hell to pay. Most of the “new Technologies” have dismal EROEI’s. When Petroleum had a 100/1 EROEI it meant that for 100 units of CO2 released by burning that petroleum only 1 unit of CO2 was released in producing it. With a technology that yields only 4 units per unit of input energy it means that 25 units of CO2 are going to be released in producing 100 units of energy
What are the global warming implications of our High Tech Low EROEI culture? The global warming debate ignores the law of thermodynamics that states that all energy eventually ends up as waste heat. The more energy we use the more waste heat we dump into the Earth Ecosystem. The act of burning fossil fuels adds to the heat load of our planet. Turning tar into liquid fuel or beaming solar energy from space to become waste heat hardly seem like wise plans.
Rather than stacks of dollars funding techno-fixes, we should learn to live on the “solar power from space” that we already get. for all of our species existence, we have managed wisely the solar energy stored in our food. Stonehenge, the pyramids and Tical were built with that energy. Redesigning our society to run on food that we grow ourselves may hold out far more hope for “Safe, Clean, Renewable Energy” than high tech fantasies. The experience of paying for Ontario Hydro’s nuclear mistakes through the “debt retirement charge” and its failure to deal with decommissioning the reactors or coming up with solutions to radioactive fuel wastes, are lessons we do not seem to learn. The environmental costs of that “energy too cheap to meter” fantasy have been swept into the future.
Let us be careful not to commit vast quantities of our limited resources to high tech adventures that are likely to make matters worse not better. We are more likely to survive and prosper if we return to being tool users and minimize our reliance and addiction to machines. We can set our personal and societal design criteria to rejoin the community of life on this planet. Rediscovering our own “metabolic energy” can be the key to our survival. It would address the causes of both the “compost conundrum” and the “greenhouse effect.”
